Now it’s time to finish up my tour and critique of Huemer’s new book. This week: animal ethics.
My Preamble
Five years ago, I had an extended debate on animal ethics with Huemer on EconLog. Here are segments 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7.
As expected, Huemer and I failed to convince each other. Unexpectedly, at least two people I personally know told me that Huemer changed their minds. No one has ever told me that I changed their minds on this issue. If my favorite philosopher says I’m wrong, and successfully changes my friends’ minds in a fair debate, I have to suspect that he’s right and I’m wrong. So while I’m tempted just to declare an impasse, I feel obliged to resume the argument.
Before I delve into this chapter, however, let me quote a passage from Huemer’s “Defending Liberty: The Commonsense Approach,” an essay in Foundations of a Free Society.
The fundamental fallacy of rationalism is the idea that human knowledge proceeds from the abstract to the concrete, from the general to the specific; that one arrives at particular judgments by applying pre-given abstract rules to particular circumstances. The evidence of human experience stands almost uniformly against these assumptions, in virtually every area of human intellectual endeavor. In the sciences, one does not begin with an abstract theory and then use it to interpret experiences. If one wants to develop a theory, one begins with a large collection of concrete facts; patterns may emerge and explanations may suggest themselves, once one has collected a sufficient body of background facts. One’s theories must conform to and be driven by the concrete facts, not the other way around…
The same is true in philosophy. [I]f we wish to arrive ultimately at some general theory of ethics, we must start from a variety of relatively concrete, particular ethical truths. It is those who proceed in the opposite direction—declaring some general, abstract theory and then demanding that the particular facts conform to it—who are responsible for the mountains of failed (and often absurd) theories that dominate the landscape of the history of philosophy.
My fundamental problem with Chapter 17 is that Huemer almost completely loses sight of these insights. Virtually everyone accepts a long list of “relatively concrete, particular ethical” views that give animals near-zero moral weight. And instead of taking these ubiquitous intuitions seriously, Huemer sets them all aside in favor of two extremely abstract and general claims. Namely:
1. Suffering is bad.
2. It is wrong to cause an enormous amount of something bad, for the sake of relatively minor benefits for ourselves.
The correct intuitionist approach, I say, would be much more concrete. Along the lines of the following short dialogue:
A: It is wrong to cause an enormous amount of suffering, for the sake of relatively minor benefits for ourselves.
B: So if the only way for me to build a swimming pool is to bulldoze a den of mice, causing them to horribly suffer, it is wrong to build my pool?
A: Perhaps I overstated.
B: Indeed.
Why is this more concrete approach superior to Huemer’s? Because B’s concrete, particular ethical claim that mouse suffering is no big deal is far more plausible than A’s sweeping moral generalization.
Doesn’t this undermine Huemer’s Problem of Political Authority, which makes an intuitionist case for anarchism? No, because as Huemer shows in great detail, the case against government pits ubiquitous concrete, particular views about the ethical treatment of humans against sweeping moral generalizations about government authority. In his words, “I do not, of course, lay claim to common sense political views. I claim that revisionary political views emerge out of common sense moral views.” The whole project of Chapter 17, in contrast, is precisely to defend a revisionary moral view about the proper treatment of animals. And as Huemer makes clear in Chapter 17, his view is deeply revisionary, condemning virtually all human beings as moral monsters.
Chapter 17: Applied Ethics, 2: Animal Ethics
In previous chapters, my disagreements with Huemer have been so rare that I’ve been able to register virtually all of my objections. For Chapter 17, I’ll have to focus on my larger criticisms. Here goes:
The most common argument for ethical vegetarianism is something like this:
1. Suffering is bad.
2. It is wrong to cause an enormous amount of something bad, for the sake of relatively minor benefits for ourselves.
3. Factory farming causes an enormous amount of suffering, for the sake of relatively minor benefits for humans.
4. Therefore, factory farming is wrong.
5. If it’s wrong to do something, it’s wrong to pay other people to do it.6. Buying products from factory farms is paying people for factory farming.
7. Therefore, it’s wrong to buy products from factory farms.
Shortly thereafter, he adds:
The usual target is premise 1: Defenders of animal cruelty claim that only human suffering is bad; animal suffering isn’t. They then need to identify some relevant difference between humans and animals that explains why that would be so.
I’d say this is overly generous to Premise #1. Making extremely evil humans like Hitler or a serial killer suffer is actually very good. A weird view? Hardly; it’s classic retributivism.
Furthermore, if animal suffering is only slightly bad, then an enormous amount of animal suffering would still not be enormously bad. So you need an additional premise in between (1) and (2).
(Aside: We could delete (1) and replace (2) with little change in plausibility: “2.’ It is wrong to kill a living creature, for the sake of relatively minor benefits for ourselves.”)
The rest of the argument seems fine.
Huemer then moves on to “Defenses of Meat-Eating.” The good news is that my preferred argument comes first. The bad news is that he swiftly dismisses it.
Argument 1: It’s okay to torture other animals for our own pleasure, because we are intelligent, and other animals are not.
Replies:
1. This is a non sequitur. What does intelligence have to do with the badness of pain and suffering? Is the claim that pain is only bad if you’re smart? Why would that be?
2. Human babies are also unintelligent. Argument 1 thus implies that it would be permissible to torture babies for fun.
3. Similarly, Argument 1 implies that it would be permissible to torture mentally retarded people for fun.
My replies to Huemer’s replies:
(1) This is not supposed to be a deductive argument, so it makes no sense to call it a “non sequitur.” Instead, it is a moral premise – “The suffering of intelligent beings is much more morally important than the suffering of less-intelligent beings.” And this premise strikes most of us as highly intuitive. We can see this clearly in science fiction. In the Star Wars universe, for example, we readily accept the idea that it is wrong to kill Wookies or Ewoks. Why? Because they are other intelligent beings. Killing Banthas, on the other hand, is no big deal, because they’re just alien animals.
(2) If you haven’t had much time to learn, ignorance and intelligence are perfectly compatible. Why? Because “intelligence” is roughly synonymous with “learning ability.” And since human babies go from knowing zero languages to one language in a couple of years, one can plausible say that they are in fact highly intelligent. If that doesn’t convince you, I’d appeal to the separate moral premise that, “The suffering of beings who will normally develop intelligence is much more morally important than the suffering of beings who will never develop intelligence, though probably not as important as the suffering of beings who are already intelligent.” Also highly plausible.
And yes, the latter premise lends some support to a moderately anti-abortion view, but I say that is a feature, not a bug.
(3) Most mentally retarded humans are still much more intelligent than almost any animal, so this does not follow. In the rare cases where humans are reduced to the mental level of an animal, we routinely consider options like euthanasia (or at least “pulling the plug”) that would be out of the question for a functional yet mentally retarded human.
Huemer’s critique of Arguments #2-9 seem basically right.
His reply to Argument #10, though, falls short:
Argument 10: Plant farming also kills animals! Farmers kill insects with pesticides. Even if you buy organic foods, they probably kill field mice sometimes in the process of tilling fields and harvesting vegetables with machines. Therefore, vegetarians are no better than carnivores!
Reply: Animal agriculture is worse than plant agriculture in a number of ways.
1. Factory farms confine animals in unnatural and unpleasant conditions, subjecting them to pain and suffering for their entire, brief lives before killing them. Plant farms do not do this.
2. Chickens, pigs, and cows definitely feel pain and suffering. Insects almost certainly do not, due to the absence of nociceptors (the kind of nerves that generate pain sensations in us). This is why insects can continue what they are doing even when their bodies are severely injured, they place the same weight on an injured leg as on an intact leg, etc.113
3. Animal farms require food for the animals, which comes from plant farms. The amount of food you have to feed the animals in the course of raising them is greater than the amount of food you get out of them at the end. Hence, meat production causes more of whatever harms are caused by plant farming, in addition to the harms directly inflicted on the animals in the factory farms. Thus, while it might be true that plant farming causes some harm, this can’t be used to excuse animal farming. In general, one can’t justify some bad behavior by saying that the alternative action causes some (much smaller) amount of harm.
My reply:
(1) This is a hyperbolic caricature of a reasonable argument. Namely: While “It is wrong to cause an enormous amount of something bad, for the sake of relatively minor benefits for ourselves,” probably allows you to incidentally kill animals in order to stay alive, even strict vegans usually cause far more animal suffering than they need to survive. After all, cutting your calories by 5% wouldn’t ruin your vegan life, and cutting those vegan calories by 5% would probably reduce a lot of suffering. Or you could try to buy food from areas with low rodent populations. I’ve never heard of any vegan doing such things, though admittedly I’m out of their loop. (The same goes for living in housing with a small footprint, since building any architectural foundation is likely to bring serious suffering to pre-existing animals in the vicinity).
(2) Upshot: You could say, “Fine, even strict vegans are moral monsters.” Or you could reassess the “It is wrong to cause an enormous amount of something bad, for the sake of relatively minor benefits for ourselves” principle.
(3) The “insects almost certainly do not feel pain” argument still seems grossly overstated. There could easily be many neurological pathways to pain, and pain has so much survival value that you would expect almost any ambient species to evolve it. And while you can point out differences between how humans and insects respond to pain, these are dwarfed by the similarities. Have you ever seen an insect fighting for its life?
(4) Even if Huemer is right about insects, moral philosophers couldn’t have known this until recent decades. So until then, a proto-Huemer should have been as committed to reducing insect suffering as modern-day Huemer is to reducing non-insect suffering now. Which again strikes me as a reductio ad absurdum.
General point: I agree that almost all of the pro-meat-eating arguments that Huemer analyzes are terrible. And most of them are not straw men; I’ve heard people make them.
While Huemer concludes that – in light of their terrible arguments – meat-eaters are desperately trying to rationalize obviously evil behavior, I have an alternative explanation. Namely: The moral unimportance of animal welfare is so obvious to almost everyone that asking them for arguments confuses them.
As Huemer knows, normal humans often flounder when asked to justify the obvious. If you ask people to “Prove they exist,” they present inane arguments. The same goes if you ask people for proofs of the external world, knowledge, consciousness, or morality. While you could conclude that all of these “common-sense” beliefs are actually ridiculous, the more reasonable inference is that non-philosophers are too confused to say, “It’s obvious” (and too ignorant of the history of philosophy to appeal to G.E. Moore).
I say the same is going on with animal ethics.
All this explains why, if you agree with the arguments of this chapter, you should not only refrain from buying factory farm products yourself. You should also exert social pressure on other people around you. E.g., express serious disapproval whenever your friends buy products from factory farms. If you meet someone for a meal, you should insist on going to a vegetarian restaurant.
By the way, if you do this, you can expect other people to act resentful, and indignant, and often to insult you. This is because, again, they are horrible. Given their horribleness, their main thought when someone points out their immorality is to get angry at the other person for making them feel slightly uncomfortable. They won’t blame themselves for being immoral; they’ll blame you for making them aware of it. It’s sort of like how a serial murderer would get mad at you if you tried to stop him from murdering more people. He would then blame you for being “preachy”. Perhaps the murderer would then refuse to be your friend any more. If so, good riddance.
If Huemer is right, merely “exerting social pressure on other people around you” seems like a tremendous underreaction. If non-vegans are half as awful as Huemer claims, he shouldn’t be “insisting on going to a vegetarian restaurant.” He shouldn’t be socializing with them at all. This is just an application of this moderate deontological principle: “Don’t socialize with moral monsters unless the benefits greatly exceed the costs.” Seems plausible, doesn’t it?
And things don’t stop there. If you insist on eating at a vegetarian restaurant, why not refuse to patronize any shopping center that allows non-vegan restaurants in the complex? A single landlord will normally own the entire shopping center, after all. Or you could refuse to eat vegan food unless the deliverymen are vegans as well. Sure, don’t starve yourself to death for veganism. But if comparisons to the Holocaust are in the right ballpark, extreme social pressure is well-warranted.
In saying this, my hope is not to turn Huemer and other ethical vegetarians into hermits. I like Mike. My point, rather, is that even they are less radical in their behavior than their rhetoric suggests. And the best explanation is that on some level they intuit that their pro-vegan premises are considerably more dubious than they admit.
Chapter 18
No objections, so I’ll just quote my favorite passage:
[G]ood philosophers answer objections. If you have a philosophical view (or any view really), and you know that a lot of smart people disagree with it, you really need to think about why they disagree. And I don’t mean “Because they’re jerks” or “Because they’re evil.” What you need to think about are the best reasons someone could have for disagreeing. If you can’t think of any, then you probably haven’t thought or read enough about the issue; you should then go look up some intelligent opponents and see what they say. And I don’t mean television pundits or celebrities on Twitter. The best defenders of a view are usually academics who have written books about it. You should then think seriously about those objections and whether they might be correct. If you don’t find them persuasive, try to figure out why. This is the part of rational thought that most human beings tend to skip.
READER COMMENTS
Parrhesia
Jul 13 2021 at 11:36am
Even if we assign very low probability that insects feel pain and they feel significantly less pain, there are something like 10^18 insects so insect suffering is a massive problem. Nematodes have nociceptors and there are 4*10^19, which is 57 billion for every human. I do not know exactly how but I imagine human beings could be causing massive amounts of suffering to these tiny creatures for trivial reasons all the time. Increases in global temperature, anything that made soil to be less hospitable or the ocean more acidic, wildfires and so forth may be causing massive amounts of pain and suffering despite it being difficult to imagine this.
Having children is not trivial but it would seem there is a moral obligation not to reproduce if there is a risk your child may not be a vegan. It would be the same as the obligation not to reproduce if your children would have a decent chance of being mass murderer. Even vegan children would cause animal suffering as noted above.
If you turn the dial of animal concern up too high then saving lives may be unethical. Imagine saving the life of a mass murderer. If I give money to help those in developing countries by giving them malaria nets or vaccines, they could be meat eaters or at least start eating meat 20 years from now when their country is more developed. Turn up the dial more and it might be morally praiseworthy to kill meat eaters. Turn the dial up higher and all human life is inflicting too much suffering on animals; if we were provided the chance, we should kill all human life.
It seems like vegans keep the dial turned pretty high but not quite high enough to start doing really crazy stuff. Where is the line between “trivial”, “moderately trivial” and “unnecessary” or “not completely necessary.” I can’t stomach the idea of having no concern for animals but I can’t see good reason to exclude possibly insects, nematodes, fish, vermin and so forth. And their suffering accumulates. However, doing so seems really really counter intuitive.
Thank you both for doing the book club.
Jasper
Jul 13 2021 at 10:13pm
I think it’s pretty intuitive that we should have some concern for the well-being of insects and fish, although perhaps not for nematodes (if only because the practical difficulty of doing anything at all for them completely outweighs any benefit such action might confer to them.) It’s pretty clear that doing harm to insects or fish for no reason whatsoever is immoral; there’s a reason it’s a cliché that bullies enjoy frying ants with magnifying glasses. Even though fishing is a sport, most fishermen believe you should either throw the fish back or eat it – that is, the benefit of entertainment from fishing is enough to outweigh the immorality of sticking a hook in a fish’s mouth, but not enough to justify killing it. I would consider someone who willfully kills or injures a captive fish for no reason at all to be immoral.
All this is to say that it is widely agreed on that one should not be cruel to small animals, fish, or even insects. The argument would hold for nematodes, except that I don’t believe anyone has ever taken an action with the sole intent of harming one. Thus, all nematode-concerning actions are justified by something else, and because the organisms themselves are so insignificant, we accept the cost. If it were possible to be needlessly cruel to nematodes, then such an action would also be wrong. Thus all living creatures deserve some baseline of respect, even when that baseline is below the scale of human action.
Henri Hein
Jul 14 2021 at 2:19am
Driving. Whenever I go through Central Valley, my windscreen has a thick cake of dead bugs on it. If you think dying on a windscreen is merciful for an insect, just assume that at least as many had a body part torn off by a bounce or partial hit. Which brings to mind Bryan’s point in the earlier thread that we might reduce suffering more by driving 10% less than by giving up meat.
I once asked a Buddhist friend how it is that the Dalai Lama allows himself to fly. She responded that the good he does by spreading his message around the world makes up for the killings occasioned by the flights. I respect my friend and didn’t want to argue the point, but it doesn’t make sense to me.
PS: I don’t know if “these tiny creatures” were meant to include insects — I assume it did.
Miriam Blatt
Jul 13 2021 at 12:11pm
Recommendation for the most convincing anti vegetarian book I have come across: The Vegetarian Myth. Covers arguments about health and about politics.
Written by someone who was vegan for 25 years, and developed severe health issues. Likely due to not taking the supplements required to survive in decent health on a vegan diet.
Another good book : Cows Save the Planet. This one shows how to replenish topsoil quickly.
These are practical books. Maybe not satisfactory if your only interest is abstract philosophical debate. Still I found them eye opening. Especially The Vegetarian Myth. For example, her view of grains as “fossil fuel on a stalk” because of the fossil fuel needed to create synthetic fertilizer.
B K
Jul 13 2021 at 12:51pm
What if vastly super-intelligent aliens tortured humans for mild amusement? It can even be the case that, like modern factory farming, the torture of humanity wasn’t the direct goal of those aliens, but rather just the predictable side effect (a side effect the aliens don’t care about) of achieving their goal of getting mild amusement.
Since intelligence doesn’t appear to be binary but rather a continuous gradient, and if, as a matter of physics and computer science, there is no hard upper ceiling on intelligence, or if the ceiling is arbitrarily high, those aliens might be hundreds, thousands, millions, billions, or trillions of times smarter than we are. The intelligence difference between them and us could in principle be much greater than the difference between us and cows, pigs, chimpanzees etc.
From the perspective of ‘intelligence is what makes suffering morally bad’ premise, it seems like the only way to say that the aliens above are morally wrong is to posit some threshold of intelligence above which no matter how much more intelligent the aliens are, it is wrong for them to cause great suffering for trivial reasons on those who are merely above the threshold.
Moreover, it would not suffice to say that moral worth/badness-of-suffering increases less than linearly with intelligence (e.g. logarithmic), for the thought experiment can always be tuned to make the aliens as intelligent as needed to make them morally justified to torture us for mild amusement (as long as the intelligence is within physical and computer science based limits). To say that the aliens are morally wrong, it seems to me you really would have to posit hard arbitrary thresholds, rather than some smooth continuous curve in the graph of badness-of-suffering/moral worth vs intelligence.
Of course, one could claim this is simply intuitively obvious, and no further explanation is needed. A very lame response in my opinion.
pgbh
Jul 14 2021 at 4:36am
You and I had similar reactions to Bryan’s theory.
I looked at the prior debate, and he actually did bite the bullet which you suggest in your second-to-last paragraph; i.e., he agreed that moral worth is proportional to intelligence, and hence there could (theoretically) be a creature which is so intelligent that it would be entitled to torture and kill us to avoid so much as a stubbed toe.
The issue with this is that I don’t think it agrees with typical moral intuitions, and the purpose of Bryan’s proposing a relationship between intelligence and moral value is to preserve the typical intuition that human suffering matters much more than that of animals.
I prefer my own explanation, which is that we care more about humans, not because we correctly perceive, as an objective fact, that humans have superior moral worth, but because that’s just how we are. This seems to better explain why we value animals less than us, but probably wouldn’t value superintelligences more.
Joe Denver
Jul 13 2021 at 12:54pm
Most people are animal eaters. Very few people are vegetarians.
If there’s a small percentage on each side that changes their mind. Given the small initial number of vegetarians, it’s much more likely that you would run into people converted (even erroneously) to vegetarianism, than people converted to omnivorism.
I too remain unconvinced of vegetarianism, even though I too highly admire Huemer.
pgbh
Jul 13 2021 at 1:16pm
Bryan,
I’m curious if you think that, if there were a creature as far beyond us in intelligence as we are beyond cows, that creature would be entitled to torture or eat us at will.
Personally I’m a moral anti-realist, so I don’t find it plausible that our intuitions against hurting and killing humans spring from the recognition of an objective moral fact like “moral worth is due to intelligence”. So I doubt that if such a creature existed, we would accord it high moral worth. I think we would be more likely to hate and fear it.
The other claim you could make, I suppose, is that the relationship is not proportional — everything above a certain threshold has the same moral worth, and this threshold just happens to correspond to the intelligence of an exceptionally stupid human. I have no way of proving that this is false — it just strikes me as far too convenient.
Kevin Jackson
Jul 13 2021 at 6:48pm
I think this is a good question, but we need a more specific level of intelligence to have a productive discussion. Here’s my proposal: an alien species with the intelligence to single handedly turn a barren planet into one that will produce human level intelligence with a high (say, >99%) success rate. (To be more specific, I’m imagining a prices that doesn’t require constant maintenance, but is instead about seeing the initial conditions and being confident in the output. Definitely a task that is beyond the capabilities of a human!)
Such a creature would be responsible for the creation of trillions of intelligence like mine. If it were to decree that the pain and suffering of since if those intelligences was important to it, I would have to defer to its judgement. It does make me uncomfortable though, if I consider my own pain and suffering rather than a general variety inflicted upon anonymous others.
Joe Denver
Jul 13 2021 at 1:31pm
On the common argument for ethical vegetarianism, I generally agree with Bryan’s treatment of premise 1 and 2. However, I think most people also relinquish premise 3 too easily.
There are two parts to this premise, and from my perspective, both seem false.
First, does factory farming actually cause an enormous amount of suffering?
When I talk with vegetarians on this subject, they will often quote some particular harm that is being done to animals. But I think they miss one of two crucial points:
There’s no reason to believe animals have the same intuitive senses that humans do.
Often the suffering caused to animals is at least partially the animals own fault.
An example for point 1, vegetarians will often bring up the fact that factory farmed cows live in quite filthy environments. If humans lived in these environments, it would be reasonable to assume that these humans are suffering, because humans have an intuitive sense of disgust that is likely being violated. However, not only is there absolutely no reason to believe that cows share a similar sense of disgust, if you have ever spent a significant time around cows, you would know that there is ample reason to believe that cows don’t share such a sense. I have nothing against cows, but they are quite disgusting creatures, and remain so, even on the open range.
An example for point 2, vegetarians will often bring up the fact that some factory farms remove the beaks off of chickens, which seems quite cruel, unless you’ve spent ample time around chickens. Ever heard of the term “pecking order”, well that’s actually a thing. Chickens will literally peck each other to determine their dominance in the local hierarchy. And they have no qualms pecking each other literally to death, and then cannibalizing the corpse. A vegetarian could respond “sure, but chickens are only killing each other because they are confined in these factory farms”. And that may be true, but chickens are not humans. You would first have to prove that chickens have a right to not be constrained. But the question of animals rights was at least part of what the original argument was trying to prove.
Second, does the supposed suffering of these animals truly constitute only a relatively minor benefit to humans?
Most humans like the taste of meat. The price of steak at your local grocery store should be at least some indication to the truth of this statement. It seems weird to only say this is a minor benefit.
Can people live without consuming any meat? Sure. But is the satisfaction people get from consuming meat really minor? I think back on all the times that I have spent going out to restaurants with friends and paying large sums of money to consume meat. This seems like a non-trivial amount of time, particularly if you also consider the amount of hours spent in labor to purchase said meat.
It seems like this is a significant benefit, at least in my case. Not simply a minor benefit.
That alone isn’t enough to justify meat eating (e.g. if human meat tasted really good, that wouldn’t justify cannibalism), but it does seem like a serious hole in the aforementioned premise.
KevinDC
Jul 13 2021 at 4:54pm
A few quick nitpicks.
You said:
I can’t speak for whoever you’ve heard these claims from, but I’ve never heard someone say that these conditions are bad because they make the cows feel grossed out or whatever. The idea here (as I’ve always heard it) is that in most factory farms, animals are confined in tiny spaces and pens where they can’t even lay down or fully extend their limbs, for their entire lives, and end up constantly covered in waste. Aside from the physical pain that level of confinement creates, it also makes the animals constantly sick. In the US, upwards of 80% antibiotics are actually used for livestock, to keep them from dying from diseases. I’ve never heard anyone suggest that violating a cow’s innate sense of disgust was the issue at hand.
This is false, at least as far as Huemer’s argument goes. He’s making a welfare based argument, not a rights based one. He’s not saying “factory farming is bad because it violates rights” – he makes that point explicit.
I think you’re conflating two different things here. There’s the question of how much enjoyment people get from eating meat or whatever, which is different from the question of how much moral significance their enjoyment entails. Obviously, this isn’t a physics question, so we can’t assign precise values, but it seems to me that “gustatory pleasure” has about the same moral significance as “entertainment.” When Huemer says “gustatory pleasure” is a minor benefit, he’s not saying that it’s something that only gives people a small amount of satisfaction. The problem isn’t about if the level of the benefit being provided is or isn’t high enough, it’s that the benefit in question (gustatory pleasure/entertainment) is not the kind of thing that justifies inflicting large amounts of avoidable suffering to attain.
Joe Denver
Jul 13 2021 at 7:53pm
Perhaps I was not clear.
My example was but one example to illustrate a larger point. Namely, vegans often appeal to human senses, when there’s no reason to believe these apply to animals.
Even in this reply, you are appealing to the human sense of claustrophobia and desire for freedom of movement. Do cows feel this same desire? It’s not immediately obvious to me they do.
It’s not even obvious to me that cows are really all that bothered by not being able to stretch out their limbs or lie down. At least some animals actually prefer extremely confined quarters, how certain are we that cows do not also fall into this category (or are at least ambivalent about confinement). Not to mention hedonic adaption, even humans grow accustomed to horrible environments, and humans we know are bothered by such conditions (whereas we’re just guessing with cows).
I think this is a good illustration of my point 2. Cows are disgusting creatures. Disgusting creatures, when confined, are more prone to sickness.
Saying we should stop confining cows presupposes we ought to care about the confinement of cows (as we would humans). Which is part of what this argument is trying to prove.
Perhaps I was sloppy with my wording. But this doesn’t really change my point.
These arguments presuppose we ought to care about the freedom of movement of chickens. Which is the very thing they are trying to prove.
I’m not certain if I agree that there’s a categorical difference here. It would be interesting to hear Huemer’s view on this argument. It seems like a thing a deontologist would say, not an intuitionist.
Nonetheless, I do want to point out the circularity of this argument.
Remember, we are debating a premise to an argument which argues that people ought to be concerned with animal welfare (to the point of not eating meat).
I stated eating meat does not seem like a “minor benefit”, it actually seems quite significant. Responding that this benefit is not the kind of thing that justifies a disregard for animal welfare presupposes the argument.
I do not think we ought to be concerned with eating the meat of animals. Ergo, I do not see why this benefit is minor (even categorically so). This argument only makes sense to someone who has already accepted the argument in question.
KevinDC
Jul 13 2021 at 9:00pm
A few quick replies –
This is false. I appealed to two things – the fact that constant confinement and restriction of the ability to move creates significant physical pain, and fosters the spread of illness and disease. Nowhere did I appeal to anything like claustrophobia.
By this reasoning, humans, too, are disgusting creatures. When humans are confined in conditions mirroring those of factory farms (POW camps, for example), humans are also vastly more prone to sickness. Even on, say, a US Navy ship, where hygiene and cleanliness are enforced to absurdly strict degrees, people are still significantly more prone to sickness. This isn’t because humans are “disgusting.” It’s just a fact about how diseases spread. The tighter and longer proximity is held, the more easily disease spreads.
This isn’t how I responded though. I said that things like gustatory pleasure or entertainment aren’t the kind of things which justify the infliction of avoidable suffering to attain – not that they don’t justify a disregard for animal welfare. This is apparent even in the section you quote, where I say “the benefit in question (gustatory pleasure/entertainment) is not the kind of thing that justifies inflicting large amounts of avoidable suffering to attain.” This statement of mine in turn leads to various conclusions about the acceptability of how animals are treated for the sake of human pleasure, but those are conclusions derived from the argument. They are not “presupposed” by the argument.
Some years ago, a football player named Michael Vick was charged with animal cruelty for running a dogfighting ring where dogs were kept in horrible conditions, beaten, starved, made to fight each other, and eventually killed when they weren’t capable of fighting anymore. I think what he did was wrong. And I’d make the a similar argument to what Huemer made:
1. Suffering is bad.
2. It is wrong to cause an enormous amount of something bad, for the sake of relatively minor benefits for ourselves.
3. Dogfighting rings causes an enormous amount of suffering, for the sake of relatively minor benefits for humans (entertainment, in this case).
4. Therefore, dogfighting rings are wrong.
5. If it’s wrong to do something, it’s wrong to pay other people to do it.
6. Betting on dogfights is paying for dogfighting rings.
7. Therefore, it’s wrong to bet on dogfights.
It would be a weak, and false, response to this argument by claiming that it just “presupposes” that we should be opposed to dogfighting. That we should oppose dogfighting is a conclusion, not a presupposition – which is why in the argument it appears after the word “therefore.” And I stand by my assessment of “minor benefit.” If someone tried insisting that the benefit they got from dogfighting wasn’t “minor” because they gained just as much entertainment value from it as the gustatory pleasure one gets from eating meat, I’d find that obviously inadequate. Sure, maybe you were really really entertained by it, but entertainment is not morally significant enough to justify the infliction of suffering.
(Okay, I guess those replies weren’t all that quick 😛 )
Joe Denver
Jul 13 2021 at 10:35pm
“I’ve always heard it) is that in most factory farms, animals are confined in tiny spaces and pens where they can’t even lay down or fully extend their limbs, for their entire lives,”
In what way is this not an appeal to human senses? Yes, you then went on to argue about physical pain an disease. But I don’t think my characterization was “false”.
Not nearly to the extent of cows. This is difficult to relay if you haven’t spent much time around cows, but there are a lot of disgusting things they do that humans deliberately avoid.
Do you have any evidence for this?
Nonetheless, sure, some of the spread of disease is inherent to confinement. But if the cause of cow’s sickness is significantly due to their own behavior, I am less sympathetic to their plight (and, again, I am not concerned with not confining cows).
You are correct, my bad.
I guess my bigger problem is just that I find this logic highly unintuitive. There are many things that seem to cause suffering in exchange for pleasure. Playing sports, working out to look good, eating healthy, making jokes at someone else’s expense, paying for anything, criticizing someone’s work, this conversation, just to name a few examples.
Dogs are far more human-like than most animals, on a host of different levels. So they may be an exception to typical intuitions with regards to animals.
Regardless, caging, starving, beating, and forcing dogs to fight is obviously bad, on at least some level. Giving cows a chance at life that they would never have that, though confined, is far less stressful than they would ever have in the wild, does not seem like an obvious bad.
And yes, such an argument would not be adequate when applied to humans, but as you’ve mentioned, even Michael isn’t making a rights based argument. So typical objections wouldn’t apply.
KevinDC
Jul 13 2021 at 11:11pm
Because you claimed that I was appealing specifically to the human sense of claustrophobia, which I wasn’t. I was describing the physical consequences (pain, disease) of constricting a creatures ability to move while keeping them in crammed conditions.
I grew up with cow farmers literally next door. More than once we had cows wander into my yard in my childhood, and I spent a fair amount of time wandering cow fields in my childhood. Rest assured, I’m well versed in cows 🙂
For one, firsthand military experience. For two, just do some googling on the spread of disease on ships – whether military ships or even cruise ships. Ships are gigantic petri dishes where diseases flourish.
I didn’t say things which merely “cause suffering,” I said things which inflict suffering. If I experience some suffering while working out to look good, that’s one thing. If I somehow gained the ability to look good by inflicting that suffering on someone else, that seems clearly bad – it seems like something a villain in a fairy tale would do, like a version of Elizabeth Bathory. There’s a significant difference in enduring suffering yourself to gain pleasure for yourself, and inflicting suffering on others for your own pleasure.
Pigs are actually more intelligent, emotionally complicated, and “human like” than dogs on all these different levels, so however bad dogfighting seems to you, you should find pig farming even worse.
This is not what factory farms do. They aren’t giving cows lives that would be less stressful than they would have in the wild. Factory farms give cows lives which are net-negative in the utilitarian sense, lives that would be better off not having been lived, which involve significantly more suffering and stress than animals experience in the wild. In principle, farms could exist which give animals net-positive lives which are superior to what their wild brethren experience, but in practice this is not what actually happens on factory farms.
And on that note, I’m off to bed. I can’t promise I’ll be back to look for more replies, but we’ll see. Good night!
Joe Denver
Jul 14 2021 at 12:04am
“I caused myself pain when I workout” seems equivalent, in some sense, to “I inflicted pain on myself when I workout”. I agree with Huemer in his earlier chapters, I don’t really like these semantic arguments.
If you’re simply trying to distinguish between causing yourself pain vs causing others pain, there is a reason several of my examples consisted of causing others pain at the benefit of yourself/others.
I’m skeptical. Dogs are social animals. They co-evolved with humans for tens of thousands of years. Dogs seem more empathetic than pigs (though all animals are highly unempathetic), or at the very least, I can empathize with a dog more than I can a pig. Dogs can easily understand basic human commands, both voice and visual (e.g pointing) in ways that I highly doubt pigs could. I haven’t spent much time around pigs, but I imagine dogs are easier to train.
I could go on, but at the end of the day, I don’t have a grand theory of when it is right or wrong to kill, or when something is “human-like” or not. But given an example, I can easily distinguish between the two (e.g. it’s ok to kill a bantha but not an ewok).
That doesn’t seem true to me. I’ve spent quite a lot of time in the wild, it is not a nice place. It’s anecdote, but if we’re talking about cows specifically, the worst deaths I have seen in cows have been in the open range, where there weren’t humans nearby to take care of them when they got in trouble.
If someone came to me before I was born and gave me a deal “hey, you can either live a life of misery and suffering, or you can never exist”. I would probably take the former option over the later. Existence is nice, even if it is full of suffering.
There are far more cows in existence today than there ever could be in the wild if humans never came along. To say this is net-negative seems weird to me.
And yes, this argument wouldn’t work if applied to humans, but as you’ve stated, Michael isn’t making a rights based argument. So typical objections wouldn’t apply.
KevinDC
Jul 13 2021 at 4:19pm
I was among those who followed the initial debate between Huemer and Caplan years ago. I was initially on Bryan’s side of the debate, however, by the end of the discussion I became (and remain) a vegan because I thought Huemer’s arguments were far stronger. In the subsequent years when people have asked why I stopped eating meat I would actually send them links to this debate, and I know a few others who were also convinced by Huemer and are now also vegetarian or vegan. After this latest reply from Bryan, my opinion is unchanged. I find several problems with this response, but I’ll have to keep this limited for now.
Regarding Caplan’s claim that Huemer eschews concrete cases in favor of abstraction, this is false. In Huemer’s first response to Bryan in the aforementioned debate, he starts by referencing a concrete case almost right out of the gate: “If you just look at some of the things that go on on factory farms, you’re going to be horrified. If you look, I think you are going to find it extremely difficult to say, ‘Oh yeah, that seems fine.’”
I disagree that this strikes “most of us as highly intuitive.” I find it highly counterintuitive – enough so that when I’ve discussed the topic with people, I bring that up and ask them if that’s what they’re saying. And when I put that to them, the near universal response is to back off from that statement and say that no, of course they’re not trying to say that, because they think that’s obviously absurd and counterintuitive.
This is a bit of a shift in goal posts. Huemer isn’t talking about merely “killing” animals, he’s talking about keeping them in conditions of constant suffering for their entire existence, so responding with examples of animals being killed after living normal lives is a red herring. A more relevant application to Huemer’s argument would have to be more like “Torturing and mutilating Banthas while keeping them confined and in constant pain and suffering from birth until their death, even when doing so could be easily avoided, in order to gain a minor personal benefit is no big deal, since they’re just alien animals.” And to keep the Star Wars analogy going, I’d have to say, that sounds more like a Sith than a Jedi.
That doesn’t follow. This demonstrates that babies later gain learning ability, and will thus later become intelligent, but that doesn’t entail that babies therefore are highly intelligent in the present sense. That makes no more sense that saying that since babies will go from being almost completely immobile to walking and running within a couple years, it’s plausible to say babies are in fact highly mobile.
I disagree, I find it highly implausible. And it leads to even more implausible conclusions. Imagine a mad philosopher is prepared to push one of two buttons – button A will inflict some degree of suffering on a small child of ordinary childhood intelligence, and button B will inflict the same amount of suffering on a grown man of ordinary adult intelligence. You can do nothing to stop him, but you can choose which button he will press. By Caplan’s argument, all else equal, we should prefer that they push button A and inflict the suffering on the child, because the adult is more intelligent than the child and therefore their suffering is of at least somewhat greater moral importance. (Obviously, Caplan’s theory would still prefer no suffering be inflicted at all, but if for some reason it was unavoidable, he’d have to say it’s at least somewhat preferable for the child suffer because the adult is smarter.) Caplan might point out that the gap in intelligence between the child and adult is tiny compared to the gap in intelligence between human and non-human animals. But the gap, though tiny, is still there, so he’d have to say that, all else equal, it’s a least a tiny bit less bad for children to suffer compared to adults. If someone tried to tell me that in their moral view, the harm caused to a child is “probably not as important” as that done to an adult because the adult is “already intelligent” while the child will only later “develop intelligence” equal to that of the adult, I’d take that as a reductio of their worldview. But this seems to be a straightforward implication of what Caplan claims here. So Caplan only seems to be offering a very implausible premise that leads to extremely implausible conclusions.
I think Bryan underestimates the intelligence of animals relative to mentally retarded humans – the book Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? makes a strong case that animals are much more intelligent than we usually give them credit for – the review on Scott Alexander’s new blog is worth checking out for a summary. But that’s still an empirical question, which leads me to wonder about this hypothetical. Suppose we were assured beyond question (perhaps God makes a rare public appearance to pass along the information) that empirically, all of the people who were held at the Willowbrook State School were so mentally disabled as to have their intelligence on par with that of farmyard pigs. Would Caplan, if he was assured beyond question that was the case, seriously say that therefore everything that happened there was of little to no moral significance, because those people were really really stupid?
I think this is wrong on every count. I think the differences are dwarfed in the other direction – among the examples Huemer cited were things like insects putting full weight on crushed limbs and walking on them as though nothing happened, and engaging in behaviors like feeding and mating even as they are being eaten alive. These are much more dramatic differences! Having had a few broken bones in my life, I can tell you that the idea of walking around like normal on a freshly split shin bone is unthinkable. And while I enjoy engaging in reproductive activities as much as any chap, I struggle to imagine myself engaging in such activities without distraction while also actively being eaten by a grizzly bear. Insects “fighting for their lives” usually consists of them avoiding or escaping from damaging stimulus, but having an instinct to avoid damage doesn’t entail feeling pain, especially when they fail to show any recognition of wounds afterwards. Similarly, responding to the point that bugs lack the physical structures to feel pain by speculating that there could just be other pathways to feeling pain is a weak response. If someone suggests an animal is blind because it acts like it can’t see and it lacks all known physical structures needed for sight, it’s a weak reply to say the animal might not be blind because there might just be other ways to see. Lastly, Caplan’s confident assertion that pain would be evolutionarily advantageous to insects is just false, at least according to entomologists, who argue that for insects, pain would actually be maladaptive. For example, to quote Professor Matan Shelomi:
Peter
Jul 13 2021 at 5:08pm
Brilliant analysis!
KevinDC
Jul 13 2021 at 9:17pm
Thank you Peter 🙂
Bryan_9730
Jul 13 2021 at 6:22pm
Very well done Kevin. Thank you!
David Henderson
Jul 13 2021 at 6:30pm
Very nicely done. Are you moving me closer to vegetarianism or, at a minimum, to buying meat from non-factory farms? Yes, and I’m not happy because I love meat.
KevinDC
Jul 13 2021 at 9:17pm
Thank you, David!
And for what it’s worth, I said very much the same in the beginning – that I loved meat and I expected it to be a huge personal cost. It’s not an exaggeration to say that 80% of my calories came from meat before I made the change. But it turns out that taste buds are remarkably adaptable – when you make a permanent change to the way you eat, the kinds of food which appeal to you also change quickly. Penn Jillette (of Penn & Teller) describes how he had the same experience when he switched to a plant based diet, albeit for health reasons rather than ethical concerns. But his experience broadly matches my own – and his explanation of that experience is more entertaining and charismatic than mine would be, so I’d recommend listening to him describe it.
Joe Denver
Jul 13 2021 at 8:06pm
I agree that the intelligence argument isn’t as intuitive as Bryan suggests.
However, I think you missed Bryan’s point about star wars.
There is something intuitive about killing even fictional creatures that seems either moral or immoral depending on the creature and it’s presentation.
So my question to you: suppose we modified Bryan’s argument to be something like:
What specifically is wrong with this argument?
Obviously “human-like” is ill defined. But that is part of the point, as illustrated by star wars. Personally, I suspect it has much more to do with empathy than intelligence, but I’m not convinced that’s everything.
KevinDC
Jul 13 2021 at 9:12pm
Hey Joe –
I’m not sure that the fictional nature of the creatures in question makes much intuitive difference, to me. At least not within the Star Wars universe, where I’m nerdy enough to be pretty well versed. In my head, a bantha isn’t all that different from a funny looking cow or yak. And when you say:
I don’t have that intuition regarding, say, a bantha. But more to the point, as I tried to make clear in my comment, I think that “killing a bantha” is a red herring. The question here isn’t whether or not killing banthas can ever be justified. If I had to choose between killing a bantha or Yoda, I’d kill a bantha. If you asked me if Yoda or a bantha’s life is more valuable in some ultimate sense, I’d also pick Yoda. But if you asked me “Is it okay for Yoda to inflict a lifetime of severe pain and suffering on a bantha when doing so would give Yoda some personal pleasure, since Yoda is so much smarter and more human like than a bantha” the answer to that seems obvious to me: “No, of course not, that sounds like something Emperor Palpatine would do, not Yoda.”
BW
Jul 15 2021 at 1:42am
I’m curious: do you eat fish, and if not, why not?
KevinDC
Jul 15 2021 at 2:37pm
Hey BW –
No, I do not eat fish, for much of same reasoning described by Huemer and throughout my various comments. However, I see why you’d ask, and in item 6 of the debate linked above, Huemer outlines a plausible theory for why lower intelligence can make pain less bad – if you haven’t read it, you should, but the short version is that the less consciously aware of a pain you are, the less bad the pain is. Animals with lower intelligence plausibly have lower levels of conscious awareness, which correspondingly would make their experience of pain less bad. Taking that as given, does it follow that eating fish is okay?
Given that the debate so far has largely focused on factory farming, I’m going to focus on the equivalent with fish – things like large scale fishing industries, rather than someone fly fishing out in an Alaska river or something.
That said, I in turn consider these words from Peter Singer describing the scale of the fishing industry (in his book Ethics in the Real World, p 46):
Given that it seems extremely likely that fish experience pain and suffering while in the process of getting impaled and suffocating to death, and given the truly gargantuan number of fish killed in such a way every year, I find it questionable that eating fish is justified. And even finding it questionable is too much to be willing to engage in it. In a way, I agree with Caplan, when he says we should not inflict harm unless we can be extremely certain that the benefits will vastly outweigh the costs. And am I willing to claim, in light of the evidence that fish feel pain and the massive numbers of them killed each year, that the pleasant sensory experience I get while tasting a fish is extremely likely to vastly outweigh the costs? No, I don’t think I can say that, not honestly.
Cigarros
Jul 13 2021 at 5:45pm
Very brief questions.
Brian, you say that animal welfare has moral import, though a lot less than human welfare. However, your arguments suggest that concerns for animal welfare place no moral constrains on human behavior. What activity involving animals do you think it is morally wrong, if any, and why?
Michael, about intuitionism. We know that our physical intuitions evolved in the world of neither-very-small-nor-very-large sizes and not-very-fast-speeds. As a result, these intuitions do a very poor job at predicting behavior in extreme scenarios (very high speeds, super massive objects, etc). Couldn’t something similar happen with moral intuitions?
My worry is that our moral intuitions might not extrapolate well beyond what would have been typical ethical dilemmas faced by our ancestors. For example, our ancestors didn’t systematically face anything resembling a trolley problem, had to build complex societies, or come up with collective responses to global warming. Being so, how can we trust that out moral intuitions will give correct answers in these situations
Jens
Jul 13 2021 at 6:18pm
I think Ewoks and Wookies are cute, cool and nice. That’s why one doesn’t want them to be killed. In fact they were made to be like that. And Banthas were modelled after some kind of cattle. If Ewoks and Wookies were sneaky, fickle and evil, while Banthas were like kitten things would be a bit different.
Jasper
Jul 13 2021 at 9:57pm
I have a couple objections to your objection. The first concerns a counterexample you used in the first series of posts, and brought back here:
This counterexample fails, in my opinion. In the context of the discussion of factory farming, a swimming pool is not a “relatively minor benefit,” nor would the bulldozing of a den of mice result in an “enormous amount of suffering.” If A wants their argument to lead into factory farming, then they are referring to “enormous amounts of suffering” on the scale of some 50 million animals, not a den of mice, and the “relatively minor benefits” are the transient pleasures of so many meals of meat. For this counterexample to be convincing as relates to this conversation, the suffering and benefits should be roughly equal in scale. Imagine the following conversation:
That sounds pretty wrong to me, and I wouldn’t see why B would think themselves obviously justified in building their pool.
My other objection concerns Bryan’s complaints about Huemer’s apparent failure to live up to his own moral standards. According to Bryan, the rational response to believing factory farming is morally evil is the most extreme response possible: vegetarians should stop socializing with meat-eating friends, avoid all facilities not run completely by vegans, and otherwise exert extreme social pressure to push people towards veganism at any and all costs. Noting Huemer’s failure to do so, Caplan concludes:
We just learned earlier in the book that a committed utilitarian should give away all of their possessions to charity, keeping only the bare minimum necessary to survive, as well as engaging in constant proselytization to convince others to do the same. While this is in fact morally optimal in a utilitarian framework, it is no mystery why such behavior is not widespread. Utilitarians are people, too, and it is extremely difficult for them to act morally optimally when social pressures and strong personal desires clash with their moral intuitions. Rather than conclude that the moral framework is wrong, however, we simply accept the fact that people are imperfect, while still striving for more moral behavior within the bounds of reason.
The same applies here. Of course, the moral framework of veganism should cause a believer to eschew society, proselytize endlessly, and perhaps (although Bryan did not mention this) sell all of their possessions and donate all of their income to animal-welfare organizations. Again, however, the fact that they fail to do so is not a negative reflection on their moral framework. It is simply a consequence of the fact that Huemer and other vegetarians are humans, too. It is to their credit that they still strive for more morally optimal behavior, despite strong societal pressures against their doing so. There is no personal benefit to behaving morally besides the intrinsic good of being moral, so it should stand as a testament to the strength of vegan theory that someone would be willing to make any sacrifices at all in the name of animal welfare.
Henri Hein
Jul 14 2021 at 2:10am
It’s not at all clear to me that murdering 100 cows is worse than murdering 100 mice.
pgbh
Jul 14 2021 at 4:22am
Ethical and meta-ethical theories are usually supposed to jibe with our moral intuitions. Utilitarianism doesn’t, because nobody is a utilitarian and pretty much nobody feels bad about this or even considers it abnormal. I would certainly consider this a strike against utilitarianism, and I believe Huemer took the same point of view in the book.
The same is true of veganism. Almost nobody is a vegan, and almost nobody feels bad about this or considers it weird in any way. This is evidence that whatever our moral intuitions support, it isn’t veganism.
As an aside, I was a vegetarian for some years. Whenever I discussed the issue with others, I got pretty much the same response; we pretty quickly reached a point where they admitted that my arguments were sound, but they just weren’t going to change their behavior. That’s not what I would expect from people who strongly intuited that causing suffering was wrong.
As an aside to that aside, how would we even have such an intuition? We’re an omnivorous species; if anything, the opposite intuition would be more useful. Here are two theories:
— Theory one: People have the intuition that harming conscious beings is wrong, even though this intuition is evolutionarily harmful. But we don’t follow this intuition, instead we almost all act just as if we didn’t have it, and harm other living creatures or even humans merrily and at will; in fact, we do this so much that large industries and significant parts of our social institutions are dedicated to doing it.
Let me further extend this aside. There is an anecdote in the book Among the Lowest of the Dead: When the death penalty was reinstated in Florida, people held a cookout outside Death Row on the day before the first execution (to celebrate the convict “frying”.) Does that seems like the behavior of an organism that has an intuition against harming conscious beings?
— Theory two: People are just behaving as evolutionary biology would predict.
I find the second theory more plausible.
Jasper
Jul 14 2021 at 7:00pm
I think people definitely have the belief that harming conscious beings is wrong, to at least some extent. In situations where there is no advantage at all to be gained by such harm, there is universal agreement that cruelty to other beings should be avoided. Do we think positively or negatively of the child who spends its free time frying ants with a magnifying glass? If a friend asked you to come whip some pigs with them, would you shrug your shoulders or recoil at the needless act of violence? The death penalty is not a good counterexample to this general intuition, because most death penalty supporters see it as more than gruesome entertainment. Supporters see it as a retribution for wrongs, or a way of preventing future crimes.
So why don’t our moral intuitions about veganism jibe with the theory? Personally, I think it’s because non-veganism is so prevalent in our culture and biology. We’re wired to derive pleasure from eating meat, and it’s pretty hard to see why it might be unethical, especially when it’s so normal. Most people don’t ever see a factory farm; they get their meat wrapped in neat styrofoam squares from the meat section of the grocery store.
If the past, say, 3 generations of humanity went vegetarian, all else being equal, I don’t think that we would see a strong meat-eating movement based off of ethical norms. The biological justification that humans evolved to eat meat is a decent defense of the status quo, but I don’t think it would convince anyone in a plant-eating world to switch to omnivorism. Vegetarianism has had some success so far combatting the status quo. How would your arguments hold up if you were arguing for meat-eating in under a status quo ante opposite to ours?
Henri Hein
Jul 14 2021 at 3:24am
I think Huemer’s case in chapter 17 is pretty strong. That said, I want to raise an argument that I thought was dismissed too quickly in the book and ignored above: #11 It’s natural. It is indeed natural. Of course, the mechanics of factory farming is not natural, but it is natural for predators to treat their prey unfeelingly. Not for the faint of heart, but you can see some examples here. Herons eating live gophers is another case. Cats are notorious for playing with their prey. So though it may be “wrong to cause an enormous amount of something bad, for the sake of relatively minor benefits,” it is natural. Many of these predators have the tools and skills to quickly kill their prey before eating them, but don’t bother. That is causing an enormous amount of suffering for relatively minor benefits.
Of course, moral theory is also not natural (at least I don’t believe it is), so maybe that is philosophically uninteresting. My point is that people are not horrible because they don’t immediately become vegetarian when hearing about factory meat farming. You are asking them to buck millions of years of evolution. You can excuse them for hesitating.
Henri Hein
Jul 14 2021 at 3:32am
I don’t buy the intelligence argument. I don’t think I can define exactly why it is that humans should have more rights than non-humans, but I’m uncomfortable relating it with intelligence. In that case, Bill Gates should have more rights than me. That doesn’t make any sense.
Hellestal
Jul 14 2021 at 4:19am
The last line of the chapter is great.
Liam
Jul 14 2021 at 6:56am
The “but rodents die during harvesting” objection cannot stand on its own. We had better hope there is a moral difference between suffering and death that we knowingly and deliberately inflict and suffering and death that is an unintended and accidental byproduct of industry and agriculture. Otherwise Ted Bundy could have offered the following defence of his actions:
“You are no better than me. You all support the killing of innocent human beings. Do you know how many people die in road traffic accidents around the world each year? How about deaths in industry? Or pollution? It’s in the millions. Millions more are horribly injured and maimed. A significant proportion of those deaths are avoidable and they are suffered by innocent third parties. You indirectly support those deaths whenever you drive or buy products from these industries. Some of these deaths are very painful and protracted. Most of my victims suffered nothing more than a quick blow to the head with a hammer!”
Think about how you would respond to Bundy’s argument, and then ask yourself if vegans could use similar points as part of their reply to the crop deaths argument.
KevinDC
Jul 14 2021 at 12:05pm
At the risk of taxing the patience of all readers of the comment section here, I felt the need to slide in one more comment. Caplan suggests we ought to start with concrete cases – which reminded me of the opening thought experiment in the paper by Alistair Norcross Puppies, Pigs, and People: Eating Meat and Marginal Cases. In it, Norcross begins by describing a case that would be much more analogous to factory farming than Bryan’s hypothetical about killing a den of mice while building a pool. Norcross describes the hypothetical case of Fred:
Fred then explains his situation – he had suffered a head injury that left him without the ability to experience the taste of chocolate, his absolute favorite food. This was very upsetting to him. Later, however, he learned that if dogs are kept in extremely painful and stressful conditions like the above and then violently killed, their bodies produce a hormone which, when consumed, temporarily restores his ability to taste chocolate. Fred continues:
Norcross then says (and I agree):
This situation much more relevantly and concretely compares to factory farming than what Bryan described. With that in mind, I’d re-write the conversation between A and B as follows:
Joe Denver
Jul 14 2021 at 1:08pm
Most factory farms do not torture and mutilate animals, without legitimate reason, to the extent described in this hypothetical.
The fact that these are puppies (both that they are dogs, and that they are children), is not an irrelevant fact. Many people empathize with dogs more than other animals. And virtually everyone empathizes with children more than adults.
If you reform the hypothetical:
Clearly, much of the emotional weight goes away.
KevinDC
Jul 14 2021 at 3:22pm
Hi Joe –
You say:
As a statement of fact, the torture and mutilations described as happening to dogs in the thought experiment do regularly occur to animals on factory farms. Whether or not the reasons for that torture and mutilation are “legitimate,” of course, is the very thing under dispute. One of the claims being interrogated here is whether or not it’s justified to inflict severe, lifelong pain on animals for the sake of gaining some mealtime pleasure for ourselves. If that is justified, then it would be “legitimate” for Fred to subject the animals to that treatment, since by hypothesis that’s the only way they’ll produce the hormone he needs to enjoy the taste of chocolate again, since, as you correctly point out, the empathy people feel for dogs is not morally relevant. But if it is wrong for Fred to subject the dogs to that treatment for his desired ends, then it’s wrong to inflict severe lifelong pain on other farm animals to enhance your own pleasure. You could go with either option and have a logically valid claim – if you read the paper I cited, you’d see the author makes the same point:
I find the former argument far, far more plausible. Perhaps you think the second seems more plausible.
In your alternate hypothetical, you suggest that the pigs tusks are removed “to prevent them from goring each other to death.” But this also fails according to your own hypothetical – you also state that the pigs are isolated from each other in individual cages barely big enough to hold them, and are only allowed out of the cages in order to be mutilated. So your own scenario rules out the basis you give for why such a mutilation would be “legitimate.”
By contrast, pigs on factory farms have their tails chopped off, and there is a “reason” for it, in the sense that doing so is means-ends oriented. Michael Pollan gives a detailed account for what that reason is:
Maybe your reaction to that reason is to say “yeah that seems like a perfectly legitimate reason to me.” To me, it seems absurd to say that it’s justified to inflict that sum total of pain and suffering on billions of such creatures throughout their entire lives, because my mealtime pleasures are more important.
Joe Denver
Jul 14 2021 at 5:26pm
If Fred needs to butcher pigs in order to gain the ability to taste chocolate, I think there are ways in which he is justified in doing so per my modified hypothetical.
The former argument, modus ponens, is correct.
And yes, lopping off tails to prevent pigs from cannibalizing each-other is justified. In humans, it would be preferable to take action against the cannibalizer, not the cannibalee. But I’m not certain such logic applies to pigs (especially since virtually all pigs are cannibals given the opportunity).
A Country Farmer
Jul 14 2021 at 2:42pm
This premise is questionable:
I believe humans evolved as omnivores. There are serious people out there that believe that humans are more on the carnivorous side than the vegetarian side. I don’t have the expertise to evaluate those arguments, and I don’t have evidence at hand for the following claim, but it seems very common that people solve health issues with meat-related diets. Therefore, it at least seem plausible that the benefits may not be minor.
I haven’t read this section of Huemer’s book yet, but I did read Ethical Vegetarianism by Huemer and I was honestly surprised that Huemer didn’t even consider this argument. I brought it up to him by email, and it sounds from Bryan’s review above, that he still hasn’t taken up this argument. This isn’t some obscure argument. There are massive communities (search for Paleo, Keto, and Carnivore) of people that believe meat brings large benefits. Yet Huemer seems to often makes the mind-reading argument that meat eaters are mostly eating meat for pleasure.
I don’t know what the right answer is on the health benefits of meat eating for humans, but I think this continued lack of steelmanning by Huemer suggests some sort of cognitive bias.
Personally, I think there is a middle ground (if and until definitive proof and randomized controlled trial can be found that vegetarianism is just as or more healthy): humanely treated and killed meat. I’m glad Huemer covers this topic in his discussions of vegetarianism, and I agree with him that it’s a tiny amount of current meat consumption, but that seems irrelevant. Until he can show proof that vegetarianism is much healthier than meat eating, I think this is the best path to reducing suffering.
I try my best to only buy Certified Humane meat and I’m glad to give some of my excess wealth to a competitive market of such producers (there are other programs like Whole Foods’ animal welfare rating system). When I go to Whole Foods, I first look for Step 5 foods, then Step 4, and so on, and I’ll buy multiple different packages to make sure the profit motive is being exercised by multiple companies.
A Country Farmer
Jul 14 2021 at 5:06pm
The linked paper doesn’t seem to strongly support the Moorean view:
B K
Jul 15 2021 at 10:01pm
Eliezer Yudkowsky had a facebook post long ago on why he isn’t too bothered by the problem of animal suffering, it basically goes into some detail on why he thinks that factory farm animals actually don’t experience suffering at all, that to experience suffering you need an “inner listener”, and that requires more complicated brain parts than the case where mere pain signals are being sent to the brain and being responded to by it (or at least that’s my rough understanding and paraphrasing of the argument).
Link to the post
KevinDC
Jul 16 2021 at 10:11am
I tried checking out that link, but it seemed like a lot of components in the conversation were missing. I suspect it’s because I don’t actually have Facebook (deleted it a few years back, don’t miss it at all) and some comments can’t be seen by me because of that. Luckily, someone put the full conversation here. I’ve got a few musings, in no particular order of importance.
Eliezer spent some time establishing what his theory of mind is and what it entailed, but spent basically no time providing any arguments for why we should think that theory is actually true. That was probably outside the scope of his post, since it was meant to say something like “given my theory, these are the implications,” but if you don’t see any reason to accept the theory, none of the implications will seem compelling.
Further, his theory rests on foundations fundamentally incompatible with Caplan’s theory of mind. Yudkowsky is explicitly a physicalist with regards to mind, Caplan rejects physicalism. So if Eliezer’s theory of mind is right, then Caplan’s is wrong, and vice versa. They might still arrive at similar conclusions, but the chain of reasoning used to support one person’s position won’t apply to the other.
Eliezer’s theory is still vulnerable to the objection Huemer raises about babies – it would imply that there’s nothing bad about the pain of babies and young children, and that their pain has little moral worth. And contra Caplan, Yudkowsky seems to accept that farm animals actually have higher levels of the kind of cognition he considers relevant than human babies do. As he says in the dialogue – “I would certainly be more shocked to discover that a newborn baby was sentient than that a cow was sentient.” It would follow from this that, all else equal, if intelligence/sentience/inner-listener etc was what made pain morally relevant and made inflicting it on others for the sake of your own pleasure bad, anything that’s acceptable to do to a cow is even more acceptable to do to an infant.
Lastly, I think Yudkowsky gives reasons to doubt the validity of his thesis when he provides what he considers to be a relevant empirical measure of that theory – the mirror test, which is meant to be a test to see if something recognizes itself in the mirror as a show of self awareness. The mirror test generates very weird and inconsistent results. Gorillas pass it, as do dolphins. But baboons and many other primate species fail. But ants pass, as do magpies and other species of bird, as well as some kinds of fish. Pigs seem to pass (results are unclear), though dogs clearly fail. Young humans fail too – and I don’t just mean infants. Depending on where the child is from, you can get some pretty extreme results. According to Scientific American:
In Eliezer’s words: “If my model is correct then the mirror test is actually an ethically reasonable place to put a ‘do not eat’ barrier.” If your theory leads to the conclusions that it would be wrong to eat chimps, ants, fish, and magpies, but baboons, dogs, Western infants, and six year old Kenyans are okay to put on the dinner table, I think you’ve done an excellent job of torpedoing your own theory.
B K
Jul 16 2021 at 4:19pm
There seem to be 2 different theories being advanced by Yudkowsky – the strictly positive physicalist theory that certain kind of brain parts are needed to have conscious experience via an inner-listener, and a normative theory that it is ok to eat beings for whom you assign a sufficiently low probability of having those brain parts.
I would also like to point out what I see as a huge difference between Caplan’s ethical theory and Yudkowsky’s – Caplan grants that animals with low intelligence can suffer, but says that their suffering barely matters because they are not intelligent enough.
Whereas Yudkowsky’s theory denies as a matter of empirical fact that they suffer in the first place. If in fact physicalist theories of mind are true, and if cows, pigs, babies etc. do not in fact possess the necessary brain parts needed to experience anything, then it seems to me like the baby objection loses a lot of its force. Factory farm animals and babies alike may then perhaps have the ethical status of inanimate objects, as will any other being that lacks the specific brain parts needed to feel anything.
Now, this may be used as a reductio against Yudkowsky’s theory, but here is where I feel it is quite important to realize the difference between objecting to the theory because you have (1)objections against physicalism in general, (2)objections against Yudkowsky’s specific physicalist theory of mind, (3)objections to assigning a low probability that pigs, babies etc. have the brain parts needed for conscious experience, (4)objections against any theory that implies that harming babies or beings-you-care-about is ok, or (5)objections against the normative claim of saying its ok to harm beings who lack those specific brain parts, while accepting Yudkowsky’s theory of mind and his probability estimates for pig/baby consciousness. (Of course, there may be even more objections that don’t fit into the above.)
I don’t quite like objection (4), where it seems to me that the emotional intuitive reaction is being used to dismiss an empirical claim about what kind of brains are capable of having inner-listeners and hence, capable of experiencing suffering. I am not at all sure about whether Yudkowsky’s theory of mind is true, and I do not assign a low probability to pigs being conscious, but i am quite sure of physicalism, and I do think that our strong surface level intuitions about, for e.g., the badness of baby harm, give us very little insight into the actual physical fact of the matter on what kind of brain architectures/states are capable of generating an inner-listener who can suffer.
I am a vegetarian, but being a physicalist, Yudkowsky’s theory has been the strongest counter-argument I have found against the badness of factory farming. However, I don’t agree with the conclusion of it therefore being ok to eat pigs, for i think empirical uncertainty in this case ought to be resolved on the safer side morally speaking, with the safer side being to refrain from eating pigs/meat until we have a more detailed theory of brains and a more fleshed out theory of what generates inner-listeners etc.
I sure hope his theory is right though, it would mean there is far less suffering in the world than we think.
KevinDC
Jul 16 2021 at 5:25pm
Hey B K –
I think we agree more than we disagree. I, too, am a physicalist, and I agree that ambiguity in this case should err on the side of not inflicting harm, especially when the stakes are this big. If there’s even a 1% chance Huemer is right, we really ought to avoid factory farming. Perhaps Caplan thinks there’s not even a 1% chance of Huemer being right or, conversely, that he’s at least a hundred times more likely to be right than Huemer, but so far his arguments haven’t been convincing.
To run down a few things you listed – I don’t object to physicalism. But I also don’t find Yudkowsky’s specific theory of mind and inner listener remotely convincing – it strikes me as about on par with Julian Jaynes’ theory of mind/consciousness. However, I also wasn’t going for what you called objection 4, the method of “objections against any theory that implies that harming babies or beings-you-care-about is ok.” My goal wasn’t an emotional appeal, but at attempt to demonstrate absurd conclusions.
To recap, Yudkowsky said “If my model is correct then the mirror test is actually an ethically reasonable place to put a ‘do not eat’ barrier.” I pointed out that this test generated bizarre results – children as old as six frequently fail this test, but birds (which lack even a neocortex) pass it, as do ants. So I wasn’t trying to engage in an emotional appeal, but instead point to absurd results. To leave humans aside, his own selected test of his model says that it would be okay to do whatever we like to baboons or gibbons, but not to ants, because baboons and gibbons fail the mirror test while ants pass it. This isn’t appealing to your innate emotional attachment to baboons, or parrot fish, or magpies, as much as it is saying “the tests of this model generate obviously absurd results, and so much the worse for the model because of it.” If A, then B, says he. Not-B, therefore Not-A, says I.
Michael St. Jules
Jul 19 2021 at 2:58am
Social pressure sometimes works and is cost-effective, e.g. coordinated corporate campaigns against fur, cages and crates, but individually boycotting more and more things (including socialization with non-vegans) has decreasing marginal value for the cause, is sometimes actively harmful and eventually costs the cause more than it benefits it. The free-produce movement was generally ineffective against slavery.
If you’re only stopping at not starving to death, you’re well past the point where the costs exceed benefits and advocates will burn out for no real gain to the movement.
Also, what do you think is the appropriate response to products of human slavery, e.g. chocolate, conflict minerals in our electronics?
Richard Gaylord
Jul 19 2021 at 4:57am
” In the sciences, one does not begin with an abstract theory and then use it to interpret experiences. If one wants to develop a theory, one begins with a large collection of concrete facts; patterns may emerge and explanations may suggest themselves, once one has collected a sufficient body of background facts.”
this description of theory development in science is simply incorrect. we do not work in my field, theoretical physics in this way, as anyone who has done (or even read books about) theoretical work in physics should know.
John Alcorn
Jul 19 2021 at 5:44pm
Michael Huemer writes:
My intuition is that most farm animals and slaves want to live, rather than to die (or not to have been born). In the case of slaves, a relevant empirical check might be suicide rates among slaves bred in captivity in the antebellum south, if we may assume that it was within their power to commit suicide.
Perhaps an ethical way to reconcile (a) animal husbandry for meat production and (b) the moral status of farm animals to practice humane husbandry and to refrain from killing and eating young animals; for example, lamb and veal. In this scenario, ethics constrain husbandry and slaughter; and the quantity of farm animals emerges as a market outcome — not as a pseudo-moral plan “to create new beings so that they can experience brief, wretched lives.”)
This doesn’t justify slavery. Cannibalism is taboo. Voluntary cooperation is generally superior to slavery. Human reproduction and human-capital formation don’t require slavery.
John Alcorn
Jul 19 2021 at 6:04pm
Addendum: I should have mentioned that a positive side-effect of markets, if the markets are constrained by ethics of humane husbandry/slaughter, is to create many animals who lead decent lives, which the animals cherish. And these creatures otherwise would not exist.
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