Can We Eat Animals Whose Existence Depends on It?

Karri Heikkinen

doi:https://doi.org/10.26556/jesp.v30i6.4418

Volume 30, Number 6
October 2025

ARTICLE

Can We Eat Animals Whose Existence Depends on It?

Volume 30, Number 6, October 2025, Pages 890–914

https://doi.org/10.26556/jesp.v30i6.4418

PDF

MP3

Abstract

According to one common argument for moral omnivorism, eating meat produced in sufficiently high-welfare conditions is permissible because the animals we eat would otherwise never exist. While this argument has a long history, it has recently gained renewed attention, with some philosophers now claiming that we can run the argument even if we grant humans and farm animals the same moral status. In this article, I reconstruct what I take to be the best version of this argument, and I then evaluate it. I defend two main conclusions. First, I argue that even the best version of the argument is limited in important ways: it cannot justify the consumption of all animal products, and it implies that we should often stop animals from being killed if we can. Second, I argue that even this improved and limited form of the argument should ultimately be rejected because there are contexts in which it has very counterintuitive implications.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license.

|

Weak Independence Is Sufficient for Making Weak Superiority Collapse into Strong Superiority

Susumu Cato

Ours Is a Speciesist World, Really

François Jaquet

Navigating Nonidentity: Scanlonian Contractualism and Types of Persons

D. Valeska Martin

Parental Partiality and Future Children

Thomas Douglas

Moral Uncertainty About Population Axiology

Hilary Greaves and Toby Ord

Essentially Comparative Concepts

Jonathan Dancy

Can States Resist Migration Blackmail While Protecting Migrants?

Daniel Sharp

Beyond Ought-Implies-Can: Impersonal Obligatoriness Implies Historical Contingency

Peter B. M. Vranas

Letting Animals Off the Hook

Nicolas Delon

Nonhuman Animals and Epistemic Injustice

Andrew Lopez

Can We Have Moral Status for Robots on the Cheap?

Sebastian Köhler

How We Can Make Sense of Control-Based Intuitions for Limited Access Conceptions of the Right to Privacy

Björn Lundgren