The welfare of factory farm animals is deplorable. Animal ethicists have been criticising this for years, but the question of how to make livestock farming a more animal-friendly practice – es-pecially on a global scale – remains unanswered. The technological ‘improvement’ of farm an-imals through genome editing techniques is being discussed as an option to protect animals from suffering, stress and impairment. However, this approach raises serious ethical questions. It is not just a morally problematic “technological fix”. Worse, even if the projects do improve animal welfare, they will not change the situation in any significant way. Continuing with such breeding practices would most likely result in its perpetuation.This raises the question of how to evaluate actions that contribute to the perpetuation of a morally problematic practice, but which in some respects represent an improvement on the status quo. To answer this question, we propose a position of pragmatic reformism drawing on John Rawls’ distinction between ide-al and non-ideal theory.
