Dialogues on Ethical Vegetarianism (part 1)

Here, I discuss the case for ethical vegetarianism.*

[ *Based on: “Dialogues on Ethical Vegetarianism,” Between the Species 22 (2018): 20-135. A revised version appeared as a Routledge book: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1138328294/. I’m currently revising the book for a 2nd edition. ]

1. Background

• When I researched this a few years ago, people were killing ~74 billion animals for food every year, worldwide. By the way, there have only ever been an estimated 110 billion humans on the Earth.

  • An average American probably eats ~2,000 complete animals in a lifetime.

• ~99% of these animals are on “factory farms”, a type of facility designed to maximize meat harvested per dollar of cost.

• These are places of extreme pain and suffering. (Educational video) No one who looks at them disagrees with that. Sometimes, they cut off body parts without anesthetic; animals may be stuffed into cages with no room to move, sitting in their own excrement all day; in some cases, they pour ammonia on the floor because this is cheaper than cleaning out the feces, so the animals are breathing ammonia fumes all day; etc. If you subjected a human to such treatment, you’d be prosecuted for torture.

• Almost all animal products that you find in supermarkets, restaurants, clothing stores, etc., comes from factory farms.

The above are uncontroversial empirical facts, not matters of opinion. Some people disagree about the evaluation of this situation, but essentially no one disagrees that this is the actual situation.

2. Question

What is the appropriate ethical evaluation of this situation? What, if anything, should we do? Initial thoughts:

• It seems that suffering is, in general, bad.

• From the above facts, it appears that we (humans) are causing, every few years, a quantity of suffering that is comparable to all the human suffering in all of history.

• So it would appear that this is extremely bad, bad enough to vastly outweigh the benefits to us.

• So it would seem that we as a society ought to stop doing this.

• Also, in general, it seems that one ought not to pay people for doing extremely bad things.

• Therefore, it would also seem that each of us should stop buying these products.

However, it appears that only ~5% of Americans are vegetarian or vegan. Why? Maybe most people are bad, or maybe they don’t know that their actions are wrong.

Let’s start with reasons people give for why this isn’t wrong.

3. Differences Between Animals and Humans

Claim: Sure, our pain is bad, but the pain of non-human animals is either not bad or only very slightly bad, like a millionth as bad.

Q: What could explain this difference? Some answers:

Intelligence

Most popular answer: Humans are intelligent, but non-human animals are stupid.

Reply:

• a) Say some aliens arrive who are vastly smarter than us. They argue that it’s fine to torture humans because humans are stupid. Would that be right?

• b) Some babies and severely mentally retarded humans are less intelligent than some animals. Is it therefore ok to torture them to gain minor benefits for ourselves?

• c) How is your IQ at all relevant, on its face, to the badness of your suffering?

  • Example: Say you have 1 Advil, and there are two people who have headaches (and you can’t split the Advil). One of them has a higher IQ than the other. True or false: “You should give the Advil to the smarter person, because the suffering of smart people matters more than the suffering of dumb people.”? This just seems completely arbitrary.

Pain

Q: “How do we know that other animals feel pain?”

Reply:

a) Because they behave as if they have pain, in the same circumstances in which you behave similarly. E.g., they might scream, try to get away, etc.

b) Because they have the physiological structures that explain pain in you.

These things are true at least of the animals that are farmed for food, including chickens, pigs, and cows.

Souls

“Maybe humans have souls, but animals don’t.”

What does that mean?

• a) Only humans have conscious experiences? Animals are just mindless automata, as Descartes thought? If that were true, then sure, factory farming wouldn’t be so bad, because it wouldn’t actually be causing any suffering for the animals. But basically no serious person thinks this, for the reasons given above.

• b) Only humans have immortal souls, such that we can go to heaven. Reply: If that’s so, that only makes it worse to kill animals. If you kill a human, they get to go to the afterlife, but the animal doesn’t, so it would be much worse to kill an animal.

Anyway, it’s controversial that anyone has a soul. So: if we don’t have souls, then will it be okay to torture us for fun?

Morality

“Animals don’t understand morality, so morality doesn’t apply to them. So it’s okay to factory farm them.”

Reply: Psychopaths, small children, and some mentally retarded adults also fail to understand morality. Does that mean we can torture them?

Rights & Responsibilities

“Rights come with responsibilities. Cows don’t have any responsibilities, so they don’t have any rights.”

Reply: Babies also don’t have any responsibilities. Does that mean that it’s fine to torture them?

4. Other Defenses of Factory Farming

Some other reasons why people say factory farming might be permissible:

Bad Animals

“Animals eat each other, so why shouldn’t we eat them?”

Reply:

a) Some animals eat some other animals (of other species). Similarly, some humans eat some other animals (of other species). So, if this means that it’s okay to eat animals, then by the same logic, it’s fine to eat humans.

b) In general, it’s not the case that anything an animal does is something that it’s okay for you to do.

c) Animals don’t factory farm each other, so this wouldn’t explain why that is okay.

d) Imagine that intelligent aliens arrive at Earth. They say: “Humans murder other humans. Therefore, why shouldn’t we murder humans too?”

God

“The Bible says that God gave us dominion over the Earth, so we can do whatever we want.”

Reply:

a) The Bible also says that you should kill gay people, people who curse their parents, people who have premarital sex, and people who work on Sunday. That, by the way, is a lot clearer than the claim that the Bible permits factory farming. You might say “Maybe those passages are due to errors introduced by humans who misunderstood God.” In that case, maybe the “dominion over the Earth” passage is also one of those errors.

b) If there’s a God, would he want us to act as responsible stewards of the Earth’s living things, or as wanton abusers?

Plant rights

“If animal farming is wrong, why isn’t plant farming also wrong?”

Reply: Plant farming does not cause enormous pain and suffering. How do we know that plants don’t suffer? (i) Plants do not show pain behavior, (ii) they don’t have the physiological structures that explain pain in us.

Plant-farming is bad

“But plant-farming also kills animals, like insects and field mice.”

Reply:

a) Plant-farming doesn’t confine anyone to factory farms and torture them.

b) To raise animals, you also have to raise plants to feed those animals (and you need more plants than you would if you just had humans eat plants directly). So animal farming kills more insects and field mice, in addition to torturing and killing the cows, pigs, chickens, etc. So obviously it is much worse.

Do farms benefit animals?

“The animals on the factory farms wouldn’t exist at all if it weren’t for the meat industry, so they are actually benefitted by meat consumers.”

Reply:

a) This argument could be made by slave-breeders (which we actually had in the U.S. in the 1800’s). They could say that these particular people wouldn’t exist at all if it weren’t for the slavery industry, since they were specifically bred by slave traders. Does that mean that enslaving these people is okay?

b) Life on a factory farm is much worse than no life at all, so these animals are not benefitted by getting to live on a factory farm.

5. Other Defenses of Meat Consumers

Deflecting responsibility

“Consumers aren’t directly harming animals themselves; it’s the farm workers. I’m just a consumer; don’t blame me!”

Reply: In general, you shouldn’t pay people for doing extremely immoral things. E.g., if there is a used car dealer whose cars are all obtained by murdering people and then stealing their cars, you should not buy a car from that dealer.

Naturalness

“But meat-eating is natural!”

Reply:

a) Factory farming isn’t natural, though. It’s extremely unnatural.

b) Not all natural things are good; some are horrible. E.g., cancer is natural. War may be natural for humans (it goes back to pre-civilized times). Etc.

Inefficacy

“The meat industry is so big, it won’t respond to my individual behavior. So it’s fine for me to continue doing whatever I want.”

Reply:

This is the one argument that it’s easiest for people to get confused about, and it takes the most work to clear up the confusion.

a) Easy point: Suppose there was a really large industry producing meat from tortured babies. Would it be morally fine to buy meat from that industry?

b) More complicated point: The industry might respond to your behavior. Note:

• Presumably, there is some number of people who could become vegetarian, such that the industry would then reduce its production.

• Suppose, just for illustration, that the industry adjusts its production when 1000 people become vegetarian.

• In that case, they would presumably reduce their production by about the amount that 1,000 people would buy.

• But since other people become vegetarian periodically, they might be near one of those thresholds, i.e., maybe 999 people have become vegetarian since the last time they adjusted their production, in which case you’d tip them over the threshold. The probability of this is 1/1000.

• So there’s a 1/1000 chance that, by becoming vegetarian, you’d reduce meat production by 1000 times the amount that you consume. So the expected reduction in meat production is still equal to the amount that you consume.

• It doesn’t matter if you replace the “1000” number with any other number. It will still be that the expected reduction in production equals the amount that you consume.

• It also doesn’t matter if you think the thresholds vary over time, or that it’s probabilistic (i.e., they just have an increasing chance of adjusting their production as the change in demand increases), etc. It also makes no difference if you assume, e.g., that the industry aims to produce 5% more than the amount sold, rather than producing the exact amount. No other (coherent) assumptions make any difference to the conclusion, as long as we accept that (i) the industry sometimes adjusts, and (ii) that on average, production is proportional to consumption.

The people making the inefficacy argument accept (i) and (ii), so they just have a logically incoherent position.

The expected value of a variable in any given case equals the average value, unless there is some reason why the particular case is special. That is a conceptual truth. So unless you’re special, the expected reduction in production caused by your becoming vegetarian equals the average reduction caused by people becoming vegetarian. But even the advocates of the “inefficacy argument” agree that, e.g., the fact that 5% of Americans have become vegetarian has probably caused about a 5% reduction in meat production (relative to the situation where everyone is a meat-eater). So, unless you’re somehow special, the expected effect of your becoming vegetarian is a reduction in production of about 1/n of total production, where n is the population of customers.