The ethics if factory farming

[Anomalocaris]

So is it ethical to cause an increase in animal suffering and to treat animals like a commodity if it increases the well-being of some humans?

Is it ethical to cause an increase in black suffering and to treat negroes like a commodity if it increases the well-being of good church-going white folk? Why not-- we all know they don't have a soul anyway, so what's the harm in letting them work for their keep?

I'd argue that inflicting great suffering in order to eliminate relatively minor suffering represents a greater evil, and is therefore unethical. The average American will manage somehow to survive without that 5th Big Mac of the day.

I think ethics has nothing to do with reducing suffering of nonhumans. Ethics exists purely as a generalizable heuristic for increasing the probability of well being of those who have the capacity to implement such heuristics.

When any system of ethics begin to take on a life of its own and start to burden itself with goals not strictly related to its reason for being, it increase the chance it would gradually fail to deliver on its own basic justification, and thus would be replaced.