Summary of the argument:
1. Many consequentialists advocate veganism because they think farming practices are overly harmful to animals.
2. Millions of humans live in poverty or in war zones and believe their lives to be worth living: if they didn’t believe this, they would commit suicide.
3. Conditions in free-range farms are no worse than conditions in places stricken by poverty and war. Conditions in factory farms might also be no worse.
4. So the lives of animals in some farms are worth living.
5. So the consequentialist ideal should actually be one of the following:
(i) Eat as much meat as possible to fund the lives as maximally many animals.
(ii) Remain vegan, but only because rearing animals is more expensive than growing crops. The money saved can be used for human welfare, or for animal welfare projects independent of meat production.
Read the extended argument
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6 comments:
Please be as harsh as you like in your responses. Also, if you think anything is unclear or infelicitous, please let me know.
As you'll have read, I've focused on consequentialist views on animals. However, I do think that some of my points could be relevant to the discussion of animals in other systems of ethics.
Yours is a very thoughtful, careful, and modest argument. My disagreements are mainly empirical; I think your underlying logic is valid.
Why don't people in dire conditions commit suicide? I think the reasons that you listed may be part of the answer, although you correctly point out that they cannot be the only explanations. To that list, I would add the following:
It's not pleasant for a person to kill himself, especially if he is very poor and lacks access to drugs. The Wikipedia article on suicide gives the following list of suicide methods:
In countries where firearms are readily available, many suicides involve the use of firearms. [...] Asphyxiation methods (including hanging) and toxification (poisoning and overdose) are fairly common as well. [...] Other methods of suicide include blunt force trauma (jumping from a building or bridge, or stepping in front of a train, for example), exsanguination or bloodletting (slitting one's wrist or throat), self-immolation, electrocution, car collision and intentional starvation. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide)
All of these methods are very unpleasant, so that even if it was in a person's long-term utility interest to kill himself, he still might avoid doing so because he acts according to the dictates of his immediate utility.
Even beyond fear of pain, I think there's a built-in tendency for a person to hesitate when he attempts suicide. (Indeed, it would be surprising from an evolutionary standpoint if this weren't the case.) Bill Moyers' "On our Own Terms" series (http://www.pbs.org/wnet/onourownterms/), which discusses death and euthanasia, features one man who suffered greatly from a terminal illness. He wanted to be killed by a physician, but he was not able to make that happen because euthanasia was illegal in his state. Instead, he declared that he would kill himself with pills that he had from taking care of horses. However, he never got around to actually carrying it out, because his inhibition was too great. He eventually died of natural causes.
Finally, people considering suicide may also fear that their attempt to kill themselves will fail. If it does, it may result in serious long-term injury.
In general, I tend to think many people are not rational enough to commit suicide even when doing so would be in their best interest. I think the existence and survival of large numbers of organisms that don't have lives worth living is not implausible from an evolutionary standpoint, since the organisms that go on living even though their lives are terrible would be the ones that survive. The scenario is not unlike that of the "All-Work-and-No-Fun" post-humans that Nick Bostrom describes in his "Future of Human Evolution" (http://www.nickbostrom.com/fut/evolution.html).
There are other ways besides looking at suicides to think about the question of whether animals in factory farms have lives worth living. (I say "factory farms" because I think you may be right that animals in free-range farms do have lives generally worth living.) In his "Least harm: a defense of vegetarianism from Steven Davis’s omnivorous proposal" (http://www.springerlink.com/index/ V0726K81713341M1.pdf), Gaverick Matheny makes the following comparison:
Of course deciding what makes a life worth living is no simple matter, but we can think how we consider whether or not to euthanize a hopelessly sick dog or cat. I suspect the suffering experienced by animals in factory farms is greater than that experienced by many of those sick dogs and cats we choose to euthanize, as factory farmed animals often experience an entire lifetime of suffering compared with a few weeks or months of pain. If, for instance, we knew our dog or cat would have no choice but to be confined in a cage so restrictive turning around or freely stretching limbs is difficult if not impossible, live in his own excrement, be castrated, debeaked, dehorned, or have his teeth, tail, and toes sliced off without anesthesia, I suspect most of us would believe euthanizing the animal would be the humane choice. It would be better, then, if farmed animals who endure these conditions did not exist.
On to a different topic. I disagree empirically with this statement:
Of course, meat farming also damages natural habitats, by using land for farm buildings and by killing off local predators like wolves and foxes. Yet the costs for animals of crop farming seem more severe.
Once again, I quote from Matheny's article. Note that this particular argument applies to free-range animals:
Davis suggests the number of wild animals killed per hectare in crop production (15) is twice that killed in ruminant-pasture (7.5). If this is true, then as long as crop production uses less than half as many hectares as ruminant-pasture to deliver the same amount of food, a vegetarian will kill fewer animals than an omnivore. In fact, crop production uses less than half as many hectares as grass-fed dairy and one-tenth as many hectares as grass-fed beef to deliver the same amount of protein. In one year, 1,000 kilograms of protein can be produced on as few as 1.0 hectares planted with soy and corn, 2.6 hectares used as pasture for grass-fed dairy cows, or 10 hectares used as pasture for grass-fed beef cattle (Vandehaar, 1998; UNFAO, 1996). As such, to obtain the 20 kilograms of protein per year recommended for adults, a vegan-vegetarian would kill 0.3 wild animals annually, a lacto-vegetarian would kill 0.39 wild animals, while a Davis-style omnivore would kill 1.5 wild animals. Thus, correcting Davis’s math, we see that a vegan-vegetarian population would kill the fewest number of wild animals, followed closely by a lacto-vegetarian population.
In a different paper, "Human Diets and Animal Welfare: The Illogic of the Larder" (http://www.ires.ubc.ca/personal/kaichan/ articles/Matheny_and_Chan_2005_JAEE.pdf), Matheny and co-author Kai Chan examine how many wild-animal life-years are created or precluded by eating factory-farmed animals instead of plants:
Even if [factory-farmed animals] did have lives worth living, however, LL [the Logic of the Larder] faces another difficulty before it could justify purchasing meat, eggs, or dairy products. Farm animal production requires large plots of agricultural land. Monogastric farm animals – pigs, turkeys, chickens – require a diet of feedgrains produced on cropland, and most cattle are ‘‘finished’’ on feedgrains in feedlots. Twenty percent of the United States’ land area is cropland, and around half of this area is used to grow animal feed. Another 32% of the United States’ land area is used for grazing cattle (Vesterby and Krupa, 2001).
This use of land has a significant impact on wildlife populations. Agricultural land is biologically simplified compared with many of the land-use types it replaces, and a large fraction of its productivity is appropriated directly or indirectly by humans, greatly limiting that available to other animals. Likewise, the population densities of wild animals on agricultural land are typically lower than those on undisturbed land-use types. [...]
The recommended daily allowance of protein is 0.8 g per kg body weight for most adults. For the average American adult, this amounts to around 20 kg of protein per year.
If one obtained all of this protein from chicken meat, one would need to consume 82.6 chickens per year (CAST, 1999: Table 4.10). Given the 7-week lifespan of most chickens, this amounts to creating 10.8 chicken life-years [...]. To produce the animal feed for these chickens, one would need to use 280 m^2 of cropland (Smil, 2000: Table 5.2). Had this land been left uncultivated, 0.8 additional [...] wild bird or mammal life-years would have existed (Gaston et al., 2003). Subtracting this number from the 10.8 chicken life-years that exist thanks to our consumption of chicken meat [...], the world has 10.0 more animal life-years than it would have, otherwise. Using the same method, we find that obtaining our protein from eggs causes an increase of 11.2 life-years; while obtaining our protein from pork, beef and dairy causes a decrease of 4.2, 13.6, and 1.3 life-years, respectively. [...]
What are the implications of these results for a typical American omnivore? In a year, an American consumes, on average, 5.9 kg protein from beef, 4.4 from pork, 6.4 from poultry meat, 7.7 from milk, and 1.5 from eggs (USDA ERS, 2005; assuming 20% protein content in trimmed, boneless meats, by edible weight). Applying the numbers [above], an American omnivore’s meat, egg, and milk purchases are responsible, for, on average, the net loss of 1.4 animal life-years per year. For a vegetarian to obtain the same protein (25.9 kg) from soybeans requires a net loss of only 0.8 animal life-years per year. Thus, a vegan vegetarian diet may result in fewer animal life-years than a diet of chicken meat and eggs, but more animal life-years than a typical American diet.
As for other, more valuable ways to spend one's money, Matheny and Chan consider that too:
Assuming a cost of $3 per pound of boneless chicken and $1.40 per dozen eggs, chicken meat and eggs cost around $27 and $38 per kg protein (or $54 and $68 per life-year), respectively. In contrast, dry beans and texturized vegetable protein (TVP) cost around $6 and $7 per kg protein, respectively. Eating beans or TVP, rather than chicken meat or eggs, would thus free $20–$32 per kg protein that we could spend to increase moral value. Could this money be spent in such a way to increase moral value by a greater amount than purchases of meat or eggs?
There are many animals smaller than farm animals, who require smaller investments to house and feed. For instance, an adult mouse weighs around 30 g, while a chicken is around 67 times heavier, at 2 kg. Assuming the marginal costs of housing and feeding animals are roughly proportional to their weight, one could tend a colony of 67 mice for the same cost as tending a single chicken – less than a dollar per life-year. Thus, by eating beans rather than chicken, and investing our saved money in raising colonies of mice, we could create on the order of 50 times as many life-years per dollar invested. [...]
The Logic of the Larder’s argument for personal omnivory fails. If one wishes to increase the total population of happy animals in the world, one should likely adopt a (vegan) vegetarian diet and invest savings in colonies of mice, or other projects.
Thanks for your comment!
All of these methods are very unpleasant, so that even if it was in a person's long-term utility interest to kill himself, he still might avoid doing so because he acts according to the dictates of his immediate utility.
This is a good point. One could investigate it by talking to people who have spent their whole lives in dire conditions and have become incapacitated in old age. You could ask them whether they would have been better off killing themselves when young and capable. (Taking into account the self-serving biases people have about the correctness of their major decisions). One could also look at whether there are more suicides among people who frequently experience lots of visceral pain and so are somewhat inured to it (e.g. people in warzones, people with acute medical conditions). If unpleasantness were a serious deterrent, I would expect (at least in some cultures) attempts to make the death more pleasant by enlisting other people to help out. I haven't heard of this ever happening, but I don't know much about the subject.
Finally, people considering suicide may also fear that their attempt to kill themselves will fail. If it does, it may result in serious long-term injury.
But if their lives were bad enough, one would expect them to put in sufficient effort to minimize the risk of the suicide attempt failing. For instance, by enlisting an accomplice, by going to a high enough bridge, by practicing with the gun beforehand. (And again, if this were a major deterrent, then you would expect more suicides among people who know they have a good chance of sustaining long-term injuries even if they don't kill themselves).
In general, I tend to think many people are not rational enough to commit suicide even when doing so would be in their best interest.
Certainly there are cases where people are irrational in not committing suicide. I am less sure of how widespread this irrationality is. Consider the following inchoate argument:
I experience completely unwanted pain in my life from various sources. I get painful injuries from playing sport. I get painful bruises on my head from bumping into my lofted bed frame accidentally. I get back-pain. I get pain from illnesses. I get head-aches from not getting enough sleep. It is easy to imagine an augmented human who experiences none of this pain (and who experiences much less of the emotionally or psychologically negative experiences I suffer). Would such a human look at my life as not being worth living?
This argument (for the sake of simplicity) assumes that utility is thought of in terms of pleasure and pain. You might (as Parfit does in 'Reasons and Persons') say that what matters in terms of utility is that I am able to perform certain objectively good activities (family and friends, aesthetic beauty, intellectual activity) that I actually wish to perform. The poorest people in the world don't experience the objectively good activities that they wish to and that is what makes their lives not worth living.
I think the existence and survival of large numbers of organisms that don't have lives worth living is not implausible from an evolutionary standpoint, since the organisms that go on living even though their lives are terrible would be the ones that survive.
I'll have to think more about this. Human beings are among the few animals that make decisions in part based on expected utility, rather than reinforcement. So expected-utility decision making must have been evolutionarily successful. Yet the sort of expected-utility decision making that you'd think would be an evolutionary advantage (long-term planning of food and shelter) should challenge that survival instinct on the issue of suicide if life is bad.
Regarding the quotes from Matheny et al:
This is exactly the sort of empirical work I was interested in, so I'm very glad to have it pointed out to me. I will have to go through the papers more carefully when I have time. A couple of points:
One might say that mice are too cognitively unsophisticated to be worth breeding in large numbers. If you breed a larger animal instead, then I assume it would be cheap to convert the animals to meat when they die, and then for the meat to be transported to people who live nearby for eating. [Correct me if this assumption is wrong.] So you wouldn't have full vegetarianism. (It might also be sufficiently cheap to convert dead mice into meat).
I don't consider fish and seafood worthy of moral consideration. There are still economic, pragmatic (giving non-utilitarians mixed messages), and environmental reasons not to eat fish. However, it seems likely that in some cases fish and seafood will not be cheaper than vegetables and that harvesting them from the sea will not be environmentally damaging, e.g. if a certain kind of fish lives (in abundance) close to the shore and is very easy to catch. Moreover, if one takes humans to be much more significant than animals in making utility calculations, then the eating of more expensive fish may be justified by its health benefit to humans. I don't know that much about the special health benefits of fish, but they seem at least to be better confirmed than any supposedly special benefits of meat. And, if, for instance, eating fish has even a relatively minor effect on the cognitive functioning and longevity of some influential utilitarians, then they would be justified in eating it.
Here are some further comments. Not all of these are related to the original topic, but I think they're interesting nonetheless.
One might say that mice are too cognitively unsophisticated to be worth breeding in large numbers.
It's not clear to me why cognitive sophistication is relevant to the amount of utility an organism can experience, unless one takes a Mill-like view that mental pleasures are superior to physical pleasures.
I think mice colonies could produce a lot of moral value. For instance, one might raise mice in pleasant environments and then allow them to perform Electrical Brain Stimulation (EBS), perhaps as a method of euthanasia. After enough time, the mice would die from thirst or hunger, but they would enjoy the process:
A consistent finding is that the reinforcing effects of brain stimulation can be far more powerful than those produced by food or water. In one experiment, rats pressed a lever for brain stimulation reinforcement almost without pause for 20 days, averaging 29.2 responses per minute (Valenstein&Beer, 1964) ! When the reinforcing effects of brain stimulation are pitted against those of natural rewards, hungry rats (Routtenberg&Lindy, 1965) as well as humans (Bishop et al., 1963) disregard palatable foods in order to work for brain stimulation reinforcement. (source: http://www.wireheading.com/brainstim/index.html)
I should point out that some have challenged the assumption that EBS produces meaningful pleasure. This article (http://www.apa.org/science/psa/sb-berridge.html) suggests that it may produce "wanting" without "liking"--i.e., it may produce arousal of desire for pleasure, but not pleasure itself.
Regarding this comment,
I don't consider fish and seafood worthy of moral consideration.
I would say that fish do deserve moral consideration, perhaps at a discounted value. It's true that we're less certain that fish can feel pain than we are that, say, dogs can feel pain. However, a number of studies suggest that fish can feel pain, e.g.:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/2983045.stm
http://www.commondreams.org/views06/1008-26.htm
From what I know of this debate, it seems to go back and forth every time a new study comes out. So it would seem prudent to assign a subjective probability of, say, 0.5 to fish sentience. Then we would count fish as having half the moral value that a known sentient organism would have in their place.
Moreover, if one takes humans to be much more significant than animals in making utility calculations, then the eating of more expensive fish may be justified by its health benefit to humans.
I don't understand the rationale for the position that humans deserve more consideration than other animals as a matter of principle. Certainly there may be instrumental reasons for giving more weight to humans (as is shown by your example of utilitarians who derive cognitive benefits from fish). There may also be probabilistic considerations: i.e., fish have a lower probability of feeling pain than other humans do. But beyond this, I'm not sure what the thinking would be
I agree with you on mice: I was just suggested a way that Matheny's arguments might plausibly not lead to veganism. As I remarked, this could happen even if you advocate mice colonies, because it would be (I presume) cheap and therefore optimal to eat the mice you rear.
Fish might feel pain. Oysters and shrimps seem much less likely to do so. I would give fish a lower probability given their physiology. We also eat some very small fish with tiny brain stems. But in any case, a fair amount of fish (e.g. North Atlantic Cod) is not farmed, and so the only harm done to the fish is in the act of catching it (presumably this can be minimized).
It seems fairly far fetched to me to suggest that the conditions of ordinary people anywhere in the world are typically as bad as those of animals in factory farms. Women in Afghanistan under the Taliban came somewhat close, but a noticable fraction of them did commit suicide, often in terribly painful ways. People probably also have biases against suicide. It's not obvious that animals in factory farms have net negative welfare, but that seems to me to be the way to bet.
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