Alastair Norcross has a paper that starts with a pretty interesting analogy. Imagine a person is torturing puppies in their basement. However, the reason they’re doing this is that when they torture puppies, they’re able to extract a particular chemical from the puppies — this chemical makes chocolate taste better.
Norcross argues that this is perfectly analogous to eating meat, in most ordinary circumstances. When we eat meat, we cause animals to be tortured for mere taste pleasure. Sometimes it’s also because it’s a bit more convenient.
We — or at least those who eat meat — are like those who torture animals for fun. Sure, most of us don’t directly torture animals — but we pay others to torture animals so that we can eat their corpses. We subject them to the worst torture imaginable — conditions evocative of horror movies and nazi concentration camps — all for the tiniest of benefits. All because we enjoy the way that they taste.
How have the factory farms transformed us into such amoral monsters. Most of us like to think of ourselves as good people — ones willing to do the right thing, even at great personal cost. But when you point out that most people are paying for the worst torture that exists on the planet, all so they can have eggs, steak, and chicken sandwiches, they just accept it resignedly.
What happened to our desires to do the right thing? How did we become such a morally confused society that most people are fine with being complicit in horrendous atrocities? When did we become willing to accept that we were doing something deeply evil, without fretting at all?
Many people in tough times would be willing to engage in truly heroic action — to sacrifice themselves to save others or go to war, to fight for their country. People are willing to risk their life for the good sometimes — but they’re unwilling to give up a hamburger.
Every day, most people do something seriously morally wrong — something so abjectly horrible that they don’t want to hear about what it causes, they don’t want to hear about what goes on in the factory farms that they buy from. This isn’t because they’re horrible people — most people eat meat after all. It is because we’ve become desensitized to the concept of evil — willing to tolerate grave evils, or to come up with ridiculous tales about why the torture that we pay for in exchange for a few chicken nuggets aren’t really evil.
Throughout much of human history, slavery has been tolerated — very few philosophers have even bothered criticizing it. Factory farming is a practice that will one day be looked upon the way that slavery is. We will one day ask how people ate meat, when so many of the animals had their skin ripped off by pliers, or were castrated with no anesthetic, or were ground up in blenders, or were pounded to death against the concrete — their blood adorning the floor of the farm on which they’re raised. And the answer will be simple — we just didn’t care enough to stop eating meat.
Many people don’t know what goes on in factory farms. But most readers of this blog surely do. And most people, even after finding out that they’re paying for the worst torture imaginable, are perfectly willing to continue to eat animals.
Lots of meat eaters are perfectly nice people. And that’s one of the things that’s so sad about it. These people work at their local soup kitchens, help the poor, and are lovely, benevolent family members. Yet despite this, they cause more suffering through seemingly innocuous diet choices than hardened criminals who assault multiple people do. They will, over the course of their life, bring hundreds of extra animals into a torturous existence.
Kind people cause things on a regular basis that only psychopaths would intentionally cause. They haven’t really grappled with the moral implications of their meat consumption — and all of the horrors that come associated with it. Deep evil runs through the dinner plates of most Americans — and a huge percentage of people the world over.
This article doesn’t have any super deep meaning, nor action-guiding implications. It’s just a bit sad that billions of animals are tortured to death in the worst conditions imaginable, and nearly everyone is fine with that and participates in furthering their torture.
If we could agree to pass and enforce legislation ensuring animals in factory farms live lives at least marginally better than not being born, is there still a moral case for veganism? Wouldn’t you endorse factory farming then for repugnant conclusion type reasons?