Abstract

It is broadly accepted in the field of animal ethics (and beyond) that standard practices of animal husbandry are deeply wrong: they cause a lot of harm and the added gustatory pleasure (if any) that people gain from eating animal products cannot justify this harm. It is much more controversial whether it is okay consume products from animals that had pleasant lives, where painlessly killed and would not have existed at all if it were not for our consumption. In order to evaluate these latter practices we need to engage with population ethics: the field of ethics that is concerned with what we have reason to do if our actions affect who will live and how many will live. This talk will introduce some famous puzzles of population ethics and point out their practical relevance, in particular for animal ethics.