Home / Political objections / Utilitarianism
"Human pleasures are worth more: better to be a human dissatisfied than a pig satisfied."
Utilitarianism: the principle
Maximize well-being and minimize suffering for everyone affected, counting each one's interest equally.
Why excluding animals contradicts the principle
- Bentham, one of the founders of utilitarianism, already said the question is not whether animals can reason, but whether they can suffer. Excluding them contradicts the theory itself.
- Mill's line compares kinds of pleasure, but it does not zero out animal suffering. Even if intellectual pleasures were worth more, an animal's pain would still count (A16, A22).
- Scale changes the sum: tens of billions of land animals and trillions of fish every year.
The strongest counter-reply
The most serious version grants that animals count, but says that farming with a good life and a painless death could be justified in the calculation, because it brings happy animals into existence (B6).
See also
E13 Defending animals is just utilitarianismA22 Humans suffer more than animalsB6 Without farming, these animals wouldn't even exist.