I think Travis Timmerman took that kind of stance in a talk he gave on Zoom which I believe related to the logic of the larder. If I remember right, his stance was that creating happy animals and killing them for food is wrong, but the practice makes the world better and we should hope it occurs. I think when I asked him more about this,…
I think Travis Timmerman took that kind of stance in a talk he gave on Zoom which I believe related to the logic of the larder. If I remember right, his stance was that creating happy animals and killing them for food is wrong, but the practice makes the world better and we should hope it occurs. I think when I asked him more about this, he said that wrongness occurring does not in itself affect the value of worlds. If we are choosing between creating two worlds, and the only difference between them is that one includes wrongness and the other lacks it, we can flip a coin to decide which of the two worlds we create. (I'm not certain he said this in the Q&A for that talk, but I'm pretty sure he has told me something like this at some point.) At the time he said he had no plans to turn this talk into a paper.
This makes me think of Podgorski's "The Diner's Defence: Producers, Consumers, and the Benefits of Existence." In this paper Podgorski argues that people who buy animal products from farms that give animals good lives do nothing wrong because in purchasing the products, they are casually responsible for creating happy animals who will be wrongly killed, but they are not casually responsible for the wrongful killing. So he seems to think it's not wrong to create someone whom we know will be wrongfully killed. I can't remember how directly he addresses that question, but that answer is at least clearly implied.
As for Kamm, I don't know, but I wouldn't be surprised if she thought we should prevent very short lives from popping into existence if the reason these lives would be short is their wrongful killing. However, she made this point about the harm of death in the context of abortion, which does involve killing, so maybe I'm wrong about that.
Here's a relevant passage from "The Diner's Defence":
"The implication of this argument is that it is not wrong for harm-based reasons to cause someone to exist who is then abused by someone else, provided that her life is worth living, and there was no alternative act that would have caused her to exist with a better life. This is the typical position of the diner in relation to the animals that their purchase affects.
"This principle, I claim, is plausible even when applied to uncontroversial full-moral-status human beings..."
I think Travis Timmerman took that kind of stance in a talk he gave on Zoom which I believe related to the logic of the larder. If I remember right, his stance was that creating happy animals and killing them for food is wrong, but the practice makes the world better and we should hope it occurs. I think when I asked him more about this, he said that wrongness occurring does not in itself affect the value of worlds. If we are choosing between creating two worlds, and the only difference between them is that one includes wrongness and the other lacks it, we can flip a coin to decide which of the two worlds we create. (I'm not certain he said this in the Q&A for that talk, but I'm pretty sure he has told me something like this at some point.) At the time he said he had no plans to turn this talk into a paper.
This makes me think of Podgorski's "The Diner's Defence: Producers, Consumers, and the Benefits of Existence." In this paper Podgorski argues that people who buy animal products from farms that give animals good lives do nothing wrong because in purchasing the products, they are casually responsible for creating happy animals who will be wrongly killed, but they are not casually responsible for the wrongful killing. So he seems to think it's not wrong to create someone whom we know will be wrongfully killed. I can't remember how directly he addresses that question, but that answer is at least clearly implied.
As for Kamm, I don't know, but I wouldn't be surprised if she thought we should prevent very short lives from popping into existence if the reason these lives would be short is their wrongful killing. However, she made this point about the harm of death in the context of abortion, which does involve killing, so maybe I'm wrong about that.
Here's a relevant passage from "The Diner's Defence":
"The implication of this argument is that it is not wrong for harm-based reasons to cause someone to exist who is then abused by someone else, provided that her life is worth living, and there was no alternative act that would have caused her to exist with a better life. This is the typical position of the diner in relation to the animals that their purchase affects.
"This principle, I claim, is plausible even when applied to uncontroversial full-moral-status human beings..."
Perfect, thanks! I'll be sure to cite this if I end up expanding this post into a paper.