Eating animals the nice way

Abstract

This article explores the ethics of benign carnivorism, or the practice of raising animals humanely for food. It acknowledges that the prevention of animal suffering should be prioritized, but argues that animal lives also matter to some extent, as animals have an interest in living to experience the goods in prospect for them. While the lives of animals raised in humane conditions are good, causing them to exist with those lives is not necessarily worse for them. However, killing the animals to consume them is bad, though justified if the animals would not have existed at all otherwise. The article then considers objections to benign carnivorism based on the comparison to causing humans to exist to use their organs, but it concludes that this analogy is flawed as animals do not have the same rights as humans. It further argues that comparing the human interest in eating meat with the animal interest in living suggests that eating meat is unjustifiable. It proposes a solution in the form of genetically modifying animals to die naturally, which would avoid the problem of killing them. – AI-generated abstract.