The Torture Party

Why the Republican party is on the hook for, in expectation, torturing and killing perhaps 10 billion babies.

I’d tend to vote Democrat in most elections. I wouldn’t, for instance, vote for Trump given that I don’t like his policies on most things and find him unstable and erratic. But most of the time, I don’t think who to vote for is an obvious call: I think it’s genuinely hard to know which party is better given their vastly different priorities and the complexity of politics. I don’t think that anymore.

All across the country, Republican states are working to ban lab meat. It’s been banned in Florida and many other states are working to ban it, all over the country. I don’t say this lightly: banning lab-grown meat is the single most consequential issue in our politics by an order of magnitude and I will never support a party that supports its ban.

The excuses for banning meat are pitiful and have to do mostly with cynical political considerations. Lab meat offers a healthier alternative to the current meat industry that’s better for the environment, less likely to start pandemics, and better for the animals. Yet because it threatens cattle ranchers, numerous states are banning it.

I’ve elsewhere argued that factory farming is the worst thing in the world by quite a sizeable margin. Every year, a population of land animals roughly equivalent to the number of people who have ever been born are bred into existence, locked into tiny torturous cages, and killed for food. The total amount of suffering caused by factory farms every few years outstrips all suffering in human history. Even by extremely conservative estimates of the badness of factory farms, because of the endless quantity of suffering it causes, it easily wins out as the worst thing ever.

Even if you think that animal suffering is only 1% as consequential as human suffering—a totally unjustified prejudice—factory farming is still easily the worst thing in the world. The torture and murder of a population many times larger than the number of humans on Earth every year is so much more significant than, say, whether there are government tax cuts.

Lab meat offers the potential to end these factory farms. It’s predicted by betting markets that by 2037, lab meat is decently likely to be cheaper than regular meat. Once it’s cheaper and healthier, people are likely to eat it instead. Just as people are unconvinced by vegan moral appeals when meat is cheap, convenient, and healthy, when people taste lab meat that looks, tastes, and feels like chicken, and is cheaper than regular chicken, shrill squeaks from the animal torture industry are likely to be ignored.

Suppose that conservative policies delay the advent of lab meat by a year. Just to make the math easier, assume that there’s a 30% chance that meat gets fully phased out when lab meat takes over (which is decently likely—people are more likely to be convinced by moral appeals not to eat animal flesh when they are no longer eating animal flesh). Note, I think this is relatively conservative: lab meat bans might delay the industry by longer and may increase the amount of factory farming every year for many years, rather than just quickening the demise of the industry.

Meat production is only increasing. So let’s even conservatively assume that meat production will only be 100 billion per year by the time lab meat replaces it. Well, that means that these bans will be good for resulting in the extra torture and murder of, on average, 30 billion animals. These are pretty conservative estimates.

Now, lots of people think animals don’t matter much because they aren’t very smart and they suffer less intensely. The most up-to-date report finds that the animals we eat mostly suffer about a third as intensely as people. It’s true that they aren’t as smart, but babies and some mentally disabled people are around as smart as animals. So then lab meat bans, by these conservative assumptions, are only as bad as bringing into existence, torturing, and killing around 10 billion infants.

. Even if you think that it’s, for some reason, only 1% as bad as that, then the lab meat ban is as bad as bringing into existence, torturing, and killing 100 million infants or severely mentally disabled people. That’s something worth being a single-issue voter for!

When one realizes that the degree of suffering in factory farms is truly beyond decent contemplation, that the total amount of suffering easily outstrips the most horrendous of human crimes by orders of magnitude, it becomes clear that factory farming is the only really important issue. Welfare, taxes, foreign policy—all of that is thousands of times less important than ending these animal Treblinkas, where billions go to be tortured and then die, locked in tiny cages, in constant pain, wheezing and coughing from the shit surrounding them, never getting the chance to have joy or see the sun.

While it’s easy to ignore the caged hens, gassed pigs, and macerated baby chicks—who are ground up on the scale of several billion a year because they can’t lay eggs—they’re so much more consequential than anything else we discuss. This isn’t the kind of issue you can ignore and keep supporting your preferred political party. The torture of literally billions of animals is so much more consequential than anything else. If Biden supported banning lab meat, I’d support Trump in a heartbeat.

There is nothing else on earth where the scale of death and destruction approaches anything like that in the factory farms. There is nothing else where so many cry out in pain, where so many know neither joy nor human kindness. And while animals are unlike us in many ways, they are like us in that they can suffer. When one suffers in boredom or extreme agony, when one coughs and wheezes from the feces and ammonia that they live in twenty-four hours a day, the badness of that has nothing to do with one’s SAT score or species. Suffering’s badness comes from the nature of what suffering is, from how it feels, not any extrinsic features like the intelligence of the sufferer (if one took a pill that made them dumb before a surgery, that would not reduce the badness of the suffering during the surgery).

Hell exists on earth today, and one of the major political parties is fighting to preserve it.

The party of Lincoln and Reagan has become the torture party. And I will not support the torture party.