Against Eating Happy Animals

Veganism is a better idea than conscious omnivory even if you're a utilitarian

Introduction

The case against eating meat from the ghastly torture chambers known as factory farms is quite overwhelming. Factory farming is, indisputably, the worst crime in human history. When defending their consumption of meat, people very often focus on the minuscule portion of meat that does not come from factory farms, as if this exonerates their current meat practices, even if they eat from factory farms. This is, of course, a distraction—like defending one’s practice of forcing their kids to live in tiny cages with rotting corpses, wire mesh that cuts into their skin, the suffocating scent of feces and ammonia, and horrifying mutilation based on the fact that there is such thing as ethical parenting. However, whether it’s okay to eat animals with good lives is an important question to address, for it bares on a small number of cases.

Unfortunately for those of you who were looking forward to eating a steak any time soon, my answer is no—in the modern world, eating so-called humanely raised meat is not permissible. While it’s nowhere near as wrong as factory farming, it still should not be done.

Let me start by explaining the basic logic behind eating happy animals. When one eats happy animals, they are sending a price signal. This results in more happy animals being brought into existence and then slaughtered. If animals are being brought into existence and then slaughtered, this is fortunate—even if them being slaughtered is unfortunate, it’s a good thing that they were able to live a good life in the first place. If there was an industry that brought me into existence, allowed me to live a few good years, and then killed me, this would be a good thing—I’d be better off, after all.

1 Moral uncertainty

I’m just about the most vehement utilitarian that I know. But even I am not that certain of utilitarianism. I’d give around 20% odds to some type of deontology being the correct morality. Now, conditional on deontology, I’d give about 60% odds to animals having rights. This means that I’d give about 12% odds to animals having rights. But if animals have rights, eating them is severely wrong.

Rights are side constraints, denoting things that one can’t do even if they bring about utility. You don’t get to kill one to save two—and you certainly don’t get to pay for someone to kill someone else because you think they’ll bring more future beings into existence. Now, I don’t think this view is right, but it’s not obviously crazy. Thus, there’s about a 12% probability that eating meat is seriously wrong, even when it’s humane.

The basic intuition behind this is the following: suppose you had an industry that bred humans into existence. Most people think it wouldn’t be okay to eat them, even if they had good lives. But there doesn’t seem to be any explanation of why it’s okay to eat humane animals but not humane humans. It can’t be because of their species, because then if we found out that some type of human was technically a different species, it would be open season on humanely farming them. It can’t be because of their intelligence, because this would justify farming severely mentally disabled humans for meat. So what is it?

Now, I’m prepared to bite the bullet on humanely farming humans (sort of—I give my position in more detail here). But there’s at least some decent probability that my wild position is wrong, and thus it would be wrong to eat meat. Generally, one should not risk a 12% chance of doing something severely morally wrong for the sake of small benefits.

2 It’s really hard to know that the stuff that you’re eating is actually humane and even if it is, there are good consequentialist reasons not to eat it

It’s very difficult to know that you’re actually eating animals that live good lives. Many supposedly humane farms engage in routine mistreatment like physical abuse, beating animals to death against the pavement, and more. Undercover reports routinely uncover horrifying abuses of animals. And this is to be expected—animals are seen as products, and most of what the industries do goes on in secret.

Nice-sounding labels often mask dark realities. Certified Humane Eggs come from animals who go so insane that they need to be debeaked, who are crammed into small barns without enough space to turn around, leading to prolonged stress. Cage-free chicks are crammed in dark sheds by the tens of thousands and routinely mutilated. There are no standards for free-range chickens at the federal level, so supposedly free-range animals may never be able to go outside.

Even if animals aren’t specifically abused, they’ve been genetically engineered to be egg-producing machines, for example, or in other ways more efficient at producing the animal product that humans consume. Thus, many of them are not able to live good lives, even if they are not mistreated. Paying for animals to be brought into existence, even on supposedly humane farms, may be like paying people to have babies when they’ll have horrifying deformities, leaving to their being unable to breathe properly or enjoy life.

Even if you think you’ll be able to figure out if your meat is genuinely humane, other people can’t be trusted to do it. I’ve convinced several people to be vegan—and it would be more difficult to do that if I’d done that without being vegan. Thus, ideally, you should adopt the diet you want others to adopt. But the diet that I want others to adopt is a vegan diet—there’s a high probability that they’ll accidentally eat inhumane meat if they are eating meat. Sebo and John confirm this, finding

A 2015 study revealed that “conscientious omnivores” were less likely than vegetarians to perceive their diet as something that they needed to follow. They reported violating their diet more, feeling less guilty when doing so, feeling less disgusted by factory-farmed meat, and believing less in animal rights, among other findings. Moreover, diet had a statistically significant effect on all measures independent of whether the diet was motivated by health or ethical reasons. Whether one is a vegetarian or a conscientious omnivore appears to change one’s psychological relationship to meat and to meat-eating, with implications for how consistently one applies one’s policy. Note also that these self-reports are unlikely to capture cases in which individuals see themselves as complying with their policy when they are in fact violating it, or cases in which individuals see themselves as violating their policy but would rather not admit that.

Sebo and John press the point pretty well. The reason utilitarians shouldn’t eat meat—even humane meat—is for pretty much the same reason that utilitarians shouldn’t kill people, even if they think that it will somehow work out to have good outcomes. Following simple decision procedures produces better outcomes, especially if you want to convince others to follow them.

This is especially so because people have self-interested biases. If there aren’t clear rules, they’ll be likely to eat meat in ambiguous cases—cases when eating meat is morally unacceptable but they’d like to.

And it’s not just about what others will do—you’ll be likely to care less about animals and fight less for their interests if you see them more as food. This will probably result in less donations and a greater probability of reverting to eating factory-farmed meat. Sebo and John note

Recent psychological research on the so-called meat paradox empirically confirms these claims. For example, in a series of five studies, Brock Bastian and colleagues have demonstrated a link between seeing animals as food, on one hand, and seeing animals as having diminished mental lives and moral value, on the other hand. We will here describe three.

This is not surprising. It’s hard to maintain a deep commitment to the interests of some entity when you see it as little more than a sandwich. Given that the benefits of donating, on consequentialist grounds, swamp the benefits of abstaining from meat directly, decreasing the amount that one cares about animals has huge consequentialist costs.

3 The social effects of supposedly humane farming result in more of it

Our central contention is that, because animal agriculture is necessarily a system of institutionalized violence against nonhuman animals, the existence of any such system will tend to socially perpetuate a speciesist ideological orientation toward nonhuman animals, diminishing the moral status that society predicates to them. This will, in turn, lead to both systematic violations of compliance with the standards of farming which LARDER requires and to other harmful actions regarding nonhuman animals and other sentient beings

—Sebo and John

When animals are seen by society as food products, mistreatment of animals is legitimized. Among other things, this shows people that the way we treat animals is tolerable—that they can be treated as mere food products. This makes us more likely to, for example, neglect the impacts of our actions on wild animals. This is especially significant because it serves as a mechanism by which farming shrinks our moral circle, making it so that we’re likely to mistreat animals in the future millions or billions of years. Moral circle expansion has been the most important force in driving moral progress in history, and thus anything that potentially inhibits it threatens to be a disaster of unimaginable proportions.

Tolerating humane farming makes it more likely that the far future will have supposedly humane farming. But given incentives to cut corners and mistreat animals, if the future has supposedly humane farming, it’s still very unlikely that it would actually be humane, as Sebo and John note.

The points raised in this section combine with the points raised in the previous section. Most people, unable to understand the finer points of consequentialist moral philosophy, will have their care for animals diminished. A world where lots of people eat animals is one that is more likely to maintain the systematic abuse and repression of animals that is rampant. Even consequentialists will probably care less about animals on account of eating them.

Additionally, even aside from the impacts on animals, veganism is better for health. If one is a sophisticated consequentialist who is really carefully considering the second-order impacts of their actions on animals, then it’s probably good if they live longer. If veganism makes people live longer, then that’s another advantage to it. And there are also various other positive impacts of a vegan diet—it reduces environmental harm and antibiotic resistance, to give a few examples. Animals that have good lives are often worse for the environment, not better.

The situation with regard to animals is like the situation with regard to humans, on utilitarian grounds. There might be rare cases where someone really is negative from the standpoint of utility, but the best decision procedure to adopt would involve not killing, except in self-defense. Most of the people who think that they have a good reason to kill are wrong, and if you do something routinely, its effects will rub off on others.

In a vacuum, it may not be bad when people order humane meat. But the decision-procedure that we should actually follow would prohibit ordering humane meat. Fortunately, for steak lovers, lab-grown meat may soon be on the market and able to replace factory farming.