“IF WE DIDN’T EAT THEM, THEY WOULDN’T EXIST” The Nonidentity Problem’s Implications for Animals (Including Humans)

Abstract

The nonidentity problem raises the question whether an act that is necessary for a person’s existence can also harm that person. For example, according to the nonidentity logic, descendants of victims of historical injustices such as slavery and the Holocaust cannot complain about those injustices because the terrible events made their very existence possible. If a person has a life worth living, then past wrongs but for which she would not exist seemingly cannot have harmed her. This article offers novel solutions to the counterintuitive nonidentity reasoning by placing it in a fresh setting: claims about animal agriculture. Per the nonidentity logic, a slaughterhouse benefits the animals doomed to end there because slaughter is those animals’ raison d’être. This article responds to the nonidentity problem chiefly by positing an asymmetry between failing to create living beings and harming them, thus building on a moralized version of the endowment effect. Consideration of the nonidentity problem in the animal context reveals a common thread running through moral reasoning about human obligations toward our own as well as other species.If you are a vegan, vegetarian, or even pescatarian, you have likely encountered a seemingly paradoxical objection to your ethics. If a farmed animal—a cow, for instance—has a life worth living, and the animal would never have existed absent the demand for her meat or bodily output, then doesn’t it follow that humans deny that animal a benefit by refusing to eat her or her products? A person who uses animal products accordingly helps rather than harms animals. Absent the omnivore’s demand for these products, the animals in question would not exist at all.1 Refraining from consuming animals thus deprives those animals of lives worth living. Moreover, the benefits of life that omnivores confer accrue not just to individual animals but to entire species because animals such as domestic pigs, chickens, and cows would not exist were it not for humans breeding, raising, and eating them. Thus, the argument concludes, what may appear to be harm to animals is actually a kind of gift, a gift that vegans, vegetarians, and the like misguidedly refuse to convey to the animals they purport to care about.One way to challenge what we shall call the animals-benefit objection is to contest its factual premise that farmed animals’ lives are worth living. Although philosophers do not always specify exactly what makes a life worth living,2 the concept appears to connote at least some sort of minimally satisfying life. We will not attempt to define the term, because by any reasonable definition, most farmed and otherwise exploited animals do not have lives worth living. The overwhelming majority of egg-laying hens live in confined spaces where they can barely flap their wings and often suffer prolapses from having been bred to lay more eggs than their bodies can handle. Such animals endure sustained misery.3 So do the dairy cows whose babies the farmer repeatedly takes from them at birth so that the milk produced for baby bovine nursing can instead go to human consumers. After experiencing this torment repeatedly, the grieving mother cow must join her children at slaughter when she no longer produces as much milk as she once did.4 Similar misfortunes beset the lives of other animals that people raise for food, fiber, and other products.The foregoing response covers the vast majority of farmed animals. Yet we want to go further. We hope to persuade readers to reject the animals-benefit argument even in the small number of cases in which the farmed animal in question has a life worth living (however defined). We think that consuming animal products even from animals with worthwhile lives is wrong. Accordingly, in this article, we will assume, albeit solely for the sake of argument, that exploited animals can have lives worth living.Imagine that a farmer raises a litter of piglets and treats them as though they were his pets. Then, when they reach “slaughter weight,” the farmer kills them as humanely as possible. (His would hardly be a profitable enterprise, but we are assuming away such practical concerns.) We would consider the farmer’s pets-to-meat program wrong, even if the pigs had led happy lives up until the day of slaughter and thus even if their lives were, on net, worth living.5 Put differently, assume, against the overwhelming weight of the evidence, that defenders of “humane” animal exploitation are right in claiming that animals who become meat enjoy happy lives followed by “one bad day.”6 Still, we will argue that the many good days do not justify what happens on the bad day. We make the following core moral claim: if it is wrong to kill an animal for food at the time that one kills the animal (as it is in nearly every circumstance7), then it is also wrong to kill that same animal even after months of showing kindness to the animal.8Indeed, we can identify at least two ways in which giving the animal a good life until the “one bad day” might make the slaughter worse rather than better. First, we could regard death as a mercy for a miserable animal who endures nothing but cruelty and torment. In contrast, slaughter deprives a well-cared-for animal of a satisfying life. Second, a farmer who treats an animal with kindness and thus trains her to trust him betrays that animal when he kills her. We think most readers will share this intuition if they imagine a puppy a family raised as a pet. If the family were to slaughter the puppy one morning, they would be engaging in an egregious betrayal.9Whether the element of betrayal makes the killing worse is beside the point, however. Whether killing after cruelty or killing after kindness is worse, neither is morally justified. However kind we might be to an animal (or a human, for that matter), there never comes a point when that kindness entitles us to take the animal’s (or human’s) life for our own gain.We imagine that at least some of our readers share the intuition that taking an animal’s life is wrong no matter how kind the killer was beforehand. For those who still aren’t sure whether they agree, we offer an example involving humans.Imagine that Eve has a disease that will require her to have a heart transplant before she turns forty. Her genetic code makes her very unlikely to find a matching organ donor. Accordingly, using reproductive technology, when she is twenty-five Eve conceives, births, and begins to nurture Deborah, who grows into a happy child. Unbeknownst to Deborah, Eve plans to kill her and “harvest” her heart when she is twelve and Eve is thirty-seven. Even though Deborah will have twelve years of a life worth living, it would clearly be monstrous for Eve to carry out her plan. We would judge Eve (and any doctors or others who knowingly assisted her) culpable for doing so. As a general matter, people cannot bank credits for their good deeds (such as being kind to a child) to offset bad ones (such as killing the child). Good deeds do not cancel out bad ones, even if the actor would never have carried out the good deeds absent her plan to carry out the bad.We can think of no reason to restrict the prior-good-doesn’t-license-later-bad logic to human-on-human morality. If it is ordinarily wrong, as we believe it is, to kill or otherwise harm animals for food, then it is wrong to do so even when those animals existed only because of the plan to use them as food. Case closed, right?Maybe not. Our argument to this point has demonstrated that if it is wrong to inflict suffering or death on a sentient creature, the farmer acts wrongfully by doing so even if the farmer is also responsible for the creature’s existence and gave the creature a life worth living because of the farmer’s plan to slaughter the creature for sale. Creating a being with a life worth living does not license the farmer to harm or kill that being, even if the harm or killing leaves the being’s life overall in the worth-living category. This statement is true at least in part because we evaluate the rightness or wrongness of each separate act, given that the first does not make the second inevitable: the farmer can decide, after breeding and feeding the animal, not to kill her. From the farmer’s perspective, breeding, on one hand, and killing or harmfully exploiting, on the other hand, are distinct acts, however much he links them in his mind.From the consumer’s perspective, by contrast, there appears to be only one single act: purchasing the animal products. The consumer of animal products does not send two market signals to the farmer: (1) bring an animal into existence and give that animal a life worth living, and (2) then take the further actions of harmfully exploiting and slaughtering the animal. Buying meat, dairy, or eggs sends a single indivisible market signal to farmers both to breed more animals and to inflict harm on those animals to create the products in question.If the argument that animals benefit from being farmed fails as a defense for the farmer, might it succeed as a defense for the consumer? We reiterate that in the vast majority of cases, the animals whose flesh and secretions become food for the consumer do not have lives worth living, so the animals-benefit argument does not even get off the ground. But for the small number of animals whose lives we assume are worth living notwithstanding their terrible end, can the consumer justify her consumption habits by drawing on the indivisibility, from her perspective, of the worthwhile life and the sad and premature end?We can formulate that question as well in a way that makes it relevant to human-on-human morality. Consider a stylized example from the pre–Civil War United States. Suppose that plantation owner Beauregard enslaves a person named Jim. Suppose further that Jim exists only because Beauregard purchased and thereby brought together Jim’s parents. Even if we assume that Jim’s life is worth living, we reject out of hand the claim that Beauregard could ethically continue to enslave Jim. The claim never gets off the ground because the creation of Jim (by bringing his parents together) is severable from the continued enslavement of Jim.From the perspective of an ethical consumer, however, the moral issue may be less clear. A consumer who purchases clothing made of cotton picked by enslaved persons has performed a single indivisible act. This one act induces both the creation of people (with lives worth living, we are assuming) and the enslavement of those people once they exist. If the enslaved people indeed have lives worth living, then how do we evaluate the morality of a decision to purchase the products of slave labor?We might try to distinguish the animal case from the human slavery case by observing that consumers of animal products and consumers of slave-labor products, respectively, act as they do with a different mental state. Animal products necessarily come from animal exploitation, whereas generic commodities (such as cotton) that sometimes come from slave labor do not necessarily involve human exploitation. Consumers of animal products therefore knowingly demand injustice to animals, while consumers of cotton picked by enslaved people might just be demanding cotton and holding an attitude of reckless indifference toward sourcing.Along the dimension of mental state, then, purchasing animal products is arguably more culpable than purchasing generic goods that happen to be the product of slave labor! This observation does not, of course, amount to approval or moral endorsement of the decision to purchase goods resulting from slave labor. Furthermore, despite the possible difference in culpability arising out of the respective mental states, the act of purchasing animal products is sufficiently similar to the act of purchasing the products of slave labor to allow for a useful analogy between the two.We have a strong moral intuition that purchasing the products of slavery and purchasing animal products are both very wrong. They are wrong, we think, even though, by hypothesis, the enslaved person and the nonhuman animal have lives worth living and would not have existed but for the decision to purchase the products, respectively, of slavery and animal exploitation. Readers may share our intuitions.We face a challenge, however: defending against the pull of competing moral intuitions. Specifically, when it comes to the moral choices of consumers, how do we defeat the argument that enslaved humans and nonhuman animals benefit from consumption choices that both lead to the existence of the beings in question and demand the infliction of cruelty upon them? We refer to the argument we aim to defeat as the “animals-benefit” claim because we focus in this article on nonhuman animals, but we hope that what we have to say about nonhuman animals sheds light on related moral puzzles involving only humans.Defeating the animals-benefit claim implicates a family of puzzles that moral philosophers have long struggled to solve. These puzzles go under the name of the nonidentity problem. Here is the problem, in general terms:(1) An act or choice is wrong only insofar as it causes harm to some being (what we shall call “no-harm-no-foul”).(2) When a single act or choice causes both the existence and the misfortunes of a being, the act can be harmful only if the being has a life that is not worth living. In other words, there can be no harm to a being to whom a single act gave both existence and misfortunes if the being’s life is, on balance, worth living (“net-benefit”).(3) Yet some acts that produce net-benefit seem nonetheless to wrong the being created, thereby contradicting no-harm-no-foul (“wrong-anyway”).10To answer the animals-benefit argument, we must either demonstrate why the intuition that underwrites wrong-anyway is right, notwithstanding no-harm-no-foul and net-benefit, or show how the nonidentity reasoning goes wrong in some other way. If we succeed, we will have replied to an objection to animal rights and we will also have shed light on an important puzzle in moral philosophy.Moral philosophical questions may seem abstract, to be sure. Nonetheless, a successful solution to the nonidentity problem would not only answer the animals-benefit claim for vegans and vegetarians. It could potentially address important questions of law and public policy, including whether descendants of enslaved humans are entitled to reparations and whether we have an obligation to preserve the natural environment for our descendants.11Accordingly, this article uses the animals-benefit claim to offer new insights into the nonidentity problem. Part I specifies the problem in greater detail with some additional stylized examples. Part II conducts a critical review of the leading proposed solutions to the problem. Finding none fully satisfactory, we then articulate alternative approaches. Part III proposes our most substantial innovation; building on but also modifying arguments offered by Elizabeth Harman, Seana Shiffrin, and others, we contend that moral agents are responsible for the harm that results from, but cannot take credit for the benefits conferred by, actions that lead to the creation of a sentient being. Part IV argues, alternatively, that consumers of animal products cannot plausibly describe their actions as only incidentally harming animals; thus, their intentions and actions might be said to take the animal case entirely outside the scope of the nonidentity problem. In other words, part IV contests the claim we made above that the moral choice facing consumers differs in a relevant way from the moral choice facing farmers. Part V builds on the work of Ori Herstein, who conceptualizes historical injustices such as slavery and the Holocaust as involving group harm; although we note that Herstein’s approach does not respond to all variations of the nonidentity problem, it is particularly well suited to addressing the animals-benefit claim.The nonidentity problem takes its name from the fact that the person who complains of being harmed by someone else’s allegedly immoral choice would not exist in the absence of that choice. In other words, if the complainant had her way, then either somebody else would exist in her place (so that the complained-of act would affect the identity of who came into existence) or nobody would have come into existence. In either event, she would not exist.12 She is accordingly comparing her state of well-being now (a state that resulted from the choice she condemns) with her well-being in a state of nonexistence if the object of her condemnation had only done precisely what she claims he ought to have done. Consider some stylized examples that we borrow with minor changes from philosophers’ substantial body of work in this area.13Suppose Jane wants to have a child. She suffers from a condition that all but guarantees that her child will be born blind (and otherwise healthy). Scientists have invented a medication that will fully protect any offspring she has against developing blindness. Jane need only take a pill with no side effects one month before conceiving to eliminate the resulting child’s risk of blindness. Under these circumstances, would Jane be doing anything wrong if she conceives a blind child immediately rather than taking the pill and waiting a month to conceive a sighted child?Some people would say that by failing to take the pill and wait the month, Jane has acted wrongfully. But whom did she wrong? Blindness entails special challenges, in large part because society has organized itself around the assumption that people can see.14 Nonetheless, Jane has plentiful resources and will love her child. The child, though blind, will enjoy a life worth living. And Jane’s child—the blind one—would not have existed at all if Jane had waited a month to conceive, because a different egg and sperm would have combined to produce a different baby. For the blind child, then, there are two choices only: either to live a life worth living as a blind person or to live no life at all. We have no third option of Jane creating that same baby and endowing the child with the ability to see. Are we prepared to say that creating a blind person with a life worth living, a life that is valuable to the blind person, constitutes a harm to the child? The answer would appear to be no.Jane’s actions thus satisfy no-harm-no-foul (because they inflict no harm on anyone) and net-benefit (because Jane’s blind child enjoys a life worth living). We might therefore conclude that we cannot criticize Jane for conceiving her child without waiting a month. Yet Jane’s actions still trigger an intuition in many of us that she did something wrong (by failing to take the pill and wait a month to conceive). Her actions thus satisfy the criterion for wrong-anyway because they seem wrong notwithstanding the apparent failure to meet the harmfulness criterion. To solve the nonidentity problem, we must reject one of the three propositions because they are logically inconsistent with one another. Yet each proposition appears sound.Perhaps the reader is thinking that the scenario we describe fails to satisfy the “no one suffered a setback in his interests” premise of the nonidentity problem. Have we not identified someone who suffers harm because of Jane’s decision? Wouldn’t that be the (sighted) baby that Jane did not conceive? We might regard the sighted child who never comes into the world as having experienced a harm as a result of Jane’s decision to conceive immediately rather than wait a month. Yet the nonexistence of that sighted child might have nothing to do with Jane’s failure to wait a month. Had she waited, any one of millions of possible sighted children might have come into the world, a product of the vast number of sperm cells that might have ultimately fertilized Jane’s egg that month. We accordingly cannot identify one specific child who would be here if only Jane had waited. All but one of those alternative babies would still have never come into existence even if Jane had taken the pill and waited. How, therefore, can we say that having her baby when she did harmed a potential person who almost surely would never have existed anyway?One could respond that even though almost none of the potential babies would have become actual babies, one of them would have. Perhaps it is that baby, one whose identity we do not and cannot truly know, who suffered the harm of Jane’s refusing to wait a month to conceive.That response might be convincing if potential-but-never-existing babies were comparable to actual people who might become the victims of a future calamity. Suppose the residents of a town decide in October to hold a lottery in November to identify one resident whom they will stone to death as a sacrifice to the gods. In October, the identity of the unfortunate lottery “winner” is unknown, but we know that someone will be the victim of the awful plan.15 Thus, we could coherently say that the person who will end up being stoned to death was severely disadvantaged by the October decision to hold the lottery, even though no one knows who that person will turn out to be until November. In November, it would be perfectly understandable for the unlucky “winner” to lament that the town made its fateful decision the prior month. That’s for the obvious reason that the “winner” experiences the harm of stoning in November. By contrast, potential people who never come into existence are not harmed by their not coming into existence because they never experience anything.Are we sure? Might a reader have the intuition that it is possible to harm someone who does not exist and, as a consequence of the act in question, will never exist?If one truly believed that the failure to come into existence is a harm, a number of absurd results would follow. Every decision to not reproduce as many times as possible would inflict a harm on all the people who would otherwise have been born with lives worth living. If one thought that Jane’s decision not to wait a month to have a sighted child harmed the nonexistent sighted baby that she could otherwise have had, then one would also be committing oneself to saying that the decision to have two rather than three or more children harms each of the potential children who would have otherwise materialized. Because this idea seems indefensible except perhaps on religious grounds,16 virtually none of the philosophers who write about the nonidentity problem thinks that we harm potential persons by failing to bring them into existence.17So, is it wrong for Jane to decide to conceive now rather than take the pill and wait? Before trying to answer that question, consider another example.Suppose that a newly discovered fuel source—“contaminatium”—offers some benefits in the present but in a hundred and fifty years will impose catastrophic environmental harm. Using the contaminatium will accordingly lead to an unhealthy and poor population in the future, but because it will radically alter the ensuing course of events through so-called butterfly effects (or what Gregory Kavka called the “precariousness” of existence),18 it will also bring into existence the very people (and animals) who will experience the degraded Earth. Avoiding use of the contaminatium now would do nothing beneficial for those particular future people (and animals), because they will not be born if we refrain from using the contaminatium now. Thus, so long as those future beings’ lives are even just barely worth living, it appears that we inflict no harm upon those future people and animals when we use a fuel that does catastrophic but delayed damage to the environment in which those future beings will have to live. That conclusion is highly counterintuitive. Can we avoid it?Just as we can defeat most of the animals-benefit argument by pointing out a fact in the real world—that most farmed animals do not have lives worth living—so too can we invoke facts about the real world to defeat an argument in defense of environmental degradation. Almost every action causing serious environmental damage in the distant future will also harm and indeed is already harming people (and a large number of animals) whose identities are fixed because they were already alive when the harm from pollution commenced.19 Therefore, the premise of the hypothetical scenario—that the creation of environmental complainants and the creation of environmental harm are inextricably bound to each other—is usually going to be wrong.We like that kind of response because it is grounded in facts about the world. But it works best if the question is whether humans should care about the environment. The answer is that yes, we should care, regardless of whether or how we solve the nonidentity problem. A sufficient reason to care is that there are living beings who will suffer from a damaged environment and who do not implicate the nonidentity problem because they already exist. An additional reason to care is that there may be particular sorts of environmental problems that realistically look like the hypothetical contaminatium example. A generation ago, one could have conceived of global warming as having had this character. At the time, reasonable people could believe that the world’s extant population would not feel global warming’s effects because those effects would not materialize for over a century. Although that view is no longer reasonable with respect to global warming, there may be other kinds of very-long-latency environmental harms that operate in the way that contaminatium does.Even if our environmental example is purely hypothetical, we take it seriously for the same reason that we take seriously the highly unrealistic premise that farmed animals have lives worth living. Taking seriously stylized but far-fetched scenarios that cleanly present the nonidentity problem helps us clarify our views about more realistic scenarios in other contexts. Accordingly, we use Jane’s story, the case of distant-future-only environmental harm, the animals-benefit claim, and a variety of other real and imaginary scenarios to test others’ and our own intuitions about the nonidentity problem.Derek Parfit was not the first philosopher to discuss the nonidentity problem,20 but he addressed it in more detail than just about anyone before or since.21 Parfit presented potential solutions to parts of the problem and then explained why some of these solutions are more plausible than others.22 Yet the overall thrust of his argument accentuates rather than resolves the paradox. He demonstrated that plausible solutions to the problem in one context create trouble for versions of the problem in another context. For example, the choice in question might lead to one or another of two potential people, each happy to be alive, coming into existence (as in Jane’s case) so that one commits no wrong against either party, regardless of the decision and notwithstanding one child’s disability. But one would not want to say the same of choosing environmental devastation, even though the choice to pollute the environment will also bring into being an entirely different group of people (all of whom, we would hypothesize, are happy to be alive). Given its complexity, we will not attempt to summarize Parfit’s view, which we shall instead treat as a very powerful restatement of the problem. One comes away from Parfit’s treatment of the subject thinking that the nonidentity problem may well be an unsolvable paradox.David Boonin agrees with Parfit that there is no solution to the nonidentity problem as conventionally understood.23 He went on to argue, however, that this means we should abandon the wrong-anyway principle.24 According to Boonin, no-harm-no-foul and net-benefit are sound general claims about moral philosophy, whereas wrong-anyway merely describes a moral intuition that people may have.25 It explains our feeling that Jane acts wrongfully by conceiving a blind child or our feeling that it would be wrong to degrade the natural environment even if doing so harms only those beings who owe their existence to the very act that causes them harm.26Moral philosophy aims, among other things, to reconcile our moral intuitions.27 But it cannot always make sense of our every pre-reflective moral hunch. In a state of what John Rawls called “reflective equilibrium,”28 we take those moral intuitions that survive critical scrutiny and try to reconcile them in light of one another. Boonin exhaustively examined the many arguments for the common intuition that we should reject no-harm-no-foul and/or net-benefit in the Jane example, and he found them lacking. He accordingly concluded that wrong-anyway must be a mistake.29 Jane does nothing wrong by conceiving right away. And if using the contaminatium now would improve the lives of some presently living beings even a little and adversely affect only future generations who would not have otherwise come into existence and who will have lives worth living, then we do nothing wrong by using contaminatium.Although we might be willing to give Jane a pass, we find Boonin’s conclusion profoundly unsettling as applied to contaminatium. How can it be morally harmless and victimless behavior to despoil the environment even if the harm will manifest only in the relatively distant future? Boonin’s conclusion as applied to nonhumans would mean that any animal whose life is worth living necessarily benefits from being bred for exploitation and slaughter because the animal in question would not have existed but for the intended terrible fate. Understood in this way, the animals-benefit claim in Boonin’s framework becomes irrefutable—and not only for the farmed animals but for enslaved humans in the corresponding human example as well. We hesitate to accept such counterintuitive re