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.
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.
Interestingly, I am not actually on the side of antinatalists. I think a short term negative utilitarian thought process usually justifies antinatialism, but I also view the entirety of their ideals as short sighted. To use the most popular example in being against human birth, they might argue that human life has so much suffering that the good can never could justify it; especially, the suffering to others. However, we ought to think about the future implications of our actions. If we were to go to the extreme, stop the cycle of human birth, then eventually we do end up wiping ourselves out - the antinatalist ideal. But if I am to also use extreme future circumstance, what is stopping a future species from continuing to cause suffering? What about the suffering currently happening in the wild? I’d argue the approach from antinatalists forgets about these realities and does not actually reduce harm. Especially because there is a decent likelyhood that we eventually have a far less negative impact than we have now (see: veganism and environmentalism on the rise). I also acknowledge it could get worse, but I try not to dwell on speculation if I cannot reasonably discern the consequences, unlike the antinatalist position which most certainly does conclude the elimination of humans as a whole is good.
Anyway, back to our original conversation lol. I am familiar with some utilitarians that bring up relative harm and gain. In fact, I acknowledge that is, from my view, a significant weakness in their argument because of the subjectivity involved in an seemingly objective world view. However, I wouldn’t throw out utilitarian beliefs because of the shortcomings of a few lines of thinking. One of the arguments I’ve increasingly found more reasonable as of late is Singer’s arguments of “What We Owe Each Other”. In this attempt to answer your question of how we compare relative good/bad effects, he would argue we ought to do all we can to help one another, or in a different sense, all we can to make sure others are not harmed. For the hypothetical, “Yeah the chickens die, but I looooove wings” or other equally egregious examples, Singer would say that is well within our means to ensure we do not cause the suffering to those chickens. It is very easy, from and objective stance, to say that the trade there is not equal.
For Singer, the extent to which we should go in our consideration of others is as far as we can until we have put ourselves in relative equality to their well-being (a sort of indirect egalitarian view). For a less extreme example, he would posit I should help my struggling neighbor by cooking them a nutritious meal (a good for them), even if it costs me money and took my time away (a bad for me). However, I do not necessarily have to do that if I am struggling at an equal or less point to them. On a tangent, some of his views on effective altruism in practice seem flawed to me, but that’s for a different conversation I suppose.
That brings me back to the original point of my posting: animal byproducts. When I think of what may be permitted, I think back to Singer’s viewpoint. With that, the question isn’t “what can I permit”, but rather, “how much can I help.” This fundamental switch in ethical priority allows us to do all we can to inhibit harm rather than do everything we want, but not in specific cases. So for chickens laying eggs, I ought to do the most that I can to help them. Whether that be going vegan, protesting, speaking with others in my community, etc. That does not mean I should not use their byproducts though. For that, we’d first need to establish that it harms them. In the hypothetical presented in the original post, this requirement does not hold true, therefore there is no reason for concern.
Also, before I give my fingers a break from typing, I feel its important to note I do acknowledge there are rough edge cases with the views presented. Hell, Singer is as famous as he is because if he is not shy about confronting them. However, I find some deontological views equally troublesome. For a not-so-extreme example, if I do not exploit the chickens in the example I laid out, what do the carnivores eat? Currently, there is no means to feed them except for animal products and wiping them out requires significant harm and ecological horror. With that in mind, if I am to commit wholly to the idea of never exploiting an animal, I am dooming some wild animal to a likely violent death that I could have otherwise stopped. I’ve met several threshold deontologist that would say there is clearly some threshold for exploitative harm, but it seems to me that we run into the same issue you just presented when we go down that path (where is the line). That, I find to be more uncomfortable than some of Singer’s bullet-biting.