The objection
"Maybe, when you add it all up, the situation of animals in the wild is positive: there would be more good things than bad. So there'd be no reason to intervene."
What if the balance is positive?
Even if the overall balance were positive, there would still be animals suffering terribly. The author suggests an exercise: imagine the victims were human.
Picture a city where most people are doing fine, but thousands of children are going hungry. Nobody would say: "Since the city is doing fine overall, we don't need to help these kids."
Many ethical views agree
The idea that we should help those who are badly off, even if the overall balance is positive, would be accepted by several views:
- by those who think preventing what's bad matters more than promoting what's good;
- by those who think some people's happiness doesn't reduce the duty to help those who are badly off;
- and even by those who only care about the overall balance, because getting rid of what's bad also improves that balance.
In short
- A positive balance doesn't erase the suffering of those who are badly off.
- With human victims, nobody would accept this reasoning.
- Several ethical theories agree that we should help anyway.