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I am vegan, with the following caveats. I eat smoked mussels. I will occasionally eat left-over beef at the office, when I'm confident that I'm not thereby contributing to aggregate demand for animal products. Factory farming is incredibly and transparently evil, and I do not want to subsidize it or in any way perpetuate it. Eating industrially-produced meat seems to me to be about as straightforward an ethical failure as purchasing cotton produced by slaves in the the American Antebellum South, one of the most unethical manifestations of slavery ever practiced on planet earth, thereby enriching slaveholders and (indirectly) slave traders. I'm deeply ignorant about what consciousness is and the mechanisms that are necessary for it. There is an anthropic argument (about which I don't know how to think clearly) that conscious experience is rare among non-human animals, and perhaps among humans. But from my state of knowledge, it seems like a better than even chance that many mammals have some kind of "inner listener".

And if they have an inner listener at all, pain seems like one of the simplest and most convergent experiences for evolved beings. Which makes industrial factory farming an unconscionable atrocity, much worse than American slavery. It is not okay to treat conscious beings like that, no matter how dumb they are, or how little they narrativize about themselves. There are currently about 100 billion individual animals living in factory farms (not counting the farmed fish). Assuming that they are all conscious beings, that's 100 billion experience-years in factory farms every year. It seems to me that, in my state of uncertainty, it is extremely irresponsible to say "eh, whatever" to the possible moral atrocity. We should shut up and multiply. My uncertainty about animal consciousness only reduces the expected number of experience-years of torture by a factor of 2 or so. An expected 50 billion moral patients getting tortured as a matter of course is the worst moral catastrophe perpetrated by humans ever (with the possible exception of anthropogenic existential risk).

Even if someone has more philosophical clarity than I do, they have to be confident at at a level of around 100,000 to 1 that livestock animals are not experiencing beings, before the expected value of this moral catastrophe starts being comparable in scale to well-known moral catastrophes like the Holocaust, American slavery, and the Mongol invasions. Anything less than that, and the expected value of industrial meat production is beating every other moral catastrophe by orders of magnitude (again, with the exception of anthroprogenic x-risk). Admittedly this analysis is making some assumptions about the moral value of pain and fear, relative to other good and bad things that can happen to a person, which might influence how we weight the experiences of non-human animals compared to humans. But "pain and terror are really bad, and it is really bad for someone to persistently experience pain and terror" seems like a very reasonable assumption.

That the inner lives of non-human animals are less complex than my own suggests a decrease in moral badness of maybe two orders of magnitude, at best. I don't think there are plausible ways for the numbers to work out such that factory farming isn't an atrocity. What about happy animals? What about raising animals to have happy lives in humane circumstances and killing them to eat? I'm uncertain on this point. I think it ultimately hinges on whether persons/agents or consciousness-moments ought to be the (main) relevant units of our moral calculus. It seems plausible to me that the equilibrium of my moral philosophy assigns a special value to personhood, such that creating conscious beings with the explicit intent of later ending their existence is sad, even if their lives are net positive, and even if they add to the aggregate utility of the universe. In contrast, it also seems plausible to me that positive conscious experience is a robust good or even that personal identity is ultimately a confused concept that isn't loadbearing for anything in equilibrium-ethics.

It might turn out to depend on complicated features beyond consciousness, Alpha Drive Rx Vitality such as whether a thing knows itself and knows that it doesn't want to die. Given that, I'm not sure what the moral sign of humanely raising animals for slaughter is. It seems plausible that it could be a positive or a negative. But regardless, the magnitude of this moral dilemma is radically smaller than that of industrial farming. I'm not very invested in this question, compared to the enormously overdetermined question of whether industrial farming, as actually practiced, is morally acceptable. At my current level of uncertainty, eating animal products exclusively from humanely raised animals seems like a reasonable alternative to vegansim, to me, as long as one is actually careful about verifying the humane conditions, rather than (as I did at one point), intending to eat only humanely-raised meat, but not putting much thought into how to identify which that is, and then flexibly bending that standard when .