This morning's poll got over 600 votes in only a few hours, which may mean it's a bit skewed towards those with the strongest opinions about this. But here are the results:
| What is your opinion of so-called "factory farming"? | ||
| Selection | Votes | |
| It is a moral abomination, an animal "Holocaust" | 167 | |
| It is morally wrong | 332 | |
| It is morally neutral | 31 | |
| It is a morally justifiable way of providing low-cost food products to people | 82 | |
| It is morally commendable by bringing into existence animals who otherwise would not have existed | 5 | |
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| 617 total | ||
This is a quite remarkable consensus among philosophically-minded folks. I will be interested to see whether it holds for other issues. (By the way, a version of the last choice has been defended by Loren Lomasky [Virginia]. In general, it's clear that many philosophers are quite ready to dismiss the cultural and culinary traditions of hundreds of millions of people as having no moral weight. In this paper, I speculate about the likely practical limits of these moral arguments for vegetarianism.)






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