Contra Block on Animals: Part 2

Block's errors

See part 1 here.

He now addresses the objection that “animals eat each other, so why can’t we eat them?” He continues [33, p. 37]:

“V: Okay, chickens eat other species, so it’s okay to kill chickens. But people also eat other species, so . . . it’s okay to kill people?”

But chickens12 kill and eat members of their own species. They will peck each other to death if not prevented from doing so by farmers. In contrast, human cannibalism is all but limited to cave spelunkers and marooned sailors who would all otherwise perish. Often, this is done on a voluntary basis, by drawing lots. This is quite a bit different than what occurs in the animal kingdom

So? Huemer was just saying that the fact that some species does something to others doesn’t mean it’s permissible to do those things to that species. Additionally, chickens do lots of things that we shouldn’t do — chickens have sex with other chickens which we shouldn’t, and they don’t get jobs, and they don’t have any significant moral compass, and they would plausibly eat a human if it was fed to them ground up — this doesn’t mean we should. Additionally, as Huemer notes

Block cites the fact that chickens sometimes kill and even eat other chickens. He proudly contrasts humans, who very rarely eat members of our own species [1, p. 59]. I am not sure what point Block is trying to make. Is he arguing that because chickens sometimes eat other chickens, it is morally permissible for us to torture and kill chickens in order to experience the pleasure of eating their flesh? The logic of this inference escapes me. Perhaps the idea is that chickens are so vicious that they deserve to suffer and die? Human beings, however, have been killing each other, torturing, raping, robbing, and so on, for all of human history. If anything, humans seem far worse than most animals. By Block’s logic, then, raising humans in factory farms would be fine.

Next, Block says

The weakest part of this argument of his is this [33, p. 37]: “You don’t blame … a hurricane for destroying a city, or a lion for killing a gazelle. Because none of them are capable of regulating their behavior morally.” No, of course we do not “blame” the hurricane or the lion, but we do not grant them, rights, either.13 With rights come responsibilities. Hurricanes and lions lack the latter and thus do not deserve the former. We are justified in stopping all the storms we can. Cloud seeding does not violate rights. Ditto for initiating violence against wild and – also -- domesticated animals. They cannot petition for rights, nor do they respect the rights of others. In very sharp contrast indeed, (most) humans can be relied upon to do exactly that.

But Huemer doesn’t say we should give animals rights. He just says it’s wrong to inflict tons of suffering on them for trivial benefits. We don’t blame a lion or hurricane and we don’t give them rights — but we also don’t blame a baby or mentally enfeebled human, and we do give them rights, at least in a legal sense.

This response of Huemer’s is problematic [33, p. 38]:

“M: Okay, lions can’t restrain themselves. But do you think we should stop lions from killing gazelles?

V: If you can figure out a way of doing that without killing all the lions and disrupting the ecology, then we should consider it.”

“Consider it?” Why, merely, “consider it?” Why not, actually, do it? After all, our author is on record for opposing animal suffering. He nowhere specifically limits this to barnyard animals, although, to be sure, he waxes eloquent, and very properly so, about their suffering. But, gazelles undoubtedly suffer from the depredations of these monstrous felines.14 Farmers, presumably, kill their property far more humanely than this occurs in the wild.15

I’d agree with this — we should definitely do it if we can reduce animal suffering.

Huemer explicitly announces that rights play no role whatsoever in his analysis [33, p. 38]:

“V: My case for vegetarianism didn’t rely on any claims about ‘rights.’ Remember that it was all compatible with utilitarianism. I’m only assuming that you shouldn’t inflict enormous pain and suffering for minor reasons.”

This is more than passing curious for a distinguished contributor to libertarianism. Rights16 are practically the be-all and end-all of this philosophy. To purposefully eschew them is to take the analysis out of this realm.

Let’s imagine Huemer made the following argument — it’s immoral to have an affair, be mean to your children, desert your spouse, or bully other people. The reason for this is that they cause lots of suffering for comparatively minor benefits. Even if this is not a specifically libertarian argument, it’s still a good argument. If libertarianism is to be only a political philosophy then it can’t used as a moral catch all; it will have nothing to say about anything that has nothing to do with using force or fraud.

As for “enormous” and “minor” these are subjective concepts. They exist in the eyes of the beholders. To base a position on them is to build a house on quicksand.

These are vague concepts and somewhat context-relative, but they’re not totally subjective. It is accurate to say that the pleasure you get from eating a sandwich is minor and the pain of being confined for a month in torturous conditions. But we can make this more precise — it is wrong to do something that inflicts more than a dozen times the suffering on others as the well-being it produces for oneself. Even if there’s some vagueness about what exactly is meant by enormous and some edge cases, clearly viciously torturing a sentient being for a sandwich will be a trivial benefit and enormous suffering. This is as clear as the claim that the Milky way galaxy is enormous and atoms are tiny.

I have a verbal dispute with this author when he writes [33, p. 39]:

“V: … Say you have an adult human who can’t understand morality. Like a mentally disabled person. Can we torture them?”

Of course he realizes full well that singular and plural should match. He was taught this in middle school, if not sooner, like all the rest of us.

This sentence should have read, instead, in any of these ways:

1. “Like a mentally disabled person. Can we torture him?”

2. “Like mentally disabled persons. Can we torture them?”

3. “Like a mentally disabled person. Can we torture him or her?”

4. “Like a mentally disabled person. Can we torture her?”

Why the error in the text which I cannot regard other than purposeful? I speculate that he has gone over to the dark side in terms of obeisance to political correctness. Academics have been inflicted with this virus, and, Huemer, unfortunately, seems to have been infected by it.

Option 1 must be rejected because this bespeaks bias against women, even though “men” includes people of both genders. Option 2 would appear to be compatible with the dictates of PC, but, in refusing to ruin the language concerning singular and plural, points might be taken away from our author. Option 3 is fair game in left wing university writing, but is awkward. Option 4, nowadays, is the preferred alternative, except, that in this case, it would be read as demeaning to females.17 Not a pretty picture.

They now means a person of unspecified gender or a non-binary person. Grammar rules change sometimes. In fact, Block shows why this is a good rule — any of the other three are awkward, and become especially so if there are multiple people, some of whom are of unspecified gender, others of whom are of a particular gender. For example, suppose that several people are coming over, one of whom is male, the other of whom is of unknown gender. If you say “he’s here” for the male person and “they’re here” for the person of unspecified gender, that’s clearer.

The Colorado University Professor ventures into the thickets of economics with this statement [33, p. 44]: Insider trading is a crime wherein individuals buy and sell stocks based on ‘inside information’ not available to the public. For instance, a company executive might buy stock in a company because he knows that his own company is planning to merge with the other company, which will drive up the price. This is prohibited in the US, UK, European Union, and many other countries. Unhappily, he cites no source on this. He accepts the traditional view of this matter without demur. From the libertarian point of view, however, one which we might expect Huemer to take, this can be a voluntary contractual arrangement, and therefore should be legal.18

Huemer was giving this as a random example of something that’s immoral but not condemned by the bible. He described it as immoral — he didn’t say it should be illegal. Also, the point still stands with other examples; the bible says nothing about spreading misinformation or hacking computers to steal money.

If I had to summarize this book in three words it would be: “stop the suffering.” I acknowledge that I, too, support this plea. Who but a malevolent, malicious person, a sadist, would actually support anguish, whether for humans or non-humans. There is altogether too much misery in the world, and any lessening of it has to be counted on the asset side of the ledger. However, the reduction of wretchedness cannot be the basic premise of any coherent philosophy.

It can be one premise. Any plausible moral view will say that we should try to get rid of something that causes more suffering every few years than all humans ever have.

For, surely, some grief is justified. For example, criminals are properly punished and undoubtedly grieve thereby. If the desiderata were to eliminate, or radically reduce, agony, we would in the first instance release all murderers and rapists, kidnappers, thieves, from prison. But that would undoubtedly increase the desolation of their victims, one, who wanted revenge against these perpetrators, and two, who would be fearful of being molested yet again. Even if we could discern which inmates, although guilty of past misdeeds, would never again commit a crime, and free only them, still, this would be problematic in that these criminals deserve punishment.

But none of these reply to factory farming. Maybe there are some cases where it’s good to inflict agony intrinsically for desert reasons — but that doesn’t apply to factory farms; it certainly doesn’t apply to the degree of suffering inflicted by factory farms that would appall us if applied to any human, even a child murderer.

Suppose we could somehow overcome the interpersonal comparison of utility (ICU) problem; that is, we had a “sufferometer.” That would mean, for example, if a rape victim suffered less from being victimized in this way than the perpetrator suffered from not being allowed to rape her, we would compel not just the one or the other, but both of them, to engage in sexual intercourse. Perhaps, we could get the government to subsidize rape and tax non rapists. This is a powerful reductio ad absurdum of a philosophy limited to stopping suffering. In contrast, there is libertarianism, which focuses, instead, on rights. It is certainly more just, and will, I contend, lead to less suffering than a philosophy which explicitly made its avoidance its centerpiece.

In this article, I’m defending only Huemer’s book, so I won’t defend utilitarianism from this objection. But even if you think that utilitarianism is bad because it sanctions rape, this won’t be an objection to Huemer’s view. Huemer is not a utilitarian. You can think

A) People have the right not to be raped.

B) It’s wrong to cause vast amounts of suffering for trivial benefits.

Huemer veers perilously close to engaging in an ad hominem argument when he avers [33, p. 69]:

V: …the issue turns on a moral intuition about the badness of animal suffering. This intuition is held by many people who appear to be in general reasonable, smart, and morally sensitive.

M: I guess that’s fair to say.

V: In fact, many of them consider the intuition extremely obvious. The great majority of the literature in ethics on the topic also agrees that meateating in our society is generally wrong. Many of these experts consider the case decisive.

This is absurd. Suppose that you have an intuition but most smart people have the opposite intuition. Well, this is a good reason to revise yours — if it’s not supported by further argument, and lots of smart people have intuitions that are opposite, that should undermine your confidence in the intuition. This isn’t ad hominem; it’s merely pointing out that intuitions aren’t infallible, so if lots of people disagree, maybe we should revise our intuition. It also appeals to higher-order evidence — if most experts think X, that gives some reason to think X. It shows that X is supported by compelling arguments. I trust most experts on physics, even though I don’t understand how the hell we proved that neutrinos exist.

Just because a group of self-styled “experts reach a consensus does not mean they are correct. There are many professors of humanities who argue in favor of minimum wage laws, rent control, tariffs, licenses which restrict entry to various professions, typically on the ground that these initiatives will reduce human suffering. They err, here, and they err mightily.19

Even if we grant that many humanities professors are wrong about this, are humanities professors really experts in minimum wage laws, rent control, and tariffs? Also, just because some experts are wrong doesn’t mean they usually are.

Huemer mentions, only to reject, the contention that [33, p. 73] “… maybe the chair you’re sitting on is in great agony. No way to prove it isn’t. But we have no reason to think so, and we have to sit somewhere.” But based upon his own calculations, there is indeed a teeny, tiny, chance that chairs suffer when we deposit ourselves upon them. How would we like it if a chair sat on us? Not too well. In any case, there are an awful lot of chairs out there. If there is even a small chance that they feel grievously dealt with, perhaps we should reconsider our cavalier treatment of them. Yes, we have to sit somewhere, and stand too, despite possible protests from the floor, and we should give a thought to abusing our beds, too, by lying on them.

It is wrong to take actions that in expectation cause vast amounts of suffering for trivial benefits. That applies to eating meat, not to chairs.

Our author continues in this vein [33, p. 74]: “V: … It is virtually certain that animals feel pain. That’s clearly over 99% probable. But it is also virtually certain that plants don’t. Since plants have no nervous systems, the probability that they feel pain is very much lower than 1%.” But there are many more plants, trees, blades of grass, etc., than there are animals.20 Can we really be so blasé about this tiny possibility? When this is taken into account, the case for veganism, molesting innocent flora, weakens considerably.

But animals eat plants, so it requires more plants to feed to animals. Also, the odds that plants feel pain are very low — and plants aren’t factory farmed in the same way.

Moreover these sorts of “calculations” are highly problematic. One can apply them to virtually anything, and deduce whatever is desired. A more basic point is that even if we stipulate that animals can suffer, and that we lose little satisfaction by refraining from annihilating them, it still does not follow that we should not do so. That is a matter of rights, about which Huemer is exceedingly skeptical.

Even if animals have no right not to be eaten, that doesn’t mean it’s wrong not to eat them. Children may have no right not to be insulted, but it would be morally wrong to be excessively verbally nasty to your five year old child.

I’ll quote Huemer’s response about expected value calculations.

It is not clear what to make of this contention. Is Block saying that because it is possible to devise an incorrect expected utility calculation to support any course of action, we should never consider expected utility? This hardly seems cogent. Perhaps Block thinks that there is a correct expected utility calculation supporting any course of action. But this thesis is contradictory, for it implies that both doing A and refraining from doing A maximize expected utility, for every A. Moreover, the thesis is false on its face. To make the argument that, e.g., sitting on chairs is wrong, one would need to do two things: (a) One would have to show that sitting on chairs was more likely to cause pain than to relieve pain, and that sitting was more likely to cause pain than refraining from sitting. One cannot show this sort of thing when one has simply made up an arbitrary hypothesis; there will always be an opposite arbitrary hypothesis to cancel it out. (b) One would have to argue that the expected harm to the chair outweighs the expected benefit we get from sitting on a chair. Block gives no indication of how someone would show that – which is not surprising since of course that is false. In a footnote, Block invites the reader to make the probabilities (e.g., the probability that sitting on chairs causes pain) as low as one likes [1, p. 67n8]. It thus appears that Block thinks that the expected utility calculation would favor not sitting on chairs, no matter how low the probability is. This is not how expected utility calculations work; they are not insensitive to probabilities. Perhaps Block’s point is that my expected utility reasoning is analogous to his proposed expected utility arguments, namely, the arguments that would show (i) that I should give up veganism, and (ii) that we should avoid sitting on chairs. If that is Block’s point, I fail to see how his arguments are similar to mine, other than that both mention expected utility. I did not rely on any arbitrary hypotheses, nor any hypotheses with absurdly low probabilities, as Block’s examples do. It is in fact overwhelmingly probable that farm animals experience pain and suffering, whereas it is incredibly improbable that chairs do. If one thinks that this isn’t a relevant difference, then one does not understand expected utility.

Next, Block says

What about the possible suffering of insects? We read on this as follows [33, p. 75]: “V: … the costs of giving up killing insects are much higher than the costs of giving up meat-eating… Virtually all of modern life kills insects. You can’t drive a car without killing some; you can barely walk without killing them.”

But why should costs, of all things, be taken into account? If it is wrong to promote suffering, and there are very many more insects than humans … Yes, to use a Huemerian calculus, the probability of members of these species feeling pain, or suffering, is exceedingly small

Because Huemer’s principle is that it’s wrong to cause vast amounts of suffering for trivial gains. This clearly doesn’t apply to insects if it’s not a trivial gain to be able to go outside sometimes or drive a car.

But, still, there is a very small probability that they do feel pain, in their own unique ways. If we weight each person and each insect equally, and there are so many, many more of the latter, even a small probability might indicate we should take this into account. No more chocolate covered ants for the likes of us!

Again, this is not for trivial benefits. So no counterexample here.

Huemer is profoundly skeptical about rights [33, pp. 79-80]:

M: … do you buy humane certified meat?

V: I don’t buy it because I don’t know if it is ethical. I figure that if I don’t know, I shouldn’t do it.

M: Why don’t you know?

V: Well, I’d have to figure out whether it’s permissible to kill animals humanely for food. For that, I’d have to figure out whether they have a right to life. And for that, I guess I’d have to first figure out what’s the basis for the right to life in general.

M: Isn’t that what we have moral philosophers for?

V: Yeah, but the moral philosophers don’t agree.

M: Professor Tooley told me that the right to life is based on one’s conception of oneself as a subject of experience continuing through time.

V: That’s one theory. Another view is that the right to life rests on one’s being the subject of a life that matters to oneself. Or perhaps it rests on one’s having the potential for a human-like future. Or perhaps there aren’t any such things as rights in the first place.

M: Why don’t we just figure out which theory is true?

V: Easier said than done. The leading experts can’t agree, so it seems unlikely that we can settle it here. If we start on that, we’ll just argue about that forever.

This clearly removes him from the ranks of libertarians, at least on this one issue, since that philosophy involves practically nothing apart from rights. It is also disquieting that this author, one of the world’s leading advocates of veganism on ethical principles, does not know if free range farm animals, humane certified meat, is licit or not. Libertarians often disagree with one another, but at least the leaders of this philosophy take strongly held positions.

There are edge cases about humanely raised animals. But Huemer’s claim is that there’s something very obviously morally wrong that most people do several times a day — to argue against this, you don’t have to take a strong stance on all the edge cases. If most people viciously beat their children every day, you wouldn’t have to take a stance on whether spanking is sometimes okay — you could simply argue that the current practices which kill 20% of children in horrible ways are bad. As I’ve argued previously, if libertarianism is just about rights, it can’t explain all of ethics.

Huemer also diverges from the freedom philosophy when he states [33, p. 83]:

V: … what B did was to smash A’s car with a sledgehammer, just for fun, causing $2000 worth of damage. Several witnesses saw it. 63

M: Sounds like an easy case. A gets $2000.

V: Not so fast! There are a few philosophers in the jury room: a metaphysician, a political theorist, an epistemologist, and an ethicist. The metaphysician argues that B isn’t responsible for his action, because there’s no such thing as free will.

M: I guess that could make sense . . .

V: The political theorist says that B’s action wasn’t wrong because property rights are illegitimate. The epistemologist says that we can’t accept the eyewitnesses’ testimony until we first prove that the senses are reliable. Finally, the ethicist says that there are no moral facts, so B can’t have done anything wrong.

M: I guess this is why they don’t usually allow philosophers on the jury.

V: (laughs) No doubt. So how would you vote?

M: If I agreed with one of those philosophers, I’d have to support the defendant.

V: Right. But how would you actually vote? Would you say B did nothing wrong?

M: No. Personally, I’d still vote to award $2000 to A.\

Even though uttered by M, not V, his usual voice, our author accepts the latter without demur. But if the punishment from the crime is merely that you have to pay damages commensurate with the costs you have imposed, or, merely return what you have stolen to extrapolate from this “punishment,” then criminal behavior will skyrocket. Suppose you steal $2000 and there is a 50% chance you will be caught, and the only penalty is that you must return this amount of money to your victim. Then the statistically expected value of your theft, to you, will be $1000. Unless the alternative costs of your time are greater than that amount, then, barring ethical considerations about private property rights, you will enter the “profession” of stealing. It is also more than a tad unjust to impose such a slight punishment for theft or imposing damages on others.21

This is… very clearly not the point. Huemer was just giving this as an example of a crime and restitution — he wasn’t saying it was a perfectly just punishment. This is like objecting to a thought experiment where someone supposes houses cost 1 dollar by pointing out that they do not, in fact, cost 1 dollar.

Let me conclude. I admire Huemer. Greatly so. I join him in opposing suffering, whether for man or beast. The world has far too much misery. Any reduction is to be fervently welcomed. But I cannot think that he has made a successful case for veganism. If he had his ‘druthers, I infer he would imprison meat eaters and factory farmers. I cannot think this would be just.

Maybe he would, maybe he wouldn’t. I certainly would. But one can hold

A) Meat eaters shouldn’t be imprisoned.

B) Eating meat is wrong.

This is true of being mean to kind old ladies, making fun of rape victims, cheating on one’s spouse, being rude, intentionally making gross tasting food when company is coming over that expects tasty food, breaking a promise to a friend, yelling racial slurs at people, and more. Block’s arguments against Huemer’s case are quite weak. He confuses Huemer’s project for a political one — before ignoring all of Huemer’s ethical arguments for eating meat. He makes a dizzying array of errors. Here, I think I have systematically refuted each one of his points. I’d look forward to a response from Block.