On Liberty and Cruelty

A Reply to Walter Block

Here, I summarize my second reply to Walter Block on the subject of vegetarianism & libertarianism.* (See my first reply here.)

[ *Based on: “On Liberty and Cruelty: A Reply to Walter Block,” Studia Humana 11 (2022): 32-42. ]

1. Introduction

Here is the basic argument for ethical vegetarianism (more precisely, for not buying factory farm products):

1. It is wrong to cause a large amount of suffering for the sake of relatively minor benefits for oneself.

2. Factory farming causes a large amount of suffering for the sake of relatively minor benefits for us.

3. Therefore, factory farming is wrong. (From 1, 2).

4. If doing x is wrong, then paying others to do x is also wrong.

5. Buying products from factory farms is paying others for factory farming.

6. Therefore, buying products from factory farms is wrong. (From 3, 4, 5)

I took the central issue to be the truth of (6). Block, however, took the central issue, I guess, to be whether I am a libertarian or a utilitarian. So I will discuss libertarianism, utilitarianism, and vegetarianism.

2. Libertarianism

Block questions whether I am a genuine libertarian. If you’re not sure if I’m a libertarian, here are some relevant details: I have written in defense of gun rights, for drug legalization, for open immigration (based on individual rights), for anarcho-capitalism, for libertarianism in general, against all government authority, against wealth redistribution, against regulation, and against taxation (as a form of theft). I scored 156/160 on Caplan’s Libertarian Purity Test (after declining to answer two questions about the Federal Reserve).

I think Walter Block may be the only person in the universe who thinks I’m not a libertarian. Where did he get that idea?

I think it’s because in my book, Dialogues on Ethical Vegetarianism, I failed to argue from libertarianism in defending ethical vegetarianism; instead, I gave the argument listed in sec. 1 above.

The mistake: To be a libertarian, you just have to hold libertarian political views. It’s not required that those be the only views you have, or that everything you believe be based on libertarianism.

3. Utilitarianism

Block may also be the only person who thinks I am a utilitarian. I guess he thinks this because I oppose factory farming on the grounds that it causes enormous suffering for trivial benefits. This is certainly something utilitarians would agree with me about.

The mistake: utilitarians are not the only ones who think you shouldn’t cause vast suffering for trivial benefits; that is common to every reasonable ethical theory. What is distinctive of utilitarianism is that it claims that only pleasure and pain matter (or preference satisfaction, or welfare), whereas other people think that there are other things that matter (e.g., rights, virtue, respect, equality). Although I say that pleasure and pain matter, I never said they are the only things that matter.

4. Vegetarianism

a. Block’s indifference

I previously cautioned against reacting with indifference to a practice (factory farming) that probably causes, every few years, more suffering than all the human suffering in all of history. Block was puzzled as to why he, of all people, should get this warning. The answer is that in his first article, he wrote things like this:

A large corporation underbids a small mom and pop operation. The former earns a miniscule profit […] while the latter goes bankrupt and suffers grievously […]. Perhaps this is unethical. I don’t know, I don’t care. [“On Huemer on Ethical Veganism,” Studia Humana 9 (2020): 53–68, p. 54; emphasis added]

But, qua libertarians, we are simply not at all interested in what is, or is not, “perfectly alright.” [Ibid., p. 55]

Perhaps he didn’t really mean that, and perhaps he does care about unethical behavior.

b. The libertarian slavery advocate?

Block argued that buying meat is okay because the farm animals would not have been bred, and so would not have had any lives at all, if not for the meat industry. I pointed out that similar logic could justify slavery. If we bred certain people to be slaves, then we could say that those individuals would not have had any lives at all if not for the slavery industry.

In his reply to me, Block bit the bullet, agreeing that slavery could thus be justified—a position somewhat more in tension with libertarianism, I should think, than anything I have said.

He then tried to make this sound less absurd by (a) calling this a “weird” scenario, (b) saying that “the alternative [to slavery in the scenario] is death,” and (c) saying that as long as the slaves are alive, there is hope that they will be freed. In reply,

a) This is not a weird scenario. Slaves have often been bred, including in the actual U.S., especially after importation of slaves was banned in 1808.

b) The alternative to slavery was not (and is not in my scenario) “death”. The alternative would be to free the existing slaves, then not breed any more.

c) No, the slaves do not later get freed. This is a stipulation of the scenario. Anyway, we could not justify continuing to enslave people on the grounds that maybe we will later stop enslaving them, any more than we could justify continuing to factory farm animals on the grounds that maybe we will later stop.

With that understood, Block’s logic implies that slavery in the U.S. after 1808 was justified.

c. Other problems

There were two other points that I made previously that Block did not address: First, factory farm life is so bad that it would be better to have no such lives at all. He did not offer any evidence that it’s not really that bad.

Second, there are other alternatives, such as raising animals humanely. That’s enough to make it wrong to raise them in inhumane conditions.

Example: Suppose that Walter’s nephew, Scarface Block, shows up at Walter’s house one day with a big bag of money. The following dialogue ensues:

Scarface: Hey, I just robbed a bank and got all this loot!

Walter: Don’t you know that’s wrong?

Scarface: Oh, no. You see, when I woke up this morning, I decided that I was going to either rob a bank or murder twelve people today. I’m sure you’ll agree that bank robbery is better.

Walter: I can’t see anything wrong with this logic.

The problem: it’s not enough that bank robbery be better than some alternative. It must be better than every reasonable alternative.

d. On rights forfeiture

Block has something like the following argument against animal rights:

1. If A violates B’s rights, then A loses (some of) A’s own rights.

2. Nonhuman animals do not lose any rights upon attacking other animals.

3. Therefore, those other animals do not have rights not to be attacked.

For example, cats don’t “lose their rights” when they attack mice. So mice must not have any rights. By extension, presumably cats don’t either.

Here is an analogous argument. Suppose that a baby hits an adult. Presumably, the baby does not thereby lose any rights. This shows that adults have no right not to be hit.

Perhaps Block would say that even though adults have a right not to be hit, the baby’s action doesn’t really violate that right, because babies are not morally responsible agents, and a true rights-violation must be a morally responsible act. But then the same thing would apply to non-human animals. It’s hard to see how Block’s argument could work for animals but not babies.

What goes for babies goes also for insane people and even sleepwalking people who do harm in their sleep. Block actually bit the bullet on sleepwalkers, affirming that they lose rights if they cause harm while sleepwalking.

He tried to make this seem less absurd by adding “at the very least after the first such foray.” But I’m not letting him get away with that. His theory implies that they lose their rights the first time they cause harm while sleepwalking; there’s no basis for exempting them the first time.

Block goes on:

“If these predatory animals really had rights not to be killed by humans, they would not pick on other chickens, zebras and deer. But they do engage in these acts. Ergo, they do not have rights” [p. 71].

This is similar to the following argument:

“If humans really had rights, then they would not pick on each other. But in fact, humans have been attacking, robbing, enslaving, etc., each other throughout history. Ergo, humans do not have rights.”

e. Speciesism & homesteading

Block’s view appears to be that (a) when any human claims self-ownership rights, that is enough to confer self-ownership rights on all humans; however, (b) when a human claims rights over a specific piece of land, that only confers an ownership right to that specific human over that specific piece of land. (c) When an animal commits violence against another animal, that causes all animals to forfeit any rights they would have had, but (d) when a human commits violence against another human, that does not cause all humans to forfeit their rights.

These seem like arbitrary double standards. Block tried to explain away the tension between (a) and (b) by saying that self-ownership is different from land ownership, since (i) self-ownership is a precondition for land ownership, and (ii) some people [but not Walter Block himself!] think that self-ownership is inalienable. Block did not, however, say how (i) and (ii) are relevant. He’s basically just trying to cook up ethical principles to rationalize our current practices.

5. Avoiding Dogmatism

Dogmatism is particularly tempting in philosophy and is perhaps the field’s greatest obstacle to progress. Here are some tools people use to avoid revising their beliefs:

1. Biting the bullet: When someone finds an absurd implication of your view, just embrace the implication.

2. Appeal to foundations: When asked to explain or justify some seemingly odd or arbitrary assumption of yours, you can always declare it an ultimate starting point.

3. Rationalization: You can select principles to rationalize whatever particular beliefs you want to maintain, then justify those principles by saying they are the best explanation for the truth of those beliefs. You can also respond to any counterexamples by making ad hoc modifications, which you again justify by saying they’re needed to account for the correct judgments about cases.

We can’t say that these things should never be done. E.g., sometimes, one is justified in accepting counter-intuitive results; sometimes, one is foundationally justified in believing something; sometimes, one should believe a thing because it explains other things one already believes.

However, that having been conceded, you can also see how tactics #1-3 above are extremely vulnerable to abuse by dogmatists. You can basically maintain anything you want to believe, in the face of any evidence or arguments, provided you are willing to deploy #1-3 sufficiently often. Realizing this, you should be very careful about deploying these tactics, if you care about getting to the truth.

Carnivores use these tactics a lot. They treat “my current behavior is fine” as an axiom, then come up with whatever rationalizations they have to to explain that axiom (e.g., “rights are determined by the IQ of one’s species”). They bite the bullet on things that you never would have thought they would accept (e.g., “it’s fine to enslave people, as long as the slaves were specifically bred for that purpose”). And they posit ultimate starting points that seem arbitrary and not obvious at all (e.g., “rights accrue to species not individuals”).

This makes it hard to see how you could ever reason them out of anything they don’t want to give up.