Should Farm Animals Be Grateful for Being Raised and Killed for Food? A Critique of the Argument from the Larder

Abstract

Raising animals for food (and research) is often justified by appeal to the so-called logic of the larder – if factory farm (as well as laboratory) animals hadn’t been raised for food (or research), they wouldn’t have existed; their existence, however brief and non-ideal, is still much better than their non-existence; hence, even on the assumption that their premature death in a slaughterhouse (or laboratory) is bad for them for the same or similar reasons for which we dread and try to postpone human deaths, i.e. because they deprive the subjects of those lives of their future goods, our killing them still wouldn’t wrong, or do injustice to, them. The aim of the paper is to assess the above argument for its soundness and cogency. Careful reflection reveals the argument from the larder to depend upon, and owe its intuitive appeal to, a number of problematic modal, metaphysical and axiological assumptions, and hence as failing to make a plausible case for the moral permissibility of raising and killing animals for food and research even in a fairly remote possible world where, unlike our real world of factory farming’s abominable cruelty, they would enjoy an overall pleasant, albeit (significantly) short(ened) life.