That Matthew Adelstein quote is absurd. Of course there is a moral difference between killing an animal because we like the smell of the dead animal, and killing it because eating animals is what we do to stay alive. Now, are there other things we can eat to stay alive? Yes, but humans are naturally omnivorous so eating animals is at least as natural as eating plants or nuts. Animals kill other animals in even more cruel ways (often by eating them alive) than humans do.
Of course that doesn't mean we should mistreat animals before they are slaughtered.
You say we're eating it to stay alive, but then you note that there are other ways we can stay alive. If we were torturing animals for their smell because we needed to smell charred things to be alive, but we could also just char vegetables, then it would still be similarly wrong to char live pigs. The real reason we torture animals is that they taste good. If animals tasted gross, we wouldn't eat them; and it's not for survival because we can survive very easily without eating them. The fact animal eating is natural or that animals eat other animals is irrelevant--animals do a lot of fucked up things like rape each other and it's natural to die of malaria at 27---nature is not any exoneration of cruelty.
I don't think it's crazy to propose banning factory farming, but I'd like its proponents to be a bit more serious about the downsides. Meat would become far more scarce than it currently is. Would we potentially be dealing again with a world where meat is a luxury afforded only to the relatively wealthy, while the unwashed masses are stuck subsisting on plants? It certainly seems plausible. Would we see the emergence and rapid growth of an "ethical meat" industry of small farmers? That seems like a potentially positive result.
I think this would be more useful than going for moral absolutism and yelling at people, but I do understand that it's difficult for people to avoid that temptation, particularly online.
This is the obvious rebuttal, but I think if Michiel is honest with himself he knows this to be true already. He is reasoning backward from a conclusion that he wants to reach, not actually thinking through the implications of some moral principle he believes to be true.
To say "we torture animals soley because they taste good" is to discount all the years of evolutionary history and the necessities of the human condition that led our species to becoming meat-eaters in the first place. A good deal of it was 'necessity' and a good deal of it still is.
I live in Nigeria and I've seen poverty, real poverty. People scraping by on less than a dollar a day. Hunger showing in the bones. Out here, hunting used to be a survival necessity and is still so for a good percentage of people.
Often, children will go into the bush and lay traps and pray it catches something they can bring home to their parents. Lots of domestic animals roam around; sometimes people herd them for rainy days, sometimes people herd them for the money and sustenance it can guarantee.
A lot of this is first world problematics, and I know that's a fallacy, but y'all like to act like there's no morally relevant distinction between the life of a human and the life of an animal such that, if necessity demands it, the human can take advantage of the animal for food. But I assure you, if you were to make your way into the Bauchi hinterlands, the war-torn northeastern countryside, where children look like skeletons wearing thin clothes of flesh, and you were asked if that child could kill a bush rat to alleviate some it's hunger, there's not a single normal person in the world that would bat an eyelid.
To be clear, this is my refutation in particular: saying we eat meat "solely" because it tastes good is untrue and also such a statement of economic privilege that you can't imagine how lucky you are to even be able to conceive that argument. For lots of people, humanity's ancestors included, it was mandated by evolutionary necessities and so linked to survival that these sophisticated ethical considerations do not even begin to emerge.
You may now say, your argument pertains to people who are in positions where they can do something about their diet - in other words, it's a class critique, and fair enough. For a handsome number of people in the world, they can't be bothered about such things. They watch animals treat themselves like shit; they watch animals harm humans without hesitation if they're capable and get the chance to; they proceed to do what they have to to survive and/or make life a little less daunting. There's an implicit understanding there that certain levels of ethical considerations are reserved for beings that can, in principle, reciprocate it. That is their truth.
Right. Adelstein can still make the argument that it's wrong to kill animals to eat them, but that doesn't mean there are ZERO MORAL DIFFERENCES between killing animals for sustenance and killing them for entertainment.
Perhaps the person eating the animal is factually mistaken in his belief that he needs animals in his diet. But as a contingently good reason for acting, it's not the same as an invariably bad reason (mere titillation or entertainment). Even if your nutritional claim is correct, Meat-Eater is analogous to someone who mistakenly kills a person out of the belief he was being attacked (a mistaken act of self-defense), while Animal-Torturer is analogous to a murderer.
The only way to say eating an animal for sustenance is morally equal to killing an animal for entertainment is if deny that states of mind are relevant in moral judgment.
I think the point is that once you have thought through the issues, and realized that you can sustain yourself healthily without torturing animals, it shows poor or weak character not to act on that knowledge.
....not so. Some may be able to stay alive veganly, but most cannot, even when they have the choice. Many plants try to posion/discomfort animals who eat them.
In the article, I provide rigorous evidence that veganism tends to be better for health. We also have the statement of the largest group of nutritionists in the world that a vegan diet is adequate for all stages of life.
Ummm no. Please name one society that subsisted soley on a vegan diet. Btw eating a crap load of supplements in order to ensure health does not constitute a "healthy diet"
If you're healthy while taking supplements, then you should opt for that diet, if the other one requires torturing thousands of beings. I don't think any societies have, but there are lots of healthy diets that haven't been adopted across the board by any society.
While I don't agree with factory farming. I also dont agree with stuffing ourselves with a bunch of supplements we don't know the long term effects of. I all ears for a alternative to a diet that provides adequate protien as mentioned in the article, until then I'll attempt to eat as ethically as possible with my health as primary goal.
So why do we mistreat them? It would cost a little bit more to not torture them. Is that enough justification? And if not, why do you still eat factory farmed meat when it's not that hard to avoid anymore?
Some people aren't wealthy and choose to save on foods. Like, you do know what's the average income in the US, right? versus the median? And imagine how many people the bottom 25% of earners represent... Nearly a 100 million people... that is not a number we can comprehend.
So there's a market for cheap food, even if they are unhealthy. People will eat unhealthy food. And will feed it to their kids. That's supposed to be against their own self interest. So these people aren't going to care about animal welfare.
Yes, most people will justify animal torture to save money, or as you mention, probably don't think about it at all. But the parent comment said we shouldn't mistreat animals. If someone does believe that, then they should act on it.
And you make a good point: there are no health benefits to the fast food dominated cheap meat market. Most of those 100m people would be much better off going vegetarian, or eating less but better quality meat. So we're left with an pretty simple decision: torture animals to save money, or make different choices.
I'm under no illusion that many will ever chose the later.
Yes to all of these. And, generally speaking, I do try and take the free range/grass fed or bio etc. option pretty much always (sometimes, it's just not indicated).
But I can afford it. I'm not going to impugn the morality of people who feel they have less options.
Look, they could manage their budget differently. But they don't. B/C animal welfare isn't their only concern. I would consider "keeping up with the Joneses" to be the worst reason for spending yet countless people up and down the income ladder find it the absolute best reason, nay imperative, to spend.
We can wish for a better humanity all we want ; we got to deal with the one we have...
The problem is that meat producers have an incentive to make a profit. When that incentive is at odds with the welfare of animals, meat producers will make the profit-maximizing choice. These trade-offs happen a lot.
Unfortunately we do horribly mistreat animals before they are slaughtered, fatten them until they break their own legs standing up etc., so the question is whether or not we as individuals decide to continue eating meat inside the currently existing state of affairs.
There is an economic incentive for producers to claim that they treat their animals well, and then produce meat the normal way, at low cost. So you can't generally trust the producers themselves to vouch for their well-treatment.
Because they’re mostly marketing labels. It is possible to get humane meat, but it’s pretty rare, and if everyone were to buy humanely raised and slaughtered meat people would have to drastically reduce their meat consumption in the process as you can’t meet current demand with it. That’s why factory farming exists.
If factory farming is really the worst crime in world history, then every single person, except for a handful of vegans, is (many times?), literally and metaphorically, worse than hitler, ted bundy, idi amin, nero etc. and when philosophical exercise leads you to such a conclusion, it's much more likely that are you operating beyond the limit of usefulness of your theoretical framework (e.g. utilitarianism), than that you are grasping big truths.
What? That's clearly false. Most people will result in a few hundred years of torture in their lives, Hitler resulted in many millions of years of torture from more sentient beings and killed millions. The fact that one is complicit in the worst thing ever doesn't mean they are the worst person ever, if their marginal contribution is small. In addition, I'd say that there's a big moral difference, just in terms of character judgments, between people who unknowingly do wrong and people who do it intentionally. You don't have to be a utilitarian to think that something that inflicts, every few years, more suffering than has ever existed in human history is wrong.
please show your work. keep in mind that hitler didn't personally kill all those millions, either. he also merely took a part in it, even if his part was larger than that of many others'.
you don't really get to preach about the worst crime in world history going on right now, only to then move on to another topic while chewing on your farmed catfish. if you believe what you say you believe, you should be out there throwing bombs at the nearest factory farm. if you aren't, you are either extremely evil or a poseur.
I don't chew on farmed catfish and am vegan. I think that the head of Tyson foods might be doing something as wrong as Hitler, but average meat eaters aren't, and even there it's not clear, because if he wasn't doing it, someone else would, which isn't as clear with dictators. The more apt comparison would be between average Nazis and meat eaters, and I think meat eaters, while not necessarily worse people, are doing more harm.
I don't throw bombs at farms because I don't think it's effective, but I donate basically all of my excess income to fighting factory farms, which ends up being more than half of it.
it doesn't really matter whether you personally blame meat eaters or judge them to be worse than hitler. it follows from your premise about the magnitude of the crime that average meat eater is quite evil. and while you started with "huh, what, this is clearly false" it seems that you are now admitting this, comparing average meat eaters, unfavorably, to nazis. whether their evilness level is at the concentration camp guard level, or a hitler, or above it is a bit of a quibble, likely sensitive to at least some arbitrary parameter values.
No! I think the average meat eater is doing something worse than the average Nazi but doing something less bad than Hitler. I think average concentration camp guards are probably doing worse. But there's a difference between doing bad and being a bad person. If a baby accidentally kills someone, they're doing something bad, but they're not an evil person.
You started out claiming that average meat eaters are worse than Hitler on my view. Do you now agree that that is false?
but average meat eater knows what they are doing. they understand where the meat comes from, even if they are not familiar with the details of factory farming. so, according to your own lights, they are evil. and again, according to your own lights, a drunk driving vegan who, say, kills a family of five meat eaters - i.e. nazis - is basically a hero.
no, i don't agree that your view doesn't imply that average meat eater is worse than hitler. you haven't shown anything of the sort. but that is also not very important to me. even your own, self-serving, interpretation of the implication of your position that factory farming is the worst crime in the history of the world, leads to absurdities galore.
Okay, but you're not refuting the central point here, which is that your moral framework leads to clearly nonsense conclusions.
You write: "Most people will result in a few hundred years of torture in their lives." This would make every meat-eating person in the world worse than the most heinous vegan serial killer. That's still a nonsense conclusion, and doesn't mention Hitler at all.
You also speak of the people who knowingly do wrong and those who do it intentionally. Do you think people are just unaware that eating meat means killing animals? People used to have to kill them themselves, face-to-face. Surely they are inflicting harm intentionally, as a means to an end. Yet virtually no one would agree that a butcher is a worse person than a vegan serial killer/rapist/torturer.
This should tell you that, whatever the reason, your elevation of the moral status of animal suffering to slightly below that of human suffering is a mistake--and this is what you seem to be doing, placing more emphasis on "years of torture" rather than on the subjects of that torture.
I think most people are unaware of just how immoral eating meat is.
It's not clear that most people are worse than the most heinous vegan serial killer, because killing humans has all sorts of ripple effects on wild animal suffering. But in this case, this is surprising because of surprising facts about the world, not surprising moral facts. If we ask why the conclusion
1) Most people are doing something severely wrong, akin to maybe torturing people.
is surprising is it because of
2) Most people inflict hundreds of years of torture on sentient beings.
or
3) Inflicting hundreds of years of torture on sentient beings is severely wrong, akin to maybe torturing people.
I submit that 2 is the reason why it's surprising. Therefore, the thing here that is surprising is the empirical fact, not the moral fact. In a surprising world, we should expect surprising moral claims.
There are some formatting errors in this post which make it a little hard to read. Why is the conclusion #1? Regardless, it seems like you are saying that we find the conclusion that meat-eating is wrong (equivalent to torture) to be surprising because of the empirical fact that most people eat meat rather than anything wrong with the premises that lead you to that conclusion. We should not assume that morality will always be convenient, etc.
Well, to bring introduce a familiar thought-experiment, maybe we find the conclusion that we it is immoral to lie to Kant's axe murderer to be so nonsensical because lying to achieve "better" outcomes is normalized and most people do it. Therefore, the thing here that is surprising is an empirical fact about the world rather than something wrong with the conclusion itself.
All you've done is restate the conclusion without grappling with parts of the conclusion that fall short of what our intuitions tell us. Granted, this is not a checkpoint. This hasn't proven that your argument is inconsistent and it's possible that our intuitions are mistaken as you suggest. But it's also a weakness that could call into question the level of moral value assigned animal suffering just as many take Kant's surprising response to the axe-murderer scenario to be indicative of earlier mistakes in his ethical framework.
The Kant case is weird because most of us have the intuition that you shouldn't lie to an axe murderers. But I think most of us have the intuition that if you're inflicting hundreds of years of torture on others, that's the worst thing that you're doing. What is surprising is that the actual world is one in which most people do that, so most people are doing something deeply fucked up, but the moral and modal claim is independently plausible, unlike in the Kant case.
You don't need to be a utilitarian to understand that torturing sentient creatures for trivial pleasures is deeply immoral. It's an obvious truth and any common-sense morality will acknowledge it. Animals are sentient creatures; factory farming tortures them; and the taste of meat is a trivial pleasure.
common sense morality does not see meat eating as "torturing sentient creatures for trivial pleasure". 'torture' is a thick ethical term, not a merely descriptive one.
It might very well be possible for science to develop a path to killing animals that is experienced as pleasant or at least unpainful. Would that alone eliminate the moral issue in our eating animal flesh? If suffering is The criterion of moral/immoral then the answer is yes.
Someone I know makes a similar argument regarding humans and this is where I think this argument can falter. If a human had no friends/family (no external suffering caused when they die) and they were killed instantly and painlessly, would this be immoral? My friend says no but I say yes. The question for me comes down to whether stripping someone of future pleasure is immoral (assume this person was leading a pretty decent life). If you believe that this is immoral because stripping someone of future pleasure is immoral—and most people do, as given the choice between saving an 18 year old or 50 year old (no family/friends, equally good life trajectory) they virtually all choose the 18 year old suggesting they value future happiness—then stripping an animal of future pleasure, should also be immoral, though to a lesser degree given they presumably experience less net happiness.
This argument, applies to a human, only makes sense if you think of pleasure/happiness as the only ethically important thing. If you consider satisfaction of preferences/desires as also ethically valuable, as many utilitarians do, then this doesn't work because most humans strongly prefer not to die. (It would work if the human being killed wants to die.) I don't know how many farm animals understand what is happening to them well enough to care about their deaths if they are not in pain.
I thought it's already the case. I read some time ago that farm animals are killed with a bolt through the brain that's fired so fast they don't feel anything. I'm not quite sure what science underlies this claim as obviously we can't really know if they feel pain but I guess there's some sort of justification for that.
Only in some places? In the country where I live, cage rearing of hens (for example) has been banned for decades, and almost all livestock has regular outdoor exercise. When I travel around I see cows and sheep enjoying green fields with plenty of water and hay.
So I think it's worth separating the manner of death from the quality of life. Death is death and the only variable is how much suffering there is in the moment, but quality of life varies a lot more.
You suspect mostly wrong. They do care about what suffering the animals experience now (which is a fair amount, more I think than their literal deaths), but other than that the vegans I know would be overjoyed at the new state of affairs.
There definitely is overlap, and it is frustrating for people like myself who do focus on lessening animal suffering. But that's no different than any other issuer.
There's certainly an overlap between the ethically motivated vegans and the nuts, but since Hanania is talking only about the ethics, I think in the comments we can talk about the vegans that take ethics seriously.
For the record I think animal suffering isn't ethically relevant, but I do respect vegans for doing what they think is right. More than I respect meat-eaters who simultaneously think animal abuse is the saddest thing ever.
Adelstein is a good example of the cognitive failure to process conditionals. If the demand for pig smell was as great as the demand for pig meat, there would indeed be no outrage. There would be near universal enjoyment.
Chau is a good example of the cognitive failure to process ethics :-P. I agree that if pig torture was routine, most people would probably be fine with it, but if our current practices are no more defensible than that clearly evil practice, then we should stop them. I was not making a descriptive claim about what would happen if most people liked torturing pigs for smell, I was making a normative claim.
I'd be happy to have a public debate about this; I generally enjoy most of your blog articles, but I think this article is riddled with errors. https://benthams.substack.com/p/moral-realism-is-true. There are various factual errors in the article; just to give one example, Singer and De Lazari Radek are moral realists, and think that utilitarianism is objectively true (see The Point of View of the Universe). The article points out that lots of people don't accept impartiality; well, I think there are various arguments for impartiality, and the characteristics justifying partiality are obviously arbitrary. Whether someone is part of your tribe doesn't really matter. Pardon my saying so, but the article strikes me as from someone who knows a lot about evolutionary biology and very litle about philosophy.
I agree but the moral implication of such an action would remain the same. Now, as you suggest, virtually everyone would try to justify the action—applying similar arguments to those used to justify meat-eating—but if we rationally can conclude that this would be immoral right now, then the popularity of the action shouldn't alter it's moral state. All this example shows is that humans try to morally justify actions we are emotionally invested in, even if from a purely rational perspective we can't provide a justification.
It doesn’t appear that you’ve investigated this topic too deeply.
The ONLY humane deaths animals experience are at the hands of humans. And somewhat counter-intuitively, plant agriculture kills incomparably more animals than animal agriculture does.
2. That "plant agriculture kills incomparably more animals than animal agriculture does" is a myth.
3. If you actually believed this, the natural, ceteris paribus, conclusion would be to destroy forests and wildlife since the natural state of affairs is apparently unimaginable suffering.
1. There are a lot of farms out there, and I can't possibly defend the worst practices done by the worst of them. I do think the industry is painted with a broad brush with terms like "factory farming," and that the reality in the United States is that substantial effort is put into approaching the process of farming with minimal suffering. It simply produces a better product in the end to do so (I assume you have heard of Temple Grandin). The worst practices I have heard of are in China, where they generally don't assign any moral weight to minimizing animal suffering.
I will defend animal farming as such, however. And yes, humans are the only species that ever considers the need to be humane in killing other animals for food.
2. Drive through the plains outside of the growing season. The cattle farms still teem with life. The plant farms are wastelands.
3. No. I believe in acceptance of the natural order, in which for life to exist at all it must devour itself. I watch what wild dogs do to pregnant gazelles and feel gratitude for the cushy state of my existence with full understanding of the brutal process that made it possible. Call it the "naturalistic fallacy" if you want, but I believe we will be punished via unintended consequences by deviating too far from this process. Maybe the lab-grown meat crowd will prove me wrong. I'm open to it but I will be something like the 7 billionth guinea pig in line to try it.
The cow represents a monumental achievement in our harnessing of nature (as opposed to re-engineering it from scratch) toward producing food with minimal suffering. They are docile creatures that love a life of predictability and security. Watching them chew grass in the sun I see nature's laboratory at work and I don't think we will surpass it.
> I do think the industry is painted with a broad brush with terms like "factory farming," and that the reality in the United States is that substantial effort is put into approaching the process of farming with minimal suffering.
My understanding is that farms in the United States still grow chickens that, for example, cannot support their own weight and break their own legs standing inside the cages after a certain age, and are subjected to "forced molting", where the factories withdraw food or water from laying hens for several weeks in order to cease their egg production and increase egg production and quality in subsequent layings. Similar for other animals. Are practices such as these still continued or was there some sort of reform I didn't hear about?
> Drive through the plains outside of the growing season. The cattle farms still teem with life. The plant farms are wastelands.
The plant farms feed the animals. You would need actual statistics with calorie breakdowns to substantiate the _paradoxical_ conclusion that "plant agriculture kills incomparably more animals than animal agriculture does, inadvertently, by depopulating certain plots of land". I realize many animals are killed via pesticides, tractors, etc.; I think you're exaggerating the death tolls but even if you were right the ratios would still imply the same thing.
(I should also point out, that, at least from my vantage, the vast majority of the inhumane suffering that factory farm animals endure is pre-death. I don't actually think animal death itself is the problem; they are animals, they cannot generally see the cow bolt coming.)
> No. I believe in acceptance of the natural order...
I "believe" in the natural order too, I just don't axiomatically accept it. If hell is the natural order then the obvious thing to do is rise against hell.
> Watching them chew grass in the sun I see nature's laboratory at work and I don't think we will surpass it.
Most of the cows you eat did not chew grass in the sun. They are fed cereals inside immense compounds and remain in the same location for the majority of their lives.
"Most of the cows you eat did not chew grass in the sun. They are fed cereals inside immense compounds and remain in the same location for the majority of their lives."
This is false and just shows that you have credulously accepted propaganda. The truth is the opposite. Even conventionally raised cattle only spend the last 4-6 months of their lives in feed lots.
This fact is key to making sense of the caloric balance. Ruminants turn otherwise useless (to humans) plant matter into the highest density nutrition we can get. And, they fertilize the soil to enable more of it to grow in the future. So whether they use more overall plant protein or not (putting aside whether humans can really get by on plant protein without serious consequences), they don't do so at the expense of the eco-system. Ruminants can turn useless land into nutrition. Conventional beef farming may not make as much use of this fact as I would like but regenerative does, to the point of even being carbon-neutral.
I never said nature is "hell," that was your interpretation. I don't really know how to respond to it because I find it bizarre. "wiping it out" or "rising against it" is not on the menu of options for me.
Point three is correct. If you actually think animal suffering is a moral evil, you should want to destroy as much wildlife as possible (while increasing the number of pets raised by humans).
Fortunately for the forests, animal suffering isn't the right metric. Utilitarianism that uses the "net happiness-suffering" definition for utility has lots of problems when you take it seriously. Value satisfaction makes more sense, though it's unfortunately harder to calculate. Animals don't have values in the same way as humans, so we should treat them differently.
There are no doubt some humane deaths of all varieties, but nearly all animals live miserable lives because almost all the farms are factory farms. It's false that plant agriculture kills more animals, and even then they're not subject to the horrifying weeks of torture of factory farms. https://benthams.substack.com/p/debunking-half-a-dozen-ridiculous
It doesn’t appear that you’ve investigated this topic too deeply. It takes far more plant protein to raise an animal for food than it does to feed a human, meaning that omnivorous diets, even if plant agriculture is more destructive, result in far more animals dying.
From what I've seen in Richard's writing, he seems perfectly fine with paving over large swaths of habitat if it helps bring about the techno-utopia he desires. I think he is more concerned with the suffering of individual animals than the continuation of various animal species. In fact, bringing about the extinction of deer and wolves would decrease the suffering experienced by all animals since the deer would no longer be preyed upon by wolves (not my goal, but I'm not a utilitarian).
Much more than insects. Rodents of all sizes, salamanders, worms, etc..
The predominant approach to plant agriculture is monocrop (i.e. only one species allowed to live on this chunk of land), which nature doesn't like much, so constant genocide is required.
There's enough overlap that it holds. Besides, where do you think animal feed comes from? They're not all or even mostly grass-fed (as the labels and price difference shows).
This is true of factory farming but I’m genuinely curious about the economics of small scale and less intensive approaches. I live in a rural area with lots of family dairy farms. The cows graze in open fields for about half the year, and spend the winter in barns to get out of the elements. Almost every landowner in the area hays any fields they own, selling it to area farmers as feed through the winter.
So at a small scale, it’s entirely possible to run a viable farm using a grass-fed and -finished approach. This is far more ethical but I wonder what it would take to use that approach at scale.
If you're somewhat well off it's pretty easy to avoid factory farming these days. I buy a quarter of a cow at a time from the 4-H program. It's fantastic meat from animals that have lived VERY good lives.
A utilitarian has little problem with consuming meat from animals that have genuinely lived good lives (indeed, it’s a net plus for the world to contain more happy lives). The problem is that such meat couldn’t possibly meet current demand (which is why factory farming exists, and accounts for the vast majority of meat produced in the US). People would have to drastically reduce their levels of consumption.
I wonder about this a lot. Imagine if all meat cost 10% more, and that cost went directly to improving animal welfare. Would that make a difference? I tend to think it would.
The entire industry is setup around the factory farming model. We will never eliminate animal suffering, but if we started slowly redesigning the model, I feel like we could address a lot of the low hanging fruit fairly easily.
Meat has gone up by more than 10% in the past few years, and consumption is only down a bit, so there is definitely room in pricing to fund this.
Or the number of people could stop increasing for a second. The fertility rate is below replacement, but how would my asset values increase if we didn't increase demand, cram chickens closer together and reduce the floor space available to the average young family.
For now, making people abandon meat is impossible. But working to abolish factory farming is possible and essential. No factory farming doesn't mean no meat, just means it's more expensive. The article doesn't mention the position "I'm willing to allow massive cruelty to get a 50% discount on meat" because it's such an absurd position. Yet that's what most of the developed world does.
Whoa animal kill and eat one another? Dang. News to me.
If we were to ethically raise animals, we would be back to a situation where only the elite would be able to afford meat. Everyone else would be on potatoes and rice. It's cruel, but feeds hundreds of millions.
Ultimately, I choose to feed humanity over the wellbeing of livestock.
Are you aware that only 1/5 of the calories fed to livestock come out as meat calories on the other end? Even if meat allows us to get value out of caloric products that we couldn't reasonably feed humans, are you sure that more than 80% of those calories are of no value to humans? If not, livestock is costing calories, not increasing them.
Also, if you think the only alternatives to "meat" (what, like raw steak? Like in a comicbook?) is eating "potatoes and rice", maybe crack a cookbook or something. The state of culinary culture and nutritional quality in the United States is unfortunately so abysmal that I'm not surprised by statements like this however. If there is one industry that has proven that overdevelopment can be almost as bad as underdevelopment, it is the food industry that continues to output more and more shit as the years in rich countries like the US go by.
Cows on my ranch only have one bad day. Feedlots are an abomination, cheap meat is as unhealthy as all other processed food, for individual and environment. Answer is localism, not lab-grown meat in the near term. Long-term, probably still localism + folks who want to eat lab-grown meat. The animals that are humanely and sustainably raised are as happy and healthy and ethically defenisble as the humans who eat them.
Everything has to die, and in principle I acknowledge there may be a way to ethically steward another species while having power of life & death over it, and consuming it. In an ideal set-up, it could be a symbiotic relationship. I won't presume the details of your set-up, but I wonder if contented happy animals are what a completely subjugated species look like. When their will to resist has been completely broken, they settle in and adapt. Animal husbandry is in large part breaking the animals' ability to resist. In the long term, by conscious breeding for docility, and in each generation, by castration and de-horning.
I'm not pointing a finger here, because even tho I'm "vegan" I'm totally enmeshed in a form of life which is terrible for the planet, humans and non-humans all.
I read Peter Singer's Animal Liberation when I was 19, turned vegetarian at 20, and stayed that way until I was 27.
I gave up for a few reasons but mainly fatigue - I was the only vegetarian around and just got constant questions/queries about my reasons. At 19 I assumed the world would join me in giving up meat but that didn't happen, and it still shows no signs of happening. I also find vegans and animal rights people tedious and they hold all sorts of socialist views I don't agree with. I also quite like the taste of meat. That's normal for a human.
I still think factory farming is barbaric but I simply don't care enough to adapt my lifestyle so much to avoid meat. I occasionally buy free range chicken and try to eat less pork. If there was a synthetic alternative that tasted 70% as good I would genuinely buy it but I just still think there will be huge problems getting this kind of thing to market at scale. No one cares enough about animal rights, and I don't think they ever will.
It's comparatively lower effort than changing diets, and has a good track record. The taste and price of alternatives are much better than 10 years ago. It is still needs more research to be cost-competitive, but that's a bet worth taking.
Why not just eat meat from producers that pasture their animals and treat them well? This would fulfill your taste and body composition requirements and all you have to do is pay a premium for your meat. Seems absurd you you can pay an extra 8 bucks a pound for your steak to avoid participating in the greatest crime in human history but would rather get the discount and be sad. There are choices between veganism and factory farmed meat, and more and more producers offering this every year.
According to google, cows are milked twice per day for fifteen minutes. Better to be milked for a half hour than to be not born at all. And like meat, farms with a higher standard of animal care exist at a premium price.
This is more or less what my family does. We eat legumes, dairy, and pasture-raised eggs as the protein source in some of our meals, fish for some others, and then when we do buy meats we buy humane ones.
Richard, you should consider eating less meat rather than becoming vegan. It's not a religion (unless you're in PETA); cutting your meat intake 90% is 9x more impactful than eliminating that last bit of meat.
Richard I’ve always admired your intellectual honesty, but if you think being vegan and being muscular and lean is not possible or even a little bit difficult, you’re not trying very hard intellectually or you don’t want to give up your last excuse.
Being vegan and/or lean is not impossible (I've tried and managed both, briefly).
But it is in truth quite difficult, and, in today's calorie-rich, sedentary world very hard to achieve without large amounts of efforts to be active with exercise and restrictive on diet.
It is not vaguely scalable (look at the humans you see on the street) and it's just another case of hobbyists thinking that everyone else should take up their hobby.
Musing on whether accepting that what you're doing is wrong is actually kind of heroic, compared to others who rationalize their behavior with specious justifications - is self-indulgent. Richard: your disinclination to change behavior in the light of your moral insight seems like weak character.
Agreed, but I generally appreciate when people acknowledge that although they agree with the arguments that they aren’t changing out of weakness (eg Paul Bloom) rather than trotting out the canard about protein
"Surely there’s no morally relevant difference between a pleasant smell and a pleasant taste."
Uh, yeah there is. We need food to live and to be healthy. The smells or sounds or images of a slaughtered animal gain us nothing valuable in our lives. But we all need food. That's the difference. This is so obvious I can't believe I had to type it out, and yet Richard just accepts the argument without any skepticism.
I'm happy to eat lab-grown meat or substitute meat products if they're within reasonable distance of the real thing on price and taste. I've ordered many an Impossible Burger at restaurants. Got no particular need to have real animals raised and killed. But it's important to acknowledge that there is a totally valid reason - food! - to eat animals, and that people who do so take no sort of twisted pleasure from the killing.
Moreover, suppose we replace all actual animal-killing for food with lab-grown meat. Now, amid all the benefits to the environment from less grazing and such, we also have millions upon millions fewer chickens and cows and goats and sheep and pigs being born. We don't need 'em! Let those hogs breed in the wild and face the predation of their natural predators (see 'em killed the way nature intended, I say!). We're not going to run farms that let cows graze under armed protection all day just out of the goodness of our hearts, either. But, one might reasonably ask, when it comes to the humans making the decision, what is the moral difference between animals "born, raised and killed for food" versus "never born at all"? Leaving aside the odd psychopath who enjoys making living things suffer, I can't quite see much of a moral difference there that mandates some sort of massive ethical reckoning.
The reason to invest in (and consume) lab-grown meat has a strong argument in its favor entirely besides the ethical angle: environmental damage, equity for societies that lack arable farmland, efficiency and reliability of our food supply, etc. We don't have to reach ethical questions to decide that it's a good idea. But I take exception to the idea that there's some fundamental ethical problem with finding our own food to live healthy lives and provide for our children.
You said that there was an important difference between pleasant smell and taste, and then you gave an example of something that was neither smell or taste--health. However, as I show in the linked article, veganism is better for health.
The evidence's balance suggests that eating chicken is better for health than eating red meat. Would this cause you to shift your views? Or would you change rails and go with the animal welfare argument again? You very much seem to be arguing to a conclusion.
This is pedantry. The objection I quoted was that preferences because of how it smells or looks are clearly immoral, so why would taste be any different? And the preference we're speaking of - eating animals - isn't about the taste per se, but rather what you get when you eat them, i.e. having a nutritious meal. That it tastes nice is evolution's way of saying "this is good stuff to eat! do more of that!", but needless to say, that is secondary to the main purpose, which is sustenance. The moral justification is "We need to eat nutritious food, and we know it's good for us often based at least partly on taste".
That there might be other ways to get a fully nutritious diet without eating animals is a separate debate focused on pragmatism, and on other considerations which have nothing to do with the morality of it.
So then that's not saying there's a difference between taste and smell; it's saying that there's is a reason to eat meat other than taste and smell. Lots of things taste good that are not healthy--e.g. icecream. Evolution optimized for getting us through our child bearing age when we're calorically deprived, not overall health. You have no arguments against the evidence I present in the article that veganism is better for health.
Agree, and strongly appreciate that you’re willing to take a stance that many of most of your followers don’t like - that shows character
After reading Michael Huemers book „Dialogues on Ethical Vegetarianism“ I became vegetarian
My remaining hypocrisy is that I still eat eggs & cheese - but I can attest that for everything else I derive as much or more pleasure from artificial meat & alternatives, and I’m just as healthy, so I suggest you should try again. The options are becoming better and better.
That Matthew Adelstein quote is absurd. Of course there is a moral difference between killing an animal because we like the smell of the dead animal, and killing it because eating animals is what we do to stay alive. Now, are there other things we can eat to stay alive? Yes, but humans are naturally omnivorous so eating animals is at least as natural as eating plants or nuts. Animals kill other animals in even more cruel ways (often by eating them alive) than humans do.
Of course that doesn't mean we should mistreat animals before they are slaughtered.
You say we're eating it to stay alive, but then you note that there are other ways we can stay alive. If we were torturing animals for their smell because we needed to smell charred things to be alive, but we could also just char vegetables, then it would still be similarly wrong to char live pigs. The real reason we torture animals is that they taste good. If animals tasted gross, we wouldn't eat them; and it's not for survival because we can survive very easily without eating them. The fact animal eating is natural or that animals eat other animals is irrelevant--animals do a lot of fucked up things like rape each other and it's natural to die of malaria at 27---nature is not any exoneration of cruelty.
I don't think it's crazy to propose banning factory farming, but I'd like its proponents to be a bit more serious about the downsides. Meat would become far more scarce than it currently is. Would we potentially be dealing again with a world where meat is a luxury afforded only to the relatively wealthy, while the unwashed masses are stuck subsisting on plants? It certainly seems plausible. Would we see the emergence and rapid growth of an "ethical meat" industry of small farmers? That seems like a potentially positive result.
I think this would be more useful than going for moral absolutism and yelling at people, but I do understand that it's difficult for people to avoid that temptation, particularly online.
There are downsides, but the upsides outweigh. I think even if we ignore impacts on animals, the desirability of banning factory farms is unclear.
This is the obvious rebuttal, but I think if Michiel is honest with himself he knows this to be true already. He is reasoning backward from a conclusion that he wants to reach, not actually thinking through the implications of some moral principle he believes to be true.
No, it's not.
To say "we torture animals soley because they taste good" is to discount all the years of evolutionary history and the necessities of the human condition that led our species to becoming meat-eaters in the first place. A good deal of it was 'necessity' and a good deal of it still is.
I live in Nigeria and I've seen poverty, real poverty. People scraping by on less than a dollar a day. Hunger showing in the bones. Out here, hunting used to be a survival necessity and is still so for a good percentage of people.
Often, children will go into the bush and lay traps and pray it catches something they can bring home to their parents. Lots of domestic animals roam around; sometimes people herd them for rainy days, sometimes people herd them for the money and sustenance it can guarantee.
A lot of this is first world problematics, and I know that's a fallacy, but y'all like to act like there's no morally relevant distinction between the life of a human and the life of an animal such that, if necessity demands it, the human can take advantage of the animal for food. But I assure you, if you were to make your way into the Bauchi hinterlands, the war-torn northeastern countryside, where children look like skeletons wearing thin clothes of flesh, and you were asked if that child could kill a bush rat to alleviate some it's hunger, there's not a single normal person in the world that would bat an eyelid.
To be clear, this is my refutation in particular: saying we eat meat "solely" because it tastes good is untrue and also such a statement of economic privilege that you can't imagine how lucky you are to even be able to conceive that argument. For lots of people, humanity's ancestors included, it was mandated by evolutionary necessities and so linked to survival that these sophisticated ethical considerations do not even begin to emerge.
You may now say, your argument pertains to people who are in positions where they can do something about their diet - in other words, it's a class critique, and fair enough. For a handsome number of people in the world, they can't be bothered about such things. They watch animals treat themselves like shit; they watch animals harm humans without hesitation if they're capable and get the chance to; they proceed to do what they have to to survive and/or make life a little less daunting. There's an implicit understanding there that certain levels of ethical considerations are reserved for beings that can, in principle, reciprocate it. That is their truth.
Right. Adelstein can still make the argument that it's wrong to kill animals to eat them, but that doesn't mean there are ZERO MORAL DIFFERENCES between killing animals for sustenance and killing them for entertainment.
There are zero moral differences if they are not necessary for sustenance because one can be perfectly healthy being vegan.
Perhaps the person eating the animal is factually mistaken in his belief that he needs animals in his diet. But as a contingently good reason for acting, it's not the same as an invariably bad reason (mere titillation or entertainment). Even if your nutritional claim is correct, Meat-Eater is analogous to someone who mistakenly kills a person out of the belief he was being attacked (a mistaken act of self-defense), while Animal-Torturer is analogous to a murderer.
The only way to say eating an animal for sustenance is morally equal to killing an animal for entertainment is if deny that states of mind are relevant in moral judgment.
I think the point is that once you have thought through the issues, and realized that you can sustain yourself healthily without torturing animals, it shows poor or weak character not to act on that knowledge.
That would be a stronger argument to make, but it's not the one he's made so far.
The badness of the things that they cause is the same, but one might be subjectively worse, in that it's indicative of worse character.
....not so. Some may be able to stay alive veganly, but most cannot, even when they have the choice. Many plants try to posion/discomfort animals who eat them.
This is just false https://benthams.substack.com/p/factory-farming-delenda-est
....I presume you can follow the science? A simple 'google' will give you an introduction to it.
In the article, I provide rigorous evidence that veganism tends to be better for health. We also have the statement of the largest group of nutritionists in the world that a vegan diet is adequate for all stages of life.
Ummm no. Please name one society that subsisted soley on a vegan diet. Btw eating a crap load of supplements in order to ensure health does not constitute a "healthy diet"
If you're healthy while taking supplements, then you should opt for that diet, if the other one requires torturing thousands of beings. I don't think any societies have, but there are lots of healthy diets that haven't been adopted across the board by any society.
While I don't agree with factory farming. I also dont agree with stuffing ourselves with a bunch of supplements we don't know the long term effects of. I all ears for a alternative to a diet that provides adequate protien as mentioned in the article, until then I'll attempt to eat as ethically as possible with my health as primary goal.
So why do we mistreat them? It would cost a little bit more to not torture them. Is that enough justification? And if not, why do you still eat factory farmed meat when it's not that hard to avoid anymore?
Some people aren't wealthy and choose to save on foods. Like, you do know what's the average income in the US, right? versus the median? And imagine how many people the bottom 25% of earners represent... Nearly a 100 million people... that is not a number we can comprehend.
So there's a market for cheap food, even if they are unhealthy. People will eat unhealthy food. And will feed it to their kids. That's supposed to be against their own self interest. So these people aren't going to care about animal welfare.
Yes, most people will justify animal torture to save money, or as you mention, probably don't think about it at all. But the parent comment said we shouldn't mistreat animals. If someone does believe that, then they should act on it.
And you make a good point: there are no health benefits to the fast food dominated cheap meat market. Most of those 100m people would be much better off going vegetarian, or eating less but better quality meat. So we're left with an pretty simple decision: torture animals to save money, or make different choices.
I'm under no illusion that many will ever chose the later.
There are plenty of political steps we could take that would alter the economic calculus, the least controversial being:
(1) stop taxpayer subsidies to corn; and
(2) regulate use of antibiotics and artificial growth hormones.
Those would raise the consumer costs of factory farmed meat. We could then go on to have more direct animal welfare regulations too.
Yes to all of these. And, generally speaking, I do try and take the free range/grass fed or bio etc. option pretty much always (sometimes, it's just not indicated).
But I can afford it. I'm not going to impugn the morality of people who feel they have less options.
Look, they could manage their budget differently. But they don't. B/C animal welfare isn't their only concern. I would consider "keeping up with the Joneses" to be the worst reason for spending yet countless people up and down the income ladder find it the absolute best reason, nay imperative, to spend.
We can wish for a better humanity all we want ; we got to deal with the one we have...
The problem is that meat producers have an incentive to make a profit. When that incentive is at odds with the welfare of animals, meat producers will make the profit-maximizing choice. These trade-offs happen a lot.
Unfortunately we do horribly mistreat animals before they are slaughtered, fatten them until they break their own legs standing up etc., so the question is whether or not we as individuals decide to continue eating meat inside the currently existing state of affairs.
I have no end of local supermarkets offering 'high welfare' meat produce.
Why don't you just buy that?
There is an economic incentive for producers to claim that they treat their animals well, and then produce meat the normal way, at low cost. So you can't generally trust the producers themselves to vouch for their well-treatment.
Because they’re mostly marketing labels. It is possible to get humane meat, but it’s pretty rare, and if everyone were to buy humanely raised and slaughtered meat people would have to drastically reduce their meat consumption in the process as you can’t meet current demand with it. That’s why factory farming exists.
If factory farming is really the worst crime in world history, then every single person, except for a handful of vegans, is (many times?), literally and metaphorically, worse than hitler, ted bundy, idi amin, nero etc. and when philosophical exercise leads you to such a conclusion, it's much more likely that are you operating beyond the limit of usefulness of your theoretical framework (e.g. utilitarianism), than that you are grasping big truths.
What? That's clearly false. Most people will result in a few hundred years of torture in their lives, Hitler resulted in many millions of years of torture from more sentient beings and killed millions. The fact that one is complicit in the worst thing ever doesn't mean they are the worst person ever, if their marginal contribution is small. In addition, I'd say that there's a big moral difference, just in terms of character judgments, between people who unknowingly do wrong and people who do it intentionally. You don't have to be a utilitarian to think that something that inflicts, every few years, more suffering than has ever existed in human history is wrong.
please show your work. keep in mind that hitler didn't personally kill all those millions, either. he also merely took a part in it, even if his part was larger than that of many others'.
you don't really get to preach about the worst crime in world history going on right now, only to then move on to another topic while chewing on your farmed catfish. if you believe what you say you believe, you should be out there throwing bombs at the nearest factory farm. if you aren't, you are either extremely evil or a poseur.
I don't chew on farmed catfish and am vegan. I think that the head of Tyson foods might be doing something as wrong as Hitler, but average meat eaters aren't, and even there it's not clear, because if he wasn't doing it, someone else would, which isn't as clear with dictators. The more apt comparison would be between average Nazis and meat eaters, and I think meat eaters, while not necessarily worse people, are doing more harm.
I don't throw bombs at farms because I don't think it's effective, but I donate basically all of my excess income to fighting factory farms, which ends up being more than half of it.
it doesn't really matter whether you personally blame meat eaters or judge them to be worse than hitler. it follows from your premise about the magnitude of the crime that average meat eater is quite evil. and while you started with "huh, what, this is clearly false" it seems that you are now admitting this, comparing average meat eaters, unfavorably, to nazis. whether their evilness level is at the concentration camp guard level, or a hitler, or above it is a bit of a quibble, likely sensitive to at least some arbitrary parameter values.
No! I think the average meat eater is doing something worse than the average Nazi but doing something less bad than Hitler. I think average concentration camp guards are probably doing worse. But there's a difference between doing bad and being a bad person. If a baby accidentally kills someone, they're doing something bad, but they're not an evil person.
You started out claiming that average meat eaters are worse than Hitler on my view. Do you now agree that that is false?
but average meat eater knows what they are doing. they understand where the meat comes from, even if they are not familiar with the details of factory farming. so, according to your own lights, they are evil. and again, according to your own lights, a drunk driving vegan who, say, kills a family of five meat eaters - i.e. nazis - is basically a hero.
no, i don't agree that your view doesn't imply that average meat eater is worse than hitler. you haven't shown anything of the sort. but that is also not very important to me. even your own, self-serving, interpretation of the implication of your position that factory farming is the worst crime in the history of the world, leads to absurdities galore.
Okay, but you're not refuting the central point here, which is that your moral framework leads to clearly nonsense conclusions.
You write: "Most people will result in a few hundred years of torture in their lives." This would make every meat-eating person in the world worse than the most heinous vegan serial killer. That's still a nonsense conclusion, and doesn't mention Hitler at all.
You also speak of the people who knowingly do wrong and those who do it intentionally. Do you think people are just unaware that eating meat means killing animals? People used to have to kill them themselves, face-to-face. Surely they are inflicting harm intentionally, as a means to an end. Yet virtually no one would agree that a butcher is a worse person than a vegan serial killer/rapist/torturer.
This should tell you that, whatever the reason, your elevation of the moral status of animal suffering to slightly below that of human suffering is a mistake--and this is what you seem to be doing, placing more emphasis on "years of torture" rather than on the subjects of that torture.
I think most people are unaware of just how immoral eating meat is.
It's not clear that most people are worse than the most heinous vegan serial killer, because killing humans has all sorts of ripple effects on wild animal suffering. But in this case, this is surprising because of surprising facts about the world, not surprising moral facts. If we ask why the conclusion
1) Most people are doing something severely wrong, akin to maybe torturing people.
is surprising is it because of
2) Most people inflict hundreds of years of torture on sentient beings.
or
3) Inflicting hundreds of years of torture on sentient beings is severely wrong, akin to maybe torturing people.
I submit that 2 is the reason why it's surprising. Therefore, the thing here that is surprising is the empirical fact, not the moral fact. In a surprising world, we should expect surprising moral claims.
There are some formatting errors in this post which make it a little hard to read. Why is the conclusion #1? Regardless, it seems like you are saying that we find the conclusion that meat-eating is wrong (equivalent to torture) to be surprising because of the empirical fact that most people eat meat rather than anything wrong with the premises that lead you to that conclusion. We should not assume that morality will always be convenient, etc.
Well, to bring introduce a familiar thought-experiment, maybe we find the conclusion that we it is immoral to lie to Kant's axe murderer to be so nonsensical because lying to achieve "better" outcomes is normalized and most people do it. Therefore, the thing here that is surprising is an empirical fact about the world rather than something wrong with the conclusion itself.
All you've done is restate the conclusion without grappling with parts of the conclusion that fall short of what our intuitions tell us. Granted, this is not a checkpoint. This hasn't proven that your argument is inconsistent and it's possible that our intuitions are mistaken as you suggest. But it's also a weakness that could call into question the level of moral value assigned animal suffering just as many take Kant's surprising response to the axe-murderer scenario to be indicative of earlier mistakes in his ethical framework.
It is 1 because it is listed first.
The Kant case is weird because most of us have the intuition that you shouldn't lie to an axe murderers. But I think most of us have the intuition that if you're inflicting hundreds of years of torture on others, that's the worst thing that you're doing. What is surprising is that the actual world is one in which most people do that, so most people are doing something deeply fucked up, but the moral and modal claim is independently plausible, unlike in the Kant case.
What about Kantian ethics do you think is implausible independent of its conclusions?
You don't need to be a utilitarian to understand that torturing sentient creatures for trivial pleasures is deeply immoral. It's an obvious truth and any common-sense morality will acknowledge it. Animals are sentient creatures; factory farming tortures them; and the taste of meat is a trivial pleasure.
common sense morality does not see meat eating as "torturing sentient creatures for trivial pleasure". 'torture' is a thick ethical term, not a merely descriptive one.
It might very well be possible for science to develop a path to killing animals that is experienced as pleasant or at least unpainful. Would that alone eliminate the moral issue in our eating animal flesh? If suffering is The criterion of moral/immoral then the answer is yes.
Yes it would for me.
Someone I know makes a similar argument regarding humans and this is where I think this argument can falter. If a human had no friends/family (no external suffering caused when they die) and they were killed instantly and painlessly, would this be immoral? My friend says no but I say yes. The question for me comes down to whether stripping someone of future pleasure is immoral (assume this person was leading a pretty decent life). If you believe that this is immoral because stripping someone of future pleasure is immoral—and most people do, as given the choice between saving an 18 year old or 50 year old (no family/friends, equally good life trajectory) they virtually all choose the 18 year old suggesting they value future happiness—then stripping an animal of future pleasure, should also be immoral, though to a lesser degree given they presumably experience less net happiness.
This argument, applies to a human, only makes sense if you think of pleasure/happiness as the only ethically important thing. If you consider satisfaction of preferences/desires as also ethically valuable, as many utilitarians do, then this doesn't work because most humans strongly prefer not to die. (It would work if the human being killed wants to die.) I don't know how many farm animals understand what is happening to them well enough to care about their deaths if they are not in pain.
Do you have any experience with animals?
They may not be self conscious to the degree humans are but they understand plenty and very much do not want to die.
I thought it's already the case. I read some time ago that farm animals are killed with a bolt through the brain that's fired so fast they don't feel anything. I'm not quite sure what science underlies this claim as obviously we can't really know if they feel pain but I guess there's some sort of justification for that.
Their lives before the bolt to the brain are dominated by intense suffering, unfortunately: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQRAfJyEsko
Only in some places? In the country where I live, cage rearing of hens (for example) has been banned for decades, and almost all livestock has regular outdoor exercise. When I travel around I see cows and sheep enjoying green fields with plenty of water and hay.
So I think it's worth separating the manner of death from the quality of life. Death is death and the only variable is how much suffering there is in the moment, but quality of life varies a lot more.
What if someone ate dogs but killed them in a way that didn't cause any suffering?
See our friends at https://www.elwooddogmeat.com/
Reading down their homepage I was half-way sold, and then was disappointed to find I couldn’t order any.
Isn't the primary issue their existence is suffering? Not necessarily their death.
If animals didn't suffer at all in life, I, a vegan, would absolutely eat them.
You suspect mostly wrong. They do care about what suffering the animals experience now (which is a fair amount, more I think than their literal deaths), but other than that the vegans I know would be overjoyed at the new state of affairs.
There definitely is overlap, and it is frustrating for people like myself who do focus on lessening animal suffering. But that's no different than any other issuer.
Vegan here--I'm very much in favor of GMOs.
There's certainly an overlap between the ethically motivated vegans and the nuts, but since Hanania is talking only about the ethics, I think in the comments we can talk about the vegans that take ethics seriously.
For the record I think animal suffering isn't ethically relevant, but I do respect vegans for doing what they think is right. More than I respect meat-eaters who simultaneously think animal abuse is the saddest thing ever.
Adelstein is a good example of the cognitive failure to process conditionals. If the demand for pig smell was as great as the demand for pig meat, there would indeed be no outrage. There would be near universal enjoyment.
Chau is a good example of the cognitive failure to process ethics :-P. I agree that if pig torture was routine, most people would probably be fine with it, but if our current practices are no more defensible than that clearly evil practice, then we should stop them. I was not making a descriptive claim about what would happen if most people liked torturing pigs for smell, I was making a normative claim.
https://brettandersen.substack.com/p/utilitarianism-is-slave-morality
I'd be happy to have a public debate about this; I generally enjoy most of your blog articles, but I think this article is riddled with errors. https://benthams.substack.com/p/moral-realism-is-true. There are various factual errors in the article; just to give one example, Singer and De Lazari Radek are moral realists, and think that utilitarianism is objectively true (see The Point of View of the Universe). The article points out that lots of people don't accept impartiality; well, I think there are various arguments for impartiality, and the characteristics justifying partiality are obviously arbitrary. Whether someone is part of your tribe doesn't really matter. Pardon my saying so, but the article strikes me as from someone who knows a lot about evolutionary biology and very litle about philosophy.
I agree but the moral implication of such an action would remain the same. Now, as you suggest, virtually everyone would try to justify the action—applying similar arguments to those used to justify meat-eating—but if we rationally can conclude that this would be immoral right now, then the popularity of the action shouldn't alter it's moral state. All this example shows is that humans try to morally justify actions we are emotionally invested in, even if from a purely rational perspective we can't provide a justification.
It doesn’t appear that you’ve investigated this topic too deeply.
The ONLY humane deaths animals experience are at the hands of humans. And somewhat counter-intuitively, plant agriculture kills incomparably more animals than animal agriculture does.
1. The lives and deaths of factory farm animals are not humane by any imaginable stretch of the imagination (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQRAfJyEsko).
2. That "plant agriculture kills incomparably more animals than animal agriculture does" is a myth.
3. If you actually believed this, the natural, ceteris paribus, conclusion would be to destroy forests and wildlife since the natural state of affairs is apparently unimaginable suffering.
1. There are a lot of farms out there, and I can't possibly defend the worst practices done by the worst of them. I do think the industry is painted with a broad brush with terms like "factory farming," and that the reality in the United States is that substantial effort is put into approaching the process of farming with minimal suffering. It simply produces a better product in the end to do so (I assume you have heard of Temple Grandin). The worst practices I have heard of are in China, where they generally don't assign any moral weight to minimizing animal suffering.
I will defend animal farming as such, however. And yes, humans are the only species that ever considers the need to be humane in killing other animals for food.
2. Drive through the plains outside of the growing season. The cattle farms still teem with life. The plant farms are wastelands.
3. No. I believe in acceptance of the natural order, in which for life to exist at all it must devour itself. I watch what wild dogs do to pregnant gazelles and feel gratitude for the cushy state of my existence with full understanding of the brutal process that made it possible. Call it the "naturalistic fallacy" if you want, but I believe we will be punished via unintended consequences by deviating too far from this process. Maybe the lab-grown meat crowd will prove me wrong. I'm open to it but I will be something like the 7 billionth guinea pig in line to try it.
The cow represents a monumental achievement in our harnessing of nature (as opposed to re-engineering it from scratch) toward producing food with minimal suffering. They are docile creatures that love a life of predictability and security. Watching them chew grass in the sun I see nature's laboratory at work and I don't think we will surpass it.
> I do think the industry is painted with a broad brush with terms like "factory farming," and that the reality in the United States is that substantial effort is put into approaching the process of farming with minimal suffering.
My understanding is that farms in the United States still grow chickens that, for example, cannot support their own weight and break their own legs standing inside the cages after a certain age, and are subjected to "forced molting", where the factories withdraw food or water from laying hens for several weeks in order to cease their egg production and increase egg production and quality in subsequent layings. Similar for other animals. Are practices such as these still continued or was there some sort of reform I didn't hear about?
> Drive through the plains outside of the growing season. The cattle farms still teem with life. The plant farms are wastelands.
The plant farms feed the animals. You would need actual statistics with calorie breakdowns to substantiate the _paradoxical_ conclusion that "plant agriculture kills incomparably more animals than animal agriculture does, inadvertently, by depopulating certain plots of land". I realize many animals are killed via pesticides, tractors, etc.; I think you're exaggerating the death tolls but even if you were right the ratios would still imply the same thing.
(I should also point out, that, at least from my vantage, the vast majority of the inhumane suffering that factory farm animals endure is pre-death. I don't actually think animal death itself is the problem; they are animals, they cannot generally see the cow bolt coming.)
> No. I believe in acceptance of the natural order...
I "believe" in the natural order too, I just don't axiomatically accept it. If hell is the natural order then the obvious thing to do is rise against hell.
> Watching them chew grass in the sun I see nature's laboratory at work and I don't think we will surpass it.
Most of the cows you eat did not chew grass in the sun. They are fed cereals inside immense compounds and remain in the same location for the majority of their lives.
"Most of the cows you eat did not chew grass in the sun. They are fed cereals inside immense compounds and remain in the same location for the majority of their lives."
This is false and just shows that you have credulously accepted propaganda. The truth is the opposite. Even conventionally raised cattle only spend the last 4-6 months of their lives in feed lots.
This fact is key to making sense of the caloric balance. Ruminants turn otherwise useless (to humans) plant matter into the highest density nutrition we can get. And, they fertilize the soil to enable more of it to grow in the future. So whether they use more overall plant protein or not (putting aside whether humans can really get by on plant protein without serious consequences), they don't do so at the expense of the eco-system. Ruminants can turn useless land into nutrition. Conventional beef farming may not make as much use of this fact as I would like but regenerative does, to the point of even being carbon-neutral.
I never said nature is "hell," that was your interpretation. I don't really know how to respond to it because I find it bizarre. "wiping it out" or "rising against it" is not on the menu of options for me.
And the best case solution is regenerative agriculture, if we can scale it adequately.
Point three is correct. If you actually think animal suffering is a moral evil, you should want to destroy as much wildlife as possible (while increasing the number of pets raised by humans).
Fortunately for the forests, animal suffering isn't the right metric. Utilitarianism that uses the "net happiness-suffering" definition for utility has lots of problems when you take it seriously. Value satisfaction makes more sense, though it's unfortunately harder to calculate. Animals don't have values in the same way as humans, so we should treat them differently.
There are no doubt some humane deaths of all varieties, but nearly all animals live miserable lives because almost all the farms are factory farms. It's false that plant agriculture kills more animals, and even then they're not subject to the horrifying weeks of torture of factory farms. https://benthams.substack.com/p/debunking-half-a-dozen-ridiculous
It doesn’t appear that you’ve investigated this topic too deeply. It takes far more plant protein to raise an animal for food than it does to feed a human, meaning that omnivorous diets, even if plant agriculture is more destructive, result in far more animals dying.
From what I've seen in Richard's writing, he seems perfectly fine with paving over large swaths of habitat if it helps bring about the techno-utopia he desires. I think he is more concerned with the suffering of individual animals than the continuation of various animal species. In fact, bringing about the extinction of deer and wolves would decrease the suffering experienced by all animals since the deer would no longer be preyed upon by wolves (not my goal, but I'm not a utilitarian).
I used to think similarly until I learned more about nutrition. Now I think a bit of humility in the face of nature's complexity is called for.
Much more than insects. Rodents of all sizes, salamanders, worms, etc..
The predominant approach to plant agriculture is monocrop (i.e. only one species allowed to live on this chunk of land), which nature doesn't like much, so constant genocide is required.
The kinds of people who hate factory farming also hate monoculture, tbh.
There are several different camps out there so it depends which kinds you mean. People hate either for different reasons.
There's enough overlap that it holds. Besides, where do you think animal feed comes from? They're not all or even mostly grass-fed (as the labels and price difference shows).
This is true of factory farming but I’m genuinely curious about the economics of small scale and less intensive approaches. I live in a rural area with lots of family dairy farms. The cows graze in open fields for about half the year, and spend the winter in barns to get out of the elements. Almost every landowner in the area hays any fields they own, selling it to area farmers as feed through the winter.
So at a small scale, it’s entirely possible to run a viable farm using a grass-fed and -finished approach. This is far more ethical but I wonder what it would take to use that approach at scale.
There are the Joel Salatin types and then there are the Animal Liberation Front types. Quite different.
LOL, some of your commenters are braindead Richard. Good article, though.
The article literally ends with the naturalistic fallacy. And the first comment is just: "But it's natural." Humans sure are weird.
If you're somewhat well off it's pretty easy to avoid factory farming these days. I buy a quarter of a cow at a time from the 4-H program. It's fantastic meat from animals that have lived VERY good lives.
A utilitarian has little problem with consuming meat from animals that have genuinely lived good lives (indeed, it’s a net plus for the world to contain more happy lives). The problem is that such meat couldn’t possibly meet current demand (which is why factory farming exists, and accounts for the vast majority of meat produced in the US). People would have to drastically reduce their levels of consumption.
I wonder about this a lot. Imagine if all meat cost 10% more, and that cost went directly to improving animal welfare. Would that make a difference? I tend to think it would.
The entire industry is setup around the factory farming model. We will never eliminate animal suffering, but if we started slowly redesigning the model, I feel like we could address a lot of the low hanging fruit fairly easily.
Meat has gone up by more than 10% in the past few years, and consumption is only down a bit, so there is definitely room in pricing to fund this.
Or the number of people could stop increasing for a second. The fertility rate is below replacement, but how would my asset values increase if we didn't increase demand, cram chickens closer together and reduce the floor space available to the average young family.
For now, making people abandon meat is impossible. But working to abolish factory farming is possible and essential. No factory farming doesn't mean no meat, just means it's more expensive. The article doesn't mention the position "I'm willing to allow massive cruelty to get a 50% discount on meat" because it's such an absurd position. Yet that's what most of the developed world does.
Whoa animal kill and eat one another? Dang. News to me.
If we were to ethically raise animals, we would be back to a situation where only the elite would be able to afford meat. Everyone else would be on potatoes and rice. It's cruel, but feeds hundreds of millions.
Ultimately, I choose to feed humanity over the wellbeing of livestock.
Are you aware that only 1/5 of the calories fed to livestock come out as meat calories on the other end? Even if meat allows us to get value out of caloric products that we couldn't reasonably feed humans, are you sure that more than 80% of those calories are of no value to humans? If not, livestock is costing calories, not increasing them.
Also, if you think the only alternatives to "meat" (what, like raw steak? Like in a comicbook?) is eating "potatoes and rice", maybe crack a cookbook or something. The state of culinary culture and nutritional quality in the United States is unfortunately so abysmal that I'm not surprised by statements like this however. If there is one industry that has proven that overdevelopment can be almost as bad as underdevelopment, it is the food industry that continues to output more and more shit as the years in rich countries like the US go by.
Cows on my ranch only have one bad day. Feedlots are an abomination, cheap meat is as unhealthy as all other processed food, for individual and environment. Answer is localism, not lab-grown meat in the near term. Long-term, probably still localism + folks who want to eat lab-grown meat. The animals that are humanely and sustainably raised are as happy and healthy and ethically defenisble as the humans who eat them.
Everything has to die, and in principle I acknowledge there may be a way to ethically steward another species while having power of life & death over it, and consuming it. In an ideal set-up, it could be a symbiotic relationship. I won't presume the details of your set-up, but I wonder if contented happy animals are what a completely subjugated species look like. When their will to resist has been completely broken, they settle in and adapt. Animal husbandry is in large part breaking the animals' ability to resist. In the long term, by conscious breeding for docility, and in each generation, by castration and de-horning.
I'm not pointing a finger here, because even tho I'm "vegan" I'm totally enmeshed in a form of life which is terrible for the planet, humans and non-humans all.
I read Peter Singer's Animal Liberation when I was 19, turned vegetarian at 20, and stayed that way until I was 27.
I gave up for a few reasons but mainly fatigue - I was the only vegetarian around and just got constant questions/queries about my reasons. At 19 I assumed the world would join me in giving up meat but that didn't happen, and it still shows no signs of happening. I also find vegans and animal rights people tedious and they hold all sorts of socialist views I don't agree with. I also quite like the taste of meat. That's normal for a human.
I still think factory farming is barbaric but I simply don't care enough to adapt my lifestyle so much to avoid meat. I occasionally buy free range chicken and try to eat less pork. If there was a synthetic alternative that tasted 70% as good I would genuinely buy it but I just still think there will be huge problems getting this kind of thing to market at scale. No one cares enough about animal rights, and I don't think they ever will.
I'm vegetarian, but I can understand these reasons.
In your case, you might be interested in supporting organisations that aim to support research for alternative proteins, such as The Good Food Institute : https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/charities/good-food-institute
It's comparatively lower effort than changing diets, and has a good track record. The taste and price of alternatives are much better than 10 years ago. It is still needs more research to be cost-competitive, but that's a bet worth taking.
You might also want to switch to bigger animals maybe : https://benthams.substack.com/p/if-youre-going-to-eat-animals-eat
And note that there have been significant progress for animals recently. There are worrying aspects, but I don't think that nobody cares about that topic : https://farmanimalwelfare.substack.com/p/a-year-of-wins-for-farmed-animals
Why not just eat meat from producers that pasture their animals and treat them well? This would fulfill your taste and body composition requirements and all you have to do is pay a premium for your meat. Seems absurd you you can pay an extra 8 bucks a pound for your steak to avoid participating in the greatest crime in human history but would rather get the discount and be sad. There are choices between veganism and factory farmed meat, and more and more producers offering this every year.
Seems hard to produce milk without running into issues though?
According to google, cows are milked twice per day for fifteen minutes. Better to be milked for a half hour than to be not born at all. And like meat, farms with a higher standard of animal care exist at a premium price.
It is the constant pregnancy and then removing the babies, not the milking
This is more or less what my family does. We eat legumes, dairy, and pasture-raised eggs as the protein source in some of our meals, fish for some others, and then when we do buy meats we buy humane ones.
Richard, you should consider eating less meat rather than becoming vegan. It's not a religion (unless you're in PETA); cutting your meat intake 90% is 9x more impactful than eliminating that last bit of meat.
Richard I’ve always admired your intellectual honesty, but if you think being vegan and being muscular and lean is not possible or even a little bit difficult, you’re not trying very hard intellectually or you don’t want to give up your last excuse.
Being vegan and/or lean is not impossible (I've tried and managed both, briefly).
But it is in truth quite difficult, and, in today's calorie-rich, sedentary world very hard to achieve without large amounts of efforts to be active with exercise and restrictive on diet.
It is not vaguely scalable (look at the humans you see on the street) and it's just another case of hobbyists thinking that everyone else should take up their hobby.
Musing on whether accepting that what you're doing is wrong is actually kind of heroic, compared to others who rationalize their behavior with specious justifications - is self-indulgent. Richard: your disinclination to change behavior in the light of your moral insight seems like weak character.
Agreed, but I generally appreciate when people acknowledge that although they agree with the arguments that they aren’t changing out of weakness (eg Paul Bloom) rather than trotting out the canard about protein
"Surely there’s no morally relevant difference between a pleasant smell and a pleasant taste."
Uh, yeah there is. We need food to live and to be healthy. The smells or sounds or images of a slaughtered animal gain us nothing valuable in our lives. But we all need food. That's the difference. This is so obvious I can't believe I had to type it out, and yet Richard just accepts the argument without any skepticism.
I'm happy to eat lab-grown meat or substitute meat products if they're within reasonable distance of the real thing on price and taste. I've ordered many an Impossible Burger at restaurants. Got no particular need to have real animals raised and killed. But it's important to acknowledge that there is a totally valid reason - food! - to eat animals, and that people who do so take no sort of twisted pleasure from the killing.
Moreover, suppose we replace all actual animal-killing for food with lab-grown meat. Now, amid all the benefits to the environment from less grazing and such, we also have millions upon millions fewer chickens and cows and goats and sheep and pigs being born. We don't need 'em! Let those hogs breed in the wild and face the predation of their natural predators (see 'em killed the way nature intended, I say!). We're not going to run farms that let cows graze under armed protection all day just out of the goodness of our hearts, either. But, one might reasonably ask, when it comes to the humans making the decision, what is the moral difference between animals "born, raised and killed for food" versus "never born at all"? Leaving aside the odd psychopath who enjoys making living things suffer, I can't quite see much of a moral difference there that mandates some sort of massive ethical reckoning.
The reason to invest in (and consume) lab-grown meat has a strong argument in its favor entirely besides the ethical angle: environmental damage, equity for societies that lack arable farmland, efficiency and reliability of our food supply, etc. We don't have to reach ethical questions to decide that it's a good idea. But I take exception to the idea that there's some fundamental ethical problem with finding our own food to live healthy lives and provide for our children.
You said that there was an important difference between pleasant smell and taste, and then you gave an example of something that was neither smell or taste--health. However, as I show in the linked article, veganism is better for health.
The evidence's balance suggests that eating chicken is better for health than eating red meat. Would this cause you to shift your views? Or would you change rails and go with the animal welfare argument again? You very much seem to be arguing to a conclusion.
This is pedantry. The objection I quoted was that preferences because of how it smells or looks are clearly immoral, so why would taste be any different? And the preference we're speaking of - eating animals - isn't about the taste per se, but rather what you get when you eat them, i.e. having a nutritious meal. That it tastes nice is evolution's way of saying "this is good stuff to eat! do more of that!", but needless to say, that is secondary to the main purpose, which is sustenance. The moral justification is "We need to eat nutritious food, and we know it's good for us often based at least partly on taste".
That there might be other ways to get a fully nutritious diet without eating animals is a separate debate focused on pragmatism, and on other considerations which have nothing to do with the morality of it.
So then that's not saying there's a difference between taste and smell; it's saying that there's is a reason to eat meat other than taste and smell. Lots of things taste good that are not healthy--e.g. icecream. Evolution optimized for getting us through our child bearing age when we're calorically deprived, not overall health. You have no arguments against the evidence I present in the article that veganism is better for health.
Agree, and strongly appreciate that you’re willing to take a stance that many of most of your followers don’t like - that shows character
After reading Michael Huemers book „Dialogues on Ethical Vegetarianism“ I became vegetarian
My remaining hypocrisy is that I still eat eggs & cheese - but I can attest that for everything else I derive as much or more pleasure from artificial meat & alternatives, and I’m just as healthy, so I suggest you should try again. The options are becoming better and better.