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As with many other such conundrums, this only appears as a problem if one is a strict utilitarian and extends that principle to all animals. I implore everyone to stop believing that people are utilitarians.
At least part of the stronger argument is not specific to utilitarians. The fuller text from the article doesn't dwell at length on it, but it does bring up that we're perfectly fine with industrialized animal-rape, whether that be make sure the next generation of cows exist, or to maximize horse race lineages, or to avoid possible complications for more esoteric dog breed combinations, sometimes in especially gross ways: the only rule is that the practitioner can't (explicitly) enjoy it.
((Mike Rowe famously described turkey farming as the grossest job he'd ever done, and he's not wrong!))
There are more serious arguments available even within a utilitarian framework. Ultimately, though, making any run prey to the problem that you've now that far too much and far too in-depth about animal-fucking.
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I think people are very much utilitarians in their everyday lives (or at least consequentialists), and the exceptions you can find to this are rare enough that they fall into the non-pedantic version of the 'prove the rule' category.
Of course, people are very often wrong about their utilitarian calculations, and using all kinds of faulty inputs and premises to do them, particularly about any large-scale issues outside of their personal lives and sphere of influence. And they often deal with this by falling back on heuristics that don't reference utilitarian concerns directly, such as virtues.
But I still think most people have a fundamental instinct towards 'we should do things that make the world better for people, instead of worse'. And that this is the basement level justification for all their types of moral reasoning.
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Doesn't seem like this argument requires utilitarianism to me, just a more principled take on good and bad than arbitrarily assigning things to that category. I certainly don't think a large number of people are utilitarians, and I'm not one myself.
The assignments of eating meat as morally neutral and fucking animals as negative aren't arbitrary, they're entirely defensible if you're not a utilitarian. People that would have been puzzled by the distinction are mostly a very modern phenomenon.
Defensible under what rule, exactly? The sacredness of sex and the profanity of murder? I guess the cow should have committed suicide rather than allow herself to be defiled.
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My point is that barring a few very specific things like a love for family or the state, people are willing to ground their moral values in some degree of consequentialism, if not utilitarianism per se. And even in those specific cases, they will rationalize reasons for doing so, even if they're not the true reason.
Many things are puzzling today that weren't in the past, simply because we're more willing to be analytical about our morality, even if at the end it grounds in arbitrary values deep down.
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