Thanks everybody for participating in this discussion. I spent some more time on this, here are my final thoughts. I thought they would be useful to share for people who stumble on this in the future:

Empirical findings: Very uncertain that organically farmed animals have a life worth living
After posting this, I contacted Animal Equality Germany and Albert Schweizer Stiftung for their thoughts on this. Both made the point that while these labels might be marginally better, how they are implemented in practice is often far from theory (e.g., link, link) and even the highest Naturland standard is not ideal (e.g., 3.000 laying hens in one shed, temporary tethering is allowed for cattle, calves separated from mothers). When I challenged Naturland with an email about this, they claimed that due to data privacy they cannot share any animal welfare checkup reports (announced visits yearly and non-anounced visits for a randomly selected 10%) or make something like live webcams mandatory. They did link to Tierwohl.TV as a project that implemented live webcams but the project pretty much died. Given that these are probably the top 1% of organic farms and the pigs and hens don't look like living their best life, I think it's safe to conclude that "we're not there yet". Side note: check out https://welfarefootprint.org/, they do great work, exactly what I was looking for with the first question I raised above (thanks @Vasco Grilo🔸 for the pointer).

Theoretical considerations: Very uncertain that a "net positive life" is justification enough to farm
As @Stijn and @MarcKrüger pointed out, even on a theoretical level we are getting into murky territory here. Most importantly, following this logic where "a net-positive life is enough to farm animals" quickly leads us to the repugnant conclusion, which I can't stand behind. My personal ethics were strongly influenced by Singer's Practical Ethics, where he argues for preference utalitariansim, and while this of course also has it's problems, it's clear that the farmed animals would have the preference to live in shelters vs on those farms. I don't claim to have the solution to population ethics but these considerations make me uncertain enough to avoid advocating for net-positive animal farming.

Personal conclusion: Be vegan
Given all this uncertainty, for me personally the conclusion is to be vegan. A bit of history because I think it's an interesting case study on how slippery slopes work: After reading Practical Ethics 15 years ago, I decided to be vegetarian because it seemed like the easy solution. I tried the vegan at home, vegetarian when eating out for a while but always ended up eating eggs and cheese again, mostly triggered by living with people who did, inviting people over, or saying "well, I eat it anyway when eating out". Then this slowly escalated to eating meat when travelling, making exceptions for fish and sushi, and most recently eating meat when eating out after my personal trainer put me on a high protein diet, justifying this with "it's not that different from being vegetarian because animals suffer in both cases and are killed in both cases", which eventually led to this post. I think the red line that goes through this is conflict avoidance - I didn't want to go into conflict with friends, partners, colleagues, and people in general. So from now on, I'll embrace the conflict and carry some emergency vegan snacks. Wish me luck ;)

Broader conclusion: Don't advocate for consuming net-positive animal products
I think my personal story is exactly the reason why we shouldn't advocate for consuming animal products of animals that "had a good life". It's super easy to get from there into a habit of eating all kinds of animal products, especially because the places where it's most difficult to be vegan will probably care the least about animal welfare. Following this, I think the answer to question 3 in this post would be "we would consumer more". As also pointed out by @MarcKrüger  and question 2, when it comes to advocacy we of course should also take into account sustainability. It's clear that farming with higher welfare standards needs more land, and probably more resources because the animals would live longer, so also not a good idea to advocate for this (vs veganism) from a sustainability perspective. Nevertheless we should of course keep advocating for higher welfare standards for the animals that are still being farmed.

Thank you for the post! I thought about some of these questions myself. Years ago even, while I was turning into a vegetarian.

"If we would not eat those animals, they wouldn't exist at all" is sometimes used as a justification for consuming animal products and if the animals in question do in fact have lifes worth living then it is quite a compelling argument. (At least for me. Substantial parts of the animal rights movement would probably disagree.) So I definitley understand why you write it might actually be morally permissible or even obligatory to eat animal products of animals living net-positive lifes. Still, after some deliberation I came to the conclusion that this is not the case and that we should still try to end factory farming altogether, even in the variations where the animals have lifes worth living. I think it might be worthwile to share my thinking here and I'm also curious about your thoughts.

So first of all when considering our behaviour towards non-human animals (I will from now on write animals for short) I often find it useful to ask myself a simple question: What would I think if they were humans instead? I do this to get a better intuition, since our moral intuitions are mostly calibrated to work with humans instead of other animals. (Of course intuition often goes wrong, but while I don't put too much credibility on my intuitions I still find them useful as a first orientation.) If I would find something acceptable even when done to humans then I normally agree with doing it to animals as well. When I would NOT allow this for humans, I see if I can find reasons why humans are so fundamentally different from other animals in regards to this question that different behaviour is warranted. For example, it is easy to see why a right to democratic participation and education it not something that should apply to animals the same way it applies to humans. Maybe the same can be said about some sort of important medical research, though I'm very uncertain in this area. And thinking about humans instead of animals makes it intuitively clear to me that wildlife population control shouldn't be done by just killing animals whenever we think there are too many of them. (Though admittedly we don't have perfect alternative solutions yet, so I'm interested where wild animal welfare might lead to eventually.)

So when I stumbled upon aforementioned justification, I applied my method here as well. You may skip this paragraph if you find it unsettling, as it illuminates how and why I came to find my arguments but not the arguments themselves. With that said, suppose we had the power to bring into existence some humans whom we would keep in captivation and eventually kill for profit. (Since we are not normally interested in human flesh, you may assume it is done in order to harvest their organs.) Since humans may be bothered by captivation much more than some of the animals (though this is just my personal guess), let's also assume they just don't really know or care about them being held in some sort of (outside?) prison, or we don't hold them captive at all. We somehow make sure these humans live lifes that are essentially good. They are held warm, get enough healthy food, they can enjoy going outside, live in small communities without predators, and so on. We essentially grant them the lifes of hunter-gatherers (which is probably the "bar to cross" in regards to humans?) with some limitations and a lot of upsides. Or maybe even the amenities of modern life. In any case, we are nearly certain their lifes are net-positive. (We can even ask them, after all.) We just sometimes take a few of them, kill them and sell their organs - in order to avoid fear and loss, we may always kill a complete group painlessly in their sleep. Intuitively we probably agree that doing so would be very much wrong. Still, assuming our intuition is correct that leaves the question why. Since these humans live net-positive lifes, it cannot really be out of concern for them, can it? In the human case the intuition is much more obvious than in the case of animals. Maybe because the case of animals is different - there is ongoing debate if painlessly killing an animal which does not have plans for or even concepts of their own future is permissible. But personally I think killing animals is wrong pretty much for the same reasons killing humans is: we rob them of all the remaining time and happy experiences they might have had. In any case, this possible distinction can not explain my intuition in regards to humans. After all, I would still prefer being born as one of those humans from my thought experiment over not being born at all, yet I am am against creating humans-to-be-slaughtered. Why?

In the end I came up with four reasons to defend my intuition and in turn (mostly) reject the claim that farming happy animals which would otherwise not be born is permissible.

1. Slippery Slope: From a strictly utilitarian perspective, if killing someone is good or bad depends solely on the outcome. (However, if we give some credibility to moral theories based on rights or at least to moral uncertainty it becomes obvious that regularly killing sentient beings in industrial scale is something ... highly problematic.) But even as a utilitarian I can agree that behaviour changes thinking which in turn changes behaviour again. (For this reason, in the human case the human rights or the principle of treating everyone the same, no matter how they came into existence, is too important to reject easily...) So if we kill (billions of) animals on a regular basis, this may change our general behaviour towards animals and how we see them in unfavourable directions, even if originally only done out of careful consideration. I am generally sceptical of slippery slope arguments, as they rest heavily on some assumption of human thinking and behaviour and how they change. Still - if I remember correctly - in this case we have some existing studies pointing out that people who just ate beef are less inclined to grant cows sentience, or something similar, so maybe the argument is warranted.
2. Abuse of power: This might be somewhat connected to 1, but in my opinion still is a different point. If we grant some farmers near absolute power over some animals and if their welfare interests are in opposition to the economic interests of those in power, then I have very little faith in human conscience. Of course, with strict regulations and controls this problem can be weakened substantially. Still, as long as (individual) humans have an interest in getting higher productivity out of their lifestock, abuse will happen - though maybe seldom enough to accept this as a necessary evil.

Still, even if objections 1. and 2. were taken care of in the human case (so neither abuse nor different behaviour towards the remainig humans would occur) my intuitions would remain unchanged. So it seems some deeper reasons have to be at play here. And I think the reasons are the following:

3. False Dichotomy: This, I think, is in some sense the strongest point. (It is also the one I mention whenever I hear the argument above that "they wouldn't exist otherwise" and I don't have time or opportunity for a detailed discussion.) The basic idea goes like this: If the animals have net-negative lifes we shouldn't bring them into existence at all. If they have net-positive lifes however, we shouldn't just end these lifes preemptivly. (Since if they lived longer, the additional "value" would be even bigger.) Of course it is better to have a net-positive life then not to be born at all. But it is even better to have a net-positive and not to be killed after some (rather short) time. In fact there is nothing wrong with bringing into existence happy beings, while there is pretty much everything wrong with killing happy beings - no matter why they exist in the first place. So if we really think it is good to have more happy animals, then the conclusion is not organic farming but to bring into existence even more of these happy animals and stop the farming altogether! (One might argue that having an animal that lives their full life is just as good as having an animal that lives for one year and is afterwards killed and replaced by a new one. I would still prefer for animals to live their full lifes instead, if only for reason 2 and moral uncertainty - and again my intuition if I were to replace them with humans instead.) Of course we cannot just bring into existence an unlimited amount of happy animals without creating a lot of problems at the same time, which is why we also need to consider the next point.
4. Animals are expensive: Animal products are notoriously bad for the environment. To feed animals we grow crops which often could just be eaten directly. I find it hard to believe that the most efficient possibility to spend our (us being humanity) limited resources is to raise a lot of animals with slightly net-positive lifes instead of caring for the already existing problems first. (Including wild animal suffering.) If anything creating more happy beings seems like something that might be done with surplus resources after all our immediate problems are resolved.

There are two conclusions to draw from these thoughts. First, it seems as if most production of animal products should still stop. This is mostly due to reasons 3 and 1, but even if killing the animals is not already immoral for those two reasons it still seems inefficient for reason 4. (However, while keeping factory farming is expensive for humanity, fighting it is sadly enough also expensive for EA. In some sense this could mean that the resources of EA might be better allocated to raising welfare instead of ending factory farming if the latter is too hard/expensive to achieve. Alternative Proteins still seem like a good bet, though, and most of EA's resources within the animal welfare pot already are directed at better welfare regulations anyways, right? In any case, if we adopt stricter welfare regulations this will not only lead to less animal "torturing" but also to increasing prices for animal products, so I suspect that using our resources to promote animal welfare regulations is actually a very good strategy to end factory farming in the long term. Which is also an answer to your last question.) Second, some sorts of animal farming might actually be permissible: In some instances they do not cost resources but actually gain them - there are areas where farming crops is essentially impossible but animals can be held and eat the grass. Sometimes these animals are even necessary to preserve a natural habitat. And even if our farming methods do take up some resources, if they are not too costly and we also get something out of it, point 4 essentially vanishes and - assuming we have strict welfare regulations and really care for their welfare - my only remaining objection is that it is still not permissible to kill these animals, at least not before they have grown so old and sick that being killed might be in their interest. Of course we wouldn't want to eat meat from them afterwards, but I can see how we might get ethical leather, wool eggs this way.

So, what do you think?

Thanks for raising this question, it's something I have thought a lot about as well.

You may find this post interesting, which I wrote just a few weeks ago.

TL;DR: I think it is extremely unclear which lives are net positive or negative and knowing the answer to this question is extremely hard. Factoring in this uncertainty leads to a stronger emphasis on (1) welfare-improving interventions (e.g., moving from factory farming to organic farming) and (2) interventions that reduce the number of lives that very likely seem not worth living (e.g., those of layer hens in battery cages).

I am quite skeptical whether different types of animals in organic farming conditions have lives worth living. But it seems like a reasonable strategy to try to move in this direction.

This is an interesting and important post. 

I don't know the answer to the question you pose about whether, on average, animals used for organic food production have net positive lives. I'm thinking there's probably a lot of variation based on animal species, what product the animal is being used for, and how well-run the organic operation is. All that makes it harder for me to try to compute an average in my brain. 

But I have a question and a thought.

The question: I'm wondering why you chose to explore organic in this post, as opposed to other food labels that are more exclusively focused on animal welfare. Organic seems to me like it introduces some distracting elements. Because my understanding is that a lot of the organic requirements are aimed at protecting consumer health, the environment, and naturalness. But there are other food labels that are more exclusively aimed at protecting animal welfare, like the various tiers of Global Animal Partnership labels. That said, I'm imagining you may have a specific reason in mind for focusing on organic.

The thought: Legal Impact for Chickens is suing Alexandre Family Farm, which advertises its products as certified organic, for starving cattle; pouring salt into animals’ eyes; dragging disabled cows across concrete; leaving calves to die while isolated in small, filthy, individual hutches; and more. I would not want to be one of those cows. That said, others in the organic farming community, like the Northeast Organic Dairy Producers Alliance and the Regenerative Organic Alliance, have come out to condemn Alexandre. And some of Alexandre's cruel practices explicitly violate organic rules. So it's possible that most animals used for organic agriculture do have net positive lives.

I'm curious to hear other peoples' thoughts. 

Thanks for the post, Christoph! You may be interested in mine on Farmed animals may have positive lives now or in a few decades?.

Summary

• I investigate whether farmed animals may have positive lives now or in a few decades.
• Now:
  • For my guesses for pain intensities, I think all the farmed animals I analysed have negative lives.

  • For Laura Duffy’s guesses for pain intensities^[1], I guess the following farmed animals:

    • May have positive/negative lives. Hens in cage-free aviaries, broilers in a reformed scenario, and decapod shrimp on an ongrowing farm with air asphyxiation, ice slurry or electrical stunning slaughter.

    • Have negative lives. Hens in conventional cages, and broilers in a conventional scenario.

• In the next few decades, I am open to at least chickens’ lives becoming positive in some animal-friendly countries.
• I am quite uncertain about the time when farmed animals of a given species will have positive lives in a certain region, if ever. To minimise the risk of decreasing the welfare of farmed animals, I think one should prioritise:
  • Improving the living conditions of farmed animals over decreasing the number of farmed animals with supposedly negative lives.
  • Learning more about:
    • The welfare of farmed animals by species and region.
    • The timeline of the effect of interventions aiming to decrease the number of farmed animals.

Thanks for writing this interesting article! I had a few objections, but it looks like most of them have been covered.

One thing I would still like to mention is using wild animals as the bar to cross. This only makes sense if the replacement is 1:1, meaning that if we didn't farm x amount of animals, there would have existed an additional x amount of wild animals (not sure if x should be individuals, or some sort of "sentience units" that weigh vertebrates more for example). If this were the case then setting 0 equal to the expected welfare of a wild animal makes sense, because that would be what the farm animal is replacing, and therefore that would define whether it's good for the farm animal to exist or not.

Although I don't think the replacement is 1:1, but I don't know in which direction it should lean. In terms of individuals I think farm animals replace many wild animals, especially invertebrates. More farm animals result in more plant crops to feed them, meaning more pesticides, meaning fewer wild bugs. On the other hand, the density of highly sentient animals are higher on farms than on wild land.

The danger of using wild animals as the bar when the replacement is not 1:1 could be the following example (with made up numbers): If we instead place the 0 at non-existence, imagine wild animals are actually at -5, and farm animals are at -1, but 10 farm animals replace 1 wild animal. Then every farm animal that exists actually decreases total utility by 0.5 (it subtracts 1 but adds -5/10). But using wild animals as the bar you'd think every farm animal increases total utility by 4

Executive summary: Organically farmed animals may already be living net-positive lives compared to wild animals, which could have significant implications for animal welfare advocacy and ethical consumer choices.

Key points:

1. Organic farming practices (e.g. Naturland certification) significantly improve animal welfare compared to conventional farming.
2. Improvements include free-range access, lower stocking densities, prohibition of mutilations, and better living conditions.
3. If organic farm animals have net-positive lives, it may be ethically justifiable or even obligatory to consume organic animal products.
4. Promoting organic diets could be an easier advocacy approach than promoting veganism.
5. Open questions remain about rigorously assessing animal quality of life and the global implications of promoting organic farming.
6. Uncertainty exists about whether promoting organic diets would increase or decrease consumption of conventional animal products.

This comment was auto-generated by the EA Forum Team. Feel free to point out issues with this summary by replying to the comment, and contact us if you have feedback.

This is an interesting question, and I'd really like to know the answer.

From what I got, chicken have a lot of trouble making hiérarchies when there are a lot of them (e.g. thousands) and it's something important for them so this might be a negative element. But frankly not sure.