I am looking for defenders of Hanson’s Meat is Moral. On the surface, this seems like a very compelling argument to me. (I am a vegetarian, primarily for ethical reasons, and have been for two years. At this point the thought of eating meat is quite repulsive to me, and I’m not sure I could be convinced to go back even if I were convinced it were moral.)
It struck me, however, nothing in this argument is specific to animals, and that anyone who truly believes this should also support growing people for cannibalism, as long as those lives are just barely worth living. (I tend to believe in relative depression so I’d argue probably any life that isn’t extremely torturous is worth living) This goes so strongly against moral intuition, though, that I can’t imagine anyone supporting it.
Sorry, can’t defend it. It’s not a horrible argument, but it’s also not totally well grounded in facts.
For starters, it takes far more land and resources to produce 1 lb of beef than 1 lb of grain, since you have to grow all the grain to feed the cow, and cows don’t turn all of that energy into meat, so if you believe that undeveloped land or other forms of resource conservation have some intrinsic worth, then vegetarianism is preferable.
Secondly, I think the metaphor comparing a factory farm to a cubicle farm is disingenuous. It’s emotionally loaded, since I work in a cubicle and I don’t wish I were dead, and it’s not terribly accurate. I think you could make a different comparison, that is arguably more accurate and compare a factory farm to a concentration camp. In both instances the inhabitants are crowded together with minimal resources as they await their slaughter. (Obviously my example is also emotionally loaded). I think if one were to ask the question should we do things that will encourage the birth of children who will grow up in concentration camps, it’s a little more difficult to come down with the same definitive yes.
Additionally, the article wanders into conjecture in several place. It’s hard to see the statement “most farm animals prefer living to dying” as anything more than a specious claim. No one has any way of knowing a cow’s preference vis-a-vis life or death, probably including the cow. Suicide is a particularly egregious red herring. By what means does a cow in a pen commit suicide? Starving to death? Surely that not comparable to wishing it had never been born...
As for your Soylent Green example, it has even worse problems with trophic losses, because if your farm-raised humans were not strictly vegetarian, you’re losing an even higher percentage of your original energy. If the food babies are raised on an all meat diet you may be getting less than 1% of the energy you would have gotten out of just eating the plants you started the process with. Humans also have a ridiculously long gestation time etc. to function as an efficient food item, although the modest proposal you mention has certainly been suggested before.
Finally, the argument makes me nervous because I think that in general the morality of causing things to be born isn’t well settled. We regard saving the life of an child as definitely a moral good. It isn’t clear that giving birth to a child is also a moral good, or also a comparable moral good. If I had to pick between saving one child and having two babies, I would think that saving the kid’s life was the higher moral calling, even though it will result in less children over all.
I think that would be true, assuming you have no additional reasons for opposing cannibalism.
Personally, I have no moral opposition to the idea of eating babies, but I suspect that baby farming would cause much more distress to the general population than the food it would produce would justify.
I don’t agree with Hanson’s position in that essay though. To take an excerpt:
We might well agree that wild pigs have lives more worth living, per day at least, just as humans may be happier in the wild instead of fighting traffic to work in a cubical all day. But even these human lives are worth living, and it is my judgment that most farm animal’s lives are worth living too. Most farm animals prefer living to dying; they do not want to commit suicide.
How does he claim to know that? It’s not as if he can extrapolate from the fact that they don’t kill themselves. Factory farmed animals are in no position to commit suicide, regardless of whether they want to or not. And even if a farm animal’s life is pure misery, it probably doesn’t have the abstract reasoning abilities to realize that ending its own life, thereby ending the suffering, is a possible thing.
He compares the life of a farmed animal to a worker who has to fight traffic to spend their time working in a cubicle, but an office worker has leisure time, probably a family to spend time with, and enough money to make them willing to work at the job in the first place. I think the abused child in Omelas is a better basis for comparison.
He compares the life of a farmed animal to a worker who has to fight traffic to spend their time working in a cubicle, but an office worker has leisure time, probably a family to spend time with, and enough money to make them willing to work at the job in the first place.
Also: very few office workers get mutilated to prevent them from mutilating their coworkers out of stress, or locked into their cubicles full-time and forced to wallow in their own faeces (periodically being hosed down from outside), or are so over-bred for meat production purposes that even in their cramped conditions the strain of their under-used, oversized muscles strains their skeletons and joints to the breaking point.
Oh, and instead of a salary designed to seem big but actually undervalue your performance, you get paid in being killed (not infrequently a painful and lingering experience) and having any children you bore taken away for no obvious reason.
Yes. “If you have doubts on this point, I suggest you visit a farm” is a massive Appeal to Generalization from One Example. I’m pretty sure some farms are a helluva much worse than others, and I strongly suspect that the farms a random person is most likely to visit will be closer to the good end of the scale.
No, I think there’s a parallel there. The solution in the story was to reduce the babies to chemical reactions, so they weren’t aware, and couldn’t suffer; that doesn’t really lessen the horror implicit in the solution.
Apparently sleep deprivation is making me -more- insightful than normal. I’m going to have to give vegetarianism/veganism more thought. Right on the heels of a huge insight into privilege arguments, which I’m considering writing up.
I had to stop (though I may resume later) at “People who buy less meat don’t really spend less money on food overall, they mainly just spend more money on other non-meat food”—it made me go “are you fucking kidding me” and wonder whether he has ever been to a supermarket. See also this—differences in retail prices aren’t quite that extreme, but that’s because governments subsidize meat production, so even though not all of the money comes out of meat eaters’ pockets, it still comes out of somewhere.
EDIT: I finished reading it, and… if I didn’t know who Hanson was and he had posted somewhere that allowed readers to comment, I would definitely conclude he was trolling. Along with things that others have already pointed out, “per land area, farms are more efficient at producing “higher” animals like pigs and cows”—where the hell did he take that from? Pretty much everyone I’ve ever read about this topic agrees that growing food for N people on a mostly vegetarian diet requires way less land, energy, and water than growing food for N people on a largely meat-based diet, and there’s a thermodynamic argument that makes that pretty much obvious.
(I do agree that “meat eaters kill animals” isn’t a terribly good argument because if it wasn’t for meat eaters those animals wouldn’t have lived in the first place (but that doesn’t apply to hunting and fishing); but that’s nowhere near one of the main reasons why I limit my consumption of meat.)
Along with things that others have already pointed out, “per land area, farms are more efficient at producing “higher” animals like pigs and cows”—where the hell did he take that from? Pretty much everyone I’ve ever read about this topic agrees that growing food for N people on a mostly vegetarian diet requires way less land, energy, and water than growing food for N people on a largely meat-based diet, and there’s a thermodynamic argument that makes that pretty much obvious.
The full sentence is
And if you do manage to induce less farmland and more wild land, you’ll have to realize that, per land area, farms are more efficient at producing “higher” animals like pigs and cows. So there is a tradeoff between producing more farm animals with worse lives, or fewer wild animals with better lives, if in fact wild animals live better lives.
or
per land area, farms are more efficient [than wilderness is] at producing “higher” animals like pigs and cows.
Thanks. I did think “more efficient than what?”, but none of the possibilities I came up with other than “than they are at producing other foodstuffs” seemed relevant in context. (I don’t even remember what they were.)
“People who buy less meat don’t really spend less money on food overall, they mainly just spend more money on other non-meat food”—it made me go “are you fucking kidding me” and wonder whether he has ever been to a supermarket.
Not only that, it makes me wonder if he realizes that most people in the world don’t live on six figures. I remember once living on nothing but cereal, milk, eggs and kimchi for about eight months because, when rent and bills were totalled, there simply wasn’t any money for more food than that.
Just one quibble: “other than pure aesthetics (“I just like it”) … which are idiosyncratic (i.e. not true for most people)” sounds like a overwhelming exception to me. Given that I’ve never met anyone trying to convince other people to become vegetarians (though I’ve read a couple such people), I guess that’s by far the most common reason. (I’ve eaten meat in front of at least a dozen different vegetarians from at least four different countries, and none of them seemed to be bothered by that.)
Depending on how ostentatiously (Which I know isn’t the right word, but I think conveys what I’m trying to evoke?) you were eating the meat, it would bother me. The type of meat would also make a difference to me. I know vegetarians who are bothered if you eat any meat near them. They are obviously polite about it, (I certainly never say anything) but it might bother people more than you realize.
Not at all—not that I tried to hide the fact that I was eating meat, but I tried to be as nonchalant as I would be if I didn’t know they were vegetarians. OTOH I’m not terribly good at hiding emotions, so probably some of them could tell I was feeling a little embarrassed.
The type of meat would also make a difference to me.
What kind of difference? Pork vs beef vs chicken? Steaks vs minced meat? Free-range vs factory farmed vs hunted (but how would you tell)?
This reminds me of something I’ve wondered about. It seems plausible that it’s cheaper to be a vegetarian, but the last I checked, meat substitutes seem to cost about as much as meat.
Is it just that no one’s been exploring how many people would like good cheap meat substitutes, or is there some reason meat substitutes are so expensive? Or are there cheap ones I haven’t noticed?
Fancy meat substitutes like quorn are expensive. TVP and tofu are dirt cheap. Going with vegetable sources of protein that make no attempt to directly replace meat, like rice and beans or peanut butter, is also cheap.
Basically what Alicorn said. People aren’t necessarily satisfied with the cheap ones that are available—mimicking the exact mouthfeel and flavor of meat is difficult, and because many of the original meat substitutes are from Asia, they weren’t common here until fairly recently Mock duck, aka Seitan (made from wheat gluten) is cheap, and very popular in Asia, but it seems to be a perennial also-ran in the US. Back during my veggie days I tried using it, only to find out I have a minor glutease deficiency (not full-on coeliac, but enough that seitan causes problems). It was by far the closest I’ve found to mimicking texture and mouthfeel for non-specific cuts of meat (as opposed to mimicking burgers or hot dogs or chicken nuggets or something); when prepared right it can be close to indistinguishable from meat.
Making good, cheap meat substitutes is a lot of work; Western would-be consumers often have high standards for them and aren’t satisfied with the more-established forms, such as tofu, while new forms have substantial outlays for R&D (Quorn) and sometimes face regulatory hurdles or other barriers to acceptance (Quorn’s initial attempt at a US release went very poorly). In the US, where meat production is directly subsidized, it’s hard to compete anyway because there’s lots of cheaper meat.
One of the confounding factors is that a lot of meat is raised on land that’s not suitable for human food farming. EG, free range cattle grazing in australia.
My evaluation is very much the same as yours, in that Hanson is way off on the efficiency of meat vs other foods. My conclusion is just that he is ignorant of the facts though, not trolling.
Essentially all domesticated animals are alive because of demand for products made from them (eggs, milk, meat, etc). If everyone kept kosher, there would be far fewer pig-experience-moments than the current world, including much less pig-experience-suffering. Is that good or bad for someone who values pig utility?
Anyway, I’ve always taken this kind of reasoning as a reason not to adopt that perspective on these types of questions. But I think that means I’m not a consequentialist—which puts me slightly out of consensus in this community.
If everyone kept kosher, there would be far fewer pig-experience-moments than the current world, including much less pig-experience-suffering. Is that good or bad for someone who values pig utility?
I value pig-utility. I’d much rather see a smaller number of comparitively well-kept, well-treated farm pigs and a healthy population of wild boars than the status quo. I’d also rather not see that arrived it by a mass slaughter of all other pigs, though, and pragmatically I’m not going to get that either way, so “a largeish-but-not-contemporary number of reasonably well-treated pigs farmed for food production” would be a much more feasible goal. Temple Grandin does a lot of work in this area, actually.
Not in the sense I was using it above, namely, “We kill them all at once to remove their population.” What’s happening at present is more like “we kill them in batches to meet production demands, and bring in more.” Aggregated over the very long term a whole lot more pigs can suffer and die in the second case; I’m simply saying I don’t find “One sudden, nearly-complete mass slaughter” to be a preferable alternative.
My point is that the lifetime of a pig (EDIT: being farmed for meat) isn’t very long (about 6 months from what I can find on the internet). Thus all we would have to do is stop breeding them for a while and we very quickly wouldn’t have many pigs.
I think it is in a similar vein, certainly, but I think it’s different in some ways too. For example, I don’t think most people would accept cannibalism even if the people (victims? food?) led very happy lives, perhaps like a system where people were pampered in spas all day before being killed for food. But the logical extension of Hanson’s argument is that this would be a great system. Assuming that there was a remote economic demand for human meat, which, thankfully, there isn’t.
Also, I think cannibalism engages people’s sense of moral intuition much moreso than simply having a lot of marginally happy people does.
I am looking for defenders of Hanson’s Meat is Moral. On the surface, this seems like a very compelling argument to me. (I am a vegetarian, primarily for ethical reasons, and have been for two years. At this point the thought of eating meat is quite repulsive to me, and I’m not sure I could be convinced to go back even if I were convinced it were moral.)
It struck me, however, nothing in this argument is specific to animals, and that anyone who truly believes this should also support growing people for cannibalism, as long as those lives are just barely worth living. (I tend to believe in relative depression so I’d argue probably any life that isn’t extremely torturous is worth living) This goes so strongly against moral intuition, though, that I can’t imagine anyone supporting it.
Sorry, can’t defend it. It’s not a horrible argument, but it’s also not totally well grounded in facts.
For starters, it takes far more land and resources to produce 1 lb of beef than 1 lb of grain, since you have to grow all the grain to feed the cow, and cows don’t turn all of that energy into meat, so if you believe that undeveloped land or other forms of resource conservation have some intrinsic worth, then vegetarianism is preferable.
Secondly, I think the metaphor comparing a factory farm to a cubicle farm is disingenuous. It’s emotionally loaded, since I work in a cubicle and I don’t wish I were dead, and it’s not terribly accurate. I think you could make a different comparison, that is arguably more accurate and compare a factory farm to a concentration camp. In both instances the inhabitants are crowded together with minimal resources as they await their slaughter. (Obviously my example is also emotionally loaded). I think if one were to ask the question should we do things that will encourage the birth of children who will grow up in concentration camps, it’s a little more difficult to come down with the same definitive yes.
Additionally, the article wanders into conjecture in several place. It’s hard to see the statement “most farm animals prefer living to dying” as anything more than a specious claim. No one has any way of knowing a cow’s preference vis-a-vis life or death, probably including the cow. Suicide is a particularly egregious red herring. By what means does a cow in a pen commit suicide? Starving to death? Surely that not comparable to wishing it had never been born...
As for your Soylent Green example, it has even worse problems with trophic losses, because if your farm-raised humans were not strictly vegetarian, you’re losing an even higher percentage of your original energy. If the food babies are raised on an all meat diet you may be getting less than 1% of the energy you would have gotten out of just eating the plants you started the process with. Humans also have a ridiculously long gestation time etc. to function as an efficient food item, although the modest proposal you mention has certainly been suggested before.
Finally, the argument makes me nervous because I think that in general the morality of causing things to be born isn’t well settled. We regard saving the life of an child as definitely a moral good. It isn’t clear that giving birth to a child is also a moral good, or also a comparable moral good. If I had to pick between saving one child and having two babies, I would think that saving the kid’s life was the higher moral calling, even though it will result in less children over all.
I think you got these flipped around.
Fixed. Thank you.
I think that would be true, assuming you have no additional reasons for opposing cannibalism.
Personally, I have no moral opposition to the idea of eating babies, but I suspect that baby farming would cause much more distress to the general population than the food it would produce would justify.
I don’t agree with Hanson’s position in that essay though. To take an excerpt:
How does he claim to know that? It’s not as if he can extrapolate from the fact that they don’t kill themselves. Factory farmed animals are in no position to commit suicide, regardless of whether they want to or not. And even if a farm animal’s life is pure misery, it probably doesn’t have the abstract reasoning abilities to realize that ending its own life, thereby ending the suffering, is a possible thing.
He compares the life of a farmed animal to a worker who has to fight traffic to spend their time working in a cubicle, but an office worker has leisure time, probably a family to spend time with, and enough money to make them willing to work at the job in the first place. I think the abused child in Omelas is a better basis for comparison.
Also: very few office workers get mutilated to prevent them from mutilating their coworkers out of stress, or locked into their cubicles full-time and forced to wallow in their own faeces (periodically being hosed down from outside), or are so over-bred for meat production purposes that even in their cramped conditions the strain of their under-used, oversized muscles strains their skeletons and joints to the breaking point.
Oh, and instead of a salary designed to seem big but actually undervalue your performance, you get paid in being killed (not infrequently a painful and lingering experience) and having any children you bore taken away for no obvious reason.
Yes. “If you have doubts on this point, I suggest you visit a farm” is a massive Appeal to Generalization from One Example. I’m pretty sure some farms are a helluva much worse than others, and I strongly suspect that the farms a random person is most likely to visit will be closer to the good end of the scale.
I vote we breed animals to be happy under these conditions. Or is that baby-eating?
Hmmm.
If you’re going to do that, why not skip the animals entirely and raise vat meat? Neither happy or sad, but much more cost effective.
not really, the rpoblem with baby eating was the babies were NOT happy
No, I think there’s a parallel there. The solution in the story was to reduce the babies to chemical reactions, so they weren’t aware, and couldn’t suffer; that doesn’t really lessen the horror implicit in the solution.
Apparently sleep deprivation is making me -more- insightful than normal. I’m going to have to give vegetarianism/veganism more thought. Right on the heels of a huge insight into privilege arguments, which I’m considering writing up.
I had to stop (though I may resume later) at “People who buy less meat don’t really spend less money on food overall, they mainly just spend more money on other non-meat food”—it made me go “are you fucking kidding me” and wonder whether he has ever been to a supermarket. See also this—differences in retail prices aren’t quite that extreme, but that’s because governments subsidize meat production, so even though not all of the money comes out of meat eaters’ pockets, it still comes out of somewhere.
EDIT: I finished reading it, and… if I didn’t know who Hanson was and he had posted somewhere that allowed readers to comment, I would definitely conclude he was trolling. Along with things that others have already pointed out, “per land area, farms are more efficient at producing “higher” animals like pigs and cows”—where the hell did he take that from? Pretty much everyone I’ve ever read about this topic agrees that growing food for N people on a mostly vegetarian diet requires way less land, energy, and water than growing food for N people on a largely meat-based diet, and there’s a thermodynamic argument that makes that pretty much obvious.
(I do agree that “meat eaters kill animals” isn’t a terribly good argument because if it wasn’t for meat eaters those animals wouldn’t have lived in the first place (but that doesn’t apply to hunting and fishing); but that’s nowhere near one of the main reasons why I limit my consumption of meat.)
The full sentence is
or
Thanks. I did think “more efficient than what?”, but none of the possibilities I came up with other than “than they are at producing other foodstuffs” seemed relevant in context. (I don’t even remember what they were.)
Not only that, it makes me wonder if he realizes that most people in the world don’t live on six figures. I remember once living on nothing but cereal, milk, eggs and kimchi for about eight months because, when rent and bills were totalled, there simply wasn’t any money for more food than that.
Richard Carrier comes to mind as making counterintuitive claims about the efficiency of meat vs plant food: http://freethoughtblogs.com/carrier/archives/87/
Interesting...
Just one quibble: “other than pure aesthetics (“I just like it”) … which are idiosyncratic (i.e. not true for most people)” sounds like a overwhelming exception to me. Given that I’ve never met anyone trying to convince other people to become vegetarians (though I’ve read a couple such people), I guess that’s by far the most common reason. (I’ve eaten meat in front of at least a dozen different vegetarians from at least four different countries, and none of them seemed to be bothered by that.)
Depending on how ostentatiously (Which I know isn’t the right word, but I think conveys what I’m trying to evoke?) you were eating the meat, it would bother me. The type of meat would also make a difference to me. I know vegetarians who are bothered if you eat any meat near them. They are obviously polite about it, (I certainly never say anything) but it might bother people more than you realize.
Not at all—not that I tried to hide the fact that I was eating meat, but I tried to be as nonchalant as I would be if I didn’t know they were vegetarians. OTOH I’m not terribly good at hiding emotions, so probably some of them could tell I was feeling a little embarrassed.
What kind of difference? Pork vs beef vs chicken? Steaks vs minced meat? Free-range vs factory farmed vs hunted (but how would you tell)?
My opposition to meat varies linearly with the intelligence of the animal. I’m much more OK with fish than I am pigs.
This reminds me of something I’ve wondered about. It seems plausible that it’s cheaper to be a vegetarian, but the last I checked, meat substitutes seem to cost about as much as meat.
Is it just that no one’s been exploring how many people would like good cheap meat substitutes, or is there some reason meat substitutes are so expensive? Or are there cheap ones I haven’t noticed?
Price of quorn
Fancy meat substitutes like quorn are expensive. TVP and tofu are dirt cheap. Going with vegetable sources of protein that make no attempt to directly replace meat, like rice and beans or peanut butter, is also cheap.
Basically what Alicorn said. People aren’t necessarily satisfied with the cheap ones that are available—mimicking the exact mouthfeel and flavor of meat is difficult, and because many of the original meat substitutes are from Asia, they weren’t common here until fairly recently Mock duck, aka Seitan (made from wheat gluten) is cheap, and very popular in Asia, but it seems to be a perennial also-ran in the US. Back during my veggie days I tried using it, only to find out I have a minor glutease deficiency (not full-on coeliac, but enough that seitan causes problems). It was by far the closest I’ve found to mimicking texture and mouthfeel for non-specific cuts of meat (as opposed to mimicking burgers or hot dogs or chicken nuggets or something); when prepared right it can be close to indistinguishable from meat.
Making good, cheap meat substitutes is a lot of work; Western would-be consumers often have high standards for them and aren’t satisfied with the more-established forms, such as tofu, while new forms have substantial outlays for R&D (Quorn) and sometimes face regulatory hurdles or other barriers to acceptance (Quorn’s initial attempt at a US release went very poorly). In the US, where meat production is directly subsidized, it’s hard to compete anyway because there’s lots of cheaper meat.
One of the confounding factors is that a lot of meat is raised on land that’s not suitable for human food farming. EG, free range cattle grazing in australia.
See also.
My evaluation is very much the same as yours, in that Hanson is way off on the efficiency of meat vs other foods. My conclusion is just that he is ignorant of the facts though, not trolling.
Isn’t this just a re-statement of the Repugnant Conclusion?
Essentially all domesticated animals are alive because of demand for products made from them (eggs, milk, meat, etc). If everyone kept kosher, there would be far fewer pig-experience-moments than the current world, including much less pig-experience-suffering. Is that good or bad for someone who values pig utility?
Anyway, I’ve always taken this kind of reasoning as a reason not to adopt that perspective on these types of questions. But I think that means I’m not a consequentialist—which puts me slightly out of consensus in this community.
I value pig-utility. I’d much rather see a smaller number of comparitively well-kept, well-treated farm pigs and a healthy population of wild boars than the status quo. I’d also rather not see that arrived it by a mass slaughter of all other pigs, though, and pragmatically I’m not going to get that either way, so “a largeish-but-not-contemporary number of reasonably well-treated pigs farmed for food production” would be a much more feasible goal. Temple Grandin does a lot of work in this area, actually.
Isn’t this what’s happening all the time anyway?
Not in the sense I was using it above, namely, “We kill them all at once to remove their population.” What’s happening at present is more like “we kill them in batches to meet production demands, and bring in more.” Aggregated over the very long term a whole lot more pigs can suffer and die in the second case; I’m simply saying I don’t find “One sudden, nearly-complete mass slaughter” to be a preferable alternative.
My point is that the lifetime of a pig (EDIT: being farmed for meat) isn’t very long (about 6 months from what I can find on the internet). Thus all we would have to do is stop breeding them for a while and we very quickly wouldn’t have many pigs.
That’s totally true, but it feels a bit tangential to what I was saying.
I think it is in a similar vein, certainly, but I think it’s different in some ways too. For example, I don’t think most people would accept cannibalism even if the people (victims? food?) led very happy lives, perhaps like a system where people were pampered in spas all day before being killed for food. But the logical extension of Hanson’s argument is that this would be a great system. Assuming that there was a remote economic demand for human meat, which, thankfully, there isn’t.
Also, I think cannibalism engages people’s sense of moral intuition much moreso than simply having a lot of marginally happy people does.