This picture is just mistaken—because plant cultivation destroys a lot of small animals. Even if you were for some reason only interested in the lives of mice etc. and assigned literally zero value to cow lives, it takes more plants to sustain a cow until it can be turned into food than to get an equivalent amount of food directly from soybeans or something. It may be that, say, turning a herd of goats loose on uncultivated land and then eating the goats is very cheap in mouse lives, but this isn’t how meat is normally procured in the developed world. Cows are fed things like soybeans and corn that humans could be eating directly, or that are produced in place of and using the resources that could have been directed towards producing other plants humans could be eating directly.
I actually have a fair amount of respect for people who go out hunting and shoot their food themselves. Pandas and koalas in particular I have separate reasons to wince over the notion of shooting for supper, but hunting wild animals in general does not have the plant cultivation problem (or the mistreatment associated with factory farming, or what seems to me a slightly perverse willful ignorance of the causal history of meat that one purchases at the grocery store).
“I actually have a fair amount of respect for people who go out hunting and shoot their food themselves. ”
I hear this a lot and agree in a vague sense that felt a lot like a cached thought. So I started thinking about it: Should we really respect people who go out to hunt and kill animals themselves?
My initial reaction was that I’m wary, not respectful, of someone comfortable/enthusiastic about ending a life! As a display of character, it’s worrying.
But on second examination, I changed my mind. Even from a virtue ethics perspective, I admire a person who’s willing to face the consequences of their actions rather than letting the factory farming go on out of sight. You’re right, willful ignorance is not something to respect.
And from a consequentialist standpoint, hunters almost certainly cause less suffering to the animals than factory farmers do.
Having grown up in a city on the East Coast, I didn’t exactly grow up with an appreciation for hunters. But I think I respect them a bit more now.
I’m not sure how valid your point is in practice. Being enthusiastic about hunting does not necessarily indicate a willingness to face the consequences of one’s actions, nor does it indicate any particular attitude toward factory farming. It may just indicate a lack of visceral discomfort when encountering animal suffering.
It is plausible that some/many/most hunters simply enjoy pursuing and eating prey, and that the comparative advantages to overall utility make little or no difference to them. In this case, I wouldn’t say that the utility advantage says anything positive about the individual’s character, but I certainly do think it’s fortunate that self-serving behaviors can occasionally lead to greater overall utility.
(Note: I’m sure there are hunters who subsist on hunted meats because they find mainstream meat production ethically appalling. I just doubt that they’re representative of all hunters.)
My initial reaction was that I’m wary, not respectful, of someone comfortable/enthusiastic about ending a life!
As a display of character, it’s worrying.
Your mileage may vary, I suppose.
I find a willingness to let other people do all the squicky, dirty, ethically-questionable and unpleasant tasks, sorted by low socioeconomic status, and then reap the benefits feeling one’s own hands are clean and all is right with the world pretty darn worrying myself. And that trait seems ubiquitous in my society.
Cows are fed things like soybeans and corn that humans could be eating directly,
Only in the last stage, the “feeding up” process in feedlots. During most of their lives they eat grass, and if over-wintered in colder areas hay with maybe some grain.
or that are produced in place of and using the resources that could have been directed towards producing other plants humans could be eating directly.
While that does speak to the efficiency difference between meat and vegetables, it doesn’t really have an impact on the statement that beef production kills fewer animals than agriculture production. Land used to pasture feed cattle isn’t killing mice, which is just as claimed. Note, this tends to vary by country with the US using the most destructive form of cattle feeding.
Even then, the comic is still wrong. Would eating meat somehow become more moral if we were to genetically engineer beef into an almost unrecognizable form with zero neurons to kill? That strikes me as even more evil.
Would eating meat somehow become more moral if we were to genetically engineer beef into an almost unrecognizable form with zero neurons to kill?
Yes. Killing something that has no mental faculties whatsoever is definitely better than killing something that can feel pain and may be dimly self-aware.
While this may be true on an individual basis, it seems abhorrent on a species level. I’ll let JenniferRM to put it much better than I could:
Supposing that there was something (vampires?) that preyed on humans and that we had absolutely no pragmatic recourse against these new apex predators (imagine saying “don’t eat me!” to a nano-wielding fusion-powered super-intelligence that likes eating humans for some reason) what policy for the consumption of humans would we hope that they adopted? Do we want them to start eating human shaped tofu and relegate humans to zoos and textbooks? Do we want them to bioengineer brainless human-flavored vat steaks and let wildtype humans go extinct? Do we want them to give us adequate human lives and then eat us in our 40′s before our flavor goes off? Do we just want them to figure out what maximizes the happiness/virtue/number of vampires (maybe re-engineering themselves to eat algea and wheat and putting every calorie that strikes the planet into the production of this food)? Do we want them to manage wild human populations such that global biomass and biodiversity is maximized? Do we want them to domesticate us via manipulation of our genetics into a variety of types designed to serve specific ends within their economy? Maybe they could offer us some kind of “minotaur feeding treaty” where we managed some of these issues ourselves in exchange for super-trinkets? Lots of those suggestions feel to me like they have good points and bad points… so framing the question this way helps me see that I don’t really know what kind of global dietary regime that I really want to bring about with my food choices as an apex predator. I am confused.
Once modified into an appropriate species, I agree with you that each individual murder would be less evil. But the act of modifying an entire species for perpetuity (or the extinction of their species) would vastly overwhelm each kill together...I think. Then again my ethics system isn’t really designed to balance such concerns as “permanent extinction (except zoos) of a species” vs “perpetual slavery and torture of a species.” I can only say that I wouldn’t want that to happen to my species, and I cannot imagine any conscious species desiring such an outcome.
Very good framework for looking at the problem. My answer is still non-sentient-vat-people, assuming it can be done cost effectively in a relatively small area. A few humans are presumably sacrificed during the research necessary to breed the vat-people, afterwards it doesn’t affect sentients.
The extinction of humanity is a separate issue, which will happen regardless of whether we’re eaten, because the vampires want our land. (We are similarly doing the same thing to plenty of animals that we don’t eat). My preference is for the vampires to do their best to live in concentrated areas to avoid driving us to extinction. My actual expectation is for the Vampires to, at best, create large reserves a la National Parks where we live mostly on our own.
The trouble with that framework, I think, is that it makes it hard for us to think of the predators as having equal moral weight to humans, let alone greater. We’ll tend to think of what scenario is most preferable to humans, but give little if any consideration to what scenario is most preferable to the predators.
One difference between cows and humans is that humans have a preference about the continued existence of mankind, while cows are presumably unaware of and indifferent to the existence of cow-kind. A lot of the persuasive force of the argument comes from the feeling that “we wouldn’t like it if they did it to us”—but the cows would not feel the same dislike.
Would eating meat somehow become more moral if we were to genetically engineer beef into an almost unrecognizable form with zero neurons to kill?
Of course. Even as a meat-eater, I’d prefer if my meat-eating could somehow be made to not involve killing animals—if we could grow meat-trees or something.
This picture is just mistaken—because plant cultivation destroys a lot of small animals. Even if you were for some reason only interested in the lives of mice etc. and assigned literally zero value to cow lives, it takes more plants to sustain a cow until it can be turned into food than to get an equivalent amount of food directly from soybeans or something. It may be that, say, turning a herd of goats loose on uncultivated land and then eating the goats is very cheap in mouse lives, but this isn’t how meat is normally procured in the developed world. Cows are fed things like soybeans and corn that humans could be eating directly, or that are produced in place of and using the resources that could have been directed towards producing other plants humans could be eating directly.
All the more reason to eat wild animals like pandas and overweight koalas right?
I actually have a fair amount of respect for people who go out hunting and shoot their food themselves. Pandas and koalas in particular I have separate reasons to wince over the notion of shooting for supper, but hunting wild animals in general does not have the plant cultivation problem (or the mistreatment associated with factory farming, or what seems to me a slightly perverse willful ignorance of the causal history of meat that one purchases at the grocery store).
“I actually have a fair amount of respect for people who go out hunting and shoot their food themselves. ”
I hear this a lot and agree in a vague sense that felt a lot like a cached thought. So I started thinking about it: Should we really respect people who go out to hunt and kill animals themselves?
My initial reaction was that I’m wary, not respectful, of someone comfortable/enthusiastic about ending a life! As a display of character, it’s worrying.
But on second examination, I changed my mind. Even from a virtue ethics perspective, I admire a person who’s willing to face the consequences of their actions rather than letting the factory farming go on out of sight. You’re right, willful ignorance is not something to respect.
And from a consequentialist standpoint, hunters almost certainly cause less suffering to the animals than factory farmers do.
Having grown up in a city on the East Coast, I didn’t exactly grow up with an appreciation for hunters. But I think I respect them a bit more now.
I’m not sure how valid your point is in practice. Being enthusiastic about hunting does not necessarily indicate a willingness to face the consequences of one’s actions, nor does it indicate any particular attitude toward factory farming. It may just indicate a lack of visceral discomfort when encountering animal suffering.
It is plausible that some/many/most hunters simply enjoy pursuing and eating prey, and that the comparative advantages to overall utility make little or no difference to them. In this case, I wouldn’t say that the utility advantage says anything positive about the individual’s character, but I certainly do think it’s fortunate that self-serving behaviors can occasionally lead to greater overall utility.
(Note: I’m sure there are hunters who subsist on hunted meats because they find mainstream meat production ethically appalling. I just doubt that they’re representative of all hunters.)
Your mileage may vary, I suppose.
I find a willingness to let other people do all the squicky, dirty, ethically-questionable and unpleasant tasks, sorted by low socioeconomic status, and then reap the benefits feeling one’s own hands are clean and all is right with the world pretty darn worrying myself. And that trait seems ubiquitous in my society.
Only in the last stage, the “feeding up” process in feedlots. During most of their lives they eat grass, and if over-wintered in colder areas hay with maybe some grain.
The critical part of the quote you made is:
That is, the comma which is followed by an ‘or’ clause which totally invalidates your refutation.
Erm, that second part of the quote is...
While that does speak to the efficiency difference between meat and vegetables, it doesn’t really have an impact on the statement that beef production kills fewer animals than agriculture production. Land used to pasture feed cattle isn’t killing mice, which is just as claimed. Note, this tends to vary by country with the US using the most destructive form of cattle feeding.
Even then, the comic is still wrong. Would eating meat somehow become more moral if we were to genetically engineer beef into an almost unrecognizable form with zero neurons to kill? That strikes me as even more evil.
Yes. Killing something that has no mental faculties whatsoever is definitely better than killing something that can feel pain and may be dimly self-aware.
While this may be true on an individual basis, it seems abhorrent on a species level. I’ll let JenniferRM to put it much better than I could:
Once modified into an appropriate species, I agree with you that each individual murder would be less evil. But the act of modifying an entire species for perpetuity (or the extinction of their species) would vastly overwhelm each kill together...I think. Then again my ethics system isn’t really designed to balance such concerns as “permanent extinction (except zoos) of a species” vs “perpetual slavery and torture of a species.” I can only say that I wouldn’t want that to happen to my species, and I cannot imagine any conscious species desiring such an outcome.
Very good framework for looking at the problem. My answer is still non-sentient-vat-people, assuming it can be done cost effectively in a relatively small area. A few humans are presumably sacrificed during the research necessary to breed the vat-people, afterwards it doesn’t affect sentients.
The extinction of humanity is a separate issue, which will happen regardless of whether we’re eaten, because the vampires want our land. (We are similarly doing the same thing to plenty of animals that we don’t eat). My preference is for the vampires to do their best to live in concentrated areas to avoid driving us to extinction. My actual expectation is for the Vampires to, at best, create large reserves a la National Parks where we live mostly on our own.
The trouble with that framework, I think, is that it makes it hard for us to think of the predators as having equal moral weight to humans, let alone greater. We’ll tend to think of what scenario is most preferable to humans, but give little if any consideration to what scenario is most preferable to the predators.
That seems like the sort of thing that varies from person to person.
One difference between cows and humans is that humans have a preference about the continued existence of mankind, while cows are presumably unaware of and indifferent to the existence of cow-kind. A lot of the persuasive force of the argument comes from the feeling that “we wouldn’t like it if they did it to us”—but the cows would not feel the same dislike.
Of course. Even as a meat-eater, I’d prefer if my meat-eating could somehow be made to not involve killing animals—if we could grow meat-trees or something.