Here, I respond to Walter Block about ethical vegetarianism.* Block is a libertarian economist whom I met when I spent a year (on sabbatical) in New Orleans.
I'm a vegan libertarian. Sometimes I think it's worth driving home the obvious, Name the Trait style: "species" doesn't have a clear definition, but mostly just means we can interbreed. So if there were severely mentally disabled 'people' we couldn't interbreed with, but were otherwise basically identical to their human counterparts, would Block say it's OK to factory farm them? If not, he hasn't specified what he thinks is true of animals that if true of humans would justify factory farming them.
But if he bites the bullet because otherwise they wouldn't exist (for both humans and animals), that's at least consistent, although absurd.
My question (not rhetorical) is if we eliminated the 83 billion animal killings and eating, would there be enough other protein-based foodstuffs to feed the world population,, or would there be massive famine? I don’t know the answer. When I posed this question to ChatGPT, here is the answer I got:Here’s the short version first: Yes, on paper the world could meet everyone’s protein needs without slaughtering a single chicken, pig, or cow. The limiting factors are politics, taste-buds, and supply-chain inertia—not the fundamental capacity of crops, legumes, nuts, fungi, or new-tech proteins to deliver amino acids. Below is the longer “show-your-work” answer.
1. How much protein do we actually eat and need?
Global per-capita protein supply Grams / person / day
From plants ≈ 51 g
From animals (meat, dairy, eggs, seafood) ≈ 28 g
That 28 g represents ~36 % of the world’s current protein intake. Average dietary requirements for healthy adults are ~50 g/day, so humanity already gets more than the RDA from plants alone.
Our World in Data
2. Why the math works out
Feed conversion is brutally inefficient. Roughly nine plant calories go in to get one chicken calorie out; beef is even worse. Redirecting those feed crops directly to people multiplies the edible output.
Harvard Law School - ALPP
Land use is lopsided. Livestock (including grazing) occupies 77 % of all agricultural land yet delivers only 37 % of dietary protein.
WellBeing International
Modeling whole-planet diets: eliminating animal products while cropping for humans could shrink global farmland needs by ~75 % and still feed everyone. That’s the Poore & Nemecek scenario, summarized by The Guardian.
Our World in Data
The Guardian
Put differently: the soy and corn we currently channel through cows and chickens contain more protein than the meat we get back. Free the crops → free the protein.
3. Caveats: nutrients ≠ protein
A U.S.-focused simulation (PNAS 2017) found that booting animals from agriculture would not cause a protein shortfall, but it would leave gaps in vitamins B₁₂, A, and a few fatty acids unless we use supplements or fortification.
PMC
Globally, the same issue pops up for B₁₂, calcium, iron, and DHA—manageable problems, but real logistics to solve.
4. Would we face famine?
Low probability, high politics. Physically, the crop calories and proteins are there; the challenge is redirecting acreage, subsidies, supply chains, and culinary habits fast enough that people in vulnerable regions aren’t caught in transition shocks. Think two-to-five-year policy ramp, not “go vegan tomorrow and hope for the best.”
Regions reliant on grazing in marginal lands (Sahel, Tibetan plateau, parts of Andes) would need alternative livelihoods or targeted food imports.
Price swings in legumes and grains would have to be cushioned (buffer stocks, cash transfers).
Micronutrient fortification (B₁₂ in plant milks, iodine in salt, etc.) becomes a public-health must.
5. My subjective odds
Outcome Rough probability if the world decided to phase out animal ag over 20 yrs
Adequate global protein supply, no mass famine 85 %
Localized shortages/price spikes but no widescale famine 10 %
Truly catastrophic famine 5 %
Those numbers assume sane policy coordination—always the trickiest bit.
6. Bottom line
Technically feasible: the protein is already being grown; we just feed it to the wrong mouths.
Nutritionally workable: needs fortification/biotech for a few micronutrients, but nothing exotic.
Politically tough: land-use change, cultural attachment to meat, and farm-state lobbying are the real chokepoints.
So, quitting the annual 83 billion-animal habit doesn’t doom us to protein deficiency; it mostly dooms us to… tofu marketing. Whether that feels like famine is a matter of taste. 😉
Did I hit the angle you were after, or should we dig into any of the numbers in more detail?
Nice job. A greatest hits list of informal fallacy, and maybe some formal, too, I lost count. Only question is on your last sentence. What do you mean by “actively contribute”? Does buying meat or chicken at the store or restaurant count as actively contributing? You saying that if you do that (even in normal circumstances), then you can’t say you oppose misery and pain?
Also, as bad as our opponents’ fallacies get I think restraining ourselves from saying that they or their argument is “silly” is a good idea. Even when it is silly, and perhaps especially then. It’s hard enough to debunk such egregious fallacy (hard in the whack-a-mole sense) and when we insert little caustic value judgements it’s a net loss imo.
Incorrect, contradictory, seemingly insincere, etc, are all better than “silly.” When you’re right, you don’t need that sort of rhetoric, and the more we use it the more we encourage it from both sides. Since persuasive ridicule like “silly” tends to work on the half-aware peanut gallery, causing a spike in the heat map of attention-paying, we want to tread carefully around its use lest it be used against us later, and it will, since it’s the weapon of last resort, and, sadly, it works.
Again, since we don’t need to resort to that when right, we have the luxury to take the high road.
As for meat, I eat it, it’s wrong, it’s probably the single biggest cognitive dissonance in my life.
Probably the only thing that will work (for me) is to visit such a farm so I can get it in my kishkes that it’s bad, and also tell my wife never to buy/cook meat.
Comparing animals to human infants and mentally disabled does less than nothing to convince me that we should treat animals better. I've experience being an infant and being severely mentally disabled (alcohol induced, and once, sleepwalking) during my lifetime. More accurately, I DID NOT experience those things - almost certainly because I was nothing more than a mindless automaton while in those states. If I had been tortured in those states, there wouldn't have been anyone home to suffer. To the extent that babies are an appropriate analog for farm animals, it makes me less concerned about farm animals.
My intuition is that there are some minimum system requirements to be able to suffer, and humans just barely clear that bar most of the time. It doesn't take much to send us under. Since reducing humans to mental states closer to that of animals seems to eliminate our ability to suffer, I estimate that the probability that farm animals can suffer is only slightly higher than the probability that rocks can suffer, so I'm not inclined to worry about it much.
Not at all! All of our usual reasons not to do that still apply, except for the reason that it would cause those people to suffer while they are in those mental states.
It's just not true that people in those mental states can suffer (provided the mentally retarded case is sufficiently severe). If you had a safe and durable way to temporarily induce any of those mental states in a patient you were going to perform surgery on, it would be an acceptable alternative to regular anesthesia (provided you could also prevent them from moving and control their heart rate, blood pressure, and other stress responses).
Like you, I'm an ethical vegetarian but on a different ground than you give in “Dialogues on Ethical Vegetarianism.” Instead of intuition, I base the position on the moral agent/moral patient distinction. I interpret that distinction as follows. A moral agent is one who (1) can distinguish between good and evil and between justice and injustice, (2) can, by choice, act or fail to act according to moral principles, (3) has moral obligations, and (4) can be held accountable for one's behavior. A moral patient is one who (1) can suffer, (2) has moral rights, and (3) is owed moral obligations by moral agents. All moral agents are moral patients, but not all moral patients are moral agents. Moral rights and obligations are divisible into those that are imperfect and those that are perfect. The former are those of goodness or benevolence. The latter are those of justice. Only the latter can be justly enforced. Moral patients have perfect rights. No moral agent can justly violate any perfect right of any moral patient. And anyone can justly defend the hapless patient or retaliate against the rights violator. A human baby is a common example of a moral patient who is not a moral agent. Apparently, to be a moral patient requires a degree of intelligence above that of insects and arachnids. Some non-human animals are more intelligent than some humans. For instance, adult pigs have been shown to have greater cognitive capacity than three-year-old humans. One might think about that before ordering a plate of bacon.
“Apparently, to be a moral patient requires a degree of intelligence above that of insects and arachnids.”
This seems a bit arbitrary. Why is intelligence the criterion? Rats are quite intelligent. Do they have rights?
Some philosophers, perhaps including Huemer, would want to say something about a creature's ability to suffer. Of course, that does not rule out the idea that very simple creatures can suffer, so it might not work so well.
Or we could make it anthropocentric, and say that creatures that that humans (or moral agents?) care about are moral patients. But then we have to argue about which creatures we do/ought to care about, and we are sort of back where we started.
Or we could take a sort of individualist tack, and say that a creature qualifies as a moral patient if at least one moral agent is willing to take responsibility for it. This would align with the idea that it is bad to hurt someone’s pet, but might not be bad to trap or kill a wild animal. But that would not really help with factory farming, unless PETA could somehow adopt every animal now in a factory farm. And if taking responsibility for an animal means making sure it is fed, it would not be practical. In that framework, i suppose PETA would have to sue claiming that killing all the factory animals and preventing new ones from coming into being would be more responsible than allowing them to suffer. But again, that is sort of where we started.
When do we have a right to impose our ideas about compassion on others (rather than just carrying them out ourselves) and when do we not? Should the Jains determine how people treat animals?
One might think that the answer would need to be obvious for moral objectivists like Huemer, but it turns out that even if we stipulate objective morals, we still have to struggle to decide some questions .
This article had me laughing uncontrollably.
I'm a vegan libertarian. Sometimes I think it's worth driving home the obvious, Name the Trait style: "species" doesn't have a clear definition, but mostly just means we can interbreed. So if there were severely mentally disabled 'people' we couldn't interbreed with, but were otherwise basically identical to their human counterparts, would Block say it's OK to factory farm them? If not, he hasn't specified what he thinks is true of animals that if true of humans would justify factory farming them.
But if he bites the bullet because otherwise they wouldn't exist (for both humans and animals), that's at least consistent, although absurd.
My question (not rhetorical) is if we eliminated the 83 billion animal killings and eating, would there be enough other protein-based foodstuffs to feed the world population,, or would there be massive famine? I don’t know the answer. When I posed this question to ChatGPT, here is the answer I got:Here’s the short version first: Yes, on paper the world could meet everyone’s protein needs without slaughtering a single chicken, pig, or cow. The limiting factors are politics, taste-buds, and supply-chain inertia—not the fundamental capacity of crops, legumes, nuts, fungi, or new-tech proteins to deliver amino acids. Below is the longer “show-your-work” answer.
1. How much protein do we actually eat and need?
Global per-capita protein supply Grams / person / day
From plants ≈ 51 g
From animals (meat, dairy, eggs, seafood) ≈ 28 g
That 28 g represents ~36 % of the world’s current protein intake. Average dietary requirements for healthy adults are ~50 g/day, so humanity already gets more than the RDA from plants alone.
Our World in Data
2. Why the math works out
Feed conversion is brutally inefficient. Roughly nine plant calories go in to get one chicken calorie out; beef is even worse. Redirecting those feed crops directly to people multiplies the edible output.
Harvard Law School - ALPP
Land use is lopsided. Livestock (including grazing) occupies 77 % of all agricultural land yet delivers only 37 % of dietary protein.
WellBeing International
Modeling whole-planet diets: eliminating animal products while cropping for humans could shrink global farmland needs by ~75 % and still feed everyone. That’s the Poore & Nemecek scenario, summarized by The Guardian.
Our World in Data
The Guardian
Put differently: the soy and corn we currently channel through cows and chickens contain more protein than the meat we get back. Free the crops → free the protein.
3. Caveats: nutrients ≠ protein
A U.S.-focused simulation (PNAS 2017) found that booting animals from agriculture would not cause a protein shortfall, but it would leave gaps in vitamins B₁₂, A, and a few fatty acids unless we use supplements or fortification.
PMC
Globally, the same issue pops up for B₁₂, calcium, iron, and DHA—manageable problems, but real logistics to solve.
4. Would we face famine?
Low probability, high politics. Physically, the crop calories and proteins are there; the challenge is redirecting acreage, subsidies, supply chains, and culinary habits fast enough that people in vulnerable regions aren’t caught in transition shocks. Think two-to-five-year policy ramp, not “go vegan tomorrow and hope for the best.”
Regions reliant on grazing in marginal lands (Sahel, Tibetan plateau, parts of Andes) would need alternative livelihoods or targeted food imports.
Price swings in legumes and grains would have to be cushioned (buffer stocks, cash transfers).
Micronutrient fortification (B₁₂ in plant milks, iodine in salt, etc.) becomes a public-health must.
5. My subjective odds
Outcome Rough probability if the world decided to phase out animal ag over 20 yrs
Adequate global protein supply, no mass famine 85 %
Localized shortages/price spikes but no widescale famine 10 %
Truly catastrophic famine 5 %
Those numbers assume sane policy coordination—always the trickiest bit.
6. Bottom line
Technically feasible: the protein is already being grown; we just feed it to the wrong mouths.
Nutritionally workable: needs fortification/biotech for a few micronutrients, but nothing exotic.
Politically tough: land-use change, cultural attachment to meat, and farm-state lobbying are the real chokepoints.
So, quitting the annual 83 billion-animal habit doesn’t doom us to protein deficiency; it mostly dooms us to… tofu marketing. Whether that feels like famine is a matter of taste. 😉
Did I hit the angle you were after, or should we dig into any of the numbers in more detail?
Sources
Nice job. A greatest hits list of informal fallacy, and maybe some formal, too, I lost count. Only question is on your last sentence. What do you mean by “actively contribute”? Does buying meat or chicken at the store or restaurant count as actively contributing? You saying that if you do that (even in normal circumstances), then you can’t say you oppose misery and pain?
Also, as bad as our opponents’ fallacies get I think restraining ourselves from saying that they or their argument is “silly” is a good idea. Even when it is silly, and perhaps especially then. It’s hard enough to debunk such egregious fallacy (hard in the whack-a-mole sense) and when we insert little caustic value judgements it’s a net loss imo.
Incorrect, contradictory, seemingly insincere, etc, are all better than “silly.” When you’re right, you don’t need that sort of rhetoric, and the more we use it the more we encourage it from both sides. Since persuasive ridicule like “silly” tends to work on the half-aware peanut gallery, causing a spike in the heat map of attention-paying, we want to tread carefully around its use lest it be used against us later, and it will, since it’s the weapon of last resort, and, sadly, it works.
Again, since we don’t need to resort to that when right, we have the luxury to take the high road.
As for meat, I eat it, it’s wrong, it’s probably the single biggest cognitive dissonance in my life.
Probably the only thing that will work (for me) is to visit such a farm so I can get it in my kishkes that it’s bad, and also tell my wife never to buy/cook meat.
Something like this (which is very convincing) may be particularly worth putting up without the paywall.
Comparing animals to human infants and mentally disabled does less than nothing to convince me that we should treat animals better. I've experience being an infant and being severely mentally disabled (alcohol induced, and once, sleepwalking) during my lifetime. More accurately, I DID NOT experience those things - almost certainly because I was nothing more than a mindless automaton while in those states. If I had been tortured in those states, there wouldn't have been anyone home to suffer. To the extent that babies are an appropriate analog for farm animals, it makes me less concerned about farm animals.
My intuition is that there are some minimum system requirements to be able to suffer, and humans just barely clear that bar most of the time. It doesn't take much to send us under. Since reducing humans to mental states closer to that of animals seems to eliminate our ability to suffer, I estimate that the probability that farm animals can suffer is only slightly higher than the probability that rocks can suffer, so I'm not inclined to worry about it much.
So it's fine to torture babies, mentally retarded people, very drunk people, and sleepwalkers?
Not at all! All of our usual reasons not to do that still apply, except for the reason that it would cause those people to suffer while they are in those mental states.
It's just not true that people in those mental states can suffer (provided the mentally retarded case is sufficiently severe). If you had a safe and durable way to temporarily induce any of those mental states in a patient you were going to perform surgery on, it would be an acceptable alternative to regular anesthesia (provided you could also prevent them from moving and control their heart rate, blood pressure, and other stress responses).
Like you, I'm an ethical vegetarian but on a different ground than you give in “Dialogues on Ethical Vegetarianism.” Instead of intuition, I base the position on the moral agent/moral patient distinction. I interpret that distinction as follows. A moral agent is one who (1) can distinguish between good and evil and between justice and injustice, (2) can, by choice, act or fail to act according to moral principles, (3) has moral obligations, and (4) can be held accountable for one's behavior. A moral patient is one who (1) can suffer, (2) has moral rights, and (3) is owed moral obligations by moral agents. All moral agents are moral patients, but not all moral patients are moral agents. Moral rights and obligations are divisible into those that are imperfect and those that are perfect. The former are those of goodness or benevolence. The latter are those of justice. Only the latter can be justly enforced. Moral patients have perfect rights. No moral agent can justly violate any perfect right of any moral patient. And anyone can justly defend the hapless patient or retaliate against the rights violator. A human baby is a common example of a moral patient who is not a moral agent. Apparently, to be a moral patient requires a degree of intelligence above that of insects and arachnids. Some non-human animals are more intelligent than some humans. For instance, adult pigs have been shown to have greater cognitive capacity than three-year-old humans. One might think about that before ordering a plate of bacon.
“Apparently, to be a moral patient requires a degree of intelligence above that of insects and arachnids.”
This seems a bit arbitrary. Why is intelligence the criterion? Rats are quite intelligent. Do they have rights?
Some philosophers, perhaps including Huemer, would want to say something about a creature's ability to suffer. Of course, that does not rule out the idea that very simple creatures can suffer, so it might not work so well.
Or we could make it anthropocentric, and say that creatures that that humans (or moral agents?) care about are moral patients. But then we have to argue about which creatures we do/ought to care about, and we are sort of back where we started.
Or we could take a sort of individualist tack, and say that a creature qualifies as a moral patient if at least one moral agent is willing to take responsibility for it. This would align with the idea that it is bad to hurt someone’s pet, but might not be bad to trap or kill a wild animal. But that would not really help with factory farming, unless PETA could somehow adopt every animal now in a factory farm. And if taking responsibility for an animal means making sure it is fed, it would not be practical. In that framework, i suppose PETA would have to sue claiming that killing all the factory animals and preventing new ones from coming into being would be more responsible than allowing them to suffer. But again, that is sort of where we started.
When do we have a right to impose our ideas about compassion on others (rather than just carrying them out ourselves) and when do we not? Should the Jains determine how people treat animals?
One might think that the answer would need to be obvious for moral objectivists like Huemer, but it turns out that even if we stipulate objective morals, we still have to struggle to decide some questions .