Factory Farming: A Life Worth Living?
In his book Living on Earth, Peter Godfrey-Smith proposes a thought experiment to aid one interested in thinking carefully about the morality of what’s somewhat euphemistically called “factory farming.” He begins by describing the lives and experience of pigs, chickens, and cattle in these “farms.” I trust I don’t need to describe these lives in detail here. Instead I’ll just say that they’re pretty miserable.
Then Godfrey-Smith asks that we work with the idea of a “life worth living” and proposes his thought experiment. (He doesn’t recall the philosopher John Rawls here, but I think this bears some resemblance to Rawls’s concept of the original position or veil of ignorance.) Imagine, he suggests, that when you die, you’re presented with a stark choice. You can not be reborn at all — i.e., your death means that you no longer exist as an experiencing subject – or you can come back as an animal. In his version of the experiment, you get to choose neither the species of animal nor the circumstances in which that animal, but I’m going to make the choice a bit more stark. You get to choose between not living at all, or living the life of a mother pig in a “factory farm,” spending most of your life in a crate allowing virtually no movement, and having your off-spring separated from you permanently when they’re only a couple of weeks old.
So, no life at all? Or a life like that of the breeding sow? If you choose no life at all, then you’re saying that the life of the pig is not worth living. And the next question is whether you’re willing to say that a pig doesn’t deserve to have a life worth living.