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> "Ethical consequentialist vegetarians believe that farmed animals have lives that are worse than non-existence." Nonsense. There are plenty of "ethical consequentialist" vegetarians who don't care about animal welfare but believe eating meat is unethical because it harms the environment or exacerbates human poverty and hunger.
The fact is, chickens would not exist if not for human captivity/breeding, so it is irrelevant to compare 17 or 50 Billion to 60 billion wild "land bird" populations. The comparison should be to zero chickens. These chickens would not spontaneously be wild fowl of another species under any circumstances.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It doesn't assume that. Those religious vegetarians are not "Ethical consequentialist vegetarians". Consequentialism is an ethical framework, so consequentalist vegetarians are vegetarian for ethical reasons.
"Avoding voilence" is not an ethical reason?
> From the abstract: "Ethical consequentialist vegetarians believe that farmed animals have lives that are worse than non-existence." This article assumes that people are vegetarians because they are sad for farm animals... Absolutely untrue. The largest concentrated majority of vegetarians in the world are vegetarians for religious reasons, under the belief that eating animals is an act of violence we have a moral r…
> "Ethical consequentialist vegetarians believe that farmed animals have lives that are worse than non-existence." Nonsense. There are plenty of "ethical consequentialist" vegetarians who don't care about animal welfare but believe eating meat is unethical because it harms the environment or exacerbates human poverty and hunger.
Did you read it? Literally the second sentence points this out.
> "Ethical consequentialist vegetarians believe that farmed animals have lives that are worse than non-existence." Nonsense. There are plenty of "ethical consequentialist" vegetarians who don't care about animal welfare but believe eating meat is unethical because it harms the environment or exacerbates human poverty and hunger.
> "Ethical consequentialist vegetarians believe that farmed animals have lives that are worse than non-existence." Nonsense. There are plenty of "ethical consequentialist" vegetarians who don't care about animal welfare but believe eating meat is unethical because it harms the environment or exacerbates human poverty and hunger.
I think "ethical vegetarian" in academic philosophy has specifically been used to refer to people motivated by animal rights or welfare, and that's still what academic philosophers themselves talk about most in connection with vegetarianism.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Did you read it? Literally the second sentence points this out.
I did read it. The author makes an arbitrary distinction between "consequentialist" and "ethical consequentialist" vegetarians and implies the second category is comprised entirely of those concerned with animal welfare.
> Some consequentialists may be vegetarian because of environmental concerns, and others for non-consequentialist reasons, but these are not my main focus here.
as acknowledging that there are other kinds of consequentialists, those that have other ethical reasons for not eating meat, but that he's not talking about them.
Vegetarianism is not about making sure animals have good lives, it's about not eating them or participating in the intentional destruction of them by humans as much as possible. Stopping nature from taking its course in the world outside of human action is not a concern of vegetarians. Moving them to farms seems to be something very much against what a vegetarian would do.
His comparison of very low estimates of livestock population (a 2004 estimate of 17B chicken compared to the 2009 estimate of 50B https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poultry_farming#World_chicken_... ) to the entire wild animal population is a particularly negligent simplification, and the cherry-picked stats and inexplicable use of scientific notation for 60B and common notation for 17B show his motive for it. The fact is…
The comparison of farm and wild population sizes is relevant, because humans have control over both the size of the chicken population (through choice of eating habits) and the size of wild animal populations (through habitat reduction or conversion).