Since this is an essay that might prove persuasive to future readers, I'd like to suggest a couple of minor edits to strengthen its rhetorical impact. I hope this is taken in the spirit intended, because I am very much in agreement with your underlying arguments on this front.
First, "gravitas" should really be "gravity" (or perhaps "enormity") to better capture the shade of your intended meaning in context. In conventional usage, "gravitas" refers more often to something more like the seriousness of an individual's manner or disposition (or the solemnity of a situation meriting respect). Word connotations are subject to change, I understand, but I halt at this unconventional usage, and it's easily revised.
Second, your closing paragraph currently reads: "We justify this cruelty by saying that our victims are inhuman. Yet when we do these things, it is we who become inhuman." I think this would be rhetorically stronger and more accurate if it were changed to read: "We justify this cruelty by saying that our victims are not human. Yet when we do these things, it is we who become inhuman." The reason is that the concept of "inhuman" implies "inhumanity," a term which comes preloaded with a pejorative weight that doesn't capture the ordinary sense of how people think of animals in order to rationalize their mistreatment and slaughter. There might be a better way to stick the landing by rephrasing it some other way, but I do think the use of "inhuman" in the first sentence grates against common usage and apprehension.
By happenstance I read this one right after the post entitled "Most Arguments For Nature Clearly Prove Too Much" and I'm struck by a juxtaposition of these two. The alternative for these animals isn't a paradise, it's the Brutal Forest. Or at best, non-existence.
But if we accept non-existence as a clear improvement over either the Torture Factory or the Brutal Forest, is the correct course of action to scorch the earth and kill all animals now so there are no future suffering animals?
How do you reconcile these without spiraling into nihilism?
I started reading this blog a couple days ago, so if this was addressed in any other entries, I would be happy to be pointed there!
The alternative is non-existence. Yes, I do support lowering wild animal populations. I don't support causing human extinction because I think the future could be very good.
But this isn't an argument for just "lowering" animal populations, is it? There's no threshold where a wild carnivore does not either inflict massive amounts of harm doing what it instinctively does to feed itself, or else suffer massive amounts of harm from starving to death slowly.
Is the argument zoos? That a small amount of "wild" animals should be put into nature preserves where they are fed and cared for without need to hunt other living creatures. (I'm sure there will be ways we can feed even obligate carnivores with lab-based meat or something like that.)
But even in that case, the gilded cage aspects of such an existence will also spur further moral catastrophe.
That seems pretty unsatisfying. Letting animals suffer in the brutal forest for the sake of possible future rewards for humans seems dangerously close to exploiting animals for their flesh (in direction if not degree).
Besides, are there any guarantees that the "good future" comes from humans and not a species evolved from another animal in the future? In that case, severely decreasing the animal population would likely destroy the biodiversity required for intelligence to arise again.
It seems like we'd be in a better position to talk about how we can best address the suffering of the remaining wild animals *after* we successfully stop committing horrific acts against the ones we directly breed into existence.
We have many billions of animals that we actively breed into existence every year whose circumstances (and birth itself) are directly under our control, and that's the most immediately tractable animal suffering problem.
Things like "what about the last few animals needed to be retained in some capacity for biospheres to function" completely ignores the first and most important step we can actually take right now.
I think it's important to address the inevitable conclusions of the logic and arguments you use because that's a prime way to uncover fallacies and bad assumptions.
I don't know what those problems are with this argument. Everything that goes into this argument seems quite sound, yet it leads to a surprising (to me at least) conclusion about how to improve animal welfare, especially if you take the argument that wild animals live in the Brutal Forest seriously. And maybe we shouldn't, but I also don't see a problem with noting that most wild animals' lives are short, brutal, and painful.
But if the conclusion is genuinely that we should kill all animals and stop all animals from being born because nature is red in tooth and claw and the prevented animal suffering is important, that seems like a completely different path to take, with different actions and priorities than any animal welfare groups are taking today.
Wow. This is all pathos with no ethos or logos. I'd be convinced if I was a 15-year-old. Where's the discussion of Halal, which will be defended culturally by those of a sinister persuasion but which has effectively destroyed animal rights, which were improving. I know that's whataboutery, but I'm just wondering who the audience is for this essay. Did you write it after doom-scrolling animal abuse? I'd like to do better. I don't eat veal. But...what is this?
I haven't the foggiest clue what you're saying about Halal. I am against it, but don't see why there's special need to discuss it.
Is there no logos? I would think it was a perfectly logical argument--one that we'd accept in all other contexts--to claim that something is bad by describing ways that it involves horrifically mistreating sentient beings in grotesque ways. It would not be an illogical argument against, say, the Khmer Rouge to note in emotive terms that they engaged in horrendous mass slaughter.
Is there some particular argument that you think is worth addressing that I didn't against my thesis?
Ngl pretty silly comment. It’s very obvious what Matthew is doing, and the fact that you can’t see that, and knowingly used a whataboutism, you might still be 15 mentally
This may be persuasive in the purely abstract sense but it's not going to motivate many to change their behavior. It certainly isn't going to motivate me to change my behavior. I know that if I change my behavior the average suffering and death of animals will be reduced by, at most, a trivial amount. This isn't going to stop until it becomes practical to have tasty food without killing animals.
It's not practical to give up meat and cheese for worse alternatives. Clearly people like real meat and cheese enough that they don't give them up. Most people are aware that animals are treated poorly. I'm saying that the mass killing of animals won't stop until there are plant-based alternatives that are both cheaper, and nearly indistinguishable from the given animal product. We are not there yet.
Plenty of people have given up meat and cheese already. My wife did it almost two decades ago with vastly inferior options. I don’t think alternative options need to be a one-to-one reproduction for people to make that change.
They don't need to be a one-to-one reproduction for an extremely small minority of people to give up meat and cheese sure. But I'm talking about the end of the mass killing of animals. For that, you need most people to give up eating animal products. Most people are not going to do that unless they can continue living their life as they currently do.
Wait why would veganism reduce suffering and death by “a trivial amount”? The average person eats 23 chickens a year, over 1,500 in a lifetime. That’s not a trivial amount of suffering and death!
First, I don't think it's reasonable to assume there's a direct correlation between the number of chickens one individual consumes and the number of chickens that would be saved had that individual not bought them. Second, I think 1500 over the course of a whole human lifetime is actually a trivial amount.
To your second point, if you think sparing 1500 animals from extreme torture is trivial, then clearly you haven’t yet recognized that animals matter morally.
I started reading this other article and something seems very fishy here. It seems extremely suspicious to me to suggest that the market for chicken is sensitive enough to detect a single individual's choices. I would suspect that the assumption that we have no reason to think we won't trigger any thresholds is wrong. In the case of an incredibly large market, it seems very likely that a single individual's consumption will not trigger any thresholds.
I can recognize that animals matter morally without 1500 animals being motivating enough to stop be from eating meat. The question is not whether they matter. The question is which desire is greater: eating animal products or saving some quantity of animals. I think it's quite obvious that 1500 over a lifetime is nowhere near enough to outweigh the desire to consume animal products.
Why is this obvious? What number would make it no longer obvious to you, and why that number?
To me, the opposite conclusion is obvious, because the downside, suffering caused by factory farming, seems clearly bigger than the upside, which is the average marginal increase in enjoyment of an animal-based food over a plant-based food. This comparison seems obvious to me because if you made me choose between spending 15 minutes experiencing any of the common factory farming abuses and spending 15 minutes eating a plant-based meal instead of an animal-based one, I would choose the latter quite easily. If I loosen this somewhat to account for valuing my own interests somewhat more than others', it doesn't meaningfully change the conclusion - even if the choice were 1 minute of the former vs 15 minutes of the latter, it still wouldn't be a tough call.
Maybe this decision isn't so obvious to you, but I struggle to see how the opposite could be.
Now it just seems like you’re not talking about morality anymore. Sure, you can *say* that you don’t care enough to stop causing the torture of 1,500 animals at very little cost to yourself. But that’s clearly not a good moral justification for causing animal torture.
It sounds almost like you’re asking “why should I not do what is deeply wrong?” But this is a question about our psychology, not morality per se. And there’s little l can say in the way of this question, except perhaps to point out how you probably wouldn’t tolerate it if you found out your neighbor was torturing 23 dogs in his basement per year thanks to your generous financial contributions.
I'm not a moral realist. When I talk about morality, I'm talking about people's preferences. You're correct that I wouldn't be ok the scenario described. But luckily for me, that is not the same scenario.
I am not committed to the existence of moral facts. I'm simply describing what I think are people's preferences. I think the case of slavery is very similar. It wasn't stopped until it became practical for it to be stopped. The reason your example sounds so strange now, is that today, people's preferences about slavery are wildly different than those held in the past. Today, many would think that the difference of one less slave is worth the loss of convenience. However, many of those same people would not consider the quantity of animals saved by going vegan sufficient to offset the inconvenience. It's just a matter of people's preferences. And I don't think those preferences will change much unless it becomes much more practical to be vegan.
Personally, as a vegan, I sometimes struggle to combat arguments from others that espouse benign carnivorism. I personally don't believe the utilitarian math works out, but other vegans and utilitarians seem to have no problem with it. Do you think you could discuss this at some point? The main source I have seen is Jeff McMahan's "Eating animals the nice way".
This article seems pretty lazy, in not doing anything to quantify the relative costs consuming different animals. It's no different, conceptually, from insisting that right now, humans are being tortured and killed in various gruesome and horrific ways, and that we must, therefore, espouse anti-natalism, and avoid any activities that incentivize natalism. Obviously, the response to the latter would be an attempt at quantification - even of the back of the envelope sort, which is missing from the article.
That article, itself, seems to start off with the sort of carelessness for rigor characteristic of demagogues. Specifically, it asserts "It’s very difficult to know that you’re actually eating animals that live good lives. Many supposedly humane farms engage in routine mistreatment like physical abuse, beating animals to death against the pavement, and more."
Do we have any order of magnitude estimates for how common it is for supposedly humane farms to engage in abuse? Is it 1/3, 1/10, 1/100, 1/1,000,000? The order of magnitude estimate can't be trivially ignored. Everything we do - including things with high expected values, carries some risk.
"Our investigations and campaigns are helping millions of chickens who would otherwise suffer much more. While we work to prevent animal abuse, we also fight against deceptive advertising to consumers. Many companies advertise meat products using images of happy animals living outside and terms like “free-range,” “natural,” and “humane.” We’ve brought legal challenges against corporations for false animal welfare and sustainability claims and prevented them from continuing to deceive consumers.
Exposing Abuse in a ‘Humane’ Hatchery (2021)..."
There are a few issues with this. First, they put 'humane' in scare quotes, but they don't even claim explicitly that that was wording used by that facility. Second, they provide no evidence for any of their claims, referencing court cases, but not linking them, or court findings. Third, the particular forms of abuse you allege aren't actually listed in the article you link to support it. Fourth, there's not even a ballpark order of magnitude estimate for the frequency of any of this, to allow for reasonable cost benefit analysis. Fifth, while it may be true that people may be fooled by advertising, that hardly implies that people can't avoid being fooled by advertising, which is the operative issue.
For example, perhaps certifying agencies can set specific standards. Is abuse present to meaningful degree in that context? These are the operative sorts of questions that the would-be benign carnivore to whom the article is nominally directed would ask.
Your next link is for the statement "Undercover reports routinely uncover horrifying abuses of animals." This is again avoids quantifying anything actually relevant. Many animals are abused. Okay. Are animals abused in ways contrary to what consumers are told, and more importantly, is there any way that consumers can know what they're getting into? Again, this is the operative question, and it's being conflated with other questions like "are animals sometimes abused."
The linked PETA article doesn't really contain anything relevant, either. It says that many eggs are labelled-cage free, but the hens still live uncomfortably, outside of cages. So it sounds like PETA is claiming that the advertising is then...accurate. And that consumers simply need to know the implications of specific advertising. What does cage-free mean, what does free-range mean, etc.
You then assert: "Nice-sounding labels often mask dark realities. Certified Humane Eggs come from animals who go so insane that they need to be debeaked, who are crammed into small barns without enough space to turn around, leading to prolonged stress."
Again, in fine rhetorical form, you use the weasel-word "often," which sounds impressive, but means nothing. On to the claim itself, we're taken to a page stating:
"The label “Animal Certified Care” doesn’t mean much. It’s the same as above with the chickens. The label was just a way for more people to buy the eggs if they thought the eggs were cared for. But it’s a misnomer."
Again, while you present this as current fact, it's actually just an article from 2009 summarizing a book from 2006, with no evidence presented, whatsoever. The previous link from PETA alleged consumers may not always understand the implication of labels. What did this certifying group guarantee as far as treatment, and did they meet those standards? We aren't told? We're just given a claim that some certification existed that didn't actually do anything, at all. With a quick internet search, I find no reference to such a label, at all. Perhaps something was lost through the series of citations, perhaps the claim is simply false, or perhaps it's just decades out of date.
Regardless, again, the operative questions are whether you can know what you're eating, not whether you could be fooled about what you're eating, and the actual frequency of abuse.
The article then claims that cage-free chicken may be treated poorly and that the term "free-range" isn't regulated on a federal level.
The former would be a good reason to understand the implications of different labels, it hardly precludes consumers gleaning useful animal-welfare related information for labels, any more than the existence of food that's marketed as "trans-fat free," but contains saturated fat precludes consumers from being able to eat healthfully, on the basis of labels.
The latter is again obviously irrelevant. It may be relevant if the question is whether a consumer could be fooled by advertising, but it obviously says little about the question of whether a consumer can know what they're consuming. Certifying agencies can set their own standards, regardless of the existence of federal standards. [The linked article doesn't even currently claim that there's no federal standard for free-range - just that standards vary among certifying agencies, which doesn't preclude the existence of universal minimum. Indeed, it seems that in reality, the opposite is the case: https://www.ams.usda.gov/publications/qa-shell-eggs. But of course, that's entirely besides the point, as noted.]
You insist here that "The myth that we are told as children is that animals spend their days in humane little barns that dot the countryside. The reality is that virtually no animals spend their time in such conditions," but you don't say anything about whether about there's a way to know whether animals are actually living like that - just that most aren't.
You rant and rave against cage-free eggs and free-range eggs, but don't tell us whether any certifications claim to provide the portrayed idyllic treatment. In point of fact, they do, and in the case of chickens, it's called 'pasture-raised.'
Is the certification accurate, such that the vast majority are indeed treated to that lifestyle? What's a rough back of the envelope calculation for the average welfare of hens with such certifications. These would be the relevant questions that could be addressed to support the claims being made.
The article then references a Vox article, which has some of its own factual issues, and is likely outdated, but I'll move past that, for now.
It then goes on to make very dubious consequentialist claims. Namely, that even if a consumer can consume ethical meat, that that'll lead others to imitate them and eat unethical meat, and that the most effective way to convince people to eat ethically is to be completely vegan and preach full veganism,
This is presented as a key argument, but seems to be pure speculation, at best. Vegans are notorious for being bad at convincing people to change their behavior! I suspect that the animal-welfare costs of omnivores could be much more effectively reduced by telling them the truth about the relative welfare costs of consuming different animal products (which likely vary by multiple orders of magnitude: https://reducing-suffering.org/how-much-direct-suffering-is-caused-by-various-animal-foods/, as well as by explaining which certifications exist, what their standards are, and how reliable they are. Regarding the effectiveness of this approach vs. the vegan advocacy you prefer, note my comment here: https://fakenous.substack.com/p/preachy-vegans-2/comment/49153476.
Importantly, this last argument is mostly about whether ethical omnivorism is *as ethical* as veganism, which is distinct from the question of whether it's a net positive from a consequentialist (or other) perspective.
There are too many other logical and factual problems with these posts to fit in this comment, but note that you misrepresent a figure about the proportion of *farmed* animals that factory farmed as the proportion of *consumed* animals that are factory farmed, and that that figure is derived based on the number of animals per farm (not even the density!) and isn't defined in terms of welfare standards. Importantly, even by their numbers, a full quarter of cows aren't "factory farmed."
Please see Chris Jones for a material analysis of factory / big-ag farming practices. Humanism and empathic arguments are for now a dead ender — too many “rationalists” easily obfuscate these rather common sense notions ironically. Only way to cut the noise is by materialism. If you want to save the chickens and the pigs we better think hard about how materially they exist in the world.
Since this is an essay that might prove persuasive to future readers, I'd like to suggest a couple of minor edits to strengthen its rhetorical impact. I hope this is taken in the spirit intended, because I am very much in agreement with your underlying arguments on this front.
First, "gravitas" should really be "gravity" (or perhaps "enormity") to better capture the shade of your intended meaning in context. In conventional usage, "gravitas" refers more often to something more like the seriousness of an individual's manner or disposition (or the solemnity of a situation meriting respect). Word connotations are subject to change, I understand, but I halt at this unconventional usage, and it's easily revised.
Second, your closing paragraph currently reads: "We justify this cruelty by saying that our victims are inhuman. Yet when we do these things, it is we who become inhuman." I think this would be rhetorically stronger and more accurate if it were changed to read: "We justify this cruelty by saying that our victims are not human. Yet when we do these things, it is we who become inhuman." The reason is that the concept of "inhuman" implies "inhumanity," a term which comes preloaded with a pejorative weight that doesn't capture the ordinary sense of how people think of animals in order to rationalize their mistreatment and slaughter. There might be a better way to stick the landing by rephrasing it some other way, but I do think the use of "inhuman" in the first sentence grates against common usage and apprehension.
By happenstance I read this one right after the post entitled "Most Arguments For Nature Clearly Prove Too Much" and I'm struck by a juxtaposition of these two. The alternative for these animals isn't a paradise, it's the Brutal Forest. Or at best, non-existence.
But if we accept non-existence as a clear improvement over either the Torture Factory or the Brutal Forest, is the correct course of action to scorch the earth and kill all animals now so there are no future suffering animals?
How do you reconcile these without spiraling into nihilism?
I started reading this blog a couple days ago, so if this was addressed in any other entries, I would be happy to be pointed there!
The alternative is non-existence. Yes, I do support lowering wild animal populations. I don't support causing human extinction because I think the future could be very good.
But this isn't an argument for just "lowering" animal populations, is it? There's no threshold where a wild carnivore does not either inflict massive amounts of harm doing what it instinctively does to feed itself, or else suffer massive amounts of harm from starving to death slowly.
Is the argument zoos? That a small amount of "wild" animals should be put into nature preserves where they are fed and cared for without need to hunt other living creatures. (I'm sure there will be ways we can feed even obligate carnivores with lab-based meat or something like that.)
But even in that case, the gilded cage aspects of such an existence will also spur further moral catastrophe.
I'd want to keep some around for fear of irreversible environmental degredation and existential risks (which I regard as low but non-zero).
That seems pretty unsatisfying. Letting animals suffer in the brutal forest for the sake of possible future rewards for humans seems dangerously close to exploiting animals for their flesh (in direction if not degree).
Besides, are there any guarantees that the "good future" comes from humans and not a species evolved from another animal in the future? In that case, severely decreasing the animal population would likely destroy the biodiversity required for intelligence to arise again.
It seems like we'd be in a better position to talk about how we can best address the suffering of the remaining wild animals *after* we successfully stop committing horrific acts against the ones we directly breed into existence.
We have many billions of animals that we actively breed into existence every year whose circumstances (and birth itself) are directly under our control, and that's the most immediately tractable animal suffering problem.
Things like "what about the last few animals needed to be retained in some capacity for biospheres to function" completely ignores the first and most important step we can actually take right now.
I think it's important to address the inevitable conclusions of the logic and arguments you use because that's a prime way to uncover fallacies and bad assumptions.
I don't know what those problems are with this argument. Everything that goes into this argument seems quite sound, yet it leads to a surprising (to me at least) conclusion about how to improve animal welfare, especially if you take the argument that wild animals live in the Brutal Forest seriously. And maybe we shouldn't, but I also don't see a problem with noting that most wild animals' lives are short, brutal, and painful.
But if the conclusion is genuinely that we should kill all animals and stop all animals from being born because nature is red in tooth and claw and the prevented animal suffering is important, that seems like a completely different path to take, with different actions and priorities than any animal welfare groups are taking today.
Wow. This is all pathos with no ethos or logos. I'd be convinced if I was a 15-year-old. Where's the discussion of Halal, which will be defended culturally by those of a sinister persuasion but which has effectively destroyed animal rights, which were improving. I know that's whataboutery, but I'm just wondering who the audience is for this essay. Did you write it after doom-scrolling animal abuse? I'd like to do better. I don't eat veal. But...what is this?
I haven't the foggiest clue what you're saying about Halal. I am against it, but don't see why there's special need to discuss it.
Is there no logos? I would think it was a perfectly logical argument--one that we'd accept in all other contexts--to claim that something is bad by describing ways that it involves horrifically mistreating sentient beings in grotesque ways. It would not be an illogical argument against, say, the Khmer Rouge to note in emotive terms that they engaged in horrendous mass slaughter.
Is there some particular argument that you think is worth addressing that I didn't against my thesis?
Ngl pretty silly comment. It’s very obvious what Matthew is doing, and the fact that you can’t see that, and knowingly used a whataboutism, you might still be 15 mentally
This may be persuasive in the purely abstract sense but it's not going to motivate many to change their behavior. It certainly isn't going to motivate me to change my behavior. I know that if I change my behavior the average suffering and death of animals will be reduced by, at most, a trivial amount. This isn't going to stop until it becomes practical to have tasty food without killing animals.
Luckily it is currently practical to have tasty food without killing animals.
It's not practical to give up meat and cheese for worse alternatives. Clearly people like real meat and cheese enough that they don't give them up. Most people are aware that animals are treated poorly. I'm saying that the mass killing of animals won't stop until there are plant-based alternatives that are both cheaper, and nearly indistinguishable from the given animal product. We are not there yet.
Plenty of people have given up meat and cheese already. My wife did it almost two decades ago with vastly inferior options. I don’t think alternative options need to be a one-to-one reproduction for people to make that change.
They don't need to be a one-to-one reproduction for an extremely small minority of people to give up meat and cheese sure. But I'm talking about the end of the mass killing of animals. For that, you need most people to give up eating animal products. Most people are not going to do that unless they can continue living their life as they currently do.
Wait why would veganism reduce suffering and death by “a trivial amount”? The average person eats 23 chickens a year, over 1,500 in a lifetime. That’s not a trivial amount of suffering and death!
First, I don't think it's reasonable to assume there's a direct correlation between the number of chickens one individual consumes and the number of chickens that would be saved had that individual not bought them. Second, I think 1500 over the course of a whole human lifetime is actually a trivial amount.
To your first first point, I would encourage you to do more research on the causal efficacy of veganism. BB has an article:
https://open.substack.com/pub/benthams/p/the-causal-inefficacy-objection-is?utm_campaign=posts-open-in-app
To your second point, if you think sparing 1500 animals from extreme torture is trivial, then clearly you haven’t yet recognized that animals matter morally.
I started reading this other article and something seems very fishy here. It seems extremely suspicious to me to suggest that the market for chicken is sensitive enough to detect a single individual's choices. I would suspect that the assumption that we have no reason to think we won't trigger any thresholds is wrong. In the case of an incredibly large market, it seems very likely that a single individual's consumption will not trigger any thresholds.
Well perhaps it would be worth *finishing* the article to see why that is, in fact, almost a logical truth.
I did finish the article. I have no idea how it's a logical truth. It seems obviously false. We have extremely good reason to think that, in large markets, our individual consumption habits won't trigger a threshold. I think this point was made very clear in this reply to your post: https://www.outrageousfortune.ca/p/duking-it-out-with-bentham-and-amos?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=2lfc1t&triedRedirect=true
I can recognize that animals matter morally without 1500 animals being motivating enough to stop be from eating meat. The question is not whether they matter. The question is which desire is greater: eating animal products or saving some quantity of animals. I think it's quite obvious that 1500 over a lifetime is nowhere near enough to outweigh the desire to consume animal products.
Why is this obvious? What number would make it no longer obvious to you, and why that number?
To me, the opposite conclusion is obvious, because the downside, suffering caused by factory farming, seems clearly bigger than the upside, which is the average marginal increase in enjoyment of an animal-based food over a plant-based food. This comparison seems obvious to me because if you made me choose between spending 15 minutes experiencing any of the common factory farming abuses and spending 15 minutes eating a plant-based meal instead of an animal-based one, I would choose the latter quite easily. If I loosen this somewhat to account for valuing my own interests somewhat more than others', it doesn't meaningfully change the conclusion - even if the choice were 1 minute of the former vs 15 minutes of the latter, it still wouldn't be a tough call.
Maybe this decision isn't so obvious to you, but I struggle to see how the opposite could be.
Now it just seems like you’re not talking about morality anymore. Sure, you can *say* that you don’t care enough to stop causing the torture of 1,500 animals at very little cost to yourself. But that’s clearly not a good moral justification for causing animal torture.
It sounds almost like you’re asking “why should I not do what is deeply wrong?” But this is a question about our psychology, not morality per se. And there’s little l can say in the way of this question, except perhaps to point out how you probably wouldn’t tolerate it if you found out your neighbor was torturing 23 dogs in his basement per year thanks to your generous financial contributions.
I'm not a moral realist. When I talk about morality, I'm talking about people's preferences. You're correct that I wouldn't be ok the scenario described. But luckily for me, that is not the same scenario.
I am not committed to the existence of moral facts. I'm simply describing what I think are people's preferences. I think the case of slavery is very similar. It wasn't stopped until it became practical for it to be stopped. The reason your example sounds so strange now, is that today, people's preferences about slavery are wildly different than those held in the past. Today, many would think that the difference of one less slave is worth the loss of convenience. However, many of those same people would not consider the quantity of animals saved by going vegan sufficient to offset the inconvenience. It's just a matter of people's preferences. And I don't think those preferences will change much unless it becomes much more practical to be vegan.
Personally, as a vegan, I sometimes struggle to combat arguments from others that espouse benign carnivorism. I personally don't believe the utilitarian math works out, but other vegans and utilitarians seem to have no problem with it. Do you think you could discuss this at some point? The main source I have seen is Jeff McMahan's "Eating animals the nice way".
https://benthams.substack.com/p/against-eating-happy-animals
This article seems pretty lazy, in not doing anything to quantify the relative costs consuming different animals. It's no different, conceptually, from insisting that right now, humans are being tortured and killed in various gruesome and horrific ways, and that we must, therefore, espouse anti-natalism, and avoid any activities that incentivize natalism. Obviously, the response to the latter would be an attempt at quantification - even of the back of the envelope sort, which is missing from the article.
The central claim seems to be that consumption of animals is clearly a massive net-negative for animal welfare, across the board. You only support this with a single citation in a comment: https://benthams.substack.com/p/inhuman/comment/185978205: citing: https://benthams.substack.com/p/against-eating-happy-animals.
That article, itself, seems to start off with the sort of carelessness for rigor characteristic of demagogues. Specifically, it asserts "It’s very difficult to know that you’re actually eating animals that live good lives. Many supposedly humane farms engage in routine mistreatment like physical abuse, beating animals to death against the pavement, and more."
Do we have any order of magnitude estimates for how common it is for supposedly humane farms to engage in abuse? Is it 1/3, 1/10, 1/100, 1/1,000,000? The order of magnitude estimate can't be trivially ignored. Everything we do - including things with high expected values, carries some risk.
That article's citation for the claim that "Many supposedly humane farms engage in routine mistreatment like physical abuse," is this page: https://web.archive.org/web/20221105024449/https://animalequality.org/blog/the-cruelty-of-chicken-farming/, of which the relevant portion states:
"Our investigations and campaigns are helping millions of chickens who would otherwise suffer much more. While we work to prevent animal abuse, we also fight against deceptive advertising to consumers. Many companies advertise meat products using images of happy animals living outside and terms like “free-range,” “natural,” and “humane.” We’ve brought legal challenges against corporations for false animal welfare and sustainability claims and prevented them from continuing to deceive consumers.
Exposing Abuse in a ‘Humane’ Hatchery (2021)..."
There are a few issues with this. First, they put 'humane' in scare quotes, but they don't even claim explicitly that that was wording used by that facility. Second, they provide no evidence for any of their claims, referencing court cases, but not linking them, or court findings. Third, the particular forms of abuse you allege aren't actually listed in the article you link to support it. Fourth, there's not even a ballpark order of magnitude estimate for the frequency of any of this, to allow for reasonable cost benefit analysis. Fifth, while it may be true that people may be fooled by advertising, that hardly implies that people can't avoid being fooled by advertising, which is the operative issue.
For example, perhaps certifying agencies can set specific standards. Is abuse present to meaningful degree in that context? These are the operative sorts of questions that the would-be benign carnivore to whom the article is nominally directed would ask.
Your next link is for the statement "Undercover reports routinely uncover horrifying abuses of animals." This is again avoids quantifying anything actually relevant. Many animals are abused. Okay. Are animals abused in ways contrary to what consumers are told, and more importantly, is there any way that consumers can know what they're getting into? Again, this is the operative question, and it's being conflated with other questions like "are animals sometimes abused."
The linked PETA article doesn't really contain anything relevant, either. It says that many eggs are labelled-cage free, but the hens still live uncomfortably, outside of cages. So it sounds like PETA is claiming that the advertising is then...accurate. And that consumers simply need to know the implications of specific advertising. What does cage-free mean, what does free-range mean, etc.
You then assert: "Nice-sounding labels often mask dark realities. Certified Humane Eggs come from animals who go so insane that they need to be debeaked, who are crammed into small barns without enough space to turn around, leading to prolonged stress."
Again, in fine rhetorical form, you use the weasel-word "often," which sounds impressive, but means nothing. On to the claim itself, we're taken to a page stating:
"The label “Animal Certified Care” doesn’t mean much. It’s the same as above with the chickens. The label was just a way for more people to buy the eggs if they thought the eggs were cared for. But it’s a misnomer."
Again, while you present this as current fact, it's actually just an article from 2009 summarizing a book from 2006, with no evidence presented, whatsoever. The previous link from PETA alleged consumers may not always understand the implication of labels. What did this certifying group guarantee as far as treatment, and did they meet those standards? We aren't told? We're just given a claim that some certification existed that didn't actually do anything, at all. With a quick internet search, I find no reference to such a label, at all. Perhaps something was lost through the series of citations, perhaps the claim is simply false, or perhaps it's just decades out of date.
Regardless, again, the operative questions are whether you can know what you're eating, not whether you could be fooled about what you're eating, and the actual frequency of abuse.
The article then claims that cage-free chicken may be treated poorly and that the term "free-range" isn't regulated on a federal level.
The former would be a good reason to understand the implications of different labels, it hardly precludes consumers gleaning useful animal-welfare related information for labels, any more than the existence of food that's marketed as "trans-fat free," but contains saturated fat precludes consumers from being able to eat healthfully, on the basis of labels.
The latter is again obviously irrelevant. It may be relevant if the question is whether a consumer could be fooled by advertising, but it obviously says little about the question of whether a consumer can know what they're consuming. Certifying agencies can set their own standards, regardless of the existence of federal standards. [The linked article doesn't even currently claim that there's no federal standard for free-range - just that standards vary among certifying agencies, which doesn't preclude the existence of universal minimum. Indeed, it seems that in reality, the opposite is the case: https://www.ams.usda.gov/publications/qa-shell-eggs. But of course, that's entirely besides the point, as noted.]
You insist here that "The myth that we are told as children is that animals spend their days in humane little barns that dot the countryside. The reality is that virtually no animals spend their time in such conditions," but you don't say anything about whether about there's a way to know whether animals are actually living like that - just that most aren't.
You rant and rave against cage-free eggs and free-range eggs, but don't tell us whether any certifications claim to provide the portrayed idyllic treatment. In point of fact, they do, and in the case of chickens, it's called 'pasture-raised.'
Is the certification accurate, such that the vast majority are indeed treated to that lifestyle? What's a rough back of the envelope calculation for the average welfare of hens with such certifications. These would be the relevant questions that could be addressed to support the claims being made.
The article then references a Vox article, which has some of its own factual issues, and is likely outdated, but I'll move past that, for now.
It then goes on to make very dubious consequentialist claims. Namely, that even if a consumer can consume ethical meat, that that'll lead others to imitate them and eat unethical meat, and that the most effective way to convince people to eat ethically is to be completely vegan and preach full veganism,
This is presented as a key argument, but seems to be pure speculation, at best. Vegans are notorious for being bad at convincing people to change their behavior! I suspect that the animal-welfare costs of omnivores could be much more effectively reduced by telling them the truth about the relative welfare costs of consuming different animal products (which likely vary by multiple orders of magnitude: https://reducing-suffering.org/how-much-direct-suffering-is-caused-by-various-animal-foods/, as well as by explaining which certifications exist, what their standards are, and how reliable they are. Regarding the effectiveness of this approach vs. the vegan advocacy you prefer, note my comment here: https://fakenous.substack.com/p/preachy-vegans-2/comment/49153476.
Importantly, this last argument is mostly about whether ethical omnivorism is *as ethical* as veganism, which is distinct from the question of whether it's a net positive from a consequentialist (or other) perspective.
There are too many other logical and factual problems with these posts to fit in this comment, but note that you misrepresent a figure about the proportion of *farmed* animals that factory farmed as the proportion of *consumed* animals that are factory farmed, and that that figure is derived based on the number of animals per farm (not even the density!) and isn't defined in terms of welfare standards. Importantly, even by their numbers, a full quarter of cows aren't "factory farmed."
I always appreciate these occasional post about animal welfare because it is indeed very important considering the amount of pain.
Please see Chris Jones for a material analysis of factory / big-ag farming practices. Humanism and empathic arguments are for now a dead ender — too many “rationalists” easily obfuscate these rather common sense notions ironically. Only way to cut the noise is by materialism. If you want to save the chickens and the pigs we better think hard about how materially they exist in the world.