Doing something here that I hate, when others do it; liking and commenting on something I haven't read. And to say that I'm continuing to rein in on my consumption of tortured flesh.
"Here’s a question that shouldn’t be difficult for anyone with a moral compass: should babies be ground to death in blenders? Should they be suffocated in bags? If your answer is no—as no doubt it should be—you should oppose this horrific practice done to billions of baby chicks."
So I guess this is the bullet I bite as a meat eater. I think a bit of introspection shows that torturing infants just isn't as terrible as it seems at first glance. When I was an infant, I was circumcised without anesthesia, and I spent a few days being prodded with needles and connected to all kinds of tubes in the ICU for a bad infection. Though neither episode was technically torture, I'm sure both were quite painful and uncomfortable. I have no memory of either. There may have been an infant wailing and screaming and reacting to pain in those situations, but there wasn't anything important within that was experiencing a bad time. I kind of wish my parents had pierced my ears as an infant or toddler because I'm way too much of a wuss to get it done today as an adult!
If the devil came to me and offered me a sandwich and some pop, with the price being that they would reduce me to an infant, body and mind, send me to a pocket dimension to be tortured for a thousand years while being kept in that infant state, and finally heal me of the damage inflicted and restore me to my adult form in the present, I would take that deal. I would take that deal because it is clear that being temporarily reduced to an infant is functionally equivalent to being temporarily anesthetized. If the devil threw in some fries, I'd go another millennium as a chicken, pig, cow, or other factory farmed animal instead of an infant.
It depends what you think morality is for. If you think morality is for maximizing the hedon count of the universe, you will give a different answer than if you think morality is for coordinating the game theory of repeatedly interacting intelligent beings, or simply put, people.
I think people are terrible at coordinating their mutual interest and an increase in the moral circle of concern to non-reciprocators imposes an additional cost that makes it even harder. It's hard enough to formulate and enforce moral norms that allow us to not backstab each other, defraud each other, attack each other, murder each other, steal from each other, etc. etc., without adding the additional constraint that we must place moral weight on chickens and far-future people and utility monsters also. It's asking a system under stress to devote its limited resources to optimization functions other than making the system function.
"But the hedon count is really important! Many chickens and many far future people!" is not an argument to convince those who have carefully examined their motivations and decided not to care about the hedons of chickens, far future people, utility monsters or hedonium.
There are six distinct arguments identified here. I think they beg the question — they assume we should care about animals. They’re effective because we have evolved to have sympathy for babies, and unless we’re socialized to regard killing animals as normal, our affection includes things that merely remind us of babies.
Argument one is simply stating that you think something is bad, so therefore it is bad. It is intuitively immoral to you — so too is homosexuality to many people.
Argument two: I think it odd that people object to those practices in and of itself. The worst that can be said of it is that it indicates certain deviant preferences, which may presage the harm of humans.
Argument three: there is no trait, per se — it must merely be beneficial to us. Fighting otherwise identical aliens would be quite unlikely to help us, so we oughtn’t do it.
Argument four: and yet, we are not chickens. We know who we are, (we do not, I think, believe in reincarnation), and we have no need to pretend we may be something we aren’t.
Argument five is begging the question that we should care about animals.
The sixth argument is the best of them all. If we assume that one is responsible for both costs and benefits alike of their decisions though, the best that can be said for it is that we should individually choose to eat less meat. If you want government intervention against meat farming, climate change is a far better case for that.
While I agree with the premise that factory farms are immoral, your and my morality is really secondary to the situation at hand. Top-down moralists don't really have a great track record over the long-term in human history tbh.
I think we're better off pivoting from a morality play to a functionalist play. People are generally functionalist, and even use their individual moralistic framework as a way to improve their functionality.
Functionally, there are pros and cons to factory farming:
Pros: Far less expensive foodstuffs to feed an ever-increasing population of human beings. Being that we're on top of the food chain, this makes functional sense, and it's hard to argue that any other being that were on top would do much different from a nature perspective. To wit, just watch any nature show: animals who eat other animals rarely think about the pain and suffering of their prey. Further, there's a moral case to be made that not allowing humans to starve to death is a superior moral framework to balancing your child's life with that of a farm animal or sea creature (or even a million of them). Name me one mother of an infant who wouldn't do anything to keep their child alive, including killing a chicken herself by any means necessary, no matter how painful it might be for said chicken.
Cons: By abusing our power of being atop the food chain by maximizing production at any expense leads to the common and typical unintended consequences of any overreach of resources: the backlash. For a century, there was precious little regard to using fossil fuels to bring affordable energy to the masses. We did this with reckless abandon. And now the proverbial hens are coming home to roost. There is "no free lunch" in the functionalist world. Everything has a price, especially the abuse of power. Using power wisely may be one one of the most wisest wise things wise people have ever imparted.
I think we need to straddle both of these facts to convert people to this cause: We need to acknowledge the obvious benefits of the factory farming system, and why it's become what it's become. And we must also, in the same breath, warn that the very same reasons why the current system is transparently compelling for humans, it comes with an equal-and-opposite cost that we have all paid for, and will continue to increasingly pay for over time -- just like climate change.
We need to accept the functionalist rationale for the current state while also outlining how it's unsustainable, and that nature will be asking for paybacks in one form or another (Mad Cow Disease, but way worse? The Bird Flu that mutates into a deadly virus that makes COVID-19 look like a walk in the park?).
We best take the wins and now pivot toward something that is equally pro-human and pro-top-o-the-food-chain: adapting our unending power to benefit us, which will, as it turns out, help the farm animals in the process.
Bonus: We can also reach meat-eating sentimintarians with catch phrases like: "Animals die for us so that we can eat them. The *least* we can do is treat them with respect while they are alive in exchange for them helping keeping us alive."
Bonus Bonus: We can also reach religious folks with catch phrases like: "If G0d created all life on earth, then we're likely sinning our butts off the way we treat the lives we rely on to survive. Just guessing He might expect a bit more from us. How about we try to avoid the next Noah's Ark, shall we?"
> "This is not just some bad thing. Even if we ignore all sea creatures and value land animals at 1/1000 what we value humans, our treatment of animals is morally equivalent to brutally torturing and killing about 80 million people every year. 80 billion animals being brutally tortured is such a vast number, that even if we devalue animals to a fairly large degree, it still wins out as the worst thing in the world. And this is a gross underestimate of its true immorality."
I think it's helpful to normalize the numbers to a more easily comparable form here. (After all, there is some number of people for whose meat-eating enjoyment it would be worth to brutally torture and kill about 80 million people per year. It's easy to make mistakes when large numbers are involved.) What follows is my quick attempt to do so – feel free to point at any mistakes.
Firstly, for one person to eat meat for a year, this comparison comes out to on the order of 80 million / 8 billion = 1/100 people tortured and killed per year. In my view, the main moral loss here is from the torturing and not the killing, because these animals would not be born in the counterfactual with no factory farming, and I don't think that being killed is worse than not having been born (all else equal; all else is ~never equal for murdering people, but it seems like it might well be in the case of factory farming, once we account for the torture). (I can foresee this last sentence being controversial.)
Quick googling suggested that most of these 80 billion animals are chicken, and that the average chicken lives for 42 days. This adds up to 42*1/100=0.42 days = 10 hours of torture per person eating meat for one year. So the question becomes this: which one of the following two options would one prefer?
A) One is a vegetarian for the next year.
B) One gets to eat meat for the next year, but has to accept 10 hours of torture of badness of intensity equal to the average intensity for a factory-farmed chicken (hopefully we can make sense of this). This torture has no adverse effects on the person at any other time.
(I guess it probably won't matter for most people, but to clarify: the 10 hours in B are added to one's life, i.e. one would not have gotten to live for these 10 hours otherwise.)
I don't think it's super obvious that everyone would choose A here – I'd bet that there is a significant fraction of people who would choose B. The comparison becomes even less obvious if we are thinking of this not from the viewpoint of someone who cares equally about all (e.g. not from what we'd hope e.g. a global government is pursuing), but who is somewhat selfish – considering how little people donate, this includes almost everyone, it seems. The latter case is what's relevant when an individual is deciding whether to stop eating meat.
To spell out what happens to the comparison in case of partial selfishness: I think most (or certainly many) people would not sacrifice themselves for 10 random people. If one considers a random chicken's pain (per second) to be worth not 1/1000 of one's own pain, but 1/1000 of a random person's, one gets a summary factor of 1/10000 for the chicken, and then the 10 hours are substituted with 1 hour in B. And so the case of A>B becomes less obvious still.
1. Animals on factory farms are given about 50% of all antibiotics used on earth. That means this is a major source of antibiotic resistance. Antibiotics speed up growth in some animals and are necessary when you pack animals together in cruel conditions.
What if I genetically modify animals such that they enjoy being factory farmed, or at least such that they are biologically incapable of experiencing suffering? For example, maybe they just get a giant gland that dumps endorphins into their brain 24 hours a day and they experience permanent bliss irrespective of how they're treated. Does factory farming become morally neutral or even morally obligatory?
>“Conclusions: This comprehensive meta-analysis reports a significant protective effect of a vegetarian diet versus the incidence and/or mortality from ischemic heart disease (-25%) and incidence from total cancer (-8%). Vegan diet conferred a significant reduced risk (-15%) of incidence from total cancer.”
One minor point related to this: I know from personal experience that it's incredibly easy, as a vegetarian or vegan, to fall into a diet as unhealthy as any omnivorous diet if you're not making sure you're getting adequate nutrients (whether from plant sources or supplements).
May The Factory Farms Burn
Doing something here that I hate, when others do it; liking and commenting on something I haven't read. And to say that I'm continuing to rein in on my consumption of tortured flesh.
Yes, I know I should read it.
Keep writing mate. This is some top-quality content. Appreciate the recommend too!
Just came across this piece via Notes. I'm going to need to gird myself to read it, but I will.
"Here’s a question that shouldn’t be difficult for anyone with a moral compass: should babies be ground to death in blenders? Should they be suffocated in bags? If your answer is no—as no doubt it should be—you should oppose this horrific practice done to billions of baby chicks."
So I guess this is the bullet I bite as a meat eater. I think a bit of introspection shows that torturing infants just isn't as terrible as it seems at first glance. When I was an infant, I was circumcised without anesthesia, and I spent a few days being prodded with needles and connected to all kinds of tubes in the ICU for a bad infection. Though neither episode was technically torture, I'm sure both were quite painful and uncomfortable. I have no memory of either. There may have been an infant wailing and screaming and reacting to pain in those situations, but there wasn't anything important within that was experiencing a bad time. I kind of wish my parents had pierced my ears as an infant or toddler because I'm way too much of a wuss to get it done today as an adult!
If the devil came to me and offered me a sandwich and some pop, with the price being that they would reduce me to an infant, body and mind, send me to a pocket dimension to be tortured for a thousand years while being kept in that infant state, and finally heal me of the damage inflicted and restore me to my adult form in the present, I would take that deal. I would take that deal because it is clear that being temporarily reduced to an infant is functionally equivalent to being temporarily anesthetized. If the devil threw in some fries, I'd go another millennium as a chicken, pig, cow, or other factory farmed animal instead of an infant.
It depends what you think morality is for. If you think morality is for maximizing the hedon count of the universe, you will give a different answer than if you think morality is for coordinating the game theory of repeatedly interacting intelligent beings, or simply put, people.
I think people are terrible at coordinating their mutual interest and an increase in the moral circle of concern to non-reciprocators imposes an additional cost that makes it even harder. It's hard enough to formulate and enforce moral norms that allow us to not backstab each other, defraud each other, attack each other, murder each other, steal from each other, etc. etc., without adding the additional constraint that we must place moral weight on chickens and far-future people and utility monsters also. It's asking a system under stress to devote its limited resources to optimization functions other than making the system function.
"But the hedon count is really important! Many chickens and many far future people!" is not an argument to convince those who have carefully examined their motivations and decided not to care about the hedons of chickens, far future people, utility monsters or hedonium.
There are six distinct arguments identified here. I think they beg the question — they assume we should care about animals. They’re effective because we have evolved to have sympathy for babies, and unless we’re socialized to regard killing animals as normal, our affection includes things that merely remind us of babies.
Argument one is simply stating that you think something is bad, so therefore it is bad. It is intuitively immoral to you — so too is homosexuality to many people.
Argument two: I think it odd that people object to those practices in and of itself. The worst that can be said of it is that it indicates certain deviant preferences, which may presage the harm of humans.
Argument three: there is no trait, per se — it must merely be beneficial to us. Fighting otherwise identical aliens would be quite unlikely to help us, so we oughtn’t do it.
Argument four: and yet, we are not chickens. We know who we are, (we do not, I think, believe in reincarnation), and we have no need to pretend we may be something we aren’t.
Argument five is begging the question that we should care about animals.
The sixth argument is the best of them all. If we assume that one is responsible for both costs and benefits alike of their decisions though, the best that can be said for it is that we should individually choose to eat less meat. If you want government intervention against meat farming, climate change is a far better case for that.
While I agree with the premise that factory farms are immoral, your and my morality is really secondary to the situation at hand. Top-down moralists don't really have a great track record over the long-term in human history tbh.
I think we're better off pivoting from a morality play to a functionalist play. People are generally functionalist, and even use their individual moralistic framework as a way to improve their functionality.
Functionally, there are pros and cons to factory farming:
Pros: Far less expensive foodstuffs to feed an ever-increasing population of human beings. Being that we're on top of the food chain, this makes functional sense, and it's hard to argue that any other being that were on top would do much different from a nature perspective. To wit, just watch any nature show: animals who eat other animals rarely think about the pain and suffering of their prey. Further, there's a moral case to be made that not allowing humans to starve to death is a superior moral framework to balancing your child's life with that of a farm animal or sea creature (or even a million of them). Name me one mother of an infant who wouldn't do anything to keep their child alive, including killing a chicken herself by any means necessary, no matter how painful it might be for said chicken.
Cons: By abusing our power of being atop the food chain by maximizing production at any expense leads to the common and typical unintended consequences of any overreach of resources: the backlash. For a century, there was precious little regard to using fossil fuels to bring affordable energy to the masses. We did this with reckless abandon. And now the proverbial hens are coming home to roost. There is "no free lunch" in the functionalist world. Everything has a price, especially the abuse of power. Using power wisely may be one one of the most wisest wise things wise people have ever imparted.
I think we need to straddle both of these facts to convert people to this cause: We need to acknowledge the obvious benefits of the factory farming system, and why it's become what it's become. And we must also, in the same breath, warn that the very same reasons why the current system is transparently compelling for humans, it comes with an equal-and-opposite cost that we have all paid for, and will continue to increasingly pay for over time -- just like climate change.
We need to accept the functionalist rationale for the current state while also outlining how it's unsustainable, and that nature will be asking for paybacks in one form or another (Mad Cow Disease, but way worse? The Bird Flu that mutates into a deadly virus that makes COVID-19 look like a walk in the park?).
We best take the wins and now pivot toward something that is equally pro-human and pro-top-o-the-food-chain: adapting our unending power to benefit us, which will, as it turns out, help the farm animals in the process.
Bonus: We can also reach meat-eating sentimintarians with catch phrases like: "Animals die for us so that we can eat them. The *least* we can do is treat them with respect while they are alive in exchange for them helping keeping us alive."
Bonus Bonus: We can also reach religious folks with catch phrases like: "If G0d created all life on earth, then we're likely sinning our butts off the way we treat the lives we rely on to survive. Just guessing He might expect a bit more from us. How about we try to avoid the next Noah's Ark, shall we?"
> "This is not just some bad thing. Even if we ignore all sea creatures and value land animals at 1/1000 what we value humans, our treatment of animals is morally equivalent to brutally torturing and killing about 80 million people every year. 80 billion animals being brutally tortured is such a vast number, that even if we devalue animals to a fairly large degree, it still wins out as the worst thing in the world. And this is a gross underestimate of its true immorality."
I think it's helpful to normalize the numbers to a more easily comparable form here. (After all, there is some number of people for whose meat-eating enjoyment it would be worth to brutally torture and kill about 80 million people per year. It's easy to make mistakes when large numbers are involved.) What follows is my quick attempt to do so – feel free to point at any mistakes.
Firstly, for one person to eat meat for a year, this comparison comes out to on the order of 80 million / 8 billion = 1/100 people tortured and killed per year. In my view, the main moral loss here is from the torturing and not the killing, because these animals would not be born in the counterfactual with no factory farming, and I don't think that being killed is worse than not having been born (all else equal; all else is ~never equal for murdering people, but it seems like it might well be in the case of factory farming, once we account for the torture). (I can foresee this last sentence being controversial.)
Quick googling suggested that most of these 80 billion animals are chicken, and that the average chicken lives for 42 days. This adds up to 42*1/100=0.42 days = 10 hours of torture per person eating meat for one year. So the question becomes this: which one of the following two options would one prefer?
A) One is a vegetarian for the next year.
B) One gets to eat meat for the next year, but has to accept 10 hours of torture of badness of intensity equal to the average intensity for a factory-farmed chicken (hopefully we can make sense of this). This torture has no adverse effects on the person at any other time.
(I guess it probably won't matter for most people, but to clarify: the 10 hours in B are added to one's life, i.e. one would not have gotten to live for these 10 hours otherwise.)
I don't think it's super obvious that everyone would choose A here – I'd bet that there is a significant fraction of people who would choose B. The comparison becomes even less obvious if we are thinking of this not from the viewpoint of someone who cares equally about all (e.g. not from what we'd hope e.g. a global government is pursuing), but who is somewhat selfish – considering how little people donate, this includes almost everyone, it seems. The latter case is what's relevant when an individual is deciding whether to stop eating meat.
To spell out what happens to the comparison in case of partial selfishness: I think most (or certainly many) people would not sacrifice themselves for 10 random people. If one considers a random chicken's pain (per second) to be worth not 1/1000 of one's own pain, but 1/1000 of a random person's, one gets a summary factor of 1/10000 for the chicken, and then the 10 hours are substituted with 1 hour in B. And so the case of A>B becomes less obvious still.
Would it be ethical for the utility monster to run the factory farming industry?
The strawmanning is irksome, e.g. trivial gustatory pleasure: https://michaelkummer.com/health/organ-meat-benefits
"The worst crime in history, *so far*!"
The arguments are compelling. Two more to add:
1. Animals on factory farms are given about 50% of all antibiotics used on earth. That means this is a major source of antibiotic resistance. Antibiotics speed up growth in some animals and are necessary when you pack animals together in cruel conditions.
2. factory farms elevate the risk of zoonotic pandemics. For more evidence on this, see “What’s Wrong with Factory Farming?”: https://academic.oup.com/phe/article/8/3/246/2362362
What if I genetically modify animals such that they enjoy being factory farmed, or at least such that they are biologically incapable of experiencing suffering? For example, maybe they just get a giant gland that dumps endorphins into their brain 24 hours a day and they experience permanent bliss irrespective of how they're treated. Does factory farming become morally neutral or even morally obligatory?
Excellent article.
>“Conclusions: This comprehensive meta-analysis reports a significant protective effect of a vegetarian diet versus the incidence and/or mortality from ischemic heart disease (-25%) and incidence from total cancer (-8%). Vegan diet conferred a significant reduced risk (-15%) of incidence from total cancer.”
One minor point related to this: I know from personal experience that it's incredibly easy, as a vegetarian or vegan, to fall into a diet as unhealthy as any omnivorous diet if you're not making sure you're getting adequate nutrients (whether from plant sources or supplements).