Published Defenses of Eating Meat Fail: Part 1
Addressing part of the scholarly literature's paltry poultry defenses
There’s an extremely strong prima facie case against eating meat. It causes unimaginable suffering for trivial benefits. Maybe an hour of meat consumption causes weeks of torture in the most brutal conditions imaginable.
Naturally, some scholarly articles have attempted to defend eating meat. These have been published in well-regarded, respected journals. I’ve already replied to one of these articles — a defense of animal cruelty by the execrable Timothy Hsiao, who sees nothing wrong with causing any amount of suffering for any benefit, however minor.
Other defenses of eating meat are generally a bit better. Though the arguments are poor, and they collapse under even fairly minor scrutiny. All as one would expect. There isn’t a good defense of our campaign of unprecedented torture, brutalization, mutilation, sexual abuse, and slaughter. However, lots of people really would like to think that it’s okay to eat meat. Thus, we’d expect people to rise up defending the practice of eating meat — providing the best arguments they can, however weak they are. This is exactly what we see.
We’d also expect the arguments to deflect from the real issue — focusing on hypothetical examples of eating meat, rather than the examples that occurs in the real world. This is also what we see. The question of whether animals have rights or whether it’s okay to eat animals that live great lives may be an interesting one, but it’s totally irrelevant to the main issues around animal rights. Let’s grant that animals have no rights and it’s okay to eat happy animals. Fine. None of that bears at all on the question of whether the vicious torture and mutilation that most people pay for regularly. It’s just distractions. So here I’ll review some attempted defenses of eating meat, and explain why they fail.
Our Alleged Moral Duty to Eat Meat
Nick Zangwill has a paper titled Our Moral Duty to Eat Meat. It’s a bold title. Unfortunately, the paper argues nothing of the sort. Instead, it argues that if animals live good lives, eating them is permissible — obligatory even. Zangwill spends pages going on and on about the virtues of eating animals if doing this is good for animals — because of symbiotic relationships, and so on. However, Zangwill ignores the crucial problem — in order for this to be a defense of eating meat, one has to show that the animals do in fact live good lives. Zangwill doesn’t even attempt this. It is as if he’s never even considered the question — instead just taking it as an axiom that the animals actually live good lives.
Of course, if you review the publicly available information about the lives of animals on factory farms, it becomes extremely clear that they’re not living good lives. I’ve documented this extensively. Most animals live lives totally indistinguishable from the lives of the victims of the worst atrocities in human history.
Most of the animals we factory farmed are crammed in dark, tiny cages, unable to adequately turn around, forced to live in feces their entire lives. They’re killing in horrible ways — billions of beings are ground up in blenders, to give one notable example. A sober look at what actually goes on in factory farms — not in some fairytale that Zangwill imagines the meat industry looks like — it becomes overwhelmingly obvious that eating meat is impermissible. This is so even if all of Zangwill’s arguments succeed.
Many of Zangwill’s arguments are dubious, for example, the claim that there’s some fundamental difference between our obligations to beings when we are and when we aren’t in symbiotic relationships with them. A more thorough reply would go through and enumerate all of the many errors in the paper. But none of that matters much — it’s mostly irrelevant to the topic of whether actually existing meat consumption is permissible. John and Sebo also provide compelling reasons why we shouldn’t be okay with eating even those animals that live good lives.
Thus, this defense fails utterly. It might work for defending what people would like to believe the meat industry looks like, but it certainly doesn’t work for defending the real, actually existing meat industry.
Is it wrong to eat animals?
Lomasky has paper arguing that it’s okay to eat animals. This paper represents an absurd underestimation of just how cruel factory farms are. He claims that eating animals is fine if one gains more benefits from eating meat. He then spends many pages describing how nice meat is. The benefits he describes from meat are six fold.
The fact that meat tastes nice and looks nice.
Meals can be artfully constructed.
Eating meat can bring cultures together.
Meat can be part of rich traditions.
Some meals are so good that they’re remembered for a long time.
Meals can be talked about.
In response to this, a few things are notable. One of them is that these are all enormous stretches. While it’s true that meat can be and is talked about sometimes, this is not the primary benefit of meat. Nor is the artful construction of meals or the fact that they bring cultures together. Only a very small part of the benefit of sushi is that it brings cultures together — a much larger part is the fact that it tastes nice.
Second, even if these are sufficiently worthy goals to sanction eating meat, they don’t apply to the vast majority of meat consumption. They provide no defense for the person who wants to justify buying chicken for a random meal rather than tofu — or ordering from chick-fil-A. Presumably, most meals do not produce the types of wonderful, transformative experiences that are imagined by Lomasky to be commonplace.
Third, all of these things also apply to the consumption of plants. If the world stopped eating meat, presumably we would continue eating. Plants consumed would produce the same benefits of bringing together culture, being part of a tradition, and so on.
Fourth, even if all these benefits would evaporate entirely, that would be a miniscule price to pay to end the horrific torture chambers that torture and kill ten times as many beings every year as there are people.
As is typical, the horrendous conditions of factory farms are glossed over with abstractions. Lomasky’s only note on the unimaginable cruelty that goes on in factory farms is the following “For every pork chop eaten, some pig has died. More precisely, some pig has been killed. If pigs and other animals possess interests, then these are set back by being slaughtered as food for human beings. Nor is their killing painless.”
This is rather like declaring that “for every piece of information extracted at Guantanamo, some people had to be harmed. Nor is this harm painless.”
Lomasky next declares “From these plain facts it does not follow forthwith that the killing of animals for food is morally condemnable, but it does mean that there are reasons counting against the moral acceptability of meat consumption. Harms visited on animals constitute the most compelling reasons for rejecting their consumption as food.” Of course, we’d have to actually conduct a thorough analysis. This analysis would involve comparing both the harms and the benefits of factory farms. However, an analysis of this sort was systematically ignored in the paper.
One way to approach the alleged moral wrongness of killing animals for food is to ask which is the greater in magnitude: harm to the animal or benefit to its eater? Put in this way, the question looks to be insoluble. Interpersonal utility comparisons are tricky enough when performed between human beings, but when implemented interspecies the quandaries are redoubled.
Of course, Lomasky later notes that we can often make confident claims when engaging in interpersonal comparison of utility, noting “Nonetheless, we have some confidence in issuing judgments such as ‘Mary's migraine headache is much worse for her than is John's stubbed toe for him.'” The question is whether animal torment is sufficiently bad that it outweighs the benefits to humans. Lomasky notes that we should have uncertainty about how bad animal suffering is. This is true, however, just as it may be much less bad than we think, so too may it be much worse. For example, kids who are less cognitively sophisticated than adults seem capable of experiencing far more pleasure and pain than adults. This should lead us to have some credence in animals suffering being worse.
While it is of course rather difficult to know precisely how bad various things are for animals, there is a pretty good indicator. When animals are shrieking in agony, when they try to escape, when we have solid evolutionary reason to expect something to harm them, and when we know that something harms humans, we have a pretty good idea that animals aren’t enjoying it. All of these are present for many of the things that go on in factory farms.
Take one example that illustrates just how horrible these things are. Animals’ slaughter is pretty awful. First is transport, in which vast numbers of animals are stuffed into trucks. The conditions are awful. To quote one source “in many cases animals suffer fatal heart attacks brought on by the high level of stress as a result of the transport conditions.” They additionally note
In addition to the stress of an unfamiliar environment, animals face unique challenges during this time, including:
Weather conditions: heat, sun, cold and wind. The lack of ventilation can cause overheating of their enclosures;
A lack of food and water, which can lead to exhaustion, weakness, and dehydration;
Being forced to stay on foot for long periods of time, which can lead to great tiredness and fatigue;
Wounds and other physical harm from fights that can occur between the animals, due to the highly stressful situation;
Jostling associated with road travel, including potholes, traffic, the speed of the vehicle, and roundabouts;
Slips, bangs, and falls against the walls of the truck or the crates in which the animals are transported, which can cause wounds, internal hemorrhages, and broken bones;
Overcrowding of the animals, which can cause suffocation.
Egg-laying birds, principally those raised in battery cages, are the most likely to suffer from broken bones during transport.3 This is because they spend their entire lives confined in cages without the possibility of moving their wings or exercising their muscles, causing their bones to become weak and brittle.4 The poor living conditions results in a 26% death rate among hens5 and a 15% among male chickens during the transport to the slaughterhouse.6
So the conditions are so horrible that a huge portion of animals die. And this is before they get to the slaughterhouse.
When they do, they’re held upside down by their leg — often breaking it, before being sent across a conveyor belt to have a knife dragged across their throat, before being sent into boiling water. Oftentimes, the knife and stunning fail, leading to around half a million birds being boiled alive.
Let’s ignore all fish. This means that the average person eats around 2500 animals. This is, taking into account elasticity, going to result in around 1875 extra animals being sent to slaughterhouses, on average, ignoring all fish. This means that, every fifteen or so days, the average American — who lives to around 77 — forces one other animal to be sent through transport and slaughtered.
If you had to experience the slaughterhouse process every fifteen or so days — experience dying horribly — you would certainly stop eating meat. Even if animals experience it a little bit less intensely, it’s still sufficiently horrific that we should expect it to cause far more suffering than the benefits that we get from it.
Thus, even if animals were robots up until the moment of transport, eating meat would still be seriously wrong. And transport and slaughter are a minuscule portion of the total suffering of the factory farms. Animals suffer in these cruel farms for weeks before being sent to slaughter.
So, even if the harms of factory farms were maybe 5% of what they actually are, factory farms would clearly be atrocious. And we should expect this to be an underestimate — for we’re biased in favor of eating meat. It’s much harder to convince a man of a position when his dinner is riding on him not being convinced of it.
While Lomasky spends many words gushing about how great meat is, he totally ignores all of the costs of meat. He ignores the vast amount of antibiotic resistance caused by the consumption of meat — as well as the devastating environmental harms. To quote my earlier article on the subject.
Yet even if we ignored the brutal torture of billions of animals we’d still conclude that factory farming must end. The end of it would massively improve health. Healthline reviewed 16 studies veganism has a positive impact on health causing weight loss, drop in LDL cholesterol, reduced heart disease risk, vegans got more fiber, less fat, blood sugar lowering, etc. Casini et al in 2016 wrote in a comprehensive meta analysis
“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.”
When it comes to health, it’s not just that a plant based diet has been shown to be healthy and nutritionally adequate for all stages of life, including pregnancy and infancy, as stated by the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics. It’s that a whole-foods plant based diet has been shown to help the gut microbiome, reduce inflammation, lower high cholesterol and high blood pressure, boost your immune system and also reduce the risk of developing many leading chronic illnesses, such as heart disease, type two diabetes , strokes, certain forms of cancer such as colon, breast, and prostate and may even protect against cognitive decline.
Factory-farmed animals use two-thirds of the world’s antibiotics. The World health organization finds by 2050 anti biotic resistant microbes will kill 10 million people a year, which is more than cancer. Much of the antibiotic resistance comes from factory farms. Most new diseases come from animals. Factory farming is a breeding ground for new disease.
Factory farms also devastate the environment, contributing to large amounts of GHG emissions.
Take one example — the direct result of air pollution from farms kills thousands of Americans annually. The most detailed report is even more gloomy about the environmental devastation brought about by the livestock industry. On top of this, the industry causes enormous pandemic risks.
They also exacerbate the risks of pandemics and other disease. As Anomaly notes “Experts agree that most (and perhaps all) strains of the influenza virus that infect human beings originated from contact with other animals.” Later, he notes
There are several reasons factory farms seem to elevate the risk of novel viral outbreaks—especially variations of avian and swine flu. First, crowding animals together in close confinement can induce stress and suppress their immune systems, raising parasite loads and making animals more susceptible to infections; second, as all of us have learned after catching a cold in school or at work, viral transmission is facilitated by animals being kept in proximity to one another; third, close contact between different species of animals gives viruses a continuous opportunity to mutate and reassort to create new strains; fourth, many factory farms confine animals to indoor spaces that lack adequate sunlight or ventilation, which allows viruses to survive longer without a host; and finally, because animals on factory farms are often genetically similar, they can be more susceptible to specific parasites ( Crawford, 2000 ; Greger, 2007 ).
The situation on factory farms is in some ways analogous to that of overcrowded prisons ( Schmidt, 2009 ). Infectious diseases flourish in prisons for some of the same reasons: high stress and poor nutrition can impair people’s immune systems, and crowding permits a quick transfer of microbes and a continuous supply of hosts. This is one reason many experts believe pathogenic viruses like hepatitis have spread more rapidly in crowded prisons than in the surrounding population ( Bick, 2007 ).
This disease spreading is so common that Jones argues persuasively that eating meat is akin to not vaccinating, or doing other risky things that spread infectious disease unnecessarily,
Thus, even if you don’t think animals matter at all, you should probably still be opposed to factory farming. The fact that factory farming plausibly causes, every few years, more suffering than has occurred in all of human history makes it especially clear — factory farming delenda est.
Thus, this article is no more persuasive than the first one. It glosses over all the specific horrors of factory farms, and only highlights, in bizarrely great detail, just how lovely meat is. If it pays this much attention to the benefits of meat — cultural, and so on — it should at least take the time to note some of the horrors of factory farming, though noting all of them would be both fatal to the point of the paper and impossible; the crimes of the factory farms are too numerous to enumerate.
There are, of course, many more published defenses. I’ll probably write more posts replying to them. But for now, I think my comments have been sufficient to show the utter and total inadequacy of these accounts.
Of course, this argument is correct. But here is my sincere question:
Does it matter?
People have had these philosophical arguments at least since Peter Singer's original "Animal Liberation" article. And meat-eating has gone up and up and up. EA embraced the issue, and meat-eating has gone up and up and up. Climate change gets worse and meat-eating goes up and up and up. Even in Germany, where it has gone down a bit, each German is eating MORE factory-farmed animals.
Even the first poster here -- your own blog reader who is against factory farming for selfish reasons -- doesn't take philosophy seriously.
The question isn't: is it wrong? The question is: what can we do differently to change things?
https://www.onestepforanimals.org/about.html
Look. The problem with eating meat is not that one must belief trivial benefits outweigh incomprehensible animal siffering. That's easy enough to believe, just set the radius of your moral circle to between 8.4 and 10.6.
The TKO is what you say in the last part of your article. Eating meat is terrible for yourself, and, even worse, terrible for the planet. Climate Change, Superbugs, etc.
When one factor in how removing those costs would benefit society, eating meat in factory farms is basically blown out of the water. At worst any real and substantial benefits of meat can still be gained by reducing its consumption massively outside the factory farm context.
All the stuff about animal suffering is just utilitarian "total utility!!! Moral Circle!!! holocaust x1000!!!" grandstanding.