Miscellaneous Musings on Meat

It's bad

Almost everything that almost everyone says about meat-eating is stupid. Not everyone certainly, but most people. Usually, this isn’t because they’re dumb people but just because they haven’t thought about it much. But this is quite a screwed-up state of affairs. If you do something multiple times per day that millions of people think is seriously immoral—the worst thing you’re doing by far—then you should think about it for more than 5 minutes. Unfortunately, most people don’t do this, largely because most people are motivated by social conformity and use morality as a cudgel to favor the things that they feel passionately about. Most people care very little about morality in the abstract.

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The worst crimes in history generally take place because they’re out of sight and out of mind. Ordinary Germans had heard stories about the terrible things going on in the Nazi death camps and had heard discussions of various massacres. Still, the worst excesses of them were things that they just didn’t spend much time thinking about. So if we you want to know where our society is going wrong, look to the places that everyone sort of knows about in the back of their minds but that almost no one seriously investigates. Two issues that are like that: donating to charities that can save huge numbers of lives and refraining from paying for the flesh of animals who lived their entire lives in unfathomable agony.

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People find it deeply offensive when one compares factory farming to other atrocities like slavery and the holocaust. Now, this is in large part because people don’t like to be told that they’re complicit in one of history’s greatest crimes. But if holocaust comparisons are ever fair, then they’re fair here—billions of being are been kept in confinement to be killed later, often by gassing, often in ways that are far worse than gassing. If this was happening to humans, we’d call these death camps and call the practice a holocaust.

Now, perhaps you think that animals don’t matter much—that we can torture them for trivial pleasure and it isn’t a huge deal. But that requires a justification, and no justification that I know of that is remotely plausible has ever been given. Most of the justifications, such as the claim that we can torture animals to eat them because they’re not smart, would imply that it would be okay to reopen Auschwitz and Treblinka as long as we filled them only with the most mentally disabled.

Given that 92.2 billion land animals are killed every year, as long as you think that the death of an animal after it was tortured for its entire life is even slightly bad, factory farming will come in as one of the worst crimes in human history.

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One thing that the Israel-Hamas war reminded me of is how self-righteous people are about morality when condemning others. Many of the same people who have eventually admitted that eating meat is seriously morally wrong, that factory farming is one of the worst crimes in history, get on their high horse to condemn Israeli or Hamas actions with such great zeal. How does one simultaneously hold in their minds: 1) factory farming is the worst thing ever and paying for it is seriously morally wrong, 2) I pay for it, 3) wow, it’s so outrageous that those facing serious security threats are acting immorally. If you’re not willing to give up gustatory pleasure to end complicity in a crime of unspeakable proportions, you have no right to judge anyone else for their moral failings.

Note, here I’m only discussing those who think meat-eating is immoral but do it anyway. If you don’t think it’s wrong, I think you’re wrong, but you’re not necessarily a hypocrite. However, if you think it’s gravely morally wrong but do it anyway, then you are a hypocrite and have no right to condemn others for their moral failings.

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There’s something very amusing about those who get extremely outraged about bestiality. I agree, bestiality is seriously immoral. But there’s something pretty rich about those who pay for dairy cows to be held down and artificially inseminated (a procedure we would not hesitate to call rape if inflicted on any human) and chickens to live their entire life in tiny cages where they can’t move and live in shit, who endure brutal castration and mutilation, getting self-righteous about bestiality on the grounds that it’s cruel to animals or that animals can’t consent.

If they can’t consent to sex, do you think they can consent to be tortured, killed, and turned into hamburgers? If bestiality is wrong, then why isn’t it wrong to pay for dairy cows to be held down and have bull semen injected into them as they try to get away?

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I think that a lot of the opposition to veganism comes from the just world bias. I remember the first time I ever heard about ethical vegans, I assumed that animals must be mindless automatons because surely our society wouldn’t kill them for food if they weren’t (no joke, I thought some pretty dumb things)! It’s difficult and distressing to believe that the thing that almost everyone does multiple times every day is very evil and that you yourself have been engaged in evil for many years. But if one looks at human history, they’ll see that most people doing lots of immoral things is the rule rather than the exception.

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Veganism is a rare issue where nature-loving hippies and philosophers are in agreement.

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There are various ways that one can reduce their meat consumption, at the margins, at small costs. For example, only consume small portions so that you don’t waste large amounts of food. For another, when there are two foods that taste pretty similarly good, take the fact that one of them contains animal products to be a significant pro tanto consideration. Finally, eat less chicken and eggs—even if you replace them with beef. Chickens and eggs are the cruelest animal products because chickens are small and lay few eggs, meaning that eating them causes lots of extra factory farming. Here’s a chart showing that as well as the methodology:

So even if you don’t plan to go vegan, try to reduce your meat consumption at the margins.

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The basic argument against eating meat is utterly trivial. Most of us recognize that it’s wrong to harm animals—it’s wrong to beat a dog for fun. But the average meat eaters causes animals to endure hundreds of years of extreme suffering. If you stop eating meat but start torturing your dog, total animal suffering will decrease. So if it’s wrong to torture a dog, then it’s also wrong to pay for meat, which comes from animals who lived in conditions of extreme agony. Eating meat causes much more animal cruelty than merely beating a dog so if beating a dog is wrong, so too must eating meat be wrong.