Why a Simple Declaration That You Don’t Value Animals Does Not Diffuse the Arguments for Veganism
The position that animals don't matter at all is just crazy
Richard Hanania has an excellent article about eating meat (made especially great by its favorable citation of me), though unfortunately, he still eats meat, despite agreeing that factory farming is the worst crime in human history. Many people left comments explaining why they’re not vegan—some agreed that eating meat in normal circumstances is severely wrong, others did not. One person called a_perverse_sheaf left a comment that I think demonstrates a common, yet severely wrongheaded, belief about animals:
If someone is a materialist---meaning that they believe mental states, consciousness, etc. are the results of matter interacting with other matter---I don't really see why we can't just arbitrarily say "human suffering bad, other animal suffering meh."
Animal torture is just the rearrangement of a much of energy and matter. What's wrong with that if we're okay with letting people abuse their cars to the point there's a check engine light? Surely the check engine light, like pig squealing, is a form of suffering of a less complex system?
What makes human suffering different is that we are human, so we can adopt a very strong anthropic bias in our ethics.
The point about materialism seems broadly irrelevant to the argument—even if you weren’t a materialist, you could still say that you only care about animals (and you shouldn’t be a materialist, btw). Suffering may be caused by the rearrangement of matter and energy, but every plausible view will say that suffering exists, even if it is reducible to physical processes.
These odd claims about physicalism are not what this article is about though. The basic idea that lots of people, including a_perverse_sheaf, seem to have is that because our preferences are arbitrary, we can just choose to only include humans in our moral circle and there’s no issue with that. If we choose what to care about, if value is subjective as many people think it is, then we can just choose to exclude animals from our moral circle.
Now, one can, of course, dispute the metaphysics. I’ve argued for moral realism elsewhere, and if ethics is discovered rather than an arbitrary bundle of preferences, then we can’t just arbitrarily pick which beings to care about. But one doesn’t need to dispute the metaphysics at all—even if you’re a subjectivist, you should still think that animals matter. The view that animals don’t matter doesn’t really reflect the values of almost anyone who says that they don’t care about animals.
There are various simple cases that can illustrate this. For example, suppose that a person tortured ten cats a day. This person had so thoroughly internalized the view according to which animals don’t matter that it didn’t negatively affect their character at all. Most of us would still consider that wrong. Yet if one’s values don’t include animals, that wouldn’t be wrong at all.
(Something that isn’t wrong, apparently, if it didn’t corrupt the character of the person who did it).
People in reply often claim that we shouldn’t harm animals because it makes humans worse, but that they don’t matter in their own right—Michael Knowles claimed that recently. But this doesn’t preserve our commonsense intuitions. Let me list just three.
In the earlier case where the person tortures cats but is thoroughly desensitized such that it doesn’t make them worse, it still seems wrong to torture them. If we really imagine a person ripping apart a cat slowly with pliers, that seems obviously wrong. This would be so even if doing so didn’t make the person morally worse.
Suppose that we ran detailed tests and concluded that boxing had exactly the same negative impact on character as raping and torturing animals. Suppose one raped and tortured an animal while using very thorough protection, such that there was no risk of disease spreading. That would seem more wrong than boxing, even if they had the same effect on the person, yet this view entails that those would be equally wrong.
Suppose a fire burns to death 1,000,000 animals, but these animals are on a faraway planet where there are no humans, such that it doesn’t affect humans at all. That seems bad, but it wouldn’t be bad on this view.
In response to Richard’s article, someone on Twitter declares
But why does torturing dogs require having a mental disorder? If a person “tortured” plants, that would be weird, but it wouldn’t necessitate them having a mental disorder. If someone really enjoyed doing so, we wouldn’t see that as objectionable. So why do we see dog torture as objectionable? The reason is that most of us have the intuition that animal suffering is bad, and we should try to prevent it. This just seems like total cope—people don’t want to have to change their diet, despite the cruelty it causes, so they pretend to think animals don’t matter at all, and then provide obviously ludicrous replies to the arguments for veganism.
But the problem gets even worse. If one only cares about humans, as a species, then if we discovered people from Laos were, while physically and cognitively identical to us, not technically human—instead, they were a totally different species, almost identical in capacities—then it would be open season on torturing people from Laos for trivial benefits. This is not consistent with the values of anyone who isn’t an idiot or a psychopath—what makes it wrong to torture people is not their species but various facts about them. The reason the holocaust was wrong—or in the language of the subjectivist, not in accordance with my values, and the values of most subjectivists—had nothing to do with whether the victims of it turned out to be homo sapiens under a DNA test.
Imagine if a person tortured others horribly. However, when they were torturing them, they thought that, though they were fully conscious and intelligent, they were not homo sapiens. We would not think that their mistaken belief was an exoneration, the way we would if a crazy person didn’t realize they were torturing others. The reason for this is simple: The wrongness of torture is not about species membership.
So clearly people don’t only care about humans. Now, in response, one might say that they only care about beings that are smart. Animals, being very mentally enfeebled, don’t merit consideration. But this doesn’t reflect our values either. There are lots of humans who are more enfeebled than the animals we eat. We don’t think it’s okay to torture them. Torture is bad because it feels bad, not because the victim can do calculus and solve sudokus quickly.
In fact, babies are severely cognitively enfeebled too. Animals are much smarter than babies—they’re often as smart as toddlers. But most people are opposed to baby torture. And it’s not just because babies become smart in the future—most people don’t think you should torture terminally ill babies.
So let’s compare the views.
Not caring about animals because they’re not human
—Must say that we could torture smart aliens that were no threat to us for fun just because they’re not human.
—Must say that if we discovered that some group of people wasn’t technically human, we could torture and eat them.
—Must say that if one was very desensitized, it wouldn’t be wrong to torture or rape animals.
—Must say that if torturing and raping animals produced exactly the same negative impacts on one’s character as watching boxing, watching boxing would be just as wrong as torturing and raping animals, assuming they could prevent the spread of disease.
—Must say it isn’t bad when animals burn to death in fires if it doesn’t harm humans.
—Must say that sometimes it’s okay to inflict vast amounts of suffering for the sake of comparatively minor benefits.
Not caring about animals because they’re not smart
—Must say that we can torture and kill mentally disabled people and babies.
—Must say that if one was very desensitized, it wouldn’t be wrong to torture or rape animals.
—Must say that if torturing and raping animals produced exactly the same negative impacts on one’s character as watching boxing, watching boxing would be just as wrong as torturing and raping animals, assuming they could prevent the spread of disease.
—Must say it isn’t bad when animals burn to death in fires if it doesn’t harm humans.
—Must say that sometimes it’s okay to inflict vast amounts of suffering for the sake of comparatively minor benefits.
Caring about animals
—Must say it’s wrong to eat meat.
It’s obvious which option is the most plausible. Virtually no one actually has the psychopathic preferences described by the view according to which animals don’t matter at all.
Not caring for things that are not smart in a comparable way to us is an intuition I cannot even parse. Making 'intelligence' a qualifier for not being tortured, when capacity for pain isn't an equivalent property, is so arbitrary I don't even know how to rebut the idea. One might as well decide that surface skin area is the determining factor in deciding which suffering creatures count and which do not.
I'm still firmly in the "Not caring about animals because they’re not smart" camp.
Unlike Bentham, I actually do have an intuition that harming plants is wrong. I can't help feeling bad whenever I'm gardening and have to pinch off excess seedlings. I'm not sure how common such intuitions are, but I'm definitely not alone in this. By the same token I even feel bad about "harming" inanimate objects like stuffed animals. I'm pretty sure many children would agree with that particular intuition.
My point is that intuitions can be flawed. The above are not the only flawed moral intuitions I possess. My intuitions also tell me it is wrong to harm human fetuses, or to unplug Terri Schiavo, or to torture dogs or babies, or for there to be billionaires while I am not also a billionaire.
Some intuitions that are widely held are still flawed and I think Bentham is using such intuitions to try to show that factory farming is bad.
I maintain that we don't have to worry about the suffering of non-"smart" animals because it is not *like* anything to be a non-"smart" animal. As far as I know, drugs that can enfeeble the human mind lead to black out well before the mind is reduced to an animal level of function. To me that means there are no experiences to worry about beneath a certain level of cognition.