Objective Morality?

[Captain Scarlet]

The argument holds even under battery farming (which I'm not a fan of). The cow again would not have lived, and it would meet an even more "in-humane" adversary in life as a wild animal. Not to mention it's eventual end beneath the slow jaws of some carnivorous predator that hasn't developed stun/bolt. Or starvation, disease, and injury.

Right, plus modern methods for killing in abattoirs avoid an enormous amount of the pain of being killed and eaten by some other animal.

Even while that argument may work for battery farming and it could be realistically be deemed amoral I'd still largely abstain because of my own attitudes.

It's a bit of a side issue to the good overall case presented for moral realism. But I am not convinced by the response here. I buy that some animals have such a low capacity to have desires that they are inconsequential. But higher animals that show some degree of intelligence may indeed benefit from being born in captivity but still do not want to be slaughtered. Lets stick with the example of the cow and grant them the ability to have some form of desires. What is the difference between farming cows (which would not have been born otherwise) and farming fertilized human embryos (which would not have been born otherwise) to harvest organs for transplants? Again i would buy the capacity to have desires is much higher in the case of humans, but that doesn't appear to be the case you are making. Surely what you are arguing for is a consequential morality and the mere fact a sentient animal was raised in captivity is not relevant, as the animal can have no or very limited desires before being born, but can have them afterwards, as with human embryos.