I do not have the time for a more detailed critique of this, but by the gods does it leave me uneasy. I certainly could not be bothered to defend veganism, which irritates me as well. But to start making statements about how animals can’t feel pain - really? Has the writer ever had a pet? What is this, a week after that autistic psycho Descartes said animals can’t feel pain and left the door open for unleashing heaven knows how much pain inflicted by vivisectionists?! What is this, those primitive days when surgeons decided they could operate on babies without anaesthetics because they didn’t feel pain either? This is philosophising your way into some kind of psychotic hell, it feels like to me. It feels wildly completely-left-hemisphere, as if Dr Iain McGilchrist had never written anything. As for morality only existing in humans and being based on reasoning - puh-leeze, that is so 19th century. Examples of morality at some level are found all over the animal kingdom, and quite apart from the fact that we are on a continuous spectrum with the animals we evolved from, morality is not based on anything conscious or philosophical, it is based on the foundation of compassion, which surely evolved in parent animals which had to protect and nurture infant animals, not who had some kind of “approach” to “pain” and “society”, and then from reciprocation in hunter-gatherers, even where selfish as well as unselfish. Isn’t it like the old idea that you could separate emotion and reason, when modern neuroscience teaches us you can’t do anything of the kind? People who wonder about consciousness and cognition and philosophy would, it seems to me, get something rather richer out of reading Iain McGilchrist and listening to Dr Michael Levin. Veganism doesn’t seem to contribute to a better world - but neither does the denial of animal sentience, surely. And as for whether robots will ever have their rights defended - we don’t even know how to explain consciousness yet, and even though LLMs aren’t conscious, it seems to me that listening to Dr Levin should sow at the very least a smidgen of doubt about whether we can start separating cognition and consciousness, and then phenomenology and teleology and pain and compassion, quite so “cleanly”. And I really want the quote marks around “cleanly”, because some arguments here feel anything but “clean” to me. (As for the arithmetical arguments about shrimps or prawns, that’s pure left-hemisphere madness as well. I do appreciate the writer isn’t defending the arithmetical equivalence there, but it was all just “in the mix” of “moral humans, yeah, moral animals, no”, which I think doesn’t get off the philosophical launching pad, even if just because we believe in Darwinian evolution.)
“by the gods does it leave me uneasy” that’s the kicker. It also makes me feel uneasy to think about animal suffering and that’s why I don’t want to engage in it unnecessarily.
I admit my nod to Descartes left the door wide open to criticism. He gets half way there. Animals genuinely have zero moral worth, but we betray our own moral worth if we inflict unnecessary suffering on animals. I’ve had pets (dogs) and they are amazing. I cried when my previous dog died. But that’s because I was losing a relationship—something that added to my life was suddenly subtracted from it. I could’ve formed such a relationship with a stone statue though. In fact, kids do form such relationships with fluffy toys. And adults form such relationships with supernatural beings in the sky. Doesn’t mean that the fluffy toy or the god has moral worth in any real sense.
By the way, I try hard in the essay to distinguish generic pain from human-like pain. Yeah dogs feel pain in a sense. They don’t feel pain in the same sense that humans do. There is a gaping ravine between what dog pain is and what human pain is. Most humans take human pain and use it as a mental template for any time they see something that makes them wince. It’s anthropomorphisation.
“we are on a continuous spectrum with the animals we evolved from” true but none of those animals exist anymore. As for currently extant animals, there is only a continuous spectrum up until the point of phylogenetic divergence. For shrimp, that continuous spectrum ended half a billion years ago. If you’re arguing for a spectrum across currently extant species, well that kind of spectrum extends to every single living thing (plants, bacteria etc). The relevant spectrum, which would be consciousness, seems to be very much a step-function at humans. We’d need to know more about the underpinnings of consciousness to argue this though.
As for philosophising my way into “some kind of psychotic hell”—that’s largely the point I wanted to make. This is where utilitarianism takes you. Preventing this from happening requires believing things that either aren’t true or we can’t know are true. I’m saying let’s not fabricate animal consciousness, and instead chuck out utilitarianism and use a better ethical framework that doesn’t encourage excessive sympathy but also doesn’t encourage excessive animal suffering.
Also I disagree with “morality … is based on the foundation of compassion”. Compassion is based on morality and is only a small part of total morality. Morality is based on Darwinism, as is everything else biological. Haidt’s The Righteous Mind explains his moral foundations theory well. I would really recommend it to literally everyone. Compassion is one of 6 pillars.
Btw I appreciate the pushback. I wrote with quite an aggressive tone which may imply bone-headedness. I wanted to invite stress-testing. I’m also not deeply familiar with McGilchrist or Levin. I’ll read more.
Interesting. I'm constantly stunned by how alien to each other even human beings are. "Animals genuinely have zero moral worth" - I find this statement very worthy of rejection, while unfortunately not being able at present to articulate a better objection to it. "None of those animals exist any more" - I find this statement simply not relevant, as we can have say second and third cousins, descended from dead relatives in common, and the fact that those shared relatives are dead does not even begin to invalidate shared genetic etc ancestry or metabolic characteristics - and that example is only a contraction of the many levels of "cousin" separating us from chimps or dogs or whatever. I do not believe for a moment that anyone is "fabricating" animal consciousness, or indeed that consciousness is a step-function at humans - it seems to me necessarily a development and extension of what was already there, rather than a magic wand inside the cerebral cortex (My thinking on this was particularly influenced in recent years by Dr McGilchrist. I'm not exactly crazy about the Integrated Information Theory, I just don't find it convincing). But yes, I can't claim any special knowledge about the underpinnings of consciousness. I still have to disagree about compassion, or perhaps the words empathy or sympathy might have been better, as the foundation of morality; feelings and actions and rituals, and child care necessary for organisms sufficiently evolved cerebrally to need longer than 45 minutes to learn to fend for themselves, long preceded any kind of deliberate ability to articulate or analyse or excuse things, by maybe hundreds of thousands of years, so morality came into existence long before any kind of "thought" or "philosophising" of any kind - or we wouldn't be here. I loved Haidt's The Righteous Mind, I must re-read it soon. I think you might be knocked out by Michael Levin on YouTube, probably within half an hour.
I think "zero moral worth" is perhaps too provocative to be a useful thing for me to say. I also want to reject it. I mean that animals are not moral agents (the whole lion killing a zebra vs us killing a zebra argument). Animals of course have massive worth, but who is that worth with respect to? Us! We assign worth. We are the arbiters of moral value. So maybe I don't mean that animals don't have moral worth, I mean animals have zero moral worth without humans there to grant it to them.
Hmm I am definitely open to the idea of a spectrum of consciousness actually. I'm not that sure about the step-function notion. My personal favourite theory of consciousness and free will is Penrose/Hameroff's OrchOR. Basically, microtubule bundles in axons act as big amplifiers of quantum coherence which allow for quantum decision-making to act on biological scales within brains. My first ever substack essay went into this a bit, not sure if you read it. Anyways. Per this view, there could be a gradual spectrum of consciousness that increases with the density and number of quantum superpositions harboured in brains. This theory is also compatible with a step fuction though--with sufficient superposition only occuring at or above human-level microtubule brain density/alignment. Evolution rarely works without gradients though, so a step function could exist, but it would mean that consciousness was completely serendipitous and not selected for. I am on the fence about this!
Agree RE morality pre-existing ethical thought. Childcare was likely the main driver of compassion-related morality. But there are other types. E.g. the disgust response forms part of the sanctity/degradation moral foundation. This evolved because it reduced instances of disease or toxic food consumption. This is why necrophilia is immoral to us. But crucially, it is immoral regardless of whether the original drivers of evolution of this type of morality still exist. So if a necrophile wears a condom, it doesn't make it suddenly moral. The morality of the action was baked in by evolution.
This is a good lesson for me in how overly provocative language inhibits productive thought. Duly noted!
Brilliant. Gives me more to look into. I'm interested by the idea of considering disgust as a kind of bridge between evolutionary necessity for survival, a "purely biological" response, and moral concepts. I had seen that idea referred to of quantum effects in microtubule bundles in axons, but appreciate that this is currently extremely difficult to study, as it's not like sticking an electrode in a nice big neuron in a sea slug. (In the meantime I'm off to hunt a zebra, just to prove that just as animals can't be immoral, only humans can...!) Thanks again.
Disgust is an interesting phenomenon. I think (liberal) westerners tend to shun it in general, but it is an important part of morality!
Good on you for going out there and tackling the animal suffering associated with predation. May your bullets fly straight and the zebra death be quick! 😂
I've enjoyed the previous articles but this one feels like a bit of a misfire.
First, saying we can’t know animals feel pain is like asking whether the green I see is the same green you see. We can’t access another’s consciousness, human or otherwise, but if it walks, sounds, and reacts like pain, the most reasonable assumption is that it is pain.
Second, vegans don’t claim animals experience pain identically to humans. The point is that their suffering, however different in texture, outweighs the trivial pleasure of eating them. That’s a pretty low moral bar.
Third, dismissing “animal pain science” based on one fish study is weak, and the plant-suffering argument actually backfires: most crops are grown to feed livestock, so eating plants directly reduces total plant and animal death.
The sections on utilitarianism and “virtue ethics” also contradict themselves. "The virtue ethicist, on the other hand, abstains from kicking a dog on the street not because of the interests of the dog, but because of the cruelty it reflects in the human." If animals can’t feel pain, then cruelty toward them can’t exist ... yet the author appeals to cruelty as a moral vice. You can’t have it both ways.
Glad you enjoyed previous articles, if not this one. Luckily that means the net utility of my substack is therefore positive, so we're in good stead morally here!
1) Your first point I wrestle with a lot. I agree that in a certain sense, nobody except for oneself has moral worth, because we cannot guarantee consciousness in other humans until we know what consciousness is (hardcore Cartesian view). Practically speaking, I think pain is this complex emotional human thing which we then completely flatten when we ascribe it to animals. Sure, it's kind of similar but at the same time it's completely different. It is inescapably true that assigning any emotional mental state to non-human animals is pure anthropomorphism. At least with our fellow humans we can directly communicate emotions via language, making the assumption that other humans feel pain like we do less of a stretch. Even among humans we can't agree of equality of pain. The whole male vs female pain threshold thing is always being argued. Women insist that men cannot possibly imagine what childbirth feels like. True! We assume based on their reaction that it is very painful. This may or may not actually be true compared to other pains that a male might feel in his life. Hard to compare intra-species, let alone inter-species.
2) you're right but I don't think I did use this strawman in the essay (apologies if I implied it). From the essay: "[vegans] argue that shrimp are at least a bit like humans, so let’s give a shrimp life 0.00001x the value of a human life." Is this not a correct assessment of the utilitarian vegan worldview? The reason I reject this is because humans are the only moral agents on planet earth. We don't morally judge a cat when it brings in a freshly killed mouse. "[T]heir suffering, however different in texture, outweighs the trivial pleasure of eating them". I'm saying that alleviating the animal pain is actually also a trivial human pleasure. We do it for ourselves, because that's how morality evolved. That's what morality *is*. That's what I mean when I say animals have zero moral worth. I don't mean they have no worth at all. They have substantial worth--insofar as they are valuable to us human. We are the arbiters of "worth" and "morality". It feels uncomfortable to realise, but it's just true.
3) Agree that I cherry-picked a particularly egregious example. It is a case in point though, and the point--that our tendency for anthropomorphism biases research into animal consciousness/pain--is completely valid. On the plant suffering, okay let's roll with your conclusion. Say the whole world then goes vegan. Cows become extinct etc. We now all only eat plants. Now what? Do we next move on to alleviating the plant suffering that is only exacted for human consumption? The utilitarian urge to excuse something it defines as wrong for some greater good is why it is such a dangerous ethical framework. It's real Hitler/Mao/Pot shit.
4) Hmm I see your point. By using the word "cruelty" I seem to admit to animal suffering. Not necessarily. I have no qualms using the word "cruelty" to describe what Kai Cenat did on his livestream to his humanoid robot. I think it is disgusting behaviour. Demonstrates a real cruel streak in his character. Yet I *categorically know* that the humanoid robot does not suffer. So it is possible to demonstrate cruelty without actually inflicting suffering. How is that possible? I think virtue ethics meets you where you are at. It melds with ethical emotivism and says "if doing something feels in your heart of hearts wrong, then it is wrong". This means that a virtue ethicist not being cruel to an animal makes no truth claim about the actual existence of animal suffering itself. It kind of admits to fallacious anthropomorphisation and says "if you feel like this is bad, then doing it is bad". The caveat here is that no amount of virtue excuses any vice. So if a vegan thinks shrimp are super conscious, that's cool, but also ignorance is a vice and spreading confident ignorance or lies about animal suffering is a vice. Humility is a virtue. I definitely think there is wiggle room to be a humble vegan virtue ethicist. If I were to criticize my own essay here I would want it to separate veganism from utilitarianism more. The venn diagram has a whopping overlap, but I think it is possible to inhabit the non-utilitarian vegan fringe (another commenter mentioned Martha Nussbaum, who tries to do this). This point is a deep one and definitely requires more thought than I can expend for this comment. Thanks!
1) Tbh I think here we're generally on the same page but just take different conclusions.
2) So I still think here we're still not fully aligned on the fundamental vegan argument. Comparing a human life to a shrimp life for example is not the basis of veganism. The real comparison is between the shrimp's life and the marginal gain in pleasure from eating the shrimp instead of a plant.
A vegan doesn't have to clain that an animal's life is any % worth that of a human. Whether it's 0.1x or 0.000001x is not important to a vegan and a vegan never has to be able to prove that any amount of animal suffering is equivalent to that of a human. The animals life just has to be of more value than the additional pleasure of eating it, which I think you'd agree is a much lower threshold. (Appreciate I've said the same thing in 3 different ways ahah)
And when it comes to the comparing human dietary choices to animals, I think the key distinction is choice (as well as the cognitive ability to make that choice). Take you're example of the lion and zebra from the article. The lion has to eat the zebra in order to survive. Put a human in the same scenario and it actually becomes a fairly agreeable decision. An example that comes to mind is the passengers that got stuck in the Andes after the plane crash. They chose to eat the other dead passengers to stay alive. Eating human meat is not morally justified if there was an McDonald's (or McPlant) down the road but I would say it is morally justified in their situation where it's between that and starvation. Equally, if you got stuck in sub-saharan Africa with no food, few should judge you for slaughtering a zebra to keep yourself alive.
3) I see where you've gone there. But going back to the claims of veganism, the goal is not to eliminate all animal suffering, it is just to eliminate unnecessary suffering. Assuming that for the sake of pure survival, then plant/animal suffering can be justified. Like the lion can kill the zebra to survive. With this logic, humans are morally justified to farm plants in order to survive and sustain the human race.
The question for vegans is: is it morally justified to farm significantly more plants (which leads to deforestation and destruction of wildlife) to then feed to the trillions of animals we have in the animal agriculture industry (again which leads to more deforestation and destruction of wildlife)? The vegan argument would be that this is unnecessary suffering and so morally not justified.
4) probs a confusion on language here. I had to look up the Kai robot thing which I agree is an interesting one, but personally wouldn't describe it as "cruel". To me it is uncomfortable because he's like mimicking bullying behaviour. I'd say it's similar to people's concerns with violent computer games. There's no cruelty involved but there's something problematic about enjoying going round shooting people on a video game.
for point 2, I still reject the notion of doing any arithmetic at all. Or if we do engage in arithmetic, I assign all human experiences a value of infinity and all animal experiences a value of zero. What is human life if not a string of tiny pleasures? As soon as you start to equivocate between these and something that is just in another category altogether (animal experience), I think the process becomes invalid. What I would be more amenable to, which I think is a more honest calculus, is to say "the tiny additional pleasure that eating meat for me personally is outweighed by the greater pleasure I gain from thinking that I am alleviating suffering because I am under the impression that animal suffering is like human suffering". That, I think, is a more honest and therefore respectable position for a utilitarian vegan to make. But when it comes to proselytising this worldview, despite its low likelihood of being accurate, I think that crosses the line from virtue to vice.
I like the cannibalism thought experiment. I actually am not sure I agree here. I think it is still immoral to engage in cannibalism even if you are starving. Virtues and vices aren't means-tested like that. I'm not a moral Marxist. I don't think morality is "from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs". Otherwise you go down the slippery slope of excusing bank robbery if the robber is poor enough, or rape if the person is horny enough. Makes no sense to me.
Point 3 is interesting. So it's the lesser of two evils basically? I just struggle to ever accept such a consequentialist framework, maybe this is just a mental impasse for me personally. If we're going to talk about consequences, I think excusing lesser evils to alleviate greater evils has a rich history of leading to atrocity.
What about antibiotics? Should a pure vegan not be against the genocide of healthy microbes when there is a chance the immune system can clear the bad ones just fine? Microbes also "want" to live (obviously) and can sense noxious stimuli--even swimming away from them.
On 4, yeah I think you're right we're disagreeing on semantics. I'll concede the point and say I shouldn't have used cruel, as it's inaccurate. But I'm glad you can sense the moral weight of virtues and vices when there is no actual consequence. The mimicking of the bullying behaviour *is* bad regardless of the robots feelings. Video games also a very spicy but perhaps correct take!
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In general can we perhaps zoom out to animal pain vs animal death? If I accept your utilitarian presuppositions, I still think veganism isn't the answer. Personally, I pay fuck tonnes to get regeneratively farmed meat at Whole Foods. Perhaps asking you to speak on behalf of all vegans here, but do you consider killing an extremely well looked after animal to still be bad? Like I do actually get on board with the whole animal suffering stuff in my actual life--I just like to be honest that my motivations for doing so are because seeing or thinking about animals in pain makes me feel bad--but I completely check out when people like Earthling Ed say that even if you could guarantee a completely painless life and death, it is still immoral to eat animals for food. Can we agree that this is just bonkers?
2) so yeah I do agree this discussion doesn't work if we are coming from different angles of whether animals have moral worth.
3) So here I was just going with your hypothetical that plants feel pain, which neither of us agree with anyway. So the conclusion you make that the lesser evil of "plant deaths" still existing in a vegan world we both agree is not an evil.
I guess the vegan view is that you have the choice to alleviate an evil for no cost and only benefits, so why not? Your argument is then that there is no evil in the first place to alleviate. (Which then goes back to point 2 about it being difficult to proceed in the discussion given the fundamentally different viewpoint)
But even with all that being said, veganism is again preferencial in terms of mitigating bacteria death. The majority of antibiotics are used in the animal agriculture industry so going vegan would reduce bacteria death in your hypothetical anyway (and subsequent antibiotic resistance that puts humans at risk).
4) Agreed.
5) Yeah good question. This is an interesting one I've been thinking about quite recently. Personally from our current position, if we could guarantee a good life and painless slaughter for animals I think that's a hugely positive step worth celebrating.
With that said, the obvious question to follow up with: why do you need to slaughter the animal that's had a happy life? It's not that I'd see the death as a complete tragedy (given, as you say, they've had a happy life). But to me it does seem unnecessary to kill the animal (even if painlessly), when you have the choice just to let it continue living it's happy life.
Not to go on too much of tangent, I would point out that, unless you killed the animal yourself (which I'd prefer not to do), you'd have to send it to an abattoir. Slaughterhouse workers have been shown to have significantly higher rates of depression and anxiety. I struggle to see how it's hard to justify killing an animal for no particularly good reason whilst contributing to the harm humans in the process?
On (3): it's not a hypothetical that plants feel pain. Like I genuinely think that they do if we are going to define pain as Merriam-Webster does. Regarding their subjective felt conscious sense, yes that seem unlikely to be similar to humans at all really, but does that make it less worthy? I think if we're going to invoke rights to life or say that avoidance of suffering means pain is experienced, then all organims have this equally. In reality, there is a sliding scale of similarity to humans. I think your assumption is to assign moral value according to the scale of similarity to humans (interesting how this reveals a human-centred bias at the heart of it all--which I approve of). But then your sliding scale abruptly rounds down to zero outside of animalia. If were going to adhere to the sliding scale of consciousness ( which probably does actually exist), then the utilitarian has to apply their calculations across the scale here. Sufficient numbers of plant death therefore has huge net moral weight.
You claim zero cost for going vegan but I think restricting human pleasure is a huge cost. Human thriving is all that matters evolutionarily to us and I think that any time we use an evolved tool (morality) in a manner that contravenes this rule, it is an example of perversion of morality by definition.
Otherwise doing pistol squats in chemistry class is also very immoral, because doing so raises your caloric intake unnecessarily, which then requires killing more sentient beings (plants or animals) to replenish those calories. Equating small human pleasures to imagined experiences of other animals creates a slippery slope of invalid equivocation. The end result of this is forcing humans to live the most dreary lives possibly--just clinging to survival--in order to alleviate perceived suffering by other organisms.
On (5), I think we very much agree here. And the slaughtering comes because it contributes to human flourishing, which is pretty much the only thing that is actually important. Interested in your yes/no response to support for euthanasia in humans? Think it relates to painless animal slaughter too and we should be logically consistent across these.
Slaughter house workers is a smart example, and a good way for you to re-centre on human suffering to appeal to me. Problem is I don't care about slaughter house workers that much. They have free will and can choose another job. It's equally immoral to eliminate their livelihood altogether. I don't see it as immoral to pay for their salary. PhD students are also more depressed than the average person, does that mean we should stop people doing PhDs? Or should we ban sports, because humans can get injured and therefore it is unnecessary suffering? I just find the whole vegan outlook very authoritarian tbh!
Yeah, I’d say I generally agree with the idea of a sliding scale or hierarchy. But I also don’t see what’s wrong with someone deciding that the scale goes to zero at some point. Ultimately, it’s all subjective based on our existing understanding. Haven’t you just arbitrarily assigned humans as the only organisms with moral value? What about primates that are 99% biologically equivalent to humans?
I’d agree that the vegan view (drawing the line at animals rather than all living organisms) is a crude line in the sand. But it’s also understandable. Just like someone might say “I’m a human so I care about humans,” a vegan might say “I’m an animal so I care about animals.” A narcissist might say “I’m me so I care about me.”
Clearly, some animals (like sponges) have more in common with plants than with mammals. It’s partly why I don’t subscribe to strict vegan moral ideology. But everyone draws their moral boundaries somewhere. Most people include humans and pets (which I think we’d both agree is inconsistent). You’d only include humans, I’m guessing? I’d personally move my line case by case, based on the evidence and general consensus.
Regardless of all this, you still haven’t shown how veganism isn’t beneficial to all living organisms. A vegan diet reduces deaths of animals, plants, and even bacteria compared to an omnivorous one.
Also on your point that "restricting human pleasure is a huge cost". Could you not use your previous logic against you here about th robber or the rapist?
I will concede the pistol squat analogy. Again, it's ultimately subjective what weights to experiences. For example, you clearly feel you get a benefit from eating animals over plants. For me the difference between a chicken curry and a tofu curry is zero. Similarly, I get unlimited benefit from pistol squats that could never be outweighed by any amount of human suffering.
5) on the Euthenasia point. I assume you mean whether I am pro or against in medicine. I'm principal I am pro (i.e. if we lived in a utopia). But in practice I don't think we could implement it properly and without perverse insentivises.
I think the PhD vs slaughterhouse worker comparison is disingenuous.
PhD students generally choose their path from a position of agency: they’re often educated, financially supported, and can exit if it becomes too much. By contrast, slaughterhouse workers are disproportionately from vulnerable or marginalised backgrounds (often migrants) with limited ability to refuse work, demand better conditions, or switch jobs.
What your saying is like saying the deaths of migrant labourers building Qatar’s World Cup stadiums were their own fault because “they had a choice.” Whilst that's technically true in the narrowest sense, it's pretty morally questionable when people’s economic and social realities leave them with no real alternative.
Do you mean nobody seriously thinks that cats should be morally judged or seriously thinks that mice feel excruciating pain?
There are definitely a large number of cat owners who would scold their cat for bringing in a mouse. Wagging their finger at the cat while shouting "no! bad cat"
I also disagree that you can separate moral judgement from feeling bad about something. They are the same thing. Otherwise what does it mean to describe something as "bad"? Ethical emotivism is very much true in this sense.
I don't think anyone seriously thinks the cat is performing an immoral act by killing a mouse.
> There are definitely a large number of cat owners who would scold their cat for bringing in a mouse. Wagging their finger at the cat while shouting "no! bad cat"
That's true, I've never had cats but had assumed that was more to do with 'don't bring dead animals into the house' - if you were really concerned about your cat killing mice you would just keep them indoors or not own one.
> I also disagree that you can separate moral judgement from feeling bad about something. They are the same thing.
Feeling bad about something and morally judging an agent are obviously different. I feel bad when someone dies of cancer; I'm not morally judging the tumour. The question of whether (mouse) suffering matters is separate from whether the cat is blameworthy.
I don't think utilitarianism is completely false. This is because although your assumption that animals don't feel pain like humans does work for most animals, it doesn't work for primates like chimpanzees. I think a simple modification of utilitarianism to assign variable weight will do the trick. My intuition is
Weight = pain sensitivity/e^{similarity to humans}
The weight decreases exponentially as the animal gets morphologically different from humans. This requires some standardization, which I believe is possible.
Edit:
One might say this is exactly what utilitarians do. Does assigning exponentially decreasing weight make much difference? I think so. I shall use a simple illustration.
Say a cow feels suffering 0.1 times human suffering. Say it morphologically differs from humans by a factor of 10. Then moral weight is ~4*10^{-6}, compared to 0.1 that is traditional score.
This is so negligible that utilitarianism reduces to virtue ethics. It also solves the problems associated with infinities, although I don't know if they arise in this case.
Great comment. Yes, I think if we’re going to calculate moral worth, this is probably exactly what humans intuitively do (and then most utilitarians/effective altruists don’t include the denominator in your equation). The key psychological step is to recognise *why* similarity to humans is such a crucial part of that equation. It’s because that’s who morality evolved for!! So from the perspective of evolutionary logic, it is a binary with 1 for humans and 0 for all non-humans. I think the actual reality of morality, including easily tricked sympathy, is exactly what you describe. I think utilitarians tend to forget the adjustment for proximity to humans and also implement their own binary below animalia. I’ve never seen a utilitarian vegan include plant pain, which I joke about but is very much real, just *very* distant from our pain. But with sufficient numbers of plants such plant pain should play a role for a utilitarian. They ignore this though by rounding to zero. I’m saying that it’s equally valid to round to zero outside of humans, or outside of great apes (as I do).
I do think that there is a gradient of consciousness though and your equation seems to be a pretty accurate model to describe how we feel about other living creatures.
If you believe that human consciousness arose through evolution, you have good reasons to think that animals, especially ones close to our lineage, experience pain in a way similar to our own, even though it cannot be exactly the same. I think that this alone should be enough to grant them some kind of moral status above rocks.
Yeah I think you’re right in that this is typically how we choose to assign moral value. I wasn’t clear in the essay, but I meant to distinguish between subjective moral value (which humans can allocate as they please, and we assign lots to animals) and objective moral value (which is exclusively for humans by definition—humans are the exclusive moral agents).
On consciousness, you’re imaging a sliding scale or a gradient that scales with phylogenetic proximity to humans. This may or may not be true. Equally plausible is that consciousness is a binary that is switched on above a certain threshold that only humans surpass.
If we go with the gradient of consciousness though, then we must accept that plants, too, are a little bit conscious. Then we have to weigh up how much plant death we are happy with to satisfy human life. Utilitarian calculations here just end up being mightily convenient. The constants in those equations are set to produce an answer that equals just the dietary preferences of vegans—no more, no less
But I think you need a gradient like this for the sort of virtue ethics you are advocating for, too. For example, torturing a dog to death for fun reveals very deep character flaws, that ripping off a doll does not, and taking care of a hungry cat off the street reveals a kind of virtue that taking a rock off the street does not, wouldnt you agree?
Excellent rage bait. Are you sure that humans actually feel pain though?
(Jokes aside, apart from the well-deserved derision of utilitarians I don't quite see why you saw the need to write this. The paradox of morality is that being moral is - in the grand scheme of things - rational from an egoistical perspective, but you cannot be moral if you don't reject this fact.)
Perhaps regrettably rage-baity because some of my points are not intended only as jokes, but actually serious (e.g. plant pain--this needs to be taken into account by the utilitarian in all earnest!).
The answer to your question is no! "cogito, ergo sum", not "cogitamus, ergo sumus". Until we can actually describe the physical basis for consciousness (assuming it has a physical basis, which I suspect to be the case), then it's just an act of faith that we assume other humans feel pain (in terms of the complex emotional sensation) in the same way we do.
I actually will go and add some footnotes once I get a chance as post-script edits. When I wrote "animals don't feel pain" it was more a semantic point to say that what we mean by pain is different for different animals, and the vegan worldview treats it all as the same thing and therefore can be treated algebraically as the same variable in equations of ethical arithmetic. I do of course believe (although can't "know") that animals experience some low grade level of consciousness that scales with phylogenetic proximity to us.
I love the paradox as you put it. So we have to reject the truth? Is there not room to be cognizant of our own hypocrisy and still be morally virtuous? I dunno, it's interesting!
I actually agree with most of this (esp virtue, morality) except the first section.
(re morality: I was reminded of Heinlein's phrasing: "Morality is the survival instinct applied at a level higher than the individual")
But re pain:
It seems pretty clear to me that at least some animals feel pain, if you define the word in a remotely useful way. (I won't assert it since I can't prove it)
The line between humans and other non-human animals is far blurrier than your choice of examples makes it seem. I'm not so sure about fish and shrimp and chickens, but what about dogs, pigs, gorillas, chimpanzees and elephants?
(Yes, I read the footnote: Would you say the same of Neanderthals? early hominins? Humans 10000 years ago before objectively impressive achievements like leaving the gravity well?)
Ultimately I think you're making the same error as in the quote below, which is correct but misleading:
“For a human, the x-axis is the input and the y-axis the output. Yet when we sympathise with animals in pain, we use the y-axis as the input and attempt to infer cause from correlation. This is logically fallacious.”
Yes, it's logically fallacious to attempt to use syllogistically reasoning on absolute binary variables (PAIN/NoPAIN) to *prove* causation from some correlated data. But what matters is which hypotheses about what's really going on it provides (Bayesian) evidence for.
Consider a dog which has been abandoned by its owner. It’s not being subjected to a noxious stimulus, but its behavioral responses are pretty hard to explain unless something is going on, on the x-input emotional axis.
Ultimately PAIN and MORALITY are human concepts in the map that we try to apply to the messy territory of reality to make it simpler and more organized. All binary lines that we can draw are arbitrary, but some lines are more useful than others.
I really doubt that the sensible place to draw an arbitrary PAIN/NoPAIN line is at humans. (I do agree that it's a useful place to draw the MORAL-AGENT/NotMORAL-AGENT line)
I think claiming animals don't feel any pain is too bold and, I agree, not accurate. My point was more to highlight a semantic inconsistency. We use the word "pain" to describe very different things in humans and non-humans. Dog's I think do experience psychological pain, as you highlight, but as to what the experience of this actually "feels" like is unknown and I suspect massively overestimated by humans who tend to anthropomorphise everything. We can't even empathize (meaning "understand the subjective experience of") other humans, let alone other animals. When someone's loved one dies we say "I can't imagine what you're going through" because it is absolutely true!
On the sliding scale of pain, I do actually agree with you in the sense that this is how sympathy works. It increases for objects with increasing similarity to us. That's because it is easier to trick sympathy as you get more and more human-like. So a chimp gets way more sympathy than a fruit fly. For the binary, I was stripping back to the ultimate cause of morality, which is to serve humans. So according to evolutionary logic, non-human animals get an assignment of zero while humans get all the moral worth available. In reality, the felt sense of morality isn't calculated according to the original evolutionary logic that created it, so I do agree that the sliding scale of sympathy is just real.
In practical terms, everyone draws the line in the sand somewhere, and that place is arbitrary. I tried to expose that, if you follow utilitarian logic, you necessarily have to be against plant pain, or even unnecessary use of antibiotics, say. It becomes a self-defeating sacrificial and suicidal ethical framework if your moral assignments are even slightly off. By their calculus they should not have a line in the sand anywhere, but they are forced to be inconsistent for their own survival.
I personally would stop short of great apes. But I think it's more honest to think and say that this is because eating a chimp would feel uncomfortable for me, and it is this discomfort which motivates me against it. The problem with proselytising vegans is that they ignore the fact that the line in the sand is totally arbitrary and personal, and motivated by alleviating their own discomfort, and wish to force the position of their line on everyone else. It's very authoritarian.
To critique my essay, I think I did get bogged down in the pain point when it's actually not even necessary. It's also obviously true to me that you can alleviate animal pain without being vegan. Regenerative farming produces higher welfare animals than if there were no meat consumption at all.
On the difference between pain/no pain vs moral agent/not moral agent lines, this is interesting, no? It's funny how you and I can both admit to a sliding scale of pain, but we tend not to do the same for moral agency. Is it worse for a cat to murder a mouse than a venus fly-trap to murder a fly? We're surprisingly binary about this categorisation--with the line directly below humans. I think this speaks directly to the promiscuity of sympathy versus empathy.
Not hate! Just disagreement. Perhaps some disgust. The environment topic would require another 5000 words at least and probably a very deep dive into some data. My basic take is that the environmental impact is overblown. E.g. convenient omissions of the fact that methane exists as part of the methane cycle. In general greenhouse gases just also aren't that bad. Warming is very mild and very manageable. I don't like the more serious environmental destruction associated with intensive farming. Thinks like deforestation, eutrophication, soil degradation etc etc. I don't like these things because they are valuable to us as humans though, not because I think they are inherently morally worthy. Regenerative farming solves much of this though, it's just more expensive and therefore currently not favoured in the free market (and therefore doesn't get scaled).
The health argument could also be explored. It's mostly based on correlation-causation fallacy from epidemiological studies. Most recent and best data suggests animal products + plant products are best. Plant alone = inferior.
I admire your tack, and agree any of these arguments should focus around whether or not they provide sustainable value to humans. I imagine there might be an argument to be made, but it wouldn't center around the inherent value of animals.
"I have no doubt that in twenty years time we’ll have utilitarians writing essays on how its really important to defend robot “rights” because there is a tiny chance they feel pain"
1- even taken ur strong stance (which is not common among active researchers) on fish pain, most animals eaten are mammals/birds which easily clear the evidentiary bars
2- @morallawwithin is a kantian so not a great cite in the veganism requires utilitarianism section, she studies under one (christine korsgaard) of the most prominent kantians alive. martha nussbaum also advocates for animal welfare consideration from a capabilities approach and is very much influenced various virtue ethical positions
3- the section regarding adler adds nothing of value when consider what our stance towards , i.e. the genealogical fallacy
1- wrong. probably about ~5 billion mammals per year, ~80 billion birds per year, and around a trillion fish per year. Besides, mammals and birds don't "easily clear the evidentiary bars". What are those bars? You're anthropomorphising.
2- yeah I don't care what she calls herself, the essay is dripping in consequentialism. If you invent categorical imperatives based on consequences and probabilities, you're a utilitarian cosplaying as a Kantian. RE Martha Nussbaum--good for her, that means she's more correct that Moralla but still wrong. Her issue is she way over-eggs the capabilities of non-human animals compared to humans. What about the capabilities of plants?
3- not quite sure what you're trying to say here, sorry
I read your article on PhDs and enjoyed it, but this one is really disappointing.
You argue animals can't feel pain because they lack human emotional processing, then later appeal to virtue ethics where cruelty to animals is a vice. But you can't be cruel when kicking a rock, it requires the other party to be able to suffer. You want animals to be morally irrelevant for utilitarian calculations but morally relevant when it suits your ethics.
You move from 'animals don't feel pain the way humans do' (motte) to 'and therefore they don't matter morally' (bailey). To say nothing of the fanciful notion that human suffering is somehow deeper or more emotional and that makes it more morally salient - if anything I think that the raw agony of pain is *more* morally relevant than the "complex emotional awareness" that humans have about their pain. You believe that humans can simply choose not to feel pain; something tells me if you were passing a kidney stone you would not be so sanguine.
Citing one fish study to discredit a whole field, then citing one study on how plants “literally scream” so you can keep flogging the horse of plant consciousness. No, they make sounds, if only because screams have to by definition to come out of a mouth. My joints make sounds when they pop. That doesn't make them conscious.
I don't think your treatment of utilitarianism and its problems is particularly sophisticated or interesting.
I think your assertion that veganism is entirely self-serving and for the status benefits of being vegan is... I don't even know what to say to that. How many popular vegans do you know?
On popularity: the fact that veganism hasn't grown much doesn't tell us anything about whether it's ethically correct. Abolitionists would like to have a word.
Tbh there are much more thoughtful treatments of animal sentience and normative ethics out there. This reads like ill-informed motivated reasoning dressed up as philosophy.
Thanks Henry. Tbh this essay was very poorly written. I should re-write it. It's also far too combative. Let me try to clarify my points:
1. you can be cruel for kicking a rock. That's the exact point of virtue ethics. Kicking a rock demonstrates violent character, which makes it immoral. It's a completely different paradigm for ethics. It is not consequentialist.
2. Hmm I'm not sure if I made that argument but if I did then I agree with you that it is a non sequitur. The reason that animals don't matter morally is because they are not moral agents. A world without humans has no morality. There would be nothing judging and therefore nothing to judge. Nothing would have any moral value at all. We (the only moral agents) can decide to assign value to animals (I do!) but it's because of the sympathetic pain that animals invoke in us primarily. Basically because of sympathy, which evolved to serve us, we can assign moral value to whatever we want.
3. You're right. That's cherry picking a particularly egregious study. A more comprehensive literature review would be helpful but also significantly more time consuming. My point is to show how bias can create falsehoods in research. A single example is sufficient to prove the point that "this can happen".
4. Ok. Sorry you feel that way. Do you not find it at least a bit problematic that a utilitarian must condone (nay, hold as a moral good) necrophilia?
5. I think we have different conceptions of status here. I mean it in the psychological sense, not the socioeconomic sense. But of course there are lots of popular vegans whose socioeconomic status depends on their views too (any vegan influencer, for example).
6. The arguments for veganism seem very widespread for me. And there are huge corporate forces behind vegan foods now. So I think what holds veganism back is persuasive power in the battleground of ideas, not exposure of their ideas. Abolitionists, on the other hand, had much more convincing arguments but were challenged by lack of exposure. With veganism, everyone's heard the arguments but remains unconvinced. So I don't really see them as equivalent. You could say the same for other moral movements that have failed, like the pro-paedophilia wave in the 70s/80s. Lots of exposure, little persuasion. That said, this argument is kind of a battle over who will predict the future better so it's not really winnable by either of us.
7. Yup I agree tbh. It's polemic, not persuasive argumentation. I'll do better.
So when you watch all the vegan documentaries of animal abuse in factory farms, awful conditions that they're treated under, etc... you don't feel any disgust whatsoever? No feeling that "this is wrong, we should stop"? If you're going to accept feelings of disgust and moral vice as what ethics is made of then surely your feeling of disgust towards the awful conditions animals are subjected to gives you reason to stop eating them.
"If good people aren’t persuaded of your moral worldview, its probably not because they’re stupid or evil. It’s probably because your moral worldview just isn’t any good."
You could have used these sentences in the 1800s in the American South to prove that slavery/racism were justified, because people weren't persuaded by it. Sometimes morality demands more from us than we currently give.
Yes, such documentaries about factory farming tug at my heartstrings. That doesn't mean they are evidence for a scientific truth about animal consciousness. You have, in your comment, admitted that you were emotionally pulled towards a conclusion and then post-hoc rationalised this position. This is what moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt calls the "elephant and rider" model for moral decision-making.
My point is that, in reality, we have zero evidence that animals experience pain in any way similar to what we do. We can merely observe their responses and impute a subjective experience. But such imputation is erroneous. It is falling for the correlation-causation fallacy. Until we have a more thorough understanding of consciousness in general, we are hopeless to study "animal consciousness".
Me disliking what I see in videos of intensive pig farms in China doesn't mean anything about their pain. It does mean something about my pain though. Because this triggers my sympathies, I don't want it to exist. Therefore I oppose it (as, I assume, you do too). So the point here is that our shared opposition to "animal suffering" is derived from a selfish desire to alleviate our own pain. And this is fine! I just want to remind people of the point as it helps to keep radical utilitarians in check--the same category of people who tend to use utopian idealism to enact great suffering on and control over other humans.
RE slavery in the south, we actually have no idea what the average person thought. Slave owners were a tiny percentage of white americans. If there was Gallup polling back then I actually suspect a majority would be against it. For example, for the abolition of slavery in the British Empire, a majority vote was won and Wilberforce got a standing ovation in the houses of parliament. The arguments were very persuasive and just needed more exposure (an ~18 year campaign for Wilberforce). With veganism, the arguments have been exposed to death, but still veganism is woefully unpopular. This should tell you something about the validity of the utilitarian arguments.
There are many true cases reported by news channels that human failed to respond ethically or morally but animals responded with better examples of morality. Killing the hen which gives golden eggs cannot be justified.
Can you give me any specific examples? Most vegans accept that animals aren't moral agents, but you are suggesting they are? That's interesting! Does this imply that predation is wrong in your view?
I respect your views and I am open to both perspectives based on scientific evidences. I would like to give you my example. Most of my relatives eat non-veg and it's a normal thing for them to eat some animals like goat, pig and fish. When I was 12 years old, I became vegetarian under the influence of some Indian vegan activists like Menka Gandhi. I got married at the age of 21, when my wife was 20 years old. Now, we are the parents of two sons. I never forced my wife or my kids to become vegetarian but again at the age of 12, my elder son became vegetarian and it was his choice. I still respect the choice of my wife to be remained non-vegetarian as it is her choice. Similarly my wife and my parents still respect my choice of becoming vegetarian. The moral of the story is everyone has a right to take decision for him or her and we should respect their choice.
That's great. I have a lot of respect for vegans who are very libertarian, like you. It also implies a level of humility, which is a great virtue.
I would question your claim that animals respond with better examples of morality than humans. I think this may just be another example of anthropomorphisation--imagining a human-like consciousness driving the actions of animals when we have no evidence for this. As I referred to, it also has bad implications for predation. If animals are moral agents, and can choose to act morally, that means that every case where animals do not act morally is reprehensible. So bear killing salmon to eat is immoral. I think a bear perhaps does have very low-grade consciousness and free will, but its cognition is far too rudimentary for most people to blame it for killing salmon. By the same logic, we should extend human-level moral worth to the life of a bear. And we don't! Bears die of starvation all the time and people don't protest about it (like they do when humans die of starvation). The difference seems to be when humans are the ones killing the animals, which points to my emphasis on virtue ethics as being a better model for morality than utilitarianism. If a vegan acts virtuously, I have no issues at all--even if I think they are incorrect about the magnitude/importance of animal suffering. If a vegan is both wrong and motivated primarily by social reward and lies about it, then this destroys their credibility.
My essay here was definitely too aggressive (and did not demonstrate much virtue at all!). It is not a takedown of all veganism, but rather a certain strain of radical and over-confident and authoritarian veganism.
It's a shame that you turned off your brain as soon as you read something that contradicted your priors. As I explain in the essay, those (provocative) points are made from the perspective of evolution. The grander point is that all morality os anthropocentric, even if you think it is not. For example, you assign animals moral value, but not plants. This is because you value things that more closely resemble humans. This is because that is what morality evolved for. Evolution gives moral value only to humans (in fact, to humans in our close kin circles). But if we find that animals benefit us (which they do, even to a vegan who enjoys their existence), then that means we portion them some moral value. The point is that we are the only moral agents and we decide what gets valued or not.
I'm not a psychopath. I love animals. I'm just capable of grappling with complex and provocative ideas. I also care more about truth than satisfying my sympathies and dicomforts.
I didn't turn off my brain. I just read your argument about animals not feeling pain and found it to be utterly retarded. Animals have a central nervous system, plants do not. Even if plants "feel pain" (I'll remind you that they don't have a central nervous system) then based on the existence of trophic levels, even if we were to want to minimize "plant suffering", we'd want to eat a plant based diet anyway.
As moral agents, it makes sense that we'd want to minimize the suffering of other sentient beings who can feel pain (and yes, this obviously includes animals). Or at least I think this makes sense. Maybe you disagree. I don't care. I think it's worth it to try to do what we can to reduce the suffering of other sentient beings, not just humans.
Also, nearly all the animals people eat come from factory farms. Would you try to defend the existence of factory farms as well? If so, you can't honestly say you love animals. Actions speak louder than words. If you defend the proliferation of factory farms (which again, is where nearly all meat comes from), I don't believe you that you "love animals". I'm calling BS on that.
It is interesting that, for you, a central nervous system is necessary and sufficient to experience pain. Do you accept that the pain that an earth worm experiences is in a fundamentally different category to humans? Not just the actual nociception, but the complex emotional processing of the painful experience.
The prioritisation of central nervous systems by you still admits to the ultimate selfishness through which morality evolved. Why is it the case that nervous systems are inherently more morally valuable than non-nervous system mechanisms of pain? A plant doesn't have specialised cells to transmit electrical signals. Instead, all of its cells partake in the propagation of electrical signals, including those triggered by noxious stimuli. It's just a different evolutionary solution, but I wouldn't say inherently any less worthy. Of course, from *our* perspective it is less worthy, because we assign moral value according to similarity to us. This all points at the fact that morality is for humans, and can be successfully siphoned by creatures that mimic us humans closely enough (ie animals, by your estimation).
Regarding trophic levels, that's a fair point if you believe that animals eating plants is immoral. I don't care about minimising universal suffering though. I'm not even sure that suffering is inherently bad! (for humans it is certainly true that suffering isn't inherently bad). That's just not what morality is. Thinking so is a weird unnatural, inhuman pseudo-rationalisation of what morality is about. Otherwise you end up being an anti-predation vegan, which is genuinely retarded. I concern myself with my everyday actions and making sure that I act in accordance with virtuous ideals. The death of the grass that fed the cow that I then eat doesn't stack onto me as if I also killed the grass. Life and death are natural and amoral things.
If minimising universal suffering is the goal, the the clear solution to all of it is to just exterminate the entire universe. Drop a nuke and kill everyone and every animal and yourself. Life is suffering, so ending and preventing future life prevents suffering. This *surely* strikes you as an odd conclusion for a well-designed ethical framework.
I'm actually in complete agreement with you about factory farms. I don't like them and personally never buy products made in this way. These are my reasons: factory farming is more directly damaging to the environment, and a pristine environment pleases me; it increases chances of disease outbreaks and therefore is riskier to us humans; when I think of pigs squished into tight spaces and treated badly, I can't help but to imagine my own experience in such a situation, and this makes me feel uncomfortable and distressed. Not buying factory farmed produce alleviates this distress for me.
You'll see that the motivations (which are your motivations too, even if you won't admit it) are entirely selfishly motivated. And that's fine! Where vegans lose their virtue is when they are dishonest about the motivations of their dietary choices and when they lie as a consequence and inhibit the freedoms of other humans as a consequence. As a generalisation, it is a very authoritarian movement. That said, of course it is possible to be a virtuous vegan who doesn't do these things.
Everyone knows there is a massive difference between chopping up a carrot or apple and chopping up an animal. You know this too.
We can get into the weeds of why there is a difference between the two but we both know there's a massive difference between the two and I don't feel like arguing over such an obvious point.
By your logic, anything we choose not to do is for selfish reasons. Don't think it's good to murder or rape people? That's selfish. Okay? Whatever. I guess I'm selfish for not wanting to harm others. I don't care how you label me for not choosing to do those things, I still think there are certain things that are right and wrong. If that makes me selfish then so be it. By that definition you're selfish as well.
I am in favor of doing whatever I reasonably can to reduce the amount of suffering I cause to sentient beings. Again, we can get into the weeds of what that means, but ultimately, when 8 billion people eat meat, that means animals get factory farmed en masse. Or they can eat cultivated meat or not eat meat at all. Those are the three options. I choose either of the latter two. Trying to convince yourself that there's a fourth option is just cope. To feed 8 billion people lots of meat, those are your options.
By writing this blurb in the first place, you've chosen to plant your flag with the first choice, which, if people listen to your argument and apply it to their lives, will lead to more animals being factory farmed. That's the truth, no matter how much you try to sugarcoat it. You can justify it to yourself if it helps you sleep at night, but I can't do that. I don't care if that makes me selfish or whatever else you want to call it. That's my choice and I believe it to be the clearly correct choice.
I agree with lots of what you've written here. Yes of course chopping a carrot versus a live animal is very different. Getting into the weeds of why this difference exists is exactly what I want to do, and what I have done in the essay. You are correct: everything humans do is selfishly motivated. I acknowledge that, but most vegans pretend it isn't so. The essay tries to expose vegan hubris. Ultimately we all serve ourselves, even if we pretend we have a wide moral circle and care about all sentient things (we only care about those things because it benefits us).
How is regeneratively farmed meat not a fourth option here? Especially since you've included cultivated meat as an option, which has many undesirable externalities (massively energy intensive, massively polluting etc). Another option would also be just killing everyone and yourself surely? Isn't that the best way to avoid suffering caused by humans? And if that's the logical conclusion of your philosophy ... do you think it's a good philosophy?
I respect your choice bro. I just don't think your reasons make much moral sense. And in reality most people just don't care that much about shrimp dying for food. It's easy enough to tug at heartstrings for things like pigs, with their human-like faces and communicative grunts. But why veganism draws the line below all animals is kinda arbitrary and not that persuasive in my view.
I think you're overcomplicating this to do mental gymnastics to justify your choice to contribute to the needless suffering of billions of animals that we factory farm every year.
"Regenerative ag" is simply not scalable in the way people think. There's a reason why almost all animals that people eat are factory farmed. If you want to keep eating meat I think you should at least be honest with yourself that you're contributing to this system and by doing so you're guaranteeing that more animals will be born into some of the most horrific conditions known to man. If you're good with that, there is no need to try to do all these mental gymnastics, just admit that you don't care.
Or do care and change your behavior to align it with your values! That's what I think you should do tbh. But it's up to you. Vegans have never forced anyone at gunpoint to stop others from harming animals (as far as I know, I'm sure there could be an exception somewhere). You'll make the decisions you're comfortable making. I'm not comfortable contributing unnecessarily to the proliferation of the mass commodification of animals. You can call that illogical or selfish or whatever else. But I think that's just a way for you to mental gymnastics your way out of the fact that you know you don't need to contribute to this system but you're too weak to choose otherwise (or at least you're currently too weak to choose otherwise, maybe that will change someday). I hope you reconsider and do make changes in the future. But that's up to you.
Also, inflicting unnecessary suffering onto others is more authoritarian than rejecting such things.
Unless you want to make the argument that outlawing rape or murder or whatever is authoritarian because you're telling others what they can and cannot do. At any rate, vegans don't stop others from harming animals anyway. They just point out people's hypocrisy (like I'm doing to you now) when people say things like "I love animals!" and then eat them. No, you don't. If you treat a pig or chicken differently than you treat a cat or a dog then you don't love them. Just be honest about that if you're going to write a whole blurb about why vegans are wrong. No, you just want to feel good about causing other beings immense amount of harm, so you deflect by bringing up "plants feel pain" and other similarly dumb arguments.
It actually is authoritarian to outlaw rape or murder. But its a level of authority that I'm very happy with!
Fair enough actually, this is a good rebuttal. Pointing out perceived hypocrisy isn't authoritarian. That said, I don't see a meat eater saying "I love animals" as being hypocritical. It would be like saying you love your grandma but then turning off her life support machine. They aren't mutually exclusive things.
I love my dog a heck of a lot more than I love some random cow that I've never met. I don't see an issue with that. Yeah I don't love chickens, that's kinda ridiculous. If I had some pet chickens, then maybe. Is that psychopathic of me? I don't think so!
Do you say that you actually love all chickens? I'm genuinely curious here. Where does that come from? Are you a devout Christian by any chance?
I do not have the time for a more detailed critique of this, but by the gods does it leave me uneasy. I certainly could not be bothered to defend veganism, which irritates me as well. But to start making statements about how animals can’t feel pain - really? Has the writer ever had a pet? What is this, a week after that autistic psycho Descartes said animals can’t feel pain and left the door open for unleashing heaven knows how much pain inflicted by vivisectionists?! What is this, those primitive days when surgeons decided they could operate on babies without anaesthetics because they didn’t feel pain either? This is philosophising your way into some kind of psychotic hell, it feels like to me. It feels wildly completely-left-hemisphere, as if Dr Iain McGilchrist had never written anything. As for morality only existing in humans and being based on reasoning - puh-leeze, that is so 19th century. Examples of morality at some level are found all over the animal kingdom, and quite apart from the fact that we are on a continuous spectrum with the animals we evolved from, morality is not based on anything conscious or philosophical, it is based on the foundation of compassion, which surely evolved in parent animals which had to protect and nurture infant animals, not who had some kind of “approach” to “pain” and “society”, and then from reciprocation in hunter-gatherers, even where selfish as well as unselfish. Isn’t it like the old idea that you could separate emotion and reason, when modern neuroscience teaches us you can’t do anything of the kind? People who wonder about consciousness and cognition and philosophy would, it seems to me, get something rather richer out of reading Iain McGilchrist and listening to Dr Michael Levin. Veganism doesn’t seem to contribute to a better world - but neither does the denial of animal sentience, surely. And as for whether robots will ever have their rights defended - we don’t even know how to explain consciousness yet, and even though LLMs aren’t conscious, it seems to me that listening to Dr Levin should sow at the very least a smidgen of doubt about whether we can start separating cognition and consciousness, and then phenomenology and teleology and pain and compassion, quite so “cleanly”. And I really want the quote marks around “cleanly”, because some arguments here feel anything but “clean” to me. (As for the arithmetical arguments about shrimps or prawns, that’s pure left-hemisphere madness as well. I do appreciate the writer isn’t defending the arithmetical equivalence there, but it was all just “in the mix” of “moral humans, yeah, moral animals, no”, which I think doesn’t get off the philosophical launching pad, even if just because we believe in Darwinian evolution.)
“by the gods does it leave me uneasy” that’s the kicker. It also makes me feel uneasy to think about animal suffering and that’s why I don’t want to engage in it unnecessarily.
I admit my nod to Descartes left the door wide open to criticism. He gets half way there. Animals genuinely have zero moral worth, but we betray our own moral worth if we inflict unnecessary suffering on animals. I’ve had pets (dogs) and they are amazing. I cried when my previous dog died. But that’s because I was losing a relationship—something that added to my life was suddenly subtracted from it. I could’ve formed such a relationship with a stone statue though. In fact, kids do form such relationships with fluffy toys. And adults form such relationships with supernatural beings in the sky. Doesn’t mean that the fluffy toy or the god has moral worth in any real sense.
By the way, I try hard in the essay to distinguish generic pain from human-like pain. Yeah dogs feel pain in a sense. They don’t feel pain in the same sense that humans do. There is a gaping ravine between what dog pain is and what human pain is. Most humans take human pain and use it as a mental template for any time they see something that makes them wince. It’s anthropomorphisation.
“we are on a continuous spectrum with the animals we evolved from” true but none of those animals exist anymore. As for currently extant animals, there is only a continuous spectrum up until the point of phylogenetic divergence. For shrimp, that continuous spectrum ended half a billion years ago. If you’re arguing for a spectrum across currently extant species, well that kind of spectrum extends to every single living thing (plants, bacteria etc). The relevant spectrum, which would be consciousness, seems to be very much a step-function at humans. We’d need to know more about the underpinnings of consciousness to argue this though.
As for philosophising my way into “some kind of psychotic hell”—that’s largely the point I wanted to make. This is where utilitarianism takes you. Preventing this from happening requires believing things that either aren’t true or we can’t know are true. I’m saying let’s not fabricate animal consciousness, and instead chuck out utilitarianism and use a better ethical framework that doesn’t encourage excessive sympathy but also doesn’t encourage excessive animal suffering.
Also I disagree with “morality … is based on the foundation of compassion”. Compassion is based on morality and is only a small part of total morality. Morality is based on Darwinism, as is everything else biological. Haidt’s The Righteous Mind explains his moral foundations theory well. I would really recommend it to literally everyone. Compassion is one of 6 pillars.
Btw I appreciate the pushback. I wrote with quite an aggressive tone which may imply bone-headedness. I wanted to invite stress-testing. I’m also not deeply familiar with McGilchrist or Levin. I’ll read more.
Interesting. I'm constantly stunned by how alien to each other even human beings are. "Animals genuinely have zero moral worth" - I find this statement very worthy of rejection, while unfortunately not being able at present to articulate a better objection to it. "None of those animals exist any more" - I find this statement simply not relevant, as we can have say second and third cousins, descended from dead relatives in common, and the fact that those shared relatives are dead does not even begin to invalidate shared genetic etc ancestry or metabolic characteristics - and that example is only a contraction of the many levels of "cousin" separating us from chimps or dogs or whatever. I do not believe for a moment that anyone is "fabricating" animal consciousness, or indeed that consciousness is a step-function at humans - it seems to me necessarily a development and extension of what was already there, rather than a magic wand inside the cerebral cortex (My thinking on this was particularly influenced in recent years by Dr McGilchrist. I'm not exactly crazy about the Integrated Information Theory, I just don't find it convincing). But yes, I can't claim any special knowledge about the underpinnings of consciousness. I still have to disagree about compassion, or perhaps the words empathy or sympathy might have been better, as the foundation of morality; feelings and actions and rituals, and child care necessary for organisms sufficiently evolved cerebrally to need longer than 45 minutes to learn to fend for themselves, long preceded any kind of deliberate ability to articulate or analyse or excuse things, by maybe hundreds of thousands of years, so morality came into existence long before any kind of "thought" or "philosophising" of any kind - or we wouldn't be here. I loved Haidt's The Righteous Mind, I must re-read it soon. I think you might be knocked out by Michael Levin on YouTube, probably within half an hour.
I think "zero moral worth" is perhaps too provocative to be a useful thing for me to say. I also want to reject it. I mean that animals are not moral agents (the whole lion killing a zebra vs us killing a zebra argument). Animals of course have massive worth, but who is that worth with respect to? Us! We assign worth. We are the arbiters of moral value. So maybe I don't mean that animals don't have moral worth, I mean animals have zero moral worth without humans there to grant it to them.
Hmm I am definitely open to the idea of a spectrum of consciousness actually. I'm not that sure about the step-function notion. My personal favourite theory of consciousness and free will is Penrose/Hameroff's OrchOR. Basically, microtubule bundles in axons act as big amplifiers of quantum coherence which allow for quantum decision-making to act on biological scales within brains. My first ever substack essay went into this a bit, not sure if you read it. Anyways. Per this view, there could be a gradual spectrum of consciousness that increases with the density and number of quantum superpositions harboured in brains. This theory is also compatible with a step fuction though--with sufficient superposition only occuring at or above human-level microtubule brain density/alignment. Evolution rarely works without gradients though, so a step function could exist, but it would mean that consciousness was completely serendipitous and not selected for. I am on the fence about this!
Agree RE morality pre-existing ethical thought. Childcare was likely the main driver of compassion-related morality. But there are other types. E.g. the disgust response forms part of the sanctity/degradation moral foundation. This evolved because it reduced instances of disease or toxic food consumption. This is why necrophilia is immoral to us. But crucially, it is immoral regardless of whether the original drivers of evolution of this type of morality still exist. So if a necrophile wears a condom, it doesn't make it suddenly moral. The morality of the action was baked in by evolution.
This is a good lesson for me in how overly provocative language inhibits productive thought. Duly noted!
Brilliant. Gives me more to look into. I'm interested by the idea of considering disgust as a kind of bridge between evolutionary necessity for survival, a "purely biological" response, and moral concepts. I had seen that idea referred to of quantum effects in microtubule bundles in axons, but appreciate that this is currently extremely difficult to study, as it's not like sticking an electrode in a nice big neuron in a sea slug. (In the meantime I'm off to hunt a zebra, just to prove that just as animals can't be immoral, only humans can...!) Thanks again.
Disgust is an interesting phenomenon. I think (liberal) westerners tend to shun it in general, but it is an important part of morality!
Good on you for going out there and tackling the animal suffering associated with predation. May your bullets fly straight and the zebra death be quick! 😂
I've enjoyed the previous articles but this one feels like a bit of a misfire.
First, saying we can’t know animals feel pain is like asking whether the green I see is the same green you see. We can’t access another’s consciousness, human or otherwise, but if it walks, sounds, and reacts like pain, the most reasonable assumption is that it is pain.
Second, vegans don’t claim animals experience pain identically to humans. The point is that their suffering, however different in texture, outweighs the trivial pleasure of eating them. That’s a pretty low moral bar.
Third, dismissing “animal pain science” based on one fish study is weak, and the plant-suffering argument actually backfires: most crops are grown to feed livestock, so eating plants directly reduces total plant and animal death.
The sections on utilitarianism and “virtue ethics” also contradict themselves. "The virtue ethicist, on the other hand, abstains from kicking a dog on the street not because of the interests of the dog, but because of the cruelty it reflects in the human." If animals can’t feel pain, then cruelty toward them can’t exist ... yet the author appeals to cruelty as a moral vice. You can’t have it both ways.
Interested in your responses to these.
Glad you enjoyed previous articles, if not this one. Luckily that means the net utility of my substack is therefore positive, so we're in good stead morally here!
1) Your first point I wrestle with a lot. I agree that in a certain sense, nobody except for oneself has moral worth, because we cannot guarantee consciousness in other humans until we know what consciousness is (hardcore Cartesian view). Practically speaking, I think pain is this complex emotional human thing which we then completely flatten when we ascribe it to animals. Sure, it's kind of similar but at the same time it's completely different. It is inescapably true that assigning any emotional mental state to non-human animals is pure anthropomorphism. At least with our fellow humans we can directly communicate emotions via language, making the assumption that other humans feel pain like we do less of a stretch. Even among humans we can't agree of equality of pain. The whole male vs female pain threshold thing is always being argued. Women insist that men cannot possibly imagine what childbirth feels like. True! We assume based on their reaction that it is very painful. This may or may not actually be true compared to other pains that a male might feel in his life. Hard to compare intra-species, let alone inter-species.
2) you're right but I don't think I did use this strawman in the essay (apologies if I implied it). From the essay: "[vegans] argue that shrimp are at least a bit like humans, so let’s give a shrimp life 0.00001x the value of a human life." Is this not a correct assessment of the utilitarian vegan worldview? The reason I reject this is because humans are the only moral agents on planet earth. We don't morally judge a cat when it brings in a freshly killed mouse. "[T]heir suffering, however different in texture, outweighs the trivial pleasure of eating them". I'm saying that alleviating the animal pain is actually also a trivial human pleasure. We do it for ourselves, because that's how morality evolved. That's what morality *is*. That's what I mean when I say animals have zero moral worth. I don't mean they have no worth at all. They have substantial worth--insofar as they are valuable to us human. We are the arbiters of "worth" and "morality". It feels uncomfortable to realise, but it's just true.
3) Agree that I cherry-picked a particularly egregious example. It is a case in point though, and the point--that our tendency for anthropomorphism biases research into animal consciousness/pain--is completely valid. On the plant suffering, okay let's roll with your conclusion. Say the whole world then goes vegan. Cows become extinct etc. We now all only eat plants. Now what? Do we next move on to alleviating the plant suffering that is only exacted for human consumption? The utilitarian urge to excuse something it defines as wrong for some greater good is why it is such a dangerous ethical framework. It's real Hitler/Mao/Pot shit.
4) Hmm I see your point. By using the word "cruelty" I seem to admit to animal suffering. Not necessarily. I have no qualms using the word "cruelty" to describe what Kai Cenat did on his livestream to his humanoid robot. I think it is disgusting behaviour. Demonstrates a real cruel streak in his character. Yet I *categorically know* that the humanoid robot does not suffer. So it is possible to demonstrate cruelty without actually inflicting suffering. How is that possible? I think virtue ethics meets you where you are at. It melds with ethical emotivism and says "if doing something feels in your heart of hearts wrong, then it is wrong". This means that a virtue ethicist not being cruel to an animal makes no truth claim about the actual existence of animal suffering itself. It kind of admits to fallacious anthropomorphisation and says "if you feel like this is bad, then doing it is bad". The caveat here is that no amount of virtue excuses any vice. So if a vegan thinks shrimp are super conscious, that's cool, but also ignorance is a vice and spreading confident ignorance or lies about animal suffering is a vice. Humility is a virtue. I definitely think there is wiggle room to be a humble vegan virtue ethicist. If I were to criticize my own essay here I would want it to separate veganism from utilitarianism more. The venn diagram has a whopping overlap, but I think it is possible to inhabit the non-utilitarian vegan fringe (another commenter mentioned Martha Nussbaum, who tries to do this). This point is a deep one and definitely requires more thought than I can expend for this comment. Thanks!
1) Tbh I think here we're generally on the same page but just take different conclusions.
2) So I still think here we're still not fully aligned on the fundamental vegan argument. Comparing a human life to a shrimp life for example is not the basis of veganism. The real comparison is between the shrimp's life and the marginal gain in pleasure from eating the shrimp instead of a plant.
A vegan doesn't have to clain that an animal's life is any % worth that of a human. Whether it's 0.1x or 0.000001x is not important to a vegan and a vegan never has to be able to prove that any amount of animal suffering is equivalent to that of a human. The animals life just has to be of more value than the additional pleasure of eating it, which I think you'd agree is a much lower threshold. (Appreciate I've said the same thing in 3 different ways ahah)
And when it comes to the comparing human dietary choices to animals, I think the key distinction is choice (as well as the cognitive ability to make that choice). Take you're example of the lion and zebra from the article. The lion has to eat the zebra in order to survive. Put a human in the same scenario and it actually becomes a fairly agreeable decision. An example that comes to mind is the passengers that got stuck in the Andes after the plane crash. They chose to eat the other dead passengers to stay alive. Eating human meat is not morally justified if there was an McDonald's (or McPlant) down the road but I would say it is morally justified in their situation where it's between that and starvation. Equally, if you got stuck in sub-saharan Africa with no food, few should judge you for slaughtering a zebra to keep yourself alive.
3) I see where you've gone there. But going back to the claims of veganism, the goal is not to eliminate all animal suffering, it is just to eliminate unnecessary suffering. Assuming that for the sake of pure survival, then plant/animal suffering can be justified. Like the lion can kill the zebra to survive. With this logic, humans are morally justified to farm plants in order to survive and sustain the human race.
The question for vegans is: is it morally justified to farm significantly more plants (which leads to deforestation and destruction of wildlife) to then feed to the trillions of animals we have in the animal agriculture industry (again which leads to more deforestation and destruction of wildlife)? The vegan argument would be that this is unnecessary suffering and so morally not justified.
4) probs a confusion on language here. I had to look up the Kai robot thing which I agree is an interesting one, but personally wouldn't describe it as "cruel". To me it is uncomfortable because he's like mimicking bullying behaviour. I'd say it's similar to people's concerns with violent computer games. There's no cruelty involved but there's something problematic about enjoying going round shooting people on a video game.
for point 2, I still reject the notion of doing any arithmetic at all. Or if we do engage in arithmetic, I assign all human experiences a value of infinity and all animal experiences a value of zero. What is human life if not a string of tiny pleasures? As soon as you start to equivocate between these and something that is just in another category altogether (animal experience), I think the process becomes invalid. What I would be more amenable to, which I think is a more honest calculus, is to say "the tiny additional pleasure that eating meat for me personally is outweighed by the greater pleasure I gain from thinking that I am alleviating suffering because I am under the impression that animal suffering is like human suffering". That, I think, is a more honest and therefore respectable position for a utilitarian vegan to make. But when it comes to proselytising this worldview, despite its low likelihood of being accurate, I think that crosses the line from virtue to vice.
I like the cannibalism thought experiment. I actually am not sure I agree here. I think it is still immoral to engage in cannibalism even if you are starving. Virtues and vices aren't means-tested like that. I'm not a moral Marxist. I don't think morality is "from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs". Otherwise you go down the slippery slope of excusing bank robbery if the robber is poor enough, or rape if the person is horny enough. Makes no sense to me.
Point 3 is interesting. So it's the lesser of two evils basically? I just struggle to ever accept such a consequentialist framework, maybe this is just a mental impasse for me personally. If we're going to talk about consequences, I think excusing lesser evils to alleviate greater evils has a rich history of leading to atrocity.
What about antibiotics? Should a pure vegan not be against the genocide of healthy microbes when there is a chance the immune system can clear the bad ones just fine? Microbes also "want" to live (obviously) and can sense noxious stimuli--even swimming away from them.
On 4, yeah I think you're right we're disagreeing on semantics. I'll concede the point and say I shouldn't have used cruel, as it's inaccurate. But I'm glad you can sense the moral weight of virtues and vices when there is no actual consequence. The mimicking of the bullying behaviour *is* bad regardless of the robots feelings. Video games also a very spicy but perhaps correct take!
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In general can we perhaps zoom out to animal pain vs animal death? If I accept your utilitarian presuppositions, I still think veganism isn't the answer. Personally, I pay fuck tonnes to get regeneratively farmed meat at Whole Foods. Perhaps asking you to speak on behalf of all vegans here, but do you consider killing an extremely well looked after animal to still be bad? Like I do actually get on board with the whole animal suffering stuff in my actual life--I just like to be honest that my motivations for doing so are because seeing or thinking about animals in pain makes me feel bad--but I completely check out when people like Earthling Ed say that even if you could guarantee a completely painless life and death, it is still immoral to eat animals for food. Can we agree that this is just bonkers?
2) so yeah I do agree this discussion doesn't work if we are coming from different angles of whether animals have moral worth.
3) So here I was just going with your hypothetical that plants feel pain, which neither of us agree with anyway. So the conclusion you make that the lesser evil of "plant deaths" still existing in a vegan world we both agree is not an evil.
I guess the vegan view is that you have the choice to alleviate an evil for no cost and only benefits, so why not? Your argument is then that there is no evil in the first place to alleviate. (Which then goes back to point 2 about it being difficult to proceed in the discussion given the fundamentally different viewpoint)
But even with all that being said, veganism is again preferencial in terms of mitigating bacteria death. The majority of antibiotics are used in the animal agriculture industry so going vegan would reduce bacteria death in your hypothetical anyway (and subsequent antibiotic resistance that puts humans at risk).
4) Agreed.
5) Yeah good question. This is an interesting one I've been thinking about quite recently. Personally from our current position, if we could guarantee a good life and painless slaughter for animals I think that's a hugely positive step worth celebrating.
With that said, the obvious question to follow up with: why do you need to slaughter the animal that's had a happy life? It's not that I'd see the death as a complete tragedy (given, as you say, they've had a happy life). But to me it does seem unnecessary to kill the animal (even if painlessly), when you have the choice just to let it continue living it's happy life.
Not to go on too much of tangent, I would point out that, unless you killed the animal yourself (which I'd prefer not to do), you'd have to send it to an abattoir. Slaughterhouse workers have been shown to have significantly higher rates of depression and anxiety. I struggle to see how it's hard to justify killing an animal for no particularly good reason whilst contributing to the harm humans in the process?
On (3): it's not a hypothetical that plants feel pain. Like I genuinely think that they do if we are going to define pain as Merriam-Webster does. Regarding their subjective felt conscious sense, yes that seem unlikely to be similar to humans at all really, but does that make it less worthy? I think if we're going to invoke rights to life or say that avoidance of suffering means pain is experienced, then all organims have this equally. In reality, there is a sliding scale of similarity to humans. I think your assumption is to assign moral value according to the scale of similarity to humans (interesting how this reveals a human-centred bias at the heart of it all--which I approve of). But then your sliding scale abruptly rounds down to zero outside of animalia. If were going to adhere to the sliding scale of consciousness ( which probably does actually exist), then the utilitarian has to apply their calculations across the scale here. Sufficient numbers of plant death therefore has huge net moral weight.
You claim zero cost for going vegan but I think restricting human pleasure is a huge cost. Human thriving is all that matters evolutionarily to us and I think that any time we use an evolved tool (morality) in a manner that contravenes this rule, it is an example of perversion of morality by definition.
Otherwise doing pistol squats in chemistry class is also very immoral, because doing so raises your caloric intake unnecessarily, which then requires killing more sentient beings (plants or animals) to replenish those calories. Equating small human pleasures to imagined experiences of other animals creates a slippery slope of invalid equivocation. The end result of this is forcing humans to live the most dreary lives possibly--just clinging to survival--in order to alleviate perceived suffering by other organisms.
On (5), I think we very much agree here. And the slaughtering comes because it contributes to human flourishing, which is pretty much the only thing that is actually important. Interested in your yes/no response to support for euthanasia in humans? Think it relates to painless animal slaughter too and we should be logically consistent across these.
Slaughter house workers is a smart example, and a good way for you to re-centre on human suffering to appeal to me. Problem is I don't care about slaughter house workers that much. They have free will and can choose another job. It's equally immoral to eliminate their livelihood altogether. I don't see it as immoral to pay for their salary. PhD students are also more depressed than the average person, does that mean we should stop people doing PhDs? Or should we ban sports, because humans can get injured and therefore it is unnecessary suffering? I just find the whole vegan outlook very authoritarian tbh!
3) Not really sure where to go on this one ahaha.
Yeah, I’d say I generally agree with the idea of a sliding scale or hierarchy. But I also don’t see what’s wrong with someone deciding that the scale goes to zero at some point. Ultimately, it’s all subjective based on our existing understanding. Haven’t you just arbitrarily assigned humans as the only organisms with moral value? What about primates that are 99% biologically equivalent to humans?
I’d agree that the vegan view (drawing the line at animals rather than all living organisms) is a crude line in the sand. But it’s also understandable. Just like someone might say “I’m a human so I care about humans,” a vegan might say “I’m an animal so I care about animals.” A narcissist might say “I’m me so I care about me.”
Clearly, some animals (like sponges) have more in common with plants than with mammals. It’s partly why I don’t subscribe to strict vegan moral ideology. But everyone draws their moral boundaries somewhere. Most people include humans and pets (which I think we’d both agree is inconsistent). You’d only include humans, I’m guessing? I’d personally move my line case by case, based on the evidence and general consensus.
Regardless of all this, you still haven’t shown how veganism isn’t beneficial to all living organisms. A vegan diet reduces deaths of animals, plants, and even bacteria compared to an omnivorous one.
Also on your point that "restricting human pleasure is a huge cost". Could you not use your previous logic against you here about th robber or the rapist?
I will concede the pistol squat analogy. Again, it's ultimately subjective what weights to experiences. For example, you clearly feel you get a benefit from eating animals over plants. For me the difference between a chicken curry and a tofu curry is zero. Similarly, I get unlimited benefit from pistol squats that could never be outweighed by any amount of human suffering.
5) on the Euthenasia point. I assume you mean whether I am pro or against in medicine. I'm principal I am pro (i.e. if we lived in a utopia). But in practice I don't think we could implement it properly and without perverse insentivises.
I think the PhD vs slaughterhouse worker comparison is disingenuous.
PhD students generally choose their path from a position of agency: they’re often educated, financially supported, and can exit if it becomes too much. By contrast, slaughterhouse workers are disproportionately from vulnerable or marginalised backgrounds (often migrants) with limited ability to refuse work, demand better conditions, or switch jobs.
What your saying is like saying the deaths of migrant labourers building Qatar’s World Cup stadiums were their own fault because “they had a choice.” Whilst that's technically true in the narrowest sense, it's pretty morally questionable when people’s economic and social realities leave them with no real alternative.
> We don't morally judge a cat when it brings in a freshly killed mouse.
You don’t need to morally judge it to feel that it’s bad for the mouse to feel excruciating pain - and I don’t think anyone does seriously think this.
There are people who take it seriously and who are investigating ways to reduce the suffering of animals in the wild.
Do you mean nobody seriously thinks that cats should be morally judged or seriously thinks that mice feel excruciating pain?
There are definitely a large number of cat owners who would scold their cat for bringing in a mouse. Wagging their finger at the cat while shouting "no! bad cat"
I also disagree that you can separate moral judgement from feeling bad about something. They are the same thing. Otherwise what does it mean to describe something as "bad"? Ethical emotivism is very much true in this sense.
I don't think anyone seriously thinks the cat is performing an immoral act by killing a mouse.
> There are definitely a large number of cat owners who would scold their cat for bringing in a mouse. Wagging their finger at the cat while shouting "no! bad cat"
That's true, I've never had cats but had assumed that was more to do with 'don't bring dead animals into the house' - if you were really concerned about your cat killing mice you would just keep them indoors or not own one.
> I also disagree that you can separate moral judgement from feeling bad about something. They are the same thing.
Feeling bad about something and morally judging an agent are obviously different. I feel bad when someone dies of cancer; I'm not morally judging the tumour. The question of whether (mouse) suffering matters is separate from whether the cat is blameworthy.
I don't think utilitarianism is completely false. This is because although your assumption that animals don't feel pain like humans does work for most animals, it doesn't work for primates like chimpanzees. I think a simple modification of utilitarianism to assign variable weight will do the trick. My intuition is
Weight = pain sensitivity/e^{similarity to humans}
The weight decreases exponentially as the animal gets morphologically different from humans. This requires some standardization, which I believe is possible.
Edit:
One might say this is exactly what utilitarians do. Does assigning exponentially decreasing weight make much difference? I think so. I shall use a simple illustration.
Say a cow feels suffering 0.1 times human suffering. Say it morphologically differs from humans by a factor of 10. Then moral weight is ~4*10^{-6}, compared to 0.1 that is traditional score.
This is so negligible that utilitarianism reduces to virtue ethics. It also solves the problems associated with infinities, although I don't know if they arise in this case.
Great comment. Yes, I think if we’re going to calculate moral worth, this is probably exactly what humans intuitively do (and then most utilitarians/effective altruists don’t include the denominator in your equation). The key psychological step is to recognise *why* similarity to humans is such a crucial part of that equation. It’s because that’s who morality evolved for!! So from the perspective of evolutionary logic, it is a binary with 1 for humans and 0 for all non-humans. I think the actual reality of morality, including easily tricked sympathy, is exactly what you describe. I think utilitarians tend to forget the adjustment for proximity to humans and also implement their own binary below animalia. I’ve never seen a utilitarian vegan include plant pain, which I joke about but is very much real, just *very* distant from our pain. But with sufficient numbers of plants such plant pain should play a role for a utilitarian. They ignore this though by rounding to zero. I’m saying that it’s equally valid to round to zero outside of humans, or outside of great apes (as I do).
I do think that there is a gradient of consciousness though and your equation seems to be a pretty accurate model to describe how we feel about other living creatures.
If you believe that human consciousness arose through evolution, you have good reasons to think that animals, especially ones close to our lineage, experience pain in a way similar to our own, even though it cannot be exactly the same. I think that this alone should be enough to grant them some kind of moral status above rocks.
Yeah I think you’re right in that this is typically how we choose to assign moral value. I wasn’t clear in the essay, but I meant to distinguish between subjective moral value (which humans can allocate as they please, and we assign lots to animals) and objective moral value (which is exclusively for humans by definition—humans are the exclusive moral agents).
On consciousness, you’re imaging a sliding scale or a gradient that scales with phylogenetic proximity to humans. This may or may not be true. Equally plausible is that consciousness is a binary that is switched on above a certain threshold that only humans surpass.
If we go with the gradient of consciousness though, then we must accept that plants, too, are a little bit conscious. Then we have to weigh up how much plant death we are happy with to satisfy human life. Utilitarian calculations here just end up being mightily convenient. The constants in those equations are set to produce an answer that equals just the dietary preferences of vegans—no more, no less
But I think you need a gradient like this for the sort of virtue ethics you are advocating for, too. For example, torturing a dog to death for fun reveals very deep character flaws, that ripping off a doll does not, and taking care of a hungry cat off the street reveals a kind of virtue that taking a rock off the street does not, wouldnt you agree?
Excellent rage bait. Are you sure that humans actually feel pain though?
(Jokes aside, apart from the well-deserved derision of utilitarians I don't quite see why you saw the need to write this. The paradox of morality is that being moral is - in the grand scheme of things - rational from an egoistical perspective, but you cannot be moral if you don't reject this fact.)
Perhaps regrettably rage-baity because some of my points are not intended only as jokes, but actually serious (e.g. plant pain--this needs to be taken into account by the utilitarian in all earnest!).
The answer to your question is no! "cogito, ergo sum", not "cogitamus, ergo sumus". Until we can actually describe the physical basis for consciousness (assuming it has a physical basis, which I suspect to be the case), then it's just an act of faith that we assume other humans feel pain (in terms of the complex emotional sensation) in the same way we do.
I actually will go and add some footnotes once I get a chance as post-script edits. When I wrote "animals don't feel pain" it was more a semantic point to say that what we mean by pain is different for different animals, and the vegan worldview treats it all as the same thing and therefore can be treated algebraically as the same variable in equations of ethical arithmetic. I do of course believe (although can't "know") that animals experience some low grade level of consciousness that scales with phylogenetic proximity to us.
I love the paradox as you put it. So we have to reject the truth? Is there not room to be cognizant of our own hypocrisy and still be morally virtuous? I dunno, it's interesting!
Interestingly provocative essay.
I actually agree with most of this (esp virtue, morality) except the first section.
(re morality: I was reminded of Heinlein's phrasing: "Morality is the survival instinct applied at a level higher than the individual")
But re pain:
It seems pretty clear to me that at least some animals feel pain, if you define the word in a remotely useful way. (I won't assert it since I can't prove it)
The line between humans and other non-human animals is far blurrier than your choice of examples makes it seem. I'm not so sure about fish and shrimp and chickens, but what about dogs, pigs, gorillas, chimpanzees and elephants?
(Yes, I read the footnote: Would you say the same of Neanderthals? early hominins? Humans 10000 years ago before objectively impressive achievements like leaving the gravity well?)
Ultimately I think you're making the same error as in the quote below, which is correct but misleading:
“For a human, the x-axis is the input and the y-axis the output. Yet when we sympathise with animals in pain, we use the y-axis as the input and attempt to infer cause from correlation. This is logically fallacious.”
Yes, it's logically fallacious to attempt to use syllogistically reasoning on absolute binary variables (PAIN/NoPAIN) to *prove* causation from some correlated data. But what matters is which hypotheses about what's really going on it provides (Bayesian) evidence for.
Consider a dog which has been abandoned by its owner. It’s not being subjected to a noxious stimulus, but its behavioral responses are pretty hard to explain unless something is going on, on the x-input emotional axis.
Ultimately PAIN and MORALITY are human concepts in the map that we try to apply to the messy territory of reality to make it simpler and more organized. All binary lines that we can draw are arbitrary, but some lines are more useful than others.
I really doubt that the sensible place to draw an arbitrary PAIN/NoPAIN line is at humans. (I do agree that it's a useful place to draw the MORAL-AGENT/NotMORAL-AGENT line)
Fair pushback, thank you.
I think claiming animals don't feel any pain is too bold and, I agree, not accurate. My point was more to highlight a semantic inconsistency. We use the word "pain" to describe very different things in humans and non-humans. Dog's I think do experience psychological pain, as you highlight, but as to what the experience of this actually "feels" like is unknown and I suspect massively overestimated by humans who tend to anthropomorphise everything. We can't even empathize (meaning "understand the subjective experience of") other humans, let alone other animals. When someone's loved one dies we say "I can't imagine what you're going through" because it is absolutely true!
On the sliding scale of pain, I do actually agree with you in the sense that this is how sympathy works. It increases for objects with increasing similarity to us. That's because it is easier to trick sympathy as you get more and more human-like. So a chimp gets way more sympathy than a fruit fly. For the binary, I was stripping back to the ultimate cause of morality, which is to serve humans. So according to evolutionary logic, non-human animals get an assignment of zero while humans get all the moral worth available. In reality, the felt sense of morality isn't calculated according to the original evolutionary logic that created it, so I do agree that the sliding scale of sympathy is just real.
In practical terms, everyone draws the line in the sand somewhere, and that place is arbitrary. I tried to expose that, if you follow utilitarian logic, you necessarily have to be against plant pain, or even unnecessary use of antibiotics, say. It becomes a self-defeating sacrificial and suicidal ethical framework if your moral assignments are even slightly off. By their calculus they should not have a line in the sand anywhere, but they are forced to be inconsistent for their own survival.
I personally would stop short of great apes. But I think it's more honest to think and say that this is because eating a chimp would feel uncomfortable for me, and it is this discomfort which motivates me against it. The problem with proselytising vegans is that they ignore the fact that the line in the sand is totally arbitrary and personal, and motivated by alleviating their own discomfort, and wish to force the position of their line on everyone else. It's very authoritarian.
To critique my essay, I think I did get bogged down in the pain point when it's actually not even necessary. It's also obviously true to me that you can alleviate animal pain without being vegan. Regenerative farming produces higher welfare animals than if there were no meat consumption at all.
On the difference between pain/no pain vs moral agent/not moral agent lines, this is interesting, no? It's funny how you and I can both admit to a sliding scale of pain, but we tend not to do the same for moral agency. Is it worse for a cat to murder a mouse than a venus fly-trap to murder a fly? We're surprisingly binary about this categorisation--with the line directly below humans. I think this speaks directly to the promiscuity of sympathy versus empathy.
Great points! I'll be mulling over them :)
I'm all about vegan hate, but what about the environmental impacts of animal related products?
Not hate! Just disagreement. Perhaps some disgust. The environment topic would require another 5000 words at least and probably a very deep dive into some data. My basic take is that the environmental impact is overblown. E.g. convenient omissions of the fact that methane exists as part of the methane cycle. In general greenhouse gases just also aren't that bad. Warming is very mild and very manageable. I don't like the more serious environmental destruction associated with intensive farming. Thinks like deforestation, eutrophication, soil degradation etc etc. I don't like these things because they are valuable to us as humans though, not because I think they are inherently morally worthy. Regenerative farming solves much of this though, it's just more expensive and therefore currently not favoured in the free market (and therefore doesn't get scaled).
The health argument could also be explored. It's mostly based on correlation-causation fallacy from epidemiological studies. Most recent and best data suggests animal products + plant products are best. Plant alone = inferior.
I admire your tack, and agree any of these arguments should focus around whether or not they provide sustainable value to humans. I imagine there might be an argument to be made, but it wouldn't center around the inherent value of animals.
"I have no doubt that in twenty years time we’ll have utilitarians writing essays on how its really important to defend robot “rights” because there is a tiny chance they feel pain"
Don't worry. We're already several steps ahead of you https://reducing-suffering.org/is-there-suffering-in-fundamental-physics/
Hahaha thank you for this. Incredible.
1- even taken ur strong stance (which is not common among active researchers) on fish pain, most animals eaten are mammals/birds which easily clear the evidentiary bars
2- @morallawwithin is a kantian so not a great cite in the veganism requires utilitarianism section, she studies under one (christine korsgaard) of the most prominent kantians alive. martha nussbaum also advocates for animal welfare consideration from a capabilities approach and is very much influenced various virtue ethical positions
3- the section regarding adler adds nothing of value when consider what our stance towards , i.e. the genealogical fallacy
1- wrong. probably about ~5 billion mammals per year, ~80 billion birds per year, and around a trillion fish per year. Besides, mammals and birds don't "easily clear the evidentiary bars". What are those bars? You're anthropomorphising.
2- yeah I don't care what she calls herself, the essay is dripping in consequentialism. If you invent categorical imperatives based on consequences and probabilities, you're a utilitarian cosplaying as a Kantian. RE Martha Nussbaum--good for her, that means she's more correct that Moralla but still wrong. Her issue is she way over-eggs the capabilities of non-human animals compared to humans. What about the capabilities of plants?
3- not quite sure what you're trying to say here, sorry
I read your article on PhDs and enjoyed it, but this one is really disappointing.
You argue animals can't feel pain because they lack human emotional processing, then later appeal to virtue ethics where cruelty to animals is a vice. But you can't be cruel when kicking a rock, it requires the other party to be able to suffer. You want animals to be morally irrelevant for utilitarian calculations but morally relevant when it suits your ethics.
You move from 'animals don't feel pain the way humans do' (motte) to 'and therefore they don't matter morally' (bailey). To say nothing of the fanciful notion that human suffering is somehow deeper or more emotional and that makes it more morally salient - if anything I think that the raw agony of pain is *more* morally relevant than the "complex emotional awareness" that humans have about their pain. You believe that humans can simply choose not to feel pain; something tells me if you were passing a kidney stone you would not be so sanguine.
Citing one fish study to discredit a whole field, then citing one study on how plants “literally scream” so you can keep flogging the horse of plant consciousness. No, they make sounds, if only because screams have to by definition to come out of a mouth. My joints make sounds when they pop. That doesn't make them conscious.
I don't think your treatment of utilitarianism and its problems is particularly sophisticated or interesting.
I think your assertion that veganism is entirely self-serving and for the status benefits of being vegan is... I don't even know what to say to that. How many popular vegans do you know?
On popularity: the fact that veganism hasn't grown much doesn't tell us anything about whether it's ethically correct. Abolitionists would like to have a word.
Tbh there are much more thoughtful treatments of animal sentience and normative ethics out there. This reads like ill-informed motivated reasoning dressed up as philosophy.
Thanks Henry. Tbh this essay was very poorly written. I should re-write it. It's also far too combative. Let me try to clarify my points:
1. you can be cruel for kicking a rock. That's the exact point of virtue ethics. Kicking a rock demonstrates violent character, which makes it immoral. It's a completely different paradigm for ethics. It is not consequentialist.
2. Hmm I'm not sure if I made that argument but if I did then I agree with you that it is a non sequitur. The reason that animals don't matter morally is because they are not moral agents. A world without humans has no morality. There would be nothing judging and therefore nothing to judge. Nothing would have any moral value at all. We (the only moral agents) can decide to assign value to animals (I do!) but it's because of the sympathetic pain that animals invoke in us primarily. Basically because of sympathy, which evolved to serve us, we can assign moral value to whatever we want.
3. You're right. That's cherry picking a particularly egregious study. A more comprehensive literature review would be helpful but also significantly more time consuming. My point is to show how bias can create falsehoods in research. A single example is sufficient to prove the point that "this can happen".
4. Ok. Sorry you feel that way. Do you not find it at least a bit problematic that a utilitarian must condone (nay, hold as a moral good) necrophilia?
5. I think we have different conceptions of status here. I mean it in the psychological sense, not the socioeconomic sense. But of course there are lots of popular vegans whose socioeconomic status depends on their views too (any vegan influencer, for example).
6. The arguments for veganism seem very widespread for me. And there are huge corporate forces behind vegan foods now. So I think what holds veganism back is persuasive power in the battleground of ideas, not exposure of their ideas. Abolitionists, on the other hand, had much more convincing arguments but were challenged by lack of exposure. With veganism, everyone's heard the arguments but remains unconvinced. So I don't really see them as equivalent. You could say the same for other moral movements that have failed, like the pro-paedophilia wave in the 70s/80s. Lots of exposure, little persuasion. That said, this argument is kind of a battle over who will predict the future better so it's not really winnable by either of us.
7. Yup I agree tbh. It's polemic, not persuasive argumentation. I'll do better.
So when you watch all the vegan documentaries of animal abuse in factory farms, awful conditions that they're treated under, etc... you don't feel any disgust whatsoever? No feeling that "this is wrong, we should stop"? If you're going to accept feelings of disgust and moral vice as what ethics is made of then surely your feeling of disgust towards the awful conditions animals are subjected to gives you reason to stop eating them.
"If good people aren’t persuaded of your moral worldview, its probably not because they’re stupid or evil. It’s probably because your moral worldview just isn’t any good."
You could have used these sentences in the 1800s in the American South to prove that slavery/racism were justified, because people weren't persuaded by it. Sometimes morality demands more from us than we currently give.
Yes, such documentaries about factory farming tug at my heartstrings. That doesn't mean they are evidence for a scientific truth about animal consciousness. You have, in your comment, admitted that you were emotionally pulled towards a conclusion and then post-hoc rationalised this position. This is what moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt calls the "elephant and rider" model for moral decision-making.
My point is that, in reality, we have zero evidence that animals experience pain in any way similar to what we do. We can merely observe their responses and impute a subjective experience. But such imputation is erroneous. It is falling for the correlation-causation fallacy. Until we have a more thorough understanding of consciousness in general, we are hopeless to study "animal consciousness".
Me disliking what I see in videos of intensive pig farms in China doesn't mean anything about their pain. It does mean something about my pain though. Because this triggers my sympathies, I don't want it to exist. Therefore I oppose it (as, I assume, you do too). So the point here is that our shared opposition to "animal suffering" is derived from a selfish desire to alleviate our own pain. And this is fine! I just want to remind people of the point as it helps to keep radical utilitarians in check--the same category of people who tend to use utopian idealism to enact great suffering on and control over other humans.
RE slavery in the south, we actually have no idea what the average person thought. Slave owners were a tiny percentage of white americans. If there was Gallup polling back then I actually suspect a majority would be against it. For example, for the abolition of slavery in the British Empire, a majority vote was won and Wilberforce got a standing ovation in the houses of parliament. The arguments were very persuasive and just needed more exposure (an ~18 year campaign for Wilberforce). With veganism, the arguments have been exposed to death, but still veganism is woefully unpopular. This should tell you something about the validity of the utilitarian arguments.
There are many true cases reported by news channels that human failed to respond ethically or morally but animals responded with better examples of morality. Killing the hen which gives golden eggs cannot be justified.
Can you give me any specific examples? Most vegans accept that animals aren't moral agents, but you are suggesting they are? That's interesting! Does this imply that predation is wrong in your view?
I respect your views and I am open to both perspectives based on scientific evidences. I would like to give you my example. Most of my relatives eat non-veg and it's a normal thing for them to eat some animals like goat, pig and fish. When I was 12 years old, I became vegetarian under the influence of some Indian vegan activists like Menka Gandhi. I got married at the age of 21, when my wife was 20 years old. Now, we are the parents of two sons. I never forced my wife or my kids to become vegetarian but again at the age of 12, my elder son became vegetarian and it was his choice. I still respect the choice of my wife to be remained non-vegetarian as it is her choice. Similarly my wife and my parents still respect my choice of becoming vegetarian. The moral of the story is everyone has a right to take decision for him or her and we should respect their choice.
That's great. I have a lot of respect for vegans who are very libertarian, like you. It also implies a level of humility, which is a great virtue.
I would question your claim that animals respond with better examples of morality than humans. I think this may just be another example of anthropomorphisation--imagining a human-like consciousness driving the actions of animals when we have no evidence for this. As I referred to, it also has bad implications for predation. If animals are moral agents, and can choose to act morally, that means that every case where animals do not act morally is reprehensible. So bear killing salmon to eat is immoral. I think a bear perhaps does have very low-grade consciousness and free will, but its cognition is far too rudimentary for most people to blame it for killing salmon. By the same logic, we should extend human-level moral worth to the life of a bear. And we don't! Bears die of starvation all the time and people don't protest about it (like they do when humans die of starvation). The difference seems to be when humans are the ones killing the animals, which points to my emphasis on virtue ethics as being a better model for morality than utilitarianism. If a vegan acts virtuously, I have no issues at all--even if I think they are incorrect about the magnitude/importance of animal suffering. If a vegan is both wrong and motivated primarily by social reward and lies about it, then this destroys their credibility.
My essay here was definitely too aggressive (and did not demonstrate much virtue at all!). It is not a takedown of all veganism, but rather a certain strain of radical and over-confident and authoritarian veganism.
I stopped reading when you said animals don't feel pain and don't have any moral worth.
I think you're a genuine psychopath and should seek help.
It's a shame that you turned off your brain as soon as you read something that contradicted your priors. As I explain in the essay, those (provocative) points are made from the perspective of evolution. The grander point is that all morality os anthropocentric, even if you think it is not. For example, you assign animals moral value, but not plants. This is because you value things that more closely resemble humans. This is because that is what morality evolved for. Evolution gives moral value only to humans (in fact, to humans in our close kin circles). But if we find that animals benefit us (which they do, even to a vegan who enjoys their existence), then that means we portion them some moral value. The point is that we are the only moral agents and we decide what gets valued or not.
I'm not a psychopath. I love animals. I'm just capable of grappling with complex and provocative ideas. I also care more about truth than satisfying my sympathies and dicomforts.
I didn't turn off my brain. I just read your argument about animals not feeling pain and found it to be utterly retarded. Animals have a central nervous system, plants do not. Even if plants "feel pain" (I'll remind you that they don't have a central nervous system) then based on the existence of trophic levels, even if we were to want to minimize "plant suffering", we'd want to eat a plant based diet anyway.
As moral agents, it makes sense that we'd want to minimize the suffering of other sentient beings who can feel pain (and yes, this obviously includes animals). Or at least I think this makes sense. Maybe you disagree. I don't care. I think it's worth it to try to do what we can to reduce the suffering of other sentient beings, not just humans.
Also, nearly all the animals people eat come from factory farms. Would you try to defend the existence of factory farms as well? If so, you can't honestly say you love animals. Actions speak louder than words. If you defend the proliferation of factory farms (which again, is where nearly all meat comes from), I don't believe you that you "love animals". I'm calling BS on that.
It is interesting that, for you, a central nervous system is necessary and sufficient to experience pain. Do you accept that the pain that an earth worm experiences is in a fundamentally different category to humans? Not just the actual nociception, but the complex emotional processing of the painful experience.
The prioritisation of central nervous systems by you still admits to the ultimate selfishness through which morality evolved. Why is it the case that nervous systems are inherently more morally valuable than non-nervous system mechanisms of pain? A plant doesn't have specialised cells to transmit electrical signals. Instead, all of its cells partake in the propagation of electrical signals, including those triggered by noxious stimuli. It's just a different evolutionary solution, but I wouldn't say inherently any less worthy. Of course, from *our* perspective it is less worthy, because we assign moral value according to similarity to us. This all points at the fact that morality is for humans, and can be successfully siphoned by creatures that mimic us humans closely enough (ie animals, by your estimation).
Regarding trophic levels, that's a fair point if you believe that animals eating plants is immoral. I don't care about minimising universal suffering though. I'm not even sure that suffering is inherently bad! (for humans it is certainly true that suffering isn't inherently bad). That's just not what morality is. Thinking so is a weird unnatural, inhuman pseudo-rationalisation of what morality is about. Otherwise you end up being an anti-predation vegan, which is genuinely retarded. I concern myself with my everyday actions and making sure that I act in accordance with virtuous ideals. The death of the grass that fed the cow that I then eat doesn't stack onto me as if I also killed the grass. Life and death are natural and amoral things.
If minimising universal suffering is the goal, the the clear solution to all of it is to just exterminate the entire universe. Drop a nuke and kill everyone and every animal and yourself. Life is suffering, so ending and preventing future life prevents suffering. This *surely* strikes you as an odd conclusion for a well-designed ethical framework.
I'm actually in complete agreement with you about factory farms. I don't like them and personally never buy products made in this way. These are my reasons: factory farming is more directly damaging to the environment, and a pristine environment pleases me; it increases chances of disease outbreaks and therefore is riskier to us humans; when I think of pigs squished into tight spaces and treated badly, I can't help but to imagine my own experience in such a situation, and this makes me feel uncomfortable and distressed. Not buying factory farmed produce alleviates this distress for me.
You'll see that the motivations (which are your motivations too, even if you won't admit it) are entirely selfishly motivated. And that's fine! Where vegans lose their virtue is when they are dishonest about the motivations of their dietary choices and when they lie as a consequence and inhibit the freedoms of other humans as a consequence. As a generalisation, it is a very authoritarian movement. That said, of course it is possible to be a virtuous vegan who doesn't do these things.
Everyone knows there is a massive difference between chopping up a carrot or apple and chopping up an animal. You know this too.
We can get into the weeds of why there is a difference between the two but we both know there's a massive difference between the two and I don't feel like arguing over such an obvious point.
By your logic, anything we choose not to do is for selfish reasons. Don't think it's good to murder or rape people? That's selfish. Okay? Whatever. I guess I'm selfish for not wanting to harm others. I don't care how you label me for not choosing to do those things, I still think there are certain things that are right and wrong. If that makes me selfish then so be it. By that definition you're selfish as well.
I am in favor of doing whatever I reasonably can to reduce the amount of suffering I cause to sentient beings. Again, we can get into the weeds of what that means, but ultimately, when 8 billion people eat meat, that means animals get factory farmed en masse. Or they can eat cultivated meat or not eat meat at all. Those are the three options. I choose either of the latter two. Trying to convince yourself that there's a fourth option is just cope. To feed 8 billion people lots of meat, those are your options.
By writing this blurb in the first place, you've chosen to plant your flag with the first choice, which, if people listen to your argument and apply it to their lives, will lead to more animals being factory farmed. That's the truth, no matter how much you try to sugarcoat it. You can justify it to yourself if it helps you sleep at night, but I can't do that. I don't care if that makes me selfish or whatever else you want to call it. That's my choice and I believe it to be the clearly correct choice.
I agree with lots of what you've written here. Yes of course chopping a carrot versus a live animal is very different. Getting into the weeds of why this difference exists is exactly what I want to do, and what I have done in the essay. You are correct: everything humans do is selfishly motivated. I acknowledge that, but most vegans pretend it isn't so. The essay tries to expose vegan hubris. Ultimately we all serve ourselves, even if we pretend we have a wide moral circle and care about all sentient things (we only care about those things because it benefits us).
How is regeneratively farmed meat not a fourth option here? Especially since you've included cultivated meat as an option, which has many undesirable externalities (massively energy intensive, massively polluting etc). Another option would also be just killing everyone and yourself surely? Isn't that the best way to avoid suffering caused by humans? And if that's the logical conclusion of your philosophy ... do you think it's a good philosophy?
I respect your choice bro. I just don't think your reasons make much moral sense. And in reality most people just don't care that much about shrimp dying for food. It's easy enough to tug at heartstrings for things like pigs, with their human-like faces and communicative grunts. But why veganism draws the line below all animals is kinda arbitrary and not that persuasive in my view.
I think you're overcomplicating this to do mental gymnastics to justify your choice to contribute to the needless suffering of billions of animals that we factory farm every year.
"Regenerative ag" is simply not scalable in the way people think. There's a reason why almost all animals that people eat are factory farmed. If you want to keep eating meat I think you should at least be honest with yourself that you're contributing to this system and by doing so you're guaranteeing that more animals will be born into some of the most horrific conditions known to man. If you're good with that, there is no need to try to do all these mental gymnastics, just admit that you don't care.
Or do care and change your behavior to align it with your values! That's what I think you should do tbh. But it's up to you. Vegans have never forced anyone at gunpoint to stop others from harming animals (as far as I know, I'm sure there could be an exception somewhere). You'll make the decisions you're comfortable making. I'm not comfortable contributing unnecessarily to the proliferation of the mass commodification of animals. You can call that illogical or selfish or whatever else. But I think that's just a way for you to mental gymnastics your way out of the fact that you know you don't need to contribute to this system but you're too weak to choose otherwise (or at least you're currently too weak to choose otherwise, maybe that will change someday). I hope you reconsider and do make changes in the future. But that's up to you.
Also, inflicting unnecessary suffering onto others is more authoritarian than rejecting such things.
Unless you want to make the argument that outlawing rape or murder or whatever is authoritarian because you're telling others what they can and cannot do. At any rate, vegans don't stop others from harming animals anyway. They just point out people's hypocrisy (like I'm doing to you now) when people say things like "I love animals!" and then eat them. No, you don't. If you treat a pig or chicken differently than you treat a cat or a dog then you don't love them. Just be honest about that if you're going to write a whole blurb about why vegans are wrong. No, you just want to feel good about causing other beings immense amount of harm, so you deflect by bringing up "plants feel pain" and other similarly dumb arguments.
It actually is authoritarian to outlaw rape or murder. But its a level of authority that I'm very happy with!
Fair enough actually, this is a good rebuttal. Pointing out perceived hypocrisy isn't authoritarian. That said, I don't see a meat eater saying "I love animals" as being hypocritical. It would be like saying you love your grandma but then turning off her life support machine. They aren't mutually exclusive things.
I love my dog a heck of a lot more than I love some random cow that I've never met. I don't see an issue with that. Yeah I don't love chickens, that's kinda ridiculous. If I had some pet chickens, then maybe. Is that psychopathic of me? I don't think so!
Do you say that you actually love all chickens? I'm genuinely curious here. Where does that come from? Are you a devout Christian by any chance?