Interesting argument, but I don't think a deontologist should accept it. Generally I don't think that the natural level of suffering and death are directly relevant to rights. It wouldn't be permissible on deontology to kill your baby after 7 years, even if living conditions where you are are so rough that the expected life of a newborn is 5 years.
You object with a vaccine counterexample. But two things to this: Firstly, the risk is very small in your example. It probably wouldn't be permissible to give them the vaccine on deontology, if it had a 10% risk of death, even if the baseline is 20%. Secondly, in the vaccine example, the action you perform on each individual will be expected to help them. This is not the case when killing animals. Imagine that we instead sacrificed 10% (or even 0.2%) of the population in a human sacrifice ritual to stop the spread of the disease (and suppose it actually works). I don't think a deontologist would accept this, but this seems like a much closer analogy to the case of killing animals.
"An alternative would be to kill all the foxes then take just less than the foxes would have anyway." This is why I am not a vegan, and I tend to reject the entire chain of logic as impermissible. Any series of utilitarian harm calculations which leads you to genociding foxes, or wolves, or bears, has gone horribly wrong.
I am against factory farming, not because it causes pain, harm, or death as a physical phenomenon, but because on aesthetic grounds, I find it disgusting. In particular, I believe it is disgusting to mutilate a living animal, or to force it into a cage, or to force it to live within its own feces. This is a spiritual offense, entirely separate from slaughtering or engaging in predation.
When a lion or tiger hunts, there is no sin committed. Any claim that the lion is sinful seems perverted. I'm not making a good argument here, but speaking purely from intuition: any claim that lions should be killed to protect gazelles should be subject to extreme scrutiny.
Humans are predatory animals, and any moral philosophy which states that predation itself is harmful is an anti-human morality. Factory farming, however, is not a result of the natural form of humanity, but of economic incentives, which can and should be regulated as offensive and repugnant.
Making a selfish argument: it is morally permissible to cause myself pain, to save the life of another, or to save my own life. However, it is not permissible to allow myself to be enslaved, humiliated, or forced to live in a cage lying in a pool of my own feces. Because it is not permissible for me to do that to myself, it is also not permissible for me to do that to animals. But because it is permissible to cause pain to myself, I am also permitted to cause pain to others in the form of hunting and predation.
What I am concerned with is not the painful suffering of the animal, but the dignity and soul of the animal, which is sacred and should not be violated. For an animal to die a violent death is part of the natural cycle of life, and any attempt to genocide predators to decrease violent death is an offense against the natural rights of predators.
Pretty poor reason to be against factory farming, and, strange it's fine for foxes to kill chickens, but not for humans to kill those foxes who kill chickens. Personally, speaking as a landowner, I'd not have all the foxes killed for aesthetic reasons.
I said "genociding foxes," not killing foxes. There's a case for anti-natalism in the case of animals which are domesticated and cannot survive independent of humans, like specially bred dogs with genetic problems.
Interesting argument, but I don't think a deontologist should accept it. Generally I don't think that the natural level of suffering and death are directly relevant to rights. It wouldn't be permissible on deontology to kill your baby after 7 years, even if living conditions where you are are so rough that the expected life of a newborn is 5 years.
You object with a vaccine counterexample. But two things to this: Firstly, the risk is very small in your example. It probably wouldn't be permissible to give them the vaccine on deontology, if it had a 10% risk of death, even if the baseline is 20%. Secondly, in the vaccine example, the action you perform on each individual will be expected to help them. This is not the case when killing animals. Imagine that we instead sacrificed 10% (or even 0.2%) of the population in a human sacrifice ritual to stop the spread of the disease (and suppose it actually works). I don't think a deontologist would accept this, but this seems like a much closer analogy to the case of killing animals.
"An alternative would be to kill all the foxes then take just less than the foxes would have anyway." This is why I am not a vegan, and I tend to reject the entire chain of logic as impermissible. Any series of utilitarian harm calculations which leads you to genociding foxes, or wolves, or bears, has gone horribly wrong.
I am against factory farming, not because it causes pain, harm, or death as a physical phenomenon, but because on aesthetic grounds, I find it disgusting. In particular, I believe it is disgusting to mutilate a living animal, or to force it into a cage, or to force it to live within its own feces. This is a spiritual offense, entirely separate from slaughtering or engaging in predation.
When a lion or tiger hunts, there is no sin committed. Any claim that the lion is sinful seems perverted. I'm not making a good argument here, but speaking purely from intuition: any claim that lions should be killed to protect gazelles should be subject to extreme scrutiny.
Humans are predatory animals, and any moral philosophy which states that predation itself is harmful is an anti-human morality. Factory farming, however, is not a result of the natural form of humanity, but of economic incentives, which can and should be regulated as offensive and repugnant.
Making a selfish argument: it is morally permissible to cause myself pain, to save the life of another, or to save my own life. However, it is not permissible to allow myself to be enslaved, humiliated, or forced to live in a cage lying in a pool of my own feces. Because it is not permissible for me to do that to myself, it is also not permissible for me to do that to animals. But because it is permissible to cause pain to myself, I am also permitted to cause pain to others in the form of hunting and predation.
What I am concerned with is not the painful suffering of the animal, but the dignity and soul of the animal, which is sacred and should not be violated. For an animal to die a violent death is part of the natural cycle of life, and any attempt to genocide predators to decrease violent death is an offense against the natural rights of predators.
Pretty poor reason to be against factory farming, and, strange it's fine for foxes to kill chickens, but not for humans to kill those foxes who kill chickens. Personally, speaking as a landowner, I'd not have all the foxes killed for aesthetic reasons.
I said "genociding foxes," not killing foxes. There's a case for anti-natalism in the case of animals which are domesticated and cannot survive independent of humans, like specially bred dogs with genetic problems.