Edit: though several weaker views are more common in animal rights advocacy, for instance that being born in order to be raised for food is not a benefit to an animal, that being born in order to be raised for food in a factory farm is not a benefit to an animal, or that being born is a benefit but that conferring a benefit on an animal doesn't make conferring harms on the same animal legitimate or appropriate even if the benefits and harms are structured as a "package deal".
This is such a patently ridiculous, self-defeating viewpoint. Simple teleology defeats it, in the sense that everyone who holds this view will probably die childless, and will not be very successful at spreading their views generationally.
As for the animals - hey, I said I want them treated decently. I don't extend them the same courtesies as I extend to humans because they're not human, and I don't shed a tear for their deaths because to do so is to anthropomorphize them, a quintessentially childish way of viewing the world.
> being born in order to be raised for food in a factory farm is not a benefit to an animal
Said animal wouldn't exist otherwise, and could not benefit from not existing, so the potential for benefit is always higher on the existence side, even if the probability is very low - it's still higher than a guaranteed 0.
I don't feel like you're really engaging with any of these ideas.
> Simple teleology defeats it, in the sense that everyone who holds this view will probably die childless, and will not be very successful at spreading their views generationally.
The same reasoning would seem to suggest that religions that successfully encourage people to have many children are most likely to be correct because they provide one method for spreading their views (that is, having children and then teaching them to believe in the religions' doctrines). This is one way that religious views do get spread in the world and one demographic factor in religious belief, but it's hard to see the connection between this and the correctness of each belief as we might otherwise understand correctness.
> Simple teleology defeats it, in the sense that everyone who holds this view will probably die childless, and will not be very successful at spreading their views generationally.
This is very silly, it plainly conflates truth and popularity.
> As for the animals - hey, I said I want them treated decently.
Suggests "decent" treatment of animals is preferable to "indecent" treatment; this is broadly accepted.
> I don't extend them the same courtesies as I extend to humans because they're not human
Suggests animals/animal suffering are/is of less moral importance than humans/human suffering. This is also broadly accepted.
> I don't shed a tear for their deaths because to do so is to anthropomorphize them, a quintessentially childish way of viewing the world.
Suggests anthropomorphisation of animals is undesirable because it is stereotypically childish; childishness is bad. Seems like quite a silly argument, kids are also fond of breathing etc.
> Said animal wouldn't exist otherwise, and could not benefit from not existing, so the potential for benefit is always higher on the existence side, even if the probability is very low - it's still higher than a guaranteed 0.
You care about the expectation, not the "potential for benefit".
In any case, the way in which you've presented these ideas suggests that you're a consequentialist maximiser (eg think that it's the outcomes of actions/choices/rules that matter, and that there exists some partial order of the desirability of possible worlds). I'd suggest that if you keep thinking about animal welfare and how to balance the lives and living conditions of animals against your own social and dietary needs, you may well decide that you want to reduce your meat intake. Peter Singer's "Animal Liberation" is fairly classic, "The Possibility of an Ongoing Moral Catastrophe
"[0] is much more general but pretty great.
Based on this logic raising kids to eat 9/10 of them after roasting them alive would be better than declining to have kids because you disregard the suffering in some sort of interesting moral arithmetic.
The bigger issue is not that nature of the math but the notion that you believe you can subject the matter to it like what is the answer to 42 + banana.
The simpler answer is that we ought to do less immoral things not to find interesting justifications for doing so.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Benatar
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antinatalism
Edit: though several weaker views are more common in animal rights advocacy, for instance that being born in order to be raised for food is not a benefit to an animal, that being born in order to be raised for food in a factory farm is not a benefit to an animal, or that being born is a benefit but that conferring a benefit on an animal doesn't make conferring harms on the same animal legitimate or appropriate even if the benefits and harms are structured as a "package deal".