I am living in rural Madagascar and realizing that every act towards developing this country and others like it into a more healthy, populous, and economically empowered place is an act towards industrializing its animal agriculture into factory farms and ensuring millions more meat-eaters. I have heard the argument that anyone who cares about animal welfare should focus entirely on animal causes rather than more inefficient human causes, but is development of negative utility in terms of the suffering it causes?
Hide table of contents
2
0
0
Reactions
0
0
New Answer
New Comment
1 Answers sorted by
This was named the Meat-Eater Problem in this article in the Journal Of Controversial Ideas by @MichaelPlant.
I think we need to be extremely suspicious of the conclusion that development is bad because of animal suffering. Development has given us everything that makes life better (as most would see it) than in pre-industrial times: antibiotics, vaccines, surgery, food security, shelter, cheap and plentiful access to knowledge and entertainment.
I don't see how you can accept the Meat-Eater Problem without also concluding that all human development in the last 10,000 years has been a mistake in light of the horrible toll we've demanded of the workhorses and mulesed sheep and caged chickens that we tortured along the way. The Ted Kaczynskiist view that the development of society has been overall bad is internally consistent and valid but also crazy and just not compatible with any sort of continued functioning of society.
To avoid this absurd conclusion that would lead us all to nihilism or posting explosive letters, I think we have to accept that development so far has been worth the costs, and that further development, for similar benefits, will be worth the additional costs.
The name is much older than this, though it has generally been refered to as 'The Poor Meat-Eater Problem' which I think is a better name; I remember discussing it in 2012 and I don't think it was new then. On the forum with a quick search I found this from over 9 years ago.
I think it's quite plausible that over the last 10,000 years the benefits have not outweighed the costs.
It's also plausible that the next 10,000 years will be dramatically better - for humans, farmed animals, and wild animals. Further human economic development will be necessary to build the knowledge and resources to fully enable this.
But this doesn't address whether supporting economic development of developing countries right now is a net benefit.
That's not really an argument at all. How do we prevent future suffering? Is enriching the global poor in line with that ambition? I can think of ways that it isn't—that it will lead to increased suffering. A counterargument would evide that global development will not lead to increased suffering. That we like having undergone development ourselves is not a counterargument and does not imply that funding global development is of positive utility.