Vegetarianism And Negative Utility

Here, I'm using vegetarianism, veganism, and other animal-avoiding diets/lifestyles interchangeably. Also, by "animal" here I mean "non-human animal". Finally, for an introduction to the concept of negative utility, see the post Utility Curves; for an introduction to the concept of total lifetime utility, see the post Total Lifetime Utility.

There are many reasons people give for not eating meat. Common reasons include moral opposition to killing or eating animals, health benefits from a vegetarian diet, environmental benefits from avoiding animal agriculture, simple dislike for the taste of meat, and support for animal welfare.

This last reason, animal welfare, is interesting to our discussion of utility. From a utilitarian perspective, it cannot be justified without negative utility. To understand why, let’s assume (unreasonably) that the only effect of not eating meat is on the animals that would be eaten. This means ignoring not only the other reasons listed above, but also the possibility that vegetarians' actions could lead to the better treatment of other animals. Let’s also assume (reasonably) that these animals are raised as livestock, i.e. are not wild.

Without the market for the animals’ meat, they would not exist in the first place. (Worldwide, there are 24 billion chickens, 1.3 billion cows, and 961 million pigs.) Thus, the vegetarian is effectively arguing that these animals are better off not existing at all than living as livestock. This is correct if these animals would have negative total lifetime utility utility. On the other hand, if these animals have positive total lifetime utility, eating meat would become a good thing to do, because it would give the animals the opportunity to enjoy life, even if only slightly and briefly.

I unfortunately have thus far been unable to find any information specifically on livestock animal utility. However, there is an abundance of information on livestock treatment, and, more unfortunately, this treatment is indeed often very bad. For example, from FactoryFarming.com:

Nearly ten billion chickens and half a billion turkeys are hatched in the U.S. annually. These birds are typically crowded by the thousands into huge, factory-like warehouses where they can barely move. Each chicken is given less than half a square foot of space, while turkeys are each given less than three square feet. Shortly after hatching, both chickens and turkeys have the ends of their beaks cut off, and turkeys also have the ends of their toes clipped off. These mutilations are performed without anesthesia, ostensibly to reduce injuries that result when stressed birds are driven to fighting.

How does such treatment translate into the chickens' utility? I would be very interested in finding out. However, given how large livestock populations are and how bad the treatment is, I suspect that livestock treatment is one of if not the biggest opportunity for increasing utility on the planet.

Personally, I avoid factory farmed meat, out of concern for animal utility and out of concern for environmental impact. Even if livestock utility turns out to be positive, it probably could be much larger, and boycotting meat probably could make that happen. Ultimately, if environmental impact is accounted for and if livestock is treated well, then I'll resume eating meat at will. (Currently, I eat meat about once every three months to make sure my body can still handle it, having heard stories of people who have gone so long without eating meat that it makes them sick. I want to always be capable of eating meat in case I ever must do so for basic nutrition, such as when travelling in places lacking in vegetarian options.)

An important take home message is that, from a utilitarian perspective, there is nothing fundamentally wrong with killing and eating animals. This means that, assuming it turns out that eating meat generally leads to a decrease in total utility, we should strive to minimize our meat consumption, not eliminate it, because the amount of harm done would be proportional to the amount of meat eaten, and because there could be circumstances in which, for other reasons, eating meat actually ends up increasing total utility.

I hope to write more on the environmental impact of meat consumption later, but for now see for example Meat-eating is the #1 global-warming human activity. I haven't read this article and can't speak for its accuracy, but at a glance it appears to at least provide a glimpse into why meat consumption is very important to climate change which is in turn important to total utility.