Animals, Hypothetical Consent, and Counterpossible Reasoning

Abstract In the present paper, we argue that the ethics of killing animals should be informed by considerations about what animals would consent to in counterfactual situations in which they know about intentions to kill them painlessly. Our proposal is opposed to a class of views on which killing animals is ethically insignificant. We argue that these views presuppose that considerations of hypothetical consent of animals cannot play a substantive role in animal ethics. This presupposition, in turn, relies on the claim that it is metaphysically impossible for animals to have a capacity to consent. We show that there are reasons to doubt this impossibility claim. As we continue to argue, however, even conceding this claim does not compromise the method of reasoning from counterfactual scenarios where animals do have the requisite capacities. This method is vindicated by facts about our reasoning practice which we argue is non-vacuist, meaning that we regularly rely on counterfactual claims in ethics and other fields without concern for whether the scenarios depicted by them are metaphysically possible. We also show how a non-vacuist account of the relevant counterfactuals is able to block parodies of appeals to considerations of hypothetical consent of animals in systematic ways. As a core consequence of our overall argument for animal ethics, we conclude that killing animals is prima facie morally wrong even when done painlessly.