Contra Caplan on Animals

Animals matter and factory farming is bad

Huemer and Caplan had a lengthy written back and forth about the wrongness of factory farming. Huemer thinks factory farming is super wrong, Caplan thinks it’s not wrong at all. As readers of the blog will know, I think Huemer is very clearly right here.

Huemer’s argument is roughly the following.

1. It’s wrong to inflict vast amounts of suffering for trivial reasons.

2. Factory farming inflicts vast amounts of suffering for trivial reasons.

Therefore, factory farming is wrong.

Caplan rejects 1. He thinks that 1 should be replaced with

3. It’s only wrong to inflict vast amounts of suffering for trivial reasons on beings that are pretty smart.

His argument for this is that it explains why we shouldn’t care very much about killing trillions of insects each year. His objection to the idea that we should actually care a lot about killing lots of insects each year is that even people that care about animals don’t take this seriously. The argument is roughly the following.

A) If killing tons of insects is wrong, Michael Huemer, as well as most card-carrying peta members would be morally horrible to animals — they’d cause tons of unnecessary animal suffering.

B) Michael Huemer as well as most card-carrying peta members are not morally horrible to animals.

Therefore, killing tons of insects is wrong.

Here’s Caplan’s graph of the wrongness of inflicting tons of suffering on a being.

I reject a huge portion of Caplan’s arguments.

Even if Caplan is right in rejecting 1, factory farming is still wrong

Let’s begin with Caplan’s rejection of 1. Even if we reject 1, we should still conclude that factory farming is super immoral. Even if inflicting tons of suffering is fine on very dumb creatures, this shouldn’t apply to animals for a few reasons.

First, there are some humans that are dumber than most animals. Take this person named Bree — she is clearly less intelligent than even very unintelligent animals. Thus, if Caplan is right, factory farming Bree would be permissible. If the intelligence threshold allows factory farming animals, it would also allow factory farming Bree. But boiling 500,000 Brees alive each year would clearly be super immoral. Thus, if we should set an intelligence threshold, it should be between Bree and insects — but this would mean factory farming is seriously wrong. This might even permit factory farming small children — after all, small children are roughly as intelligent as non-human animals. One might say that it’s wrong to farm children because they turn into adults later — but then we can just farm terminally ill children. Thus, if Huemer is right, it’s okay to walk into a Saint Jude’s hospital commercial, find every terminally ill child, and then force them into conditions similar to those inflicted on Jews during the holocaust, before eating them. Not only is this wrong, but this is also maybe the most clearly wrong action ever.

Maybe one rejects the studies that say animals are smarter than some human toddlers. No matter — if this is true, all this means is that the wrongness of holocausting terminally ill people in Saint Jude commercials hinges entirely on empirical findings about the IQ of toddlers. This is not at all plausible; if we found out that babies were actually way dumber than we thought, it would not be open season on factory farming them.

Additionally, this would permit pretty much any animal cruelty. Kicking a dog, having sex with a dog, torturing a dog so that chocolate tastes better — all fine by the Caplan standard. Yet all of this is very obviously wrong. This would also permit bestiality presumably.

In fact, Alzheimer’s no doubt lowers one’s intelligence greatly. Thus, if Caplan were right, it wouldn’t be very bad when people in the grip of severe Alzeheimer’s burn to death. Yet this is clearly crazy. Thus, even if Huemer’s argument fails, factory farming is still very, very immoral.

Let’s imagine that one was in a scenario where, each day, their IQ dropped by one point, until it they reached the intelligence of animals. Should this person be indifferent to their suffering 100 days from now, because they’d be very dumb? Of course not!

Caplan’s graph is also very suspicious. Wouldn’t it be a bit too convenient if the wrongness of killing a being started jumping shooting up right after it reaches the point of the beings that we eat. Caplan says

However, it’s also very plausible to me that the gap in intelligence between cows and the average human is so enormous that even a linear value function would yield similar results.  This is trivially true on a conventional IQ test, where all bugs and cows would score zero.  But it seems substantively true for any reasonable intelligence test: Bugs’ and cows’ ability to evaluate or construct even simple logical arguments stems from their deficient intellects, not inability to communicate.  Or at least that seems clear to me.

But babies and some mentally disabled people also score zero on an IQ test. By this standard, it would be okay to factory farm them. Additionally, if it’s linear, then a sufficiently smart alien could torture humans for trivial benefits. This is implausible.

It’s super implausible that the badness of suffering has anything to do with IQ

Let’s imagine that you were about to take a pill that would make you very dumb. Then, you would be set on fire, and it would be exactly as painful. Would this make the pain less bad? It seems not. Yet Caplan thinks that the badness of pain has something to do with the intelligence of the person that experiences the pain. This is odd. If we just reflect on what it’s like to be in pain, it seems utterly bizarre that one’s ability to problem solve, play chess, solve complex puzzles, etc would have anything to do with the badness of the pain. And Caplan has no deeper explanation for this.

Let’s imagine that you took a pill that made you a lot dumber — perhaps even comparable to the intelligence of an infant. Would your suffering matter a lot less then? Is the happiness of high people less valuable because being high detracts from one’s intelligence?

Caplan’s argument for this is that if it’s false then we’re treating insects terribly. Several things.

1. A much better reason to not care about insects is that you think they’re not conscious. Either that or they’re only a bit conscious. This is probably why most people don’t care about insects.

2. If we imagine that insects do feel a ton of pain, then it seems really bad to do what we’re doing as a society — or very good, we’ll come to that in a moment. If a person caused unimaginable suffering for 10,000 people that were roughly as smart as insects each year, they’d be doing something very bad. If we grant that insects feel lots of pain, it just seems way more plausible that we’re treating insects very badly than it is that it’s not wrong to inflict vast amounts of suffering for trivial reasons.

3. I don’t think the argument from conscience is very good. I think it’s plausible that lots of people just aren’t motivated by abstract moral considerations applied to insects. Even if it turned out that insects were very smart, but their brilliant consciousness was epiphenomenal, I think most people would still not care much about insects. However, this wouldn’t comprise a counterexample to the notion that it’s wrong to inflict vast amounts of unnecessary suffering on smart beings.

4. I think that there are lots of debunking arguments for the notion that our treatment of insects is just. One of them is that insects look weird and die all the time — given status quo and just world biases, it’s hard to imagine that insect suffering is incomparably horrible. Another is that insect death is inevitable if one wants to survive. Society would never adopt a moral standard that requires one to kill themself. Thus, to avoid the conclusion that existence causes untold horror, we just act as though insects don’t matter.

5. Insects mostly live crappy lives. Thus, I think if you think that insects matter, it’s probably good to kill them. This makes there be fewer of them. At least, I think the response to the conclusion that insects matter a lot is really unclear. A moral revolution can’t be centered on incredibly unclear demands.

6. The track record of “most people, even scrupulous people don’t think X is bad, therefore it probably isn’t” isn’t very good. Very few people — even pro-immigration people — think that immigration restrictions are an unimaginable atrocity, but Caplan thinks they are. Very few people thought slavery was very wrong for much of human history. When confronted with an obvious moral principle, the fact that those espousing it are often hypocrites, shouldn’t dissuade one from believing it.

7. People throughout history who have had expansive moral circles in some regards haven’t always had them in all regards. If a person made the Huemer argument that “it’s bad to inflict tons of suffering for trivial reasons” as an objection to slavery, it wouldn’t have been a good response to note that those people also ate meat. Most people throughout history that have had correct ideas about some really atrocious things have been wrong about other really atrocious things. Thus, we should expect that those that are progressive on farms will still often be wrong about other things.

I think the argument from conscience is a bad argument. Lots of people are hypocrites; very few people do what is logically required by the moral principles they accept. I also think that, even if this is a bit of evidence, it’s swamped by the fact that it’s just obviously super wrong to inflict tons of unnecessary suffering for trivial reasons.

Presumably Caplan — as a pro-natalist — thinks that if one could create tons of worlds full of super happy people, that would be very good. Imagine if it turned out that it was super easy to make awesome worlds full of happy people. Even if most pro-natalists didn’t do it, this would give little reason to doubt pro-natalism.

Thus, I basically agree with Huemer. Caplan’s argument relies on way too many controversial premises to be useful. It requires we accept.

1. The way we treat bugs isn’t super wrong. There is little reason to accept this.

2. The badness of suffering relates to intelligence.

3. It does so non-linearly.

4. The threshold for where a beings intelligence matters a lot is somewhere between average humans and pigs. This is especially implausible because it sanctions causing tons of unnecessary suffering to lots of actually existing dumb humans.

One last point — suppose we think there’s a 50% chance Caplan is right. Well, given the sheer volume of animal suffering, eating meat will be wrong in expectation. If there’s an action that has a 50% chance of being uninagimably awful and a 50% chance of being a bit fun, you shouldn’t do it!