Karri Heikkinen

According to one common argument for moral omnivorism, eating meat produced in sufficiently high-welfare conditions is permissible because the animals we eat would otherwise never exist. While this argument has a long history, it has recently gained renewed attention, with some philosophers now claiming that we can run the argument even if we grant humans and farm animals the same moral status. In this article, I reconstruct what I take to be the best version of this argument, and I then evaluate it. I defend two main conclusions. First, I argue that even the best version of the argument is limited in important ways: it cannot justify the consumption of all animal products, and it implies that we should often stop animals from being killed if we can. Second, I argue that even this improved and limited form of the argument should ultimately be rejected because there are contexts in which it has very counterintuitive implications.

Many political philosophers accept a view called intergenerational sufficientarianism, according to which we should aim to make sure that future people have enough of whatever is the appropriate currency of distributive justice, such as welfare, capabilities, or need-satisfaction. According to proponents of this view, we have good reasons to accept intergenerational sufficientarianism, even if sufficientarianism is not the right way to think about distributive justice among contemporaries. However, despite its popularity, and the established literature on sufficientarianism in the contemporary context, precise statements of intergenerational sufficientarianism remain relatively rare. In this paper, I first survey the reasons that have been offered for accepting intergenerational sufficientarianism, and then formulate multiple precise interpretations of the view. I argue that there is in fact no precise formulation of intergenerational sufficientarianism that achieves all the benefits attributed to the view in the literature, and all plausible interpretations of the view also face serious further problems. Thus, intergenerational sufficientarianism is not as attractive a view as many have thought.