Why I Don't Buy The Best Objection To Veganism

The only objection that has any chance of succeeding

The core argument for veganism is simple, straightforward, and powerful: you shouldn’t cause others large amounts of suffering for small benefit. Eating meat, given the way that animals are typically raised in the modern day, causes animals to undergo lots of suffering for small benefits—it’s therefore wrong. The chart below shows just how much suffering is caused by the consumption of various animals products:

Modern farms treat animals in horrendously torturous ways. Animals undergo about an hour of very extreme suffering every single day. Animals by the billions are locked in cages, ground up in macerators, slaughtered while still conscious, packed together in transport trucks that kill sizeable portions of them, trapped in overcrowded barns, choked on fumes of feces and filth, and subject to routine and horrifying mutilations that remove beaks, tails, and horns. Any sane ethical accounting will call this an atrocity.

Yet there is one argument for the permissibility of meat-eating that I sometimes wonder about. This argument has some non-zero chance of being correct. So in what follows, I’ll describe the argument, and then I will explain why I’m not ultimately moved by it. If you’re a meat-eater trying desperately to rationalize paying for animals to be tortured, this argument is the way to go—though I’ll warn you, accepting it will have some rather inconvenient implications for the rest of your behavior.