The Wrongness of Normal Meat Consumption

The basic argument for veganism

Evil is best known through examples, and the production and consumption of crush videos are about as clear an example of grotesque wickedness as one can find. These videos involve people stomping on little animals for the sexual pleasure of their degenerate viewers. The animals suffer horrifyingly, getting literally stomped to death. I suspect few will disagree when I say that purchasing crush videos is severely morally wrong.

Suppose we want to explain why purchasing crush videos is wrong. Here is my thesis: it is wrong because you shouldn’t cause animals extreme suffering for comparatively minor personal benefit. You shouldn’t beat a dog because you find it funny. You shouldn’t set a cat on fire for minor convenience. You shouldn’t burn live cats for biofuel.

The other explanation one might give is that it’s wrong to derive sexual pleasure in sadistic ways. Yet this, I think, cannot be the whole story. If a person burns a live cat to illuminate a cave or for biofuel (imagining that live cats were a marginally more efficient energy source than alternatives) they would be acting wrongly. Similarly, it would be wrong to set a cat on fire because it released a pleasing odor—even though presumably the enjoyment of the odor would be non-sadistic.

Now, another explanation people sometimes give for why such an action is morally wrong is because of what it does to the person doing it, not to the animal. It makes us worse people—or so it is claimed—when we hurt animals. This explanation, once again, might be part of the story but isn’t a complete explanation. If there was a person whose character was not hardened by tormenting animals, it would still be wrong for them to torment animals. Indeed, even if there was a person who found animal torture soothing—for whom torturing animals helped them calm down and be nicer—we would still hold that they should not torture animals. And similar things go, of course, for burning a live cat for biofuel.

So the lesson we learn from the wrongness of purchasing crush videos, burning live cats for biofuel, and tormenting animals to produce a nice smell is that you shouldn’t cause animals very large amounts of suffering for trivial benefits. Doing so is deeply immoral. It’s not just a slight foible to be brushed off, but is instead unspeakably horrific. If one was doing these things, you wouldn’t just vaguely wag your finger disapprovingly, but instead demand they stop immediately and try desperately to talk them out of their wicked acts, if not report them to police.

I have bad news for you: if it is wrong to cause animals extreme suffering for comparatively trivial benefit, then you are probably doing something very immoral several times per day. If so, you should stop.

Nearly all meat in the United States—and other developed countries—comes from factory farms. Factory farms are what you’d get if you allowed the Icebox killers to design a food system. They keep animals in tiny filthy, feces-ridden cages where they can’t turn around. They mutilate them in horrible ways, slaughter them painfully, transport them nightmarishly, and genetically engineer them so that they’re in constant pain. Every moment of a factory farmed animal’s life is hellish. These animals—being just babies at the time this occurs—are subject to suffering of a form few of us could even fathom. If anyone treated a dog or person the way factory farms treat ~80 billion animals annually, everyone would call the cruel treatment they inflicted torture. You can read more about all the horrible things they do here.

And when you purchase meat from a factory farm, you result in more animals being brought into existence. Farms have some threshold at which they purchase more animals, and you have some chance of triggering the threshold. If you do the math, in expectation you cause about one extra animal to be produced each time you eat an animal.

So each time you purchase animal products, you are causing more animals to be brought into existence in horrible conditions. This means that you are causing animals very large amounts of suffering. Why are you doing this? For comparatively small personal benefit. You will not enjoy a chicken sandwich as much as the chickens hated the weeks of brutal mistreatment they experienced in the production of the sandwich.

Sometimes people eat meat for reasons of convenience. But once again, this is a comparatively small benefit. The harms of being tortured in a factory farm are vastly greater than the convenience that accompanies meat-eating.

So, in short, to explain why it’s wrong to do all sorts of evil things to animals for personal pleasure, we must think that it’s wrong to cause animals extreme suffering for comparatively minor benefit. But that principle implies that eating meat is seriously morally wrong.

If I’m right about this, then meat-eating isn’t some minor item of misconduct, akin to littering or being rude to someone. It is more like gassing dogs in your basement because you enjoy the smell. In fact, because the average person eats thousands of animals, it would be like if you gassed several thousand dogs over the course of your life to produce a nice smell.

Now, astonishingly, charitable donations do so much good that even giving away a small amount of money does more good than going vegan. So going vegan isn’t the most important thing for a person to do—donating to good charities is even more important. But if you eat animal products, that is by far the worst act (as opposed to omission) you take. It is about as bad as puppy torture.

This doesn’t mean you’re as bad of a person as puppy torturers. Sometimes you don’t know when you do evil things. Good people often do evil things when those things are socially accepted. But you are probably causing more suffering to innocent animals than vegan producers of crush content mostly do. You are hurting animals a lot more than people who beat their dogs. Even if a person beats ten dogs a year to death, you are causing a lot more animal cruelty than they are.

So stop! Don’t do the evil thing! Go vegan! Here’s some meal prep advice if you want to take the leap, and stop doing horrendously immoral things multiple times per day.