There's senseless suffering and there's meaningful suffering
For people, the distinction is real. Suffering someone endures for something they care about can carry meaning. But that meaning belongs to the one who suffers, and a farmed animal gets none from its suffering. The only purpose served is the meal, which brings back the trivial pleasure the distinction was meant to get past.
Not all suffering is equal, and treating its reduction as the supreme value flattens something important about life. Pain that serves a purpose, is understood, or is woven into something larger can be worth bearing. Anyone who has worked with patients sees this daily. So the right question is never simply whether suffering occurs. It is whether it serves something meaningful, and a moral rule that ignores that distinction is too crude to guide us.
The distinction holds, but it does not reach the case it is being used for.
Meaningful suffering is a familiar idea. A patient grinds through rehabilitation to walk again. A parent goes through labour. Someone grieves because they loved. In each case the meaning is tied to the person suffering. They chose it, or it serves ends that are theirs, or they can make something of it. Meaning is not a property the suffering has by itself. It comes from its place in the life of whoever bears it.
A farmed animal's suffering has no such place. A pig does not endure confinement, separation or slaughter for anything it values. Nothing it goes through serves its own ends. Whatever meaning there is belongs to someone else: the person eating, for the taste of a meal they could have had another way. Call that meaningful and the word now means "useful to another party." On that reading almost any harm done to anyone qualifies.
This is not only a point about intensive systems. Welfare does differ between farms, and better conditions mean less suffering. They do not make the suffering serve the animal. On any farm a healthy animal is killed a fraction of the way into its life, for a purpose that is not its own.
The claim also does not need suffering-avoidance to be the highest good. Someone can rank meaning above comfort and still hold that imposing unnecessary suffering on others is wrong. The two fit together easily. A doctor who finds meaning in treating suffering relieves it. They do not create more of it so that it can be meaningful.
- Suffering is inevitable, and some of it is essential
Different wording, same argument. The response above answers all of them.
Using a single word in two different senses within one argument, so that a conclusion appears to follow when it does not.
How it applies here: The argument draws on 'meaningful suffering' in the sense of suffering that has meaning for the person enduring it, such as a patient's recovery or a parent's sacrifice. It then applies the phrase to animal suffering whose only purpose is someone else's meal, as though the same sense carried over.