For You
One of the more interesting topic I discuss with people is why exactly they formed their vegan belief system. Some point out that they saw a documentary of Youtube video showing the horrors of animal agriculture, but that just points to our gut reaction, not necessarily the logical backing making us change our lifestyles. With that being said, where do you personally derive your beliefs from? Do you hardline certain deontological sticking points like exploitation? Do you just care about the relative net impact on creatures and their ability to thrive? Or is it something else entirely?
Personal Viewpoint
Personally, I draw my entire ethical world view on broad utilitarian viewpoints. So if a chicken were to suffer because of something I did, I must have done something wrong. Equally, if a chicken were to thrive because of something I did, I did something good. However, I do not think about the exploitation nor commodification of that chicken, because those are anthropomorphic ideas that they likely do not care about. Sure, commodification and exploitation are usually wrong because they excuse people’s actions, but, it seems to me that there are some niche cases where these qualities, which we often find as bad, are in fact morally neutral.
I think I realized that after seeing a video of someone who saved several hens from factory farms who were still producing eggs, and continued to use the eggs for their personal usage (feeding carnivorous animals and supplementing their own diet so far as the chicken did not have any physical stressors). I tried to look at the situation objectively to find some issue with the chicken being malnourished, abused, or made to do something they didn’t like. But alas, the hens involved had no medical issues, were able to thrive in a safe and comfortable environment, and were nutritionally supplemented to ensure their well being (i.e., no nutritional deficiencies). Plus, carnivorous animals got a meal so less animals as a whole were harmed.
The humans involved in the prior example did not need to consume the chickens eggs, but doing so posed no ethical issue, so for me, it was ethically neutral - a non issue.
Other Example
If you still want to read, here’s another example of my views. I personally avoid wool as I know where it comes from and the suffering that must be inflicted in our system. However, I acknowledge that there are ways in which wool can be a viable fabric while still allowing for thriving lives for sheep.
First, I think about a normal house dog. They usually hate getting a hair cut when they’re younger because they are scared of the razor. After you get a razor with a cooling blade mechanism and get them exposed to it, they learn to not be afraid of it and instead enjoy the experience since the hair cut doesn’t actually provide any physical pain. For that, I feel no moral qualms with giving them a hair cut because they seems to enjoy or be unbothered by it. If I put in the effort to utilize the hair I cut off in a meaningful way, it’d be fine to do. Especially because I just throw it away otherwise.
Equally, a sheep “wool” is simply their hair. Some breeds have the genetics to grow more or less, but growing it and having it removed do not have to bring about harm - we just do it because we value cheap goods year round far more than their livelyhoods so we adopt cruel standards. If I were to some day have some sort of homestead, where I raised sheep from their adolescence all the way to their death of natural causes, and continued to give to shave their wool, I see not problem with doing so. Given that they are well fed, not hurt in the process, and were given access to natural pastures that they can use to thrive. In fact, I’d argue that is a good thing to do as I’ve taken care of them their entire life (protection from normal predators, warm home, access to food, etc) without harming them in the process.
TL;DR exploitation and commodification are usually bad, but I find the reason for them being bad to be the harm (direct and indirect), not just the fact that they are exploited.
There are a number of different branches I can go on here, but I’ll just post high level thoughts to start.
The issue with trying to define these lines in a capitalist society is they’ll always be blown past when any leeway is given. If you say “eggs can be harvested ethically”, what you’ll end up with necessarily is the egg industry we have today, where we macerate 10s of millions of baby male chicks a day because they’re not profitable.
If it’s done outside of a capitalist system, then you still have to contend with the idea that permitting these types of exploitation will mean that the people who want the things (eggs/wool/etc.) will do the exploitation on the grounds that they want those products, not because they want to take care of these animals and they have some byproduct you happen to use. The “caretakers” will be focused on their productive output instead of caring for them as pets. This is bad.
More abstractly, utilitarianism has some issues. Approaching morality as a simple math equation can lead to justifying atrocities much easier. When you can just say “the pleasure I get from this is more good than the pain you get is bad”, then you can justify exploitation from a utilitarian perspective. If you take a step back though, it should be obvious that the idea of justifying suffering with pleasure is horrendous, yet this is the core calculus of utilitarianism.
A focus on rights and their violations leads to a moral view that doesn’t allow you to use your own pleasure, or pleasure more generally, to justify inflicting harm. It’s a better system for the oppressed, while utilitarianism is better for the oppressors.
I don’t agree that utilitarianism is pro-oppression by nature, especially when reasonable consideration is applied. As an example, you present the transition from exploitative practices (eggs/wool/etc) without harm to the same practices with harm. This being allowed with the justification that my pleasure is worth more than their pain (an argument you attribute to the utilitarian camp). However, that would be defined as egoism rather than the utilitarianism. Utilitarians would posit all beings capable of suffering or pleasure ought to be given adequate consideration for their relative abilities.
I think many rule based utilitarians, myself included, would find a reasonable course of action in our future, even with capitalism being the main force of economic action. For example, the pleasure one receives for consuming an egg is small, while the suffering in current industry practices is great. This would result in a severely bad hedonistic calculus from utilitarians, even if the egoists would love it.
I would argue that the deontological argument of “animals have innate rights” is considered in the utilitarian approach as well, even if it is presented differently. The argument from my point of view is that most animals, besides ourselves, clearly have the basic ability to thrive and suffer. That ability needs to be considered in our calculations. This, I would say, is the core tenant of utilitarianism. All who can suffer, ought not to have to suffer. All who can thrive, ought to be able to thrive. All who can provide these qualities to others, ought to do so to the best of their abilities.
Similarly, and more of a tangent on my personal views: I sit firmly in the negative utilitarian camp. I acknowledge that more good is better than neutrality, but clearly the removal of suffering needs to be the primary impetus for action. So I am extremely rarely in agreement with the idea that “the pleasure I get from this is more good than the pain you get is bad.” As in that, pleasure, especially smaller pleasures, are weighted more than suffering.
A utilitarian and an egoist can often align on what is “just” so long as the pleasure of some action outweighs the pain it inflicts. Of course there’s no actual way to measure X pleasure or Y pain, but people will make claims to how much pain/pleasure they get in some scenario and use it as justification for whatever they want.
We’d agree that the pleasure of egg consumption is small, but I know many people who will say things like “I can’t give up cheese” or “I can’t give up eggs”. They’ll go as far to say the only pleasure they get out of life is eating food, and that no amount of suffering could outweigh the raw pleasure they get in a utilitarian calculation.
Since there’s no proper test we can do to say “no you’re only getting 4 units of pleasure but you’re inflicting 80 units of suffering for that egg”, all we can go on is people’s own judgement about their own pleasure, and their guesses about the pain they inflict. It’s a very ad-hoc and non-principled approach, that anyone can use to justify anything so long as they say they’ve hit some required pleasure threshold.
This is all an argument against utilitarianism, not negative utilitarianism specifically, which does alleviate some of these issues. You’ll still come up against moral issues that deontological ethics can solve but negative utilitarianism cannot (e.g why is it unethical to kill a person who has no connections and whose death will not produce any negative utility in the world). A rule utilitarian would say yes this is fine ethically, but the rule should be that killing is unethical because that’ll produce the most positive utility/least negative utility. This would allow people to justify isolated murders so long as it’s not setup as a rule for society that murder is okay, and that the murders produced no negative utility (e.g painless killing methods etc.).
As for more practical considerations in regards to animals, I’ll allude back to my point about being unable to actually quantify pleasure/pain units. Someone right now might say that a “family farm” of chickens is ethical because the positive utility outweighs the negative utility of the chickens, unaware of the kinds of pain the chickens go through or the maceration of the baby males required to allow the females to survive in a profitable environment. But you might be able to find a more “ethical” form of exploitation that you might find okay that still produces negative utility that you just don’t recognize as such.
The safe way to go about the world is to recognize the rights of these animals the same way we recognize the rights of humans. Whether you want to call them natural rights or human-constructs, it doesn’t matter. These animals shouldn’t be exploited for their byproducts even if we can’t find any negative utility being inflicted. Life is always going to have some kind of suffering in it, so veganism usually implies an antinatalist stance for non-human animals. As a negative utilitarian yourself, you should recognize that we don’t have the right to birth animals as they might experience negative utility as a result of our exploitation, even if we try our best to mitigate it.