I care about the environment. In particular, I care about the existence and flourishing of animals. This is not a rare concern. Very many people are saddened by, for example, the fate of the Bengal tiger.
However, people killing tigers is not why tigers are endangered. We kill several orders of magnitudes more chickens per year, and yet gallus gallus domesticus is far from endangered. Tigers are endangered because they are not very useful to people, so secure property rights have never been created in them. However, if this were to change, then tigers would quickly flourish. For example, I could run a wilderness reserve, breed the tigers, and sell the right to hunt them. This model has allowed the rhino population in Namibia to recover, despite the objections of some doctrinaire environmentalists (see e.g. here).
In other words, tigers dwindle precisely because we relate to them as magnificent creatures that exist for their own sake. But chickens flourish because we relate to them as things we can make use of. Vegetarians are doing the devil’s work by encouraging us to care about the chicken for its own sake. That way lies the end of the chicken. Resources are limited. Animals that aren’t useful to people will be pushed to the margins and perhaps even extinction.
I for one dream of a glorious future where I can eat a snow-leopard burger with cutlery made from narwhal-horn, knowing that doing so is contributing to the continuation of these species.
Not many vegetarians would agree. Is farm chicken life is worth living? Does the large number of farm chickens really have net positive effect on animal wellbeing?
Animals that aren’t useful
What about the recreational value of wild animals?
I have no idea what that question even means. I don’t want to save the Bengal tiger because I think it has a “life worth living” but because I want the species to flourish.
But to the extent that you are concerned that battery chickens have negative lives, why become a vegetarian? Eat free range meat. Or eat only hunted meat. And why make a fuss about trace amounts of meat products in your cheese or whatever? Isn’t it suspicious that people who make the strange claim that animals count as objects of moral concern also make the strange claim that animal lives aren’t worth living and also cash out that concern by a dietary purity ritual? Were I a cynic, I might even think that the religious-seeming ritual were the whole point, and the elaborate epicyclical theology built around it a mere after-the-fact justification.
“Isn’t it suspicious that people who make the strange claim that animals count as objects of moral concern also make the strange claim that animal lives aren’t worth living”
No, this makes perfect sense. 1. They decide animals are objects of moral concern. 2. Look into the conditions they live in, and decide that in some cases they are worse than not being alive. 3. Decide it’s wrong to fund expansion of a system that holds animals in conditions that are worse than not being alive at all.
Isn’t a direct consequence of (2) is that those animals are better off dead than alive and so, if the opportunity to (relatively costlessly) kill some of them arises, one should do so?
I don’t know whether we’d get to absurdum, so far I’m trying to figure out how far you (that is, the general-vegetarian “you”) are willing to take this reasoning.
Well, not quite. If you think being dead has positive utility for this creature, this positive utility is not necessarily small. If so, you need to weight the issues in killing against that positive utility.
For example, let’s take “death is painless”—actually, if the negative utility of the painful death is not as great as the positive utility of dying, you would still be justified and obligated to impose that painful death upon the creature as the net result is positive utility.
In general, vegetarians don’t care as much about e.g. species flourishing as they do about the vast amounts of suffering that farmed animals are quite likely to experience. I see nothing strange in viewing animals as morally relevant and deeming their life a net negative, thus hoping they wouldn’t have to exist.
Eating only free range or hunted meat is a pretty good option, although of course not entirely unproblematic, from the suffering-reduction point of view. It is very often brought up by non-vegetarians whenever the topic of animal suffering comes up—anecdotally I counted four people I know who I have heard using the argument when explaining or defending their meat eating. None of them actually even eats mainly free range or hunted meat. To me, it seems the whole point is unfortunately only ever used as a motte that people retreat to to avoid having to feel or look bad, before again just eating whatever as soon as they can stop thinking about it. This might not mean these people don’t really care on some level: I’d guess it is more expensive cognitively to analyze and keep tabs on which meat products cause only acceptable amounts of suffering, without succumbing to rationalization and constant habit-breaking and eventually forgetting the project, than it is to just rule meat out of your diet and stop thinking about it.
Another reason why free-range and hunted meat are not quite equivalent to veg(etari)anism is that they don’t seem to scale as easily to feed large populations for a reasonable land area and product price. That said, I for one would welcome a society which mostly eats plant-based food, but with the very occasional expensive hunted or ethically-farmed piece of meat or cheese, which indeed seems like what a non-factory-farming omnivore society could end up looking like. (Of course, for us embracing a more negative form of utilitarianism, wild-animal suffering would still be a problem, but that’s beyond the scope of this discussion.)
Do you want the human species to flourish in a way different from the way you want the chicken species to flourish. If yes, in what ways? If not, do you object to a North Korea style singleton government (which will solve a lot of present coordination problems for us, for a nominal utility fee of course)?
Yes, I view humans as substantially different from chickens and relate to them in a very different way. I view this as a strength of my position, not a weakness.
You should have started by describing your interpretation of what the word “flourish” means. I don’t think it’s a standard one (any links to prove the opposite?). For now this thread is going nowhere because of disagreements on definitions.
One of the things I hate most about this website is the people who love to claim that ordinary usages of English words are somehow non-standard or obscure.
flourish /ˈflʌrɪʃ/
verb
(of a living organism) grow or develop in a healthy or vigorous way, especially as the result of a particularly congenial environment.
I’m not sure what you mean by “factory-farmed,” but cows, sheep, pigs and free-range chickens seem healthy and vigorous. I’ve never been inside a battery-farm or a veal pen, but I’ll grant arguendo that those animals aren’t healthy or vigorous. But that’s an argument for eating free-range chicken, not for vegetarianism.
Does it matter? He has established that he does not think their happiness is important. It’s clear you two care about two different things. There is no point in further establishing what he means by “flourish”.
Many more humans would be able to “flourish” if we just ate most of them shortly after their birth. The fattest of the males might be kept as studs to continuously impregnate the females while the females’ breasts could be continuously pumped for their milk which is then bottled and sold in stores. Since we wouldn’t have to waste resources on them for things like education, medical care, bedding, or proper shelter, this could be done at a fraction of the cost of raising a regular child. We might select them from the homeless and mentally ill who are currently a net drain on resources. And what would they have to complain about? After all, they’re “flourishing.”
This only works as a reductio if you consider people and animals to have the same moral worth, and relate to them in the same way. If that kind of view is a necessary foundation for vegetarianism, then vegetarianism just becomes even more absurd. The overwhelming majority of vegetarians don’t believe anything of the sort.
If eating animals has positive value because it contributes “to the continuation of these species” as you’re claiming and humans have greater value than other animals, then a logical conclusion is that eating humans has even greater value than eating other animals because you’re maximizing the continuation of the most important species. It does not at all require equivalent moral worth.
My goals seem to be more in line with yours than those of most of the people criticizing you; perhaps you’ll also find one of my concerns more apt:
The chickens which are flourishing do not all remain the same chickens. As soon as farmers can more-cheaply harvest chicken from something like Chicken Little, most of them will. Even in the meantime, if you care about the existence of chickens who can do things like living a full lifespan without their legs or hearts failing, you’re going to have to hope that there’s always enough other people like you to support a niche market of 200%-more-expensive chicken.
You could just genetically modify chickens to die younger, so that is their full lifespan. Unless you mean that you want them to live as long as possible, in which case you should start with an animal with a longer lifespan.
Caring about individual animals and caring about species are two very different things. The continuation of the species for domesticated animals is exactly what I as a vegetarian want to prevent. I am not certain whether or not the lives of wild animals are worth living, but if I find that they are not, I hope to stop the continuation of those species as well.
We seem to have very different goals, which is fine. But, out of curiosity—why do you wish to prevent the existence of domesticated animals? Is it a terminal goal, or is it in service of something else?
I’m in favor of Euthanasia. I’m also in favor of not having kids if you know you have some kind of genetic problem. I am against Euthanasia without consent, but that’s more for political reasons. People don’t take it well if you decide if their life is worth living, and the associated problems are not worth the benefit of them not living in pain. Is there any particular example you have in mind?
Black people went on to become numerous slaves instead of nearly exterminated like the Native Americans in the US. I’m not really sure if that’s the kind of standard we should aspire to.
I care about the environment. In particular, I care about the existence and flourishing of animals. This is not a rare concern. Very many people are saddened by, for example, the fate of the Bengal tiger.
However, people killing tigers is not why tigers are endangered. We kill several orders of magnitudes more chickens per year, and yet gallus gallus domesticus is far from endangered. Tigers are endangered because they are not very useful to people, so secure property rights have never been created in them. However, if this were to change, then tigers would quickly flourish. For example, I could run a wilderness reserve, breed the tigers, and sell the right to hunt them. This model has allowed the rhino population in Namibia to recover, despite the objections of some doctrinaire environmentalists (see e.g. here).
In other words, tigers dwindle precisely because we relate to them as magnificent creatures that exist for their own sake. But chickens flourish because we relate to them as things we can make use of. Vegetarians are doing the devil’s work by encouraging us to care about the chicken for its own sake. That way lies the end of the chicken. Resources are limited. Animals that aren’t useful to people will be pushed to the margins and perhaps even extinction.
I for one dream of a glorious future where I can eat a snow-leopard burger with cutlery made from narwhal-horn, knowing that doing so is contributing to the continuation of these species.
Not many vegetarians would agree. Is farm chicken life is worth living? Does the large number of farm chickens really have net positive effect on animal wellbeing?
What about the recreational value of wild animals?
I have no idea what that question even means. I don’t want to save the Bengal tiger because I think it has a “life worth living” but because I want the species to flourish.
But to the extent that you are concerned that battery chickens have negative lives, why become a vegetarian? Eat free range meat. Or eat only hunted meat. And why make a fuss about trace amounts of meat products in your cheese or whatever? Isn’t it suspicious that people who make the strange claim that animals count as objects of moral concern also make the strange claim that animal lives aren’t worth living and also cash out that concern by a dietary purity ritual? Were I a cynic, I might even think that the religious-seeming ritual were the whole point, and the elaborate epicyclical theology built around it a mere after-the-fact justification.
“Isn’t it suspicious that people who make the strange claim that animals count as objects of moral concern also make the strange claim that animal lives aren’t worth living”
No, this makes perfect sense. 1. They decide animals are objects of moral concern. 2. Look into the conditions they live in, and decide that in some cases they are worse than not being alive. 3. Decide it’s wrong to fund expansion of a system that holds animals in conditions that are worse than not being alive at all.
Isn’t a direct consequence of (2) is that those animals are better off dead than alive and so, if the opportunity to (relatively costlessly) kill some of them arises, one should do so?
Is that supposed to be reductio ad absurdum? Euthanizing feral pets is standard. I’d do the same for livestock.
I don’t know whether we’d get to absurdum, so far I’m trying to figure out how far you (that is, the general-vegetarian “you”) are willing to take this reasoning.
If you can’t otherwise improve their lives, the death is painless, and murder isn’t independently bad.
Well, not quite. If you think being dead has positive utility for this creature, this positive utility is not necessarily small. If so, you need to weight the issues in killing against that positive utility.
For example, let’s take “death is painless”—actually, if the negative utility of the painful death is not as great as the positive utility of dying, you would still be justified and obligated to impose that painful death upon the creature as the net result is positive utility.
I was just giving what would be sufficient conditions, but they aren’t all necessarily necessary.
In general, vegetarians don’t care as much about e.g. species flourishing as they do about the vast amounts of suffering that farmed animals are quite likely to experience. I see nothing strange in viewing animals as morally relevant and deeming their life a net negative, thus hoping they wouldn’t have to exist.
Eating only free range or hunted meat is a pretty good option, although of course not entirely unproblematic, from the suffering-reduction point of view. It is very often brought up by non-vegetarians whenever the topic of animal suffering comes up—anecdotally I counted four people I know who I have heard using the argument when explaining or defending their meat eating. None of them actually even eats mainly free range or hunted meat. To me, it seems the whole point is unfortunately only ever used as a motte that people retreat to to avoid having to feel or look bad, before again just eating whatever as soon as they can stop thinking about it. This might not mean these people don’t really care on some level: I’d guess it is more expensive cognitively to analyze and keep tabs on which meat products cause only acceptable amounts of suffering, without succumbing to rationalization and constant habit-breaking and eventually forgetting the project, than it is to just rule meat out of your diet and stop thinking about it.
Another reason why free-range and hunted meat are not quite equivalent to veg(etari)anism is that they don’t seem to scale as easily to feed large populations for a reasonable land area and product price. That said, I for one would welcome a society which mostly eats plant-based food, but with the very occasional expensive hunted or ethically-farmed piece of meat or cheese, which indeed seems like what a non-factory-farming omnivore society could end up looking like. (Of course, for us embracing a more negative form of utilitarianism, wild-animal suffering would still be a problem, but that’s beyond the scope of this discussion.)
Do you want the human species to flourish in a way different from the way you want the chicken species to flourish. If yes, in what ways? If not, do you object to a North Korea style singleton government (which will solve a lot of present coordination problems for us, for a nominal utility fee of course)?
Yes, I view humans as substantially different from chickens and relate to them in a very different way. I view this as a strength of my position, not a weakness.
You should have started by describing your interpretation of what the word “flourish” means. I don’t think it’s a standard one (any links to prove the opposite?). For now this thread is going nowhere because of disagreements on definitions.
One of the things I hate most about this website is the people who love to claim that ordinary usages of English words are somehow non-standard or obscure.
Do you see anything about “a life worth living”?
Do you think factory-farmed animals grow and develop in a healthy or vigorous way, especially as the result of a particularly congenial environment?
I’m not sure what you mean by “factory-farmed,” but cows, sheep, pigs and free-range chickens seem healthy and vigorous. I’ve never been inside a battery-farm or a veal pen, but I’ll grant arguendo that those animals aren’t healthy or vigorous. But that’s an argument for eating free-range chicken, not for vegetarianism.
Does it matter? He has established that he does not think their happiness is important. It’s clear you two care about two different things. There is no point in further establishing what he means by “flourish”.
Many more humans would be able to “flourish” if we just ate most of them shortly after their birth. The fattest of the males might be kept as studs to continuously impregnate the females while the females’ breasts could be continuously pumped for their milk which is then bottled and sold in stores. Since we wouldn’t have to waste resources on them for things like education, medical care, bedding, or proper shelter, this could be done at a fraction of the cost of raising a regular child. We might select them from the homeless and mentally ill who are currently a net drain on resources. And what would they have to complain about? After all, they’re “flourishing.”
This only works as a reductio if you consider people and animals to have the same moral worth, and relate to them in the same way. If that kind of view is a necessary foundation for vegetarianism, then vegetarianism just becomes even more absurd. The overwhelming majority of vegetarians don’t believe anything of the sort.
If eating animals has positive value because it contributes “to the continuation of these species” as you’re claiming and humans have greater value than other animals, then a logical conclusion is that eating humans has even greater value than eating other animals because you’re maximizing the continuation of the most important species. It does not at all require equivalent moral worth.
EDIT—reworded for clarity
But it does require relating to them in the same way, so re-read and try again.
My goals seem to be more in line with yours than those of most of the people criticizing you; perhaps you’ll also find one of my concerns more apt:
The chickens which are flourishing do not all remain the same chickens. As soon as farmers can more-cheaply harvest chicken from something like Chicken Little, most of them will. Even in the meantime, if you care about the existence of chickens who can do things like living a full lifespan without their legs or hearts failing, you’re going to have to hope that there’s always enough other people like you to support a niche market of 200%-more-expensive chicken.
You could just genetically modify chickens to die younger, so that is their full lifespan. Unless you mean that you want them to live as long as possible, in which case you should start with an animal with a longer lifespan.
Caring about individual animals and caring about species are two very different things. The continuation of the species for domesticated animals is exactly what I as a vegetarian want to prevent. I am not certain whether or not the lives of wild animals are worth living, but if I find that they are not, I hope to stop the continuation of those species as well.
We seem to have very different goals, which is fine. But, out of curiosity—why do you wish to prevent the existence of domesticated animals? Is it a terminal goal, or is it in service of something else?
I want to prevent the suffering of domesticated animals. The simplest way is to prevent their existence.
Any reason this argument won’t apply to certain subsets of humans?
I’m in favor of Euthanasia. I’m also in favor of not having kids if you know you have some kind of genetic problem. I am against Euthanasia without consent, but that’s more for political reasons. People don’t take it well if you decide if their life is worth living, and the associated problems are not worth the benefit of them not living in pain. Is there any particular example you have in mind?
“Euthanasia without consent”—is that what is more commonly known as “murder”?
Yes, I would imagine they don’t...
Black people went on to become numerous slaves instead of nearly exterminated like the Native Americans in the US. I’m not really sure if that’s the kind of standard we should aspire to.