>>41125821
Now, perhaps the veil of ignorance isn’t a perfect procedure. It requires you be impartial—but perhaps you get to be partial towards your loved ones. Perhaps you get to save a family member over two strangers, even if you’d save the two strangers from behind the veil of ignorance. (The veil of ignorance also seems to imply on its face that you shouldn’t care about bringing people into existence if they have below-average happiness, but that’s easily fixed by including possible people behind the veil.)
But even if this is right, the veil of ignorance is a decent guide to deciding which things are important. If you’d care overwhelmingly about an issue behind the veil of ignorance, then the issue is quite important, and you should take it rather seriously. The veil of ignorance tells us which things impartially matter, and any plausible ethical view takes seriously the things that matter impartially—even if bringing about impartial value doesn’t exhaust all of ethics.
But when we apply the veil of ignorance to animals, it becomes obvious that animal welfare is by far the most important issue in the world.
A first thing one notices when they imagine they’re equally likely to be any of the conscious creatures ever born is that the odds they’ll be a human are very low. It’s about 600 times more likely that you’d be born this year as a chicken in a factory farm than a human. In fact, the odds you’d be born as a chicken in a factory farm this year are about as high as the odds you’d be born as a human ever, in all of history up until this point. Approached this way, caring about chicken farming doesn’t seem like some weird obsession of utilitarians. Behind the veil of ignorance, we’d all care about it. Our concern about chicken farming alone could very well dwarf our concern about all human problems.
