Kevin, thanks for posting that link. Very interesting. I'm not necessarily convinced that wild animals tend to have net-positive lives, but the article is certainly thought-provoking. See also this book that I read some years ago and enjoyed very much:
"Pleasurable Kingdom: Animals and the Nature of Feeling Good", by Jonathan Balcombe
I think there are solid arguments that k-reproducing (typically longer-lived) wild animals have net positive lives. It would take a hell of a lot of new evidence to convince me the same was true of rats.
You (Bentham's Bulldog) write with passion and eloquence about this topic, but I think you're missing the larger point. And, in some ways, I think your posts are actually harmful to the animal cause. Focusing solely on the cruelty of factory farms misses the broader ethical question surrounding animal use. Even if animals are raised in idyllic conditions, the act of commodifying sentient beings and ending their lives prematurely for human benefit remains deeply problematic. By fixating on cruel practices, we may be inadvertently legitimizing "humane" animal farming (if such a thing can actually exist).
Animals, like humans, have a profound interest in their own existence that extends far beyond simply avoiding suffering. They exhibit curiosity, form social bonds, engage in play, and demonstrate clear preferences for certain activities or environments. This suggests that animals have a rich inner life and a stake in their own continued existence.
Most of us probably wouldn't argue that the issue with human chattel slavery was that the slaves were whipped too much. The issue is that they were enslaved in the first place.
Alex, adopting 'anti-commodification' as the ultimate arbiter of what's ethically good leads to the problematic conclusion that a lot of cows simply wouldn't exist at all. It's true that there's something wrong with raising them to eat them, but there's no unproblematic solution--and I'd like to suggest your solution is worse. The analogy to human chattel slavery seems weak to me not only because animals are less sentient, but more importantly because the alternative to slavery isn't necessarily non-existence. Let's let the cows decide if they'd like to live yet ultimately die--but, since they can't decide that, let's decide for them. We're a biased arbiter, but again, abandoning the decision is simply equivalent to denying them any life at all.
My favorite thought experiment against the idea that "commodification" rather than harm is the source of moral wrongness:
You're riding in a car driven by a fellow vegan activist, headed for a new vegan restaurant, and you're both pretty hungry. You're on a suburban street with no traffic, so no personal danger of a crash. Suddenly, a puppy runs into the street. The driver, although she has plenty of time to stop, keeps going at full speed and mows down the puppy. "Really want to get to that restaurant", she says.
Let me just go ahead and assume that you're both horrified at the puppy's killing and especially shocked that this choice came from a vegan activist. But, seeing your reaction, she informs you that you must not understand veganism very well if you think there was anything incompatible with vegan philosophy in her choice. You see, she wasn't commodifying or exploiting the puppy to gain any value from its existence. The puppy was just incidentally in the path of her goal, getting to the restaurant quickly. In fact, if she had chosen to stop the car and pet the puppy while taking it to the side of the road, there would be a stronger argument that she was doing something wrong, because she'd have been gaining personal enjoyment out of the petting, and she wouldn't have gotten the puppy's verbal consent.
I assume you're fine with that for humans as well. Probably something about how it's nonsense to care about hypothetical people?
The trouble with that line of thinking is that it very nearly applies to real people as well, namely: if you could just kill everyone right now, then nothing ethically bad would happen *other* than their suffering in dying. The essential objection to not caring about future people (or cows) is that counterfactual reasoning is invalid--but if you kill someone, it *becomes* counterfactual reasoning to consider whether they might still be alive and thriving.
Of course, you could bite that bullet too. Most people don't.
I see horses a lot around here their lives seem idyllic compared to the wild. They pretty much live without the fear that is a constant presence for prey animals in the wild. Look into the change in elk lives when wolves were reintroduced to Yellowstone.
There is an island somewhere in Lake Michigan or Superior where half of what the moose eat goes to feeding the ticks on their bodies.
If a button was pressed that instantly killed everybody in the world, it wouldn't matter because there would be nobody left for it to matter to. If animals lived happy lives then were instantly killed for human benefit, that would be good for the animals and good for the humans. Nobody would suffer as a result of it, so no harm would be done. I don't see any reason to value autonomy noninstrumentally.
I very much agree with your second paragraph (when it comes to mammals and birds, maybe not insects), but it seems very much consequentialist and therefore not obviously compatible with your final sentence. Clearly, I wouldn't say that the harms inflicted by slavery were fully or mostly confined to the physical pain of whipping (psychological anguish and lost happiness pretty clearly dwarf this), but I fail to see what that has to do with my view that the moral wrongness of slavery derives from the totality of harms.
To ask you plainly, would you say the expected value of the marginal human or specifically meat eater is negative? That it seems hard to maintain both that factory farming is the worst thing, and that the thing responsible for it's current quantity is on the margin good, right?
The sentientist argument that humanity may be good is fundamentally futurist, i.e. the idea that "the better angels of our nature" might have us on a course toward not only abolishing our own animal agriculture, but greatly ameliorating the evils that natural selection has created for sentient beings in the wild.
But when accounting for only humans and farmed animals, I think it's negative. For the intuition behind this, imagine that a person spent all day every day torturing dogs. Is that person's existence good on balance?
If we're engaging with the fact that reducing wild animal populations reduces suffering, I think we need to engage with the fact that this naively implies a moral duty to extinguish all life. Life seems to produce net suffering to a staggering degree, such that almost every animal existence is defined by misery. It seems better for the basic utilitarian calculus that no life should ever have existed at all. The reason I call deriving the moral duty to extinguish all life from this naive is because of one thing only: the future potential to create so much pleasure it overwhelms even the massive suffering of evolved life. I believe that one day it will be possible to create minds specifically programmed to experience an ecstatic level of pleasure non-stop, programmed so that they never grow bored of it nor are subjected to a hedonic treadmill. If we send out Von Neumann probes to convert as much of the universe's matter as possible into such minds, we might be able to finally, for the first time, make the pleasure less pain in the universe become a net positive. So the goal all intelligent life should strive towards is to initiate such a conversion of the universe into pleasure-minds, as it is the only thing that can justify and redeem the massive suffering that natural life has so far inflicted on the universe. Only from the possibility of bringing this grand transformation about can the continuance of life be morally justified.
I think this is the strongest argument, but for obvious reasons most utilitarians are reluctant to admit this or even discuss this. A less bold response to the meat eater problem might also be optimism about lab grown meat. But both responses do suffer from the fact that past actions and current actions that are commonly regarded as awful might still have a positive return given how distant the technology is, and to the degree that such actions don't delay that tech.
For example intentional mass killings of wild animals/insects might have a positive return, and "radical anti-natalism" wrt humans aslong as they don't massively directly or indirectly effect such tech also.
Also from this perspective many EA activities seem less than useless, they should really be going all in on trying to get to those more extreme maxima.
Notably the linked article's calculations look at insect welfare, which Matthew seems to neglect. I'm not sure what his views are but I've never seen any of the more mainstream utilitarians seriously engage with the meat eater argument publicly.
My concern when seeing people trying to expose the unimaginably mass animal cruelty of our society is that a lot of vegans support anti-natalism. Regardless of whether our values are primarily passed to our kids through culture or genetics, having fewer kids of vegans each generation will surely be detrimental to the moral future of humanity, right?
Are there any vegan groups or pro-vegan thinkers that think vegans having kids is a good thing?
The problem with a suffering-focused ethics is that you can conclude that more humans is worse, because there will be more human suffering. Some people do think that--and they are my enemies. (Though you may not like the tribalistic word 'enemies', there's no way around it--they're evil.)
So, why is more humans = more good, instead? Because life is amazing on net--or at least easily can be in developed countries. Now, what does restoring a holistic lens, in place of a narrow suffering-focused one, do for us with regard to animals?
The answer is obvious. So obvious I'd like to not state it for a moment, so that the reader can come to it themselves... Where it takes us is that if we have reason to believe a life is good on net, that existence is therefore better than non-existence, then it is actually a great moral good *for the cows* to raise cows, despite that we will eat them in the end. Now, is this repugnant if we analogize this to raising humans? Absolutely!--but we are *not* raising humans. Cows really are not humans. They really are a lower form of life.
Okay but the post was about chickens mostly, right? Right. So, yes, let's reduce chicken suffering.
There, that wasn't so hard. But with a suffering-focused lens that suggests a terrifying approach to ethical calculus when applied to humans, and with dubious anthropomorphization, the typical EA arguments against animal suffering, such as those presented here, risk (rightly) alienating a lot of people... On the other hand, posts like this raise awareness.
What if you had the option to flip a switch that brings about countlessly more pleasure than the amount of suffering that has ever existed? I believe that we may essentially have such a thing in the future, in that we will be able to convert an arbitrarily large amount of the universe's matter into minds designed to experience constant pleasure. In my view, it is pleasure less pain that matters, since I see pleasure as being exactly as good as pain is bad, and therefore it is possible to justify even the extreme levels of suffering of darwinian life if it has the potential to bring about even more pleasure in the end. I'm curious how my intuition based on net pleasure squares with your intuition based solely on suffering.
I strongly disagree with this article's thesis that factory farming is "the worst thing ever". It's true that most farm animals live in enclosed spaces and are often denied the full range of behaviors that wild animals have. But farm animals are also fed on a regular basis and protected from parasites, predators, dehydration, heat, cold, etc to a greater extent than wild animals. Most wild animals die young from predation, disease, or hunger. Whereas most farm animals die young in a slaughterhouse, and they even have rather humane deaths in some countries. It's not clear how one is supposed to be objectively better than the other.
As for what diet is the healthiest and best for the environment, I endorse Mediterranean-like and plant-based diets, as they are the academic consensus and what I personally prefer.
Vegan diets require supplements in order to be maximally healthy.
But as long as you take supplements, a vegan diet with no processed foods will be one of the healthiest diets a person can have.
Come watch me (next Monday morning in the U.S.) take a mostly Norcrossian position that "obligation" doesn't usually mean very much, and a somewhat behaviorist view that vegan activists ought to think more in terms of shifting statistical behavioral patterns versus verbally reported principles.
Here's a big problem with how we eat. But it breaks libertarian ideological legs. Acknowledging it would tacitly admit there are some things a free market is ill equipped to deal with.. that's kryptonite. Eat beans.
How do you compare versus the vissicitudes of like on the wild. Starvation, disease, bloody tortuous predation. Hunting would seem to interdict those fates. Seems best for the animals and the environment.
I am not vegetarian but I tend to agree re the moral vacuity of factory farming mammals and chickens with little/no regard for their suffering. We can and should do better.
I also come from the “eating meat is natural” camp and don’t think that raising livestock is necessarily immoral. Many animals must eat meat to survive and humans evolved to eat (cooked) meat. The horrifying nature of our world is that everything, including us humans, is food for something else.
There is no realistic way of providing ourselves with food that doesn’t involve harming other creatures. And in a certain frame of reference, the monopolization of turf that is terrestrial farming is also quite immoral. Terrestrial farming is not generally non-violent. It displaces productive habitats so all the benefit goes to humans, while the animals that would have otherwise existed there are killed or never exist.
Eggs necessarily need to be broken to make this omelette. To survive and thrive, we must eat and there is just not perfect way to do that. This should not be an excuse to ignore suffering or other problems but its worth pointing out, I think.
I’m curious to hear a vegan’s stance on shellfish and shellfish aquaculture. Do you recognize a hierarchy of animal life such that some creatures are more or less moral to consume?
> I also come from the “eating meat is natural” camp
Lots of things (rape, infanticide, etc.) are found in the natural world but are immoral for humans to do. Animals don't have a choice in how they behave, but we do.
It's true that there is no way for people to survive without causing collateral damage to some creatures. I believe a vegan diet causes the least amount of harm (I realize that there is some debate about this).
-Eating meat is natural. You seem to sujest eating meat coul be moral because we evolved to eat it(to survive). But what is the premise that links the moral justification to eat meat with our particular evolution? I don't see it.
-The best I can tell after reading you is that you belive there's no other way to survive without producing suffering. And I agree, at least so far. But that doesn't justify eating meat from factory farm. If you can thrive with a vegan diet and and is inmoral to produce vast amounts of suffering to gain small benefits for ourselves, then it seems factory farming and paying for it is inmoral. Do you, see that even if is true there's no perfect way and that we evolved to eat meat the vegan argument works?
I wonder how you'd think the work of the Far Out Initiative would factor into this. To summarize briefly, a woman in Scotland has been discovered who has a genetic mutation that seems to make it so that she can't feel physical or mental suffering. The Far Out Initiative seeks to take this gene and splice it into factory farmed animals, so that they lose the capacity to suffer. Would billions of animals getting castrated and living in their own shit still be a bad thing if they experienced no suffering from it? Maybe you could still object to the conditions of factory farming on grounds of dignity or rights, but from a purely utilitarian standpoint the thing that makes factory farming bad would have been removed. I find this research exciting, because as someone who doesn't believe animals have dignity or rights, but does believe their suffering matters to the utilitarian calculus, this has the potential to make the literal worst thing ever not be bad anymore.
To nitpick, wild animal suffering is probably the worst thing ever, since its scale dwarfs factory farming. I agree that factory farming is the worst _atrocity_ ever, in the sense that it's an intentionally inflicted cruelty.
I agree wild animal suffering is terrible, but how on earth does it dwarf factory farming? According to wikipedia, humans and livestock make up more than 90% of the biomass of all terrestrial vertebrates, and almost as much as all insects combined.
I wonder, if you could only end one of the two, human inflicted animal suffering or non-human inflicted, which would you prevent? Leaving out considerations like the potential for factory farming to be outlawed in the future or the effects on humans who work in the farms.
I would've said human-inflicted but now I'm not sure.
I am of the controversial opinion that Aushwitz was worse.
Auschwitz made so much fewer victims in comparison to animal agriculture. Also the types of harms are generally worse in animal agriculture.
See also, "Eternal Treblinka: Our Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust", by Charles Patterson. https://www.amazon.com/Eternal-Treblinka-Treatment-Animals-Holocaust/dp/1930051999
Did you read the article? What part do you disagree with?
Interesting. My only contribution is to link to the authors of work which defends the view that wild animals have it pretty good overall.
https://therevelator.org/life-wild-animals/
Kevin, thanks for posting that link. Very interesting. I'm not necessarily convinced that wild animals tend to have net-positive lives, but the article is certainly thought-provoking. See also this book that I read some years ago and enjoyed very much:
"Pleasurable Kingdom: Animals and the Nature of Feeling Good", by Jonathan Balcombe
https://www.amazon.com/Pleasurable-Kingdom-Animals-Nature-Feeling/dp/1403986029
I think there are solid arguments that k-reproducing (typically longer-lived) wild animals have net positive lives. It would take a hell of a lot of new evidence to convince me the same was true of rats.
Nice. Thanks. It’s now on my Amazon wish list.
You (Bentham's Bulldog) write with passion and eloquence about this topic, but I think you're missing the larger point. And, in some ways, I think your posts are actually harmful to the animal cause. Focusing solely on the cruelty of factory farms misses the broader ethical question surrounding animal use. Even if animals are raised in idyllic conditions, the act of commodifying sentient beings and ending their lives prematurely for human benefit remains deeply problematic. By fixating on cruel practices, we may be inadvertently legitimizing "humane" animal farming (if such a thing can actually exist).
Animals, like humans, have a profound interest in their own existence that extends far beyond simply avoiding suffering. They exhibit curiosity, form social bonds, engage in play, and demonstrate clear preferences for certain activities or environments. This suggests that animals have a rich inner life and a stake in their own continued existence.
Most of us probably wouldn't argue that the issue with human chattel slavery was that the slaves were whipped too much. The issue is that they were enslaved in the first place.
Alex, adopting 'anti-commodification' as the ultimate arbiter of what's ethically good leads to the problematic conclusion that a lot of cows simply wouldn't exist at all. It's true that there's something wrong with raising them to eat them, but there's no unproblematic solution--and I'd like to suggest your solution is worse. The analogy to human chattel slavery seems weak to me not only because animals are less sentient, but more importantly because the alternative to slavery isn't necessarily non-existence. Let's let the cows decide if they'd like to live yet ultimately die--but, since they can't decide that, let's decide for them. We're a biased arbiter, but again, abandoning the decision is simply equivalent to denying them any life at all.
My favorite thought experiment against the idea that "commodification" rather than harm is the source of moral wrongness:
You're riding in a car driven by a fellow vegan activist, headed for a new vegan restaurant, and you're both pretty hungry. You're on a suburban street with no traffic, so no personal danger of a crash. Suddenly, a puppy runs into the street. The driver, although she has plenty of time to stop, keeps going at full speed and mows down the puppy. "Really want to get to that restaurant", she says.
Let me just go ahead and assume that you're both horrified at the puppy's killing and especially shocked that this choice came from a vegan activist. But, seeing your reaction, she informs you that you must not understand veganism very well if you think there was anything incompatible with vegan philosophy in her choice. You see, she wasn't commodifying or exploiting the puppy to gain any value from its existence. The puppy was just incidentally in the path of her goal, getting to the restaurant quickly. In fact, if she had chosen to stop the car and pet the puppy while taking it to the side of the road, there would be a stronger argument that she was doing something wrong, because she'd have been gaining personal enjoyment out of the petting, and she wouldn't have gotten the puppy's verbal consent.
This is your brain on deontology.
> a lot of cows simply wouldn't exist at all
Yes, and I'm fine with that.
I assume you're fine with that for humans as well. Probably something about how it's nonsense to care about hypothetical people?
The trouble with that line of thinking is that it very nearly applies to real people as well, namely: if you could just kill everyone right now, then nothing ethically bad would happen *other* than their suffering in dying. The essential objection to not caring about future people (or cows) is that counterfactual reasoning is invalid--but if you kill someone, it *becomes* counterfactual reasoning to consider whether they might still be alive and thriving.
Of course, you could bite that bullet too. Most people don't.
Are you seriously arguing that non existence of a human is about just as bad as death of one, or am I misunderstanding you?
No, I'm not arguing it's just as bad, but I am arguing that it matters, though I don't propose a framework for how to take it into account
Extremely good comment. I endorse 100%.
I see horses a lot around here their lives seem idyllic compared to the wild. They pretty much live without the fear that is a constant presence for prey animals in the wild. Look into the change in elk lives when wolves were reintroduced to Yellowstone.
There is an island somewhere in Lake Michigan or Superior where half of what the moose eat goes to feeding the ticks on their bodies.
If a button was pressed that instantly killed everybody in the world, it wouldn't matter because there would be nobody left for it to matter to. If animals lived happy lives then were instantly killed for human benefit, that would be good for the animals and good for the humans. Nobody would suffer as a result of it, so no harm would be done. I don't see any reason to value autonomy noninstrumentally.
I very much agree with your second paragraph (when it comes to mammals and birds, maybe not insects), but it seems very much consequentialist and therefore not obviously compatible with your final sentence. Clearly, I wouldn't say that the harms inflicted by slavery were fully or mostly confined to the physical pain of whipping (psychological anguish and lost happiness pretty clearly dwarf this), but I fail to see what that has to do with my view that the moral wrongness of slavery derives from the totality of harms.
To ask you plainly, would you say the expected value of the marginal human or specifically meat eater is negative? That it seems hard to maintain both that factory farming is the worst thing, and that the thing responsible for it's current quantity is on the margin good, right?
The sentientist argument that humanity may be good is fundamentally futurist, i.e. the idea that "the better angels of our nature" might have us on a course toward not only abolishing our own animal agriculture, but greatly ameliorating the evils that natural selection has created for sentient beings in the wild.
When you account for each person's effect on reducing wild animal populations, we might be good on balance: https://reducing-suffering.org/strategic-considerations-moral-antinatalists/#Should_antinatalists_oppose_human_reproduction
But when accounting for only humans and farmed animals, I think it's negative. For the intuition behind this, imagine that a person spent all day every day torturing dogs. Is that person's existence good on balance?
If we're engaging with the fact that reducing wild animal populations reduces suffering, I think we need to engage with the fact that this naively implies a moral duty to extinguish all life. Life seems to produce net suffering to a staggering degree, such that almost every animal existence is defined by misery. It seems better for the basic utilitarian calculus that no life should ever have existed at all. The reason I call deriving the moral duty to extinguish all life from this naive is because of one thing only: the future potential to create so much pleasure it overwhelms even the massive suffering of evolved life. I believe that one day it will be possible to create minds specifically programmed to experience an ecstatic level of pleasure non-stop, programmed so that they never grow bored of it nor are subjected to a hedonic treadmill. If we send out Von Neumann probes to convert as much of the universe's matter as possible into such minds, we might be able to finally, for the first time, make the pleasure less pain in the universe become a net positive. So the goal all intelligent life should strive towards is to initiate such a conversion of the universe into pleasure-minds, as it is the only thing that can justify and redeem the massive suffering that natural life has so far inflicted on the universe. Only from the possibility of bringing this grand transformation about can the continuance of life be morally justified.
I think this is the strongest argument, but for obvious reasons most utilitarians are reluctant to admit this or even discuss this. A less bold response to the meat eater problem might also be optimism about lab grown meat. But both responses do suffer from the fact that past actions and current actions that are commonly regarded as awful might still have a positive return given how distant the technology is, and to the degree that such actions don't delay that tech.
For example intentional mass killings of wild animals/insects might have a positive return, and "radical anti-natalism" wrt humans aslong as they don't massively directly or indirectly effect such tech also.
Also from this perspective many EA activities seem less than useless, they should really be going all in on trying to get to those more extreme maxima.
I basically agree.
At least in the case of mammals it's hard for human caused reduction in wild animal suffering to even compare with the additional suffering from livestock https://x.com/_HannahRitchie/status/1585168621088931841?lang=en
I agree with that. If humanity has been good on balance, I think it'd be due to the humanity-caused decline in invertebrate populations.
Notably the linked article's calculations look at insect welfare, which Matthew seems to neglect. I'm not sure what his views are but I've never seen any of the more mainstream utilitarians seriously engage with the meat eater argument publicly.
He's engaged with it before! https://benthams.substack.com/p/why-the-insects-scream
Unfortunately, I think grappling with the meat eater problem is beyond the pale for most people. I think it's more effective to simply argue that animal welfare is a better use of money than global health, which also avoids exacerbating the meat eater problem: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/btTeBHKGkmRyD5sFK/open-phil-should-allocate-most-neartermist-funding-to-animal
My concern when seeing people trying to expose the unimaginably mass animal cruelty of our society is that a lot of vegans support anti-natalism. Regardless of whether our values are primarily passed to our kids through culture or genetics, having fewer kids of vegans each generation will surely be detrimental to the moral future of humanity, right?
Are there any vegan groups or pro-vegan thinkers that think vegans having kids is a good thing?
The problem with a suffering-focused ethics is that you can conclude that more humans is worse, because there will be more human suffering. Some people do think that--and they are my enemies. (Though you may not like the tribalistic word 'enemies', there's no way around it--they're evil.)
So, why is more humans = more good, instead? Because life is amazing on net--or at least easily can be in developed countries. Now, what does restoring a holistic lens, in place of a narrow suffering-focused one, do for us with regard to animals?
The answer is obvious. So obvious I'd like to not state it for a moment, so that the reader can come to it themselves... Where it takes us is that if we have reason to believe a life is good on net, that existence is therefore better than non-existence, then it is actually a great moral good *for the cows* to raise cows, despite that we will eat them in the end. Now, is this repugnant if we analogize this to raising humans? Absolutely!--but we are *not* raising humans. Cows really are not humans. They really are a lower form of life.
Okay but the post was about chickens mostly, right? Right. So, yes, let's reduce chicken suffering.
There, that wasn't so hard. But with a suffering-focused lens that suggests a terrifying approach to ethical calculus when applied to humans, and with dubious anthropomorphization, the typical EA arguments against animal suffering, such as those presented here, risk (rightly) alienating a lot of people... On the other hand, posts like this raise awareness.
What if you had the option to flip a switch that brings about countlessly more pleasure than the amount of suffering that has ever existed? I believe that we may essentially have such a thing in the future, in that we will be able to convert an arbitrarily large amount of the universe's matter into minds designed to experience constant pleasure. In my view, it is pleasure less pain that matters, since I see pleasure as being exactly as good as pain is bad, and therefore it is possible to justify even the extreme levels of suffering of darwinian life if it has the potential to bring about even more pleasure in the end. I'm curious how my intuition based on net pleasure squares with your intuition based solely on suffering.
I strongly disagree with this article's thesis that factory farming is "the worst thing ever". It's true that most farm animals live in enclosed spaces and are often denied the full range of behaviors that wild animals have. But farm animals are also fed on a regular basis and protected from parasites, predators, dehydration, heat, cold, etc to a greater extent than wild animals. Most wild animals die young from predation, disease, or hunger. Whereas most farm animals die young in a slaughterhouse, and they even have rather humane deaths in some countries. It's not clear how one is supposed to be objectively better than the other.
There are many other problems with hedonism as a theory of value: https://zerocontradictions.net/misc/case-against-efilism#hedonism-is-not-self-evident
Morality is also an illusion: https://thewaywardaxolotl.blogspot.com/2020/07/what-is-morality.html
As for what diet is the healthiest and best for the environment, I endorse Mediterranean-like and plant-based diets, as they are the academic consensus and what I personally prefer.
Vegan diets require supplements in order to be maximally healthy.
But as long as you take supplements, a vegan diet with no processed foods will be one of the healthiest diets a person can have.
https://substack.com/@jason780860/note/c-62376741
https://www.youtube.com/live/NJcjX26Gg3I?si=YDMoMyk6exiEsGkI
Come watch me (next Monday morning in the U.S.) take a mostly Norcrossian position that "obligation" doesn't usually mean very much, and a somewhat behaviorist view that vegan activists ought to think more in terms of shifting statistical behavioral patterns versus verbally reported principles.
Here's a big problem with how we eat. But it breaks libertarian ideological legs. Acknowledging it would tacitly admit there are some things a free market is ill equipped to deal with.. that's kryptonite. Eat beans.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2443472-the-climate-impact-of-feeding-ourselves-is-getting-worse-and-worse/
Show quoted text
Did you intentionally publish this on Tish B’av? Surely not.
It's crazy how much dumber the average comment is on any article about factory farming/veganism.
How do you compare versus the vissicitudes of like on the wild. Starvation, disease, bloody tortuous predation. Hunting would seem to interdict those fates. Seems best for the animals and the environment.
interesting piece.
I am not vegetarian but I tend to agree re the moral vacuity of factory farming mammals and chickens with little/no regard for their suffering. We can and should do better.
I also come from the “eating meat is natural” camp and don’t think that raising livestock is necessarily immoral. Many animals must eat meat to survive and humans evolved to eat (cooked) meat. The horrifying nature of our world is that everything, including us humans, is food for something else.
There is no realistic way of providing ourselves with food that doesn’t involve harming other creatures. And in a certain frame of reference, the monopolization of turf that is terrestrial farming is also quite immoral. Terrestrial farming is not generally non-violent. It displaces productive habitats so all the benefit goes to humans, while the animals that would have otherwise existed there are killed or never exist.
Eggs necessarily need to be broken to make this omelette. To survive and thrive, we must eat and there is just not perfect way to do that. This should not be an excuse to ignore suffering or other problems but its worth pointing out, I think.
I’m curious to hear a vegan’s stance on shellfish and shellfish aquaculture. Do you recognize a hierarchy of animal life such that some creatures are more or less moral to consume?
> I also come from the “eating meat is natural” camp
Lots of things (rape, infanticide, etc.) are found in the natural world but are immoral for humans to do. Animals don't have a choice in how they behave, but we do.
It's true that there is no way for people to survive without causing collateral damage to some creatures. I believe a vegan diet causes the least amount of harm (I realize that there is some debate about this).
Well no, Alex, no creature must rape or engage in infanticide to survive.
But agriculture necessarily involves killing creatures in a way that foraging does not.
Perhaps only foraging vegetation causes the least amount of harm and we should all shame anyone who does otherwise.
Some vegan points:
-Eating meat is natural. You seem to sujest eating meat coul be moral because we evolved to eat it(to survive). But what is the premise that links the moral justification to eat meat with our particular evolution? I don't see it.
-The best I can tell after reading you is that you belive there's no other way to survive without producing suffering. And I agree, at least so far. But that doesn't justify eating meat from factory farm. If you can thrive with a vegan diet and and is inmoral to produce vast amounts of suffering to gain small benefits for ourselves, then it seems factory farming and paying for it is inmoral. Do you, see that even if is true there's no perfect way and that we evolved to eat meat the vegan argument works?
I wonder how you'd think the work of the Far Out Initiative would factor into this. To summarize briefly, a woman in Scotland has been discovered who has a genetic mutation that seems to make it so that she can't feel physical or mental suffering. The Far Out Initiative seeks to take this gene and splice it into factory farmed animals, so that they lose the capacity to suffer. Would billions of animals getting castrated and living in their own shit still be a bad thing if they experienced no suffering from it? Maybe you could still object to the conditions of factory farming on grounds of dignity or rights, but from a purely utilitarian standpoint the thing that makes factory farming bad would have been removed. I find this research exciting, because as someone who doesn't believe animals have dignity or rights, but does believe their suffering matters to the utilitarian calculus, this has the potential to make the literal worst thing ever not be bad anymore.
The website of the Far Out Initiative, if you're curious: https://faroutinitiative.com/
To nitpick, wild animal suffering is probably the worst thing ever, since its scale dwarfs factory farming. I agree that factory farming is the worst _atrocity_ ever, in the sense that it's an intentionally inflicted cruelty.
I agree wild animal suffering is terrible, but how on earth does it dwarf factory farming? According to wikipedia, humans and livestock make up more than 90% of the biomass of all terrestrial vertebrates, and almost as much as all insects combined.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Livestock#:~:text=Humans%20and%20livestock%20make%20up%20more%20than%2090%25%20of%20the%20biomass%20of%20all%20terrestrial%20vertebrates%2C%20and%20almost%20as%20much%20as%20all%20insects%20combined.
There are a lot of fish, and enough insects that though they lack much mass, by plausible assumptions about their suffering, it could be way worse.
Fair.
I wonder, if you could only end one of the two, human inflicted animal suffering or non-human inflicted, which would you prevent? Leaving out considerations like the potential for factory farming to be outlawed in the future or the effects on humans who work in the farms.
I would've said human-inflicted but now I'm not sure.
Non-human.