Erik, I don't find your thought experiment convincing. The problem is that we tend to assume that those humans on the alien planet will be *humans.* We know that even in prisons and concentration camps, imprisoned physicists have gone on doing physics, composers have composed, poets have written poetry, philosophers have philosophised, and everyone else has enjoyed whatever moments of human contact or natural beauty were available under the conditions of their imprisonment. Animals don't do these things. In order to get a better intuition, you would have to ask whether we'd want to perpetuate a particular group of humans on that alien planet: a group of primitive blokes who hang around on a sofa all day staring into the middle distance, doing absolutely nothing but chewing. They don't talk, they don't listen to music, they have no knowledge of or interest in any kind of culture or human contact. If food comes within reach, they'll chew on it. If not, they'll make some noises and starve. From time to time, they get up and walk over to another sofa nearby, on which women of the same kind spend their days chewing and staring into the middle distance. They'll copulate indifferently and return to their respective sofas. Now please raise your hands again: do *we* want to perpetuate this setup or would it be better if it was all over and done with? Note that we, the observers have to vote (no "hoofs up") because the blokes on the sofa neither care what happens to them nor will bother answering any questions. If you prod them with a stick, they'll move away -- that's all the interaction you're going to get from confronting them. Apart from that, they'll return to chewing and staring all day.
Would we still think that a society like that is valuable and worthy of keeping alive? Not so sure.
I started drafting an answer separately, but it makes more sense in this thread: I think we need to consider animals as somewhat like children - no one can give consent to being born, but they cannot give informed consent to their ongoing treatment or life either.
I've just had a child, and in the UK, children are screened for a few chromosomal diseases fairly early. Two of these, Edward's Syndrome and Patau's Syndrome (both substantially more severe than Down's syndrome), can allow a foetus to survive to term (although stillbirth/miscarriage is common), but the child will be severely disabled, in more or less constant suffering, and almost certainly die relatively shortly (90% of those which make it to birth die within a year for Patau's syndrome, for instance). My partner and I both agreed that it would be the morally correct thing to terminate the pregnancy is this was the case - yes, it would be easier for us as well, but it seemed pretty clear-cut that it's morally wrong to bring an infant into the world only for them to suffer in their short life (luckily, the issue didn't come up, and I've got a healthy daughter).
As Dr Matthias points out, and you discuss with your hypothetical 'live to 60' society, the details matter a lot here. Given the tongue in cheek nature of the post I'm not sure if the bit around not hearing responses to the 'more lives / would animals choose to die' was true (as you point out, it's a basic objection), but for good order, part of this is that animals cannot choose to die anymore than a baby can choose not to scream if they are hungry - they don't have the capacity to override that basic biological reaction to try to survive.
Even if I gave my dog the most miserable life possible - ignored her all day, kept her in a tiny cage, etc - she would still eat when presented with food. She couldn't not - she doesn't have the intellectual capacity or will to see through the consequences. It strikes me as almost unspeakably cruel to seriously make the argument that we should have puppy mills to churn out dogs to live this life, on the argument that the dogs would not (because they cannot!) choose to die once in that situation. This particular discussion is making me sad now though so I'm going to move on.
In case the above isn't clear, I firmly reject the repugnant conclusion with regards to population ethics.
For what it's worth, I'm not dogmatic about this - like many who have thought about this topic for a while, my issue is more with the concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs), not the killing. Although I probably wouldn't eat the meat myself unless required, I'm basically OK with eating meat under a few example conditions:
1) Well-regulated hunting (e.g. moose in Eastern Canada, which given the collapse of wolf populations populate very quickly)
2) There are farms in Scotland which provide their cows plenty of land to graze, the ability to socialise with each other, humane slaughter, etc... If one needs to eat meat every month or two because you can't sort out the vegan diet, fine, go for it.
Let's not get confused though - There aren't a lot of these, and the vast majority of animal protein is raised in absolutely horrific conditions. The meat from ethical sources would, of necessity, need to be very limited, and very expensive (and would take a ton of land, which for Scottish Highlands with limited alternative use, fine, pasture that could grow crops, maybe not).
Agreed that it's totally dependent on the *state* of the society on the alien planet. I think it's totally dependent on that - it's imaginable on the opposite end of the spectrum that humans live to 60 years, are only eaten (very quickly and humanely) then, and live in a mostly free and independent culture until that age. I suppose the question for contemporary farming practices is whether they approach the worst-case or the best-case scenario, translating the thought experiment into what it means for a cow to live a "good life" (which presumably is a lot easier to fulfill than a human).
While you said it a bit differently than I would, I agree with your conclusion. I spent a bit of time in the food industry. It is sobering to step back and observe the world we have constructed in service of only about 15% of us in the first world. It is hard to imagine another life-form finding us and having a big problem doing the very thing we have done. What makes our turn at the top of the food chain on this planet so challenging ethically is the dominion, imposed extinctions and now, finally a place stretched to the limit all to entertain and ease the life of a small minority of the humans on the planet.
Omg. I’m laughing out loud, especially at eating the evil, bad animals. I’m a cheating pescatarian and I like the crazy way you think. Factory farming and health are the reasons I don’t eat animals. But this is certainly a new way of looking at it. Hahahahahaha
Erik, I read a first post of yours only a couple of days ago and now will subscribe. You are a GREAT and THOUGHT-PROVOKING writer. I enjoy Substack as I guess you never know what you might find. My response to this would be entirely too long so I will set it aside for now. So glad to have found this on your corner of the internet.
I thought about this a little more. Kinda long, hope it makes sense.
I am a mostly retired guy. I changed my diet for health reasons a number of years ago. Mostly plant-based but when people ask me if I'm a vegan, I say no, I wear a belt.
This was a fantastic read as I found myself thinking about it. It helps that I like Sci-fi. While I still enjoy meat occasionally, starting to write on Substack and the stretch required for your brain to do that has let me think about some of what you write here.
My opinion is that we are 8B on the rock and a top of the food chain, extremely sentient, apex predator. We evolved after the fifth mass extinction (trial #6). The crabs and clams are the only things left after five mass extinctions. Only a predator such as ourselves has the means to eat them into extinction and may very well do it, all the while philosophizing that it is justified because they are not as thoughtful or considerate as we are.
As for meat. we are likely the primary cause of the currently controversial proposal that we are in a new mass extinction, this is different. We are so evolved that we have created Philosophy and all sorts of other things. The truth lies that we're 8B on the rock, we've developed a lifestyle to exploit 6.5B of them and ALL THE OTHER CREATURES of the Earth so that about 15% of us can enjoy meat and air conditioning. We've done this by extending evolution to our own devices and CREATED PURPOSE-BUILT creatures suitable to eat which we forcefeed corn to. Having spent a bit of time in the Food industry, the useful tidbit I share with many is that Proctor & Gamble sells more Pepto Bismol to farmers than humans (or very close). Why? to coat the animals stomach sufficiently so they can be continuously gorged on corn (which they are not built to digest). The most successful animal of the last 10000 years of 'evolution' is human-directed canines. I love my dog and they bypassed all of the cruelty we convey on most of the planet's creatures in search of entertainment and eating pleasure. The real path to survival was to endear yourself to us, the apex predator and the principal threat to a lot of living things.
All of this is to say I enjoy beef occasionally and now seek out grass-fed. Our amazing success in the last 1000 years is remarkable. I cannot imagine that an alien life-form that studied a creature that stomps out diversity on its planet and reserves 1st world living for about 15% and transfers misery on all the rest, all the while pressing hard on the ability of the planet to even be sustained is necessarily worth a lot of philosophical consideration.
I imagine philosophy and other ways to see our place in the order of things is necessary to keep our two brains from crashing into each other too much. Our two bookend meats are chicken and beef. A relentless push for efficiency has chickens raised from hatch to flash frozen on the way to the store in 30-40 days. For eggs, more than half of the chicks are culled because they are males or ill and due to selective breeding are not suitable as broilers or roasters. The other extreme is the cattle. They are finished on feedlots with corn. For how long? Just long enough to fatten and finish them and not too long as their systems begin to fail as the corn they eat methodically strips the animal of the essential amino acids that brought them to health while eating grass which their multiple stomachs are built to eat, thrive and sustain them.
Our philosophy sees all of this as reasonable. The particular challenge I see in most of it is the whole process pressures the eco-system so that perhaps 1.5B of this 'most important' of animals can enjoy animal protein. If any of this were truly sensible, ethical, philosophically justifiable because we are 'different' our world would not be constructed for the 6.5B of the rest of us to be left behind.
I don't have much constructive to add to the actual debate, so in lieu of that here's some jet-fuel on the bonfire.
This way of reasoning about moral problems and ethical dilemmas -- which I take to be both implausible in its conclusions and silly in its premises and presuppositions -- is exactly why I threw in with the likes of Anscombe and MacIntyre as a radical virtue ethicist, quite happy to throw the whole sham of "moral philosophy" in the incinerator.
Once we do ethics by asking questions about the properties and mental states of abstract ideas, like people who don't exist, animals who talk and have sophisticated existential desires suspiciously similar to human agents, or masses of aggregate utilities dubiously labeled as "pain" or "quality of life", we're lost contact with the ground and source of anything rightly called moral, good, or right.
Outliers like me don't even believe we're strictly doing ethics anymore.
We're now talking about weird logical and epistemological puzzles that share only the thinnest substance with questions about genuine moral worth. This situation makes those comfortable with logical puzzles and epistemic quandaries quite happy, while happily avoiding real questions of importance concerning living well as an actual human being in a human predicament.
"But what if we just manage our abstract cows a little better?"
I'm not convinced.
I'm also happy to consign uncounted trillions of abstract ideas to their continued non-existence without blinking an eye.
We bred them to not survive in the wild, surely we could unbreed them so that they can survive in the wild. Then there's no choice between freeing them and keeping their species alive.
I think you are right in spirit and the whole argument boils down to a false dichotomy.
Surely there are multiple alternative choices that could be made, with imagination. We also have zoos, and preserves, etc.
I don’t particularly buy the net utility of future hypothetical beings argument in general.
The same argument could be made not with aliens, but just humans. Should Elon Musk start a human farm on Mars, or just not bring people to Mars? The net utility of the future human population, or whatever, is greater in the first case.
Ultimately I think it’s a form of hubris. To the extent possible, I want to minimize nonconsensual interference with other human beings, as they deserve to live their own independent lives. I feel the same way about nature. But the nonconsensual ecosystem destruction is already done, so the next best is to preserve and care for and reestablish as best we can. Finding “breed and eat them en masse” as the second best option feels like a lack of imagination. Or, more likely, just a justification to continue one’s existing behavior. (Unless, maybe, one sources all of their meat exclusively from sources that treat the animals in that perfect suffering-free way the hypothetical describes.)
I’m only two years vegetarian. I have made one exception in that time, and there are scenarios where I would again. I probably still have a touch of the concert’s zeal, too. And I do miss meat.
- For me the problem is not meat eating, but the fact that the animals in farms for industrial consumption live in bad conditions and are treated badly. Also, the fact that the death has to be painful or scary for them.
That's a completely different thing from being able to live part of your life healthy and happy, then one day dying without even realizing it.
- "Domesticated animals exist in the numbers that they do only if there is a practice of eating them": maybe they wouldn't exist in the numbers that they do, but that doesn't mean that they would get extinct. If we domesticated some species, that means that before it was wild.
I appreciated your thought, I never saw it like that before. Thank you for sharing, Erik.
1. If you understood the realities of food production you might get over your guilt. For example, even the vegans have blood on their plates. Consider the following...
You cannot destroy habitat and cultivate land without killing and displacing the animals that live on it and under it. Animals are killed when land is cleared, planted and harvested. The animals killed during spring planting tend to be babies for that is the season when rabbits, groundhogs and other burrowing mammals have their young.
I've come across destroyed rabbit warrens in newly disced fields. I've seen bunnies caught in my own roto-tiller while preparing my gardens. Warrens also collapse when heavy equipment is driven over fields, suffocating those animals that are too young to run. And the animals that survive the destruction of their habitat or the cultivation of their land may also die due to increased competition for resources on the remaining habitat, which may result in starvation, increased disease and territorial disputes.
Animals are killed in order to protect crops in the fields, in the orchards, in the processing plants and in the warehouses. A friend who grows olives and almonds in California once said he kills on average 3 to 5 ground squirrels per acre every month in order to protect his tree roots. He said this is typical among California orchardists. There are roughly 1,600,000 acres planted in almonds in California. Multiply that by three (we'll go with the low number) and that's 4,800,000 ground squirrels killed in one month to protect California's almond crop. And that's just almonds and ground squirrels.
Endangered animals are also killed to protect crops. This includes endangered primates killed in countries that produce your bananas, pineapples, papayas, mangoes and other tropical fruits.
There is no food without death. That is just a fact of life.
2. Some 86% of livestock feed is not human consumable. This includes crop residues (leaves, stems, seeds, hulls, etc.) Very little of the phytomass produced by crops can be consumed by people, but we can and do feed it to livestock. By feeding crop residues to livestock we increase the amount of food that can be produced by existing crop land. Remove livestock from the equation and we would have to destroy more habitat... killing and displacing wild animals... in order to create more cropland.
Livestock also consumes the waste that comes from food processing such as pulp, shells, peels and rinds, oil meals and nut meals (including the almond meal that is a waste product of faux "milks") and from the production of alcoholic beverages (brewer's waste and distilling grains). This is one of the environmental services that livestock provides. Yep, that's right. Unlike most crops, livestock provides environmental services. (One of the very few crops that provides an environmental service is alfalfa, which is grown as a fodder crop.)
Which brings me to pastures, rangelands and hay, the primary source of food for ruminant livestock (cattle, goats, sheep, etc.). When properly managed, grazing ruminants will improve the land and increase biodiversity. (You will find more species living in a pasture than you will in a bean field.) Pastures also act as carbon sinks for those who believe in the CO2 theory of "climate change". These are some of the other environmental services provided by livestock.
3. I could go on... there are other issues to consider, including the lack of arable land, or the cost of shipping, say, bananas to New York... but I'll keep it short. Yes, it's good to put some thought into what you eat and where it comes from but it's also important to make informed choices. This requires more than simplistic notions of meat=bad / plants=good. And guilt is never a positive motivator if only because it encourages a narcissistic approach to a dilemma. Instead of focusing on the ins and out of an issue, one focuses on how an action may make one feel and how one appear to others, and in doing so may only make things worse.
Ruminants are herbivores... maybe. (There are videos of deer chasing down field mice and eating them, although I've never seen my goats eat mice.) Geese are mostly herbivorous too, but pigs, chickens, turkeys and ducks are omnivores.
I remember reading an article in the 90s called Plants First! It talked about this exact topic, except I noticed it was published on April 1. Guess we have come full circle.
Your list of evil animals also happens to be similar to the list of intelligent animals.. what does that mean about us? 🤔 Also, you should probably add Orcas to the list. They play with their prey in the same way cats do.
Perhaps we should consider the possibility of whether a farmed animal knows what's up. Somehow the idea of an animal living a peaceful life and then being killed without it ever knowing that was going to happen is much more palatable than the idea of an animal dying in sudden terror and realization of its situation, as pigs often do.
All of these thought experiments on food remind me of the 2nd episode of Netflix's Midnight Gospel (highly recommended).
Satiating appetites is plain weird from nearly any perspective or scale, as you've pointed out. Human morality is certainly different than octopus/crab/hyena morality, but are we the best judges of best or even better. The aliens who would capture us for livestock would certainly question our morality, and be motivated to do so (if we don't beat them to the punch).
Is there a threshold level of consciousness, sentience, Phi, that we can justify consuming on behalf of negative entropy? If so, what is it? Is there any reason to think that plants and fungi might escape this level of scrutiny?
Given these questions, I think the philosopher points to something akin to the Hippocratic Oath: while it is impossible to do no harm, one can aim to "eat just enough, and no more".
Ok but what if you are ok to let the cows die, because that would make life better for humans? (In Utah all of our water goes to watering feed for cows, if we didn’t need cows, we would have water. Also the carbon thing, and the whole bad for our health thing, yadda yadda yadda...)
I think the aliens would choose themselves over us 😝👽
In the spirit of "mostly crazy" here you go. Life on this planet has already made it through 5 mass extinctions. Crabs, clams and snails are some of the few creatures that have SURVIVED them all. We, the very best of the creatures from trial six found it perfectly reasonable to exterminate the whales. Even once we discovered kerosene as a better lamp oil, we still drove many species of whale to extinction because the oil was real good as a lubricant for our clocks. The earth is in good hands since we invented philosophy :)
Erik, I don't find your thought experiment convincing. The problem is that we tend to assume that those humans on the alien planet will be *humans.* We know that even in prisons and concentration camps, imprisoned physicists have gone on doing physics, composers have composed, poets have written poetry, philosophers have philosophised, and everyone else has enjoyed whatever moments of human contact or natural beauty were available under the conditions of their imprisonment. Animals don't do these things. In order to get a better intuition, you would have to ask whether we'd want to perpetuate a particular group of humans on that alien planet: a group of primitive blokes who hang around on a sofa all day staring into the middle distance, doing absolutely nothing but chewing. They don't talk, they don't listen to music, they have no knowledge of or interest in any kind of culture or human contact. If food comes within reach, they'll chew on it. If not, they'll make some noises and starve. From time to time, they get up and walk over to another sofa nearby, on which women of the same kind spend their days chewing and staring into the middle distance. They'll copulate indifferently and return to their respective sofas. Now please raise your hands again: do *we* want to perpetuate this setup or would it be better if it was all over and done with? Note that we, the observers have to vote (no "hoofs up") because the blokes on the sofa neither care what happens to them nor will bother answering any questions. If you prod them with a stick, they'll move away -- that's all the interaction you're going to get from confronting them. Apart from that, they'll return to chewing and staring all day.
Would we still think that a society like that is valuable and worthy of keeping alive? Not so sure.
I started drafting an answer separately, but it makes more sense in this thread: I think we need to consider animals as somewhat like children - no one can give consent to being born, but they cannot give informed consent to their ongoing treatment or life either.
I've just had a child, and in the UK, children are screened for a few chromosomal diseases fairly early. Two of these, Edward's Syndrome and Patau's Syndrome (both substantially more severe than Down's syndrome), can allow a foetus to survive to term (although stillbirth/miscarriage is common), but the child will be severely disabled, in more or less constant suffering, and almost certainly die relatively shortly (90% of those which make it to birth die within a year for Patau's syndrome, for instance). My partner and I both agreed that it would be the morally correct thing to terminate the pregnancy is this was the case - yes, it would be easier for us as well, but it seemed pretty clear-cut that it's morally wrong to bring an infant into the world only for them to suffer in their short life (luckily, the issue didn't come up, and I've got a healthy daughter).
As Dr Matthias points out, and you discuss with your hypothetical 'live to 60' society, the details matter a lot here. Given the tongue in cheek nature of the post I'm not sure if the bit around not hearing responses to the 'more lives / would animals choose to die' was true (as you point out, it's a basic objection), but for good order, part of this is that animals cannot choose to die anymore than a baby can choose not to scream if they are hungry - they don't have the capacity to override that basic biological reaction to try to survive.
Even if I gave my dog the most miserable life possible - ignored her all day, kept her in a tiny cage, etc - she would still eat when presented with food. She couldn't not - she doesn't have the intellectual capacity or will to see through the consequences. It strikes me as almost unspeakably cruel to seriously make the argument that we should have puppy mills to churn out dogs to live this life, on the argument that the dogs would not (because they cannot!) choose to die once in that situation. This particular discussion is making me sad now though so I'm going to move on.
In case the above isn't clear, I firmly reject the repugnant conclusion with regards to population ethics.
For what it's worth, I'm not dogmatic about this - like many who have thought about this topic for a while, my issue is more with the concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs), not the killing. Although I probably wouldn't eat the meat myself unless required, I'm basically OK with eating meat under a few example conditions:
1) Well-regulated hunting (e.g. moose in Eastern Canada, which given the collapse of wolf populations populate very quickly)
2) There are farms in Scotland which provide their cows plenty of land to graze, the ability to socialise with each other, humane slaughter, etc... If one needs to eat meat every month or two because you can't sort out the vegan diet, fine, go for it.
Let's not get confused though - There aren't a lot of these, and the vast majority of animal protein is raised in absolutely horrific conditions. The meat from ethical sources would, of necessity, need to be very limited, and very expensive (and would take a ton of land, which for Scottish Highlands with limited alternative use, fine, pasture that could grow crops, maybe not).
Very thoughtful. I think you raised a lot of serious points and objections.
Agreed that it's totally dependent on the *state* of the society on the alien planet. I think it's totally dependent on that - it's imaginable on the opposite end of the spectrum that humans live to 60 years, are only eaten (very quickly and humanely) then, and live in a mostly free and independent culture until that age. I suppose the question for contemporary farming practices is whether they approach the worst-case or the best-case scenario, translating the thought experiment into what it means for a cow to live a "good life" (which presumably is a lot easier to fulfill than a human).
While you said it a bit differently than I would, I agree with your conclusion. I spent a bit of time in the food industry. It is sobering to step back and observe the world we have constructed in service of only about 15% of us in the first world. It is hard to imagine another life-form finding us and having a big problem doing the very thing we have done. What makes our turn at the top of the food chain on this planet so challenging ethically is the dominion, imposed extinctions and now, finally a place stretched to the limit all to entertain and ease the life of a small minority of the humans on the planet.
Omg. I’m laughing out loud, especially at eating the evil, bad animals. I’m a cheating pescatarian and I like the crazy way you think. Factory farming and health are the reasons I don’t eat animals. But this is certainly a new way of looking at it. Hahahahahaha
Fuck crabs! Yes, yes, that says it all.
Step 1 - We decide to eat only evil animals, like cannibalistic ones
Step 2 - We realize that our ancestors were cannibals
Step 3 - ?
Step 4 - We become cannibals
Erik, I read a first post of yours only a couple of days ago and now will subscribe. You are a GREAT and THOUGHT-PROVOKING writer. I enjoy Substack as I guess you never know what you might find. My response to this would be entirely too long so I will set it aside for now. So glad to have found this on your corner of the internet.
Thank you so much for such kind words, Mark
I thought about this a little more. Kinda long, hope it makes sense.
I am a mostly retired guy. I changed my diet for health reasons a number of years ago. Mostly plant-based but when people ask me if I'm a vegan, I say no, I wear a belt.
This was a fantastic read as I found myself thinking about it. It helps that I like Sci-fi. While I still enjoy meat occasionally, starting to write on Substack and the stretch required for your brain to do that has let me think about some of what you write here.
My opinion is that we are 8B on the rock and a top of the food chain, extremely sentient, apex predator. We evolved after the fifth mass extinction (trial #6). The crabs and clams are the only things left after five mass extinctions. Only a predator such as ourselves has the means to eat them into extinction and may very well do it, all the while philosophizing that it is justified because they are not as thoughtful or considerate as we are.
As for meat. we are likely the primary cause of the currently controversial proposal that we are in a new mass extinction, this is different. We are so evolved that we have created Philosophy and all sorts of other things. The truth lies that we're 8B on the rock, we've developed a lifestyle to exploit 6.5B of them and ALL THE OTHER CREATURES of the Earth so that about 15% of us can enjoy meat and air conditioning. We've done this by extending evolution to our own devices and CREATED PURPOSE-BUILT creatures suitable to eat which we forcefeed corn to. Having spent a bit of time in the Food industry, the useful tidbit I share with many is that Proctor & Gamble sells more Pepto Bismol to farmers than humans (or very close). Why? to coat the animals stomach sufficiently so they can be continuously gorged on corn (which they are not built to digest). The most successful animal of the last 10000 years of 'evolution' is human-directed canines. I love my dog and they bypassed all of the cruelty we convey on most of the planet's creatures in search of entertainment and eating pleasure. The real path to survival was to endear yourself to us, the apex predator and the principal threat to a lot of living things.
All of this is to say I enjoy beef occasionally and now seek out grass-fed. Our amazing success in the last 1000 years is remarkable. I cannot imagine that an alien life-form that studied a creature that stomps out diversity on its planet and reserves 1st world living for about 15% and transfers misery on all the rest, all the while pressing hard on the ability of the planet to even be sustained is necessarily worth a lot of philosophical consideration.
I imagine philosophy and other ways to see our place in the order of things is necessary to keep our two brains from crashing into each other too much. Our two bookend meats are chicken and beef. A relentless push for efficiency has chickens raised from hatch to flash frozen on the way to the store in 30-40 days. For eggs, more than half of the chicks are culled because they are males or ill and due to selective breeding are not suitable as broilers or roasters. The other extreme is the cattle. They are finished on feedlots with corn. For how long? Just long enough to fatten and finish them and not too long as their systems begin to fail as the corn they eat methodically strips the animal of the essential amino acids that brought them to health while eating grass which their multiple stomachs are built to eat, thrive and sustain them.
Our philosophy sees all of this as reasonable. The particular challenge I see in most of it is the whole process pressures the eco-system so that perhaps 1.5B of this 'most important' of animals can enjoy animal protein. If any of this were truly sensible, ethical, philosophically justifiable because we are 'different' our world would not be constructed for the 6.5B of the rest of us to be left behind.
I don't have much constructive to add to the actual debate, so in lieu of that here's some jet-fuel on the bonfire.
This way of reasoning about moral problems and ethical dilemmas -- which I take to be both implausible in its conclusions and silly in its premises and presuppositions -- is exactly why I threw in with the likes of Anscombe and MacIntyre as a radical virtue ethicist, quite happy to throw the whole sham of "moral philosophy" in the incinerator.
Once we do ethics by asking questions about the properties and mental states of abstract ideas, like people who don't exist, animals who talk and have sophisticated existential desires suspiciously similar to human agents, or masses of aggregate utilities dubiously labeled as "pain" or "quality of life", we're lost contact with the ground and source of anything rightly called moral, good, or right.
Outliers like me don't even believe we're strictly doing ethics anymore.
We're now talking about weird logical and epistemological puzzles that share only the thinnest substance with questions about genuine moral worth. This situation makes those comfortable with logical puzzles and epistemic quandaries quite happy, while happily avoiding real questions of importance concerning living well as an actual human being in a human predicament.
"But what if we just manage our abstract cows a little better?"
I'm not convinced.
I'm also happy to consign uncounted trillions of abstract ideas to their continued non-existence without blinking an eye.
Hyenas can go to hell though.
We bred them to not survive in the wild, surely we could unbreed them so that they can survive in the wild. Then there's no choice between freeing them and keeping their species alive.
I think you are right in spirit and the whole argument boils down to a false dichotomy.
Surely there are multiple alternative choices that could be made, with imagination. We also have zoos, and preserves, etc.
I don’t particularly buy the net utility of future hypothetical beings argument in general.
The same argument could be made not with aliens, but just humans. Should Elon Musk start a human farm on Mars, or just not bring people to Mars? The net utility of the future human population, or whatever, is greater in the first case.
Ultimately I think it’s a form of hubris. To the extent possible, I want to minimize nonconsensual interference with other human beings, as they deserve to live their own independent lives. I feel the same way about nature. But the nonconsensual ecosystem destruction is already done, so the next best is to preserve and care for and reestablish as best we can. Finding “breed and eat them en masse” as the second best option feels like a lack of imagination. Or, more likely, just a justification to continue one’s existing behavior. (Unless, maybe, one sources all of their meat exclusively from sources that treat the animals in that perfect suffering-free way the hypothetical describes.)
I’m only two years vegetarian. I have made one exception in that time, and there are scenarios where I would again. I probably still have a touch of the concert’s zeal, too. And I do miss meat.
- For me the problem is not meat eating, but the fact that the animals in farms for industrial consumption live in bad conditions and are treated badly. Also, the fact that the death has to be painful or scary for them.
That's a completely different thing from being able to live part of your life healthy and happy, then one day dying without even realizing it.
- "Domesticated animals exist in the numbers that they do only if there is a practice of eating them": maybe they wouldn't exist in the numbers that they do, but that doesn't mean that they would get extinct. If we domesticated some species, that means that before it was wild.
I appreciated your thought, I never saw it like that before. Thank you for sharing, Erik.
Waiting on Gwyneth Paltrow to start trying to capitalise on the new, revolutionary "Evilvore diet."
Also, sorry if somebody else has pointed this out, but lambs don't have babies. :)
Eek - good catch!
Thank you. Glad you pointed this out.
very funny, not what I expected having subscribed a couple of issues ago, but definitely a pleasant surprise!
haha humorous essays are dangerous! Very easy to misread, so I don't do them that often
honestly its the best way to approach most moral philosophy :)
1. If you understood the realities of food production you might get over your guilt. For example, even the vegans have blood on their plates. Consider the following...
You cannot destroy habitat and cultivate land without killing and displacing the animals that live on it and under it. Animals are killed when land is cleared, planted and harvested. The animals killed during spring planting tend to be babies for that is the season when rabbits, groundhogs and other burrowing mammals have their young.
I've come across destroyed rabbit warrens in newly disced fields. I've seen bunnies caught in my own roto-tiller while preparing my gardens. Warrens also collapse when heavy equipment is driven over fields, suffocating those animals that are too young to run. And the animals that survive the destruction of their habitat or the cultivation of their land may also die due to increased competition for resources on the remaining habitat, which may result in starvation, increased disease and territorial disputes.
Animals are killed in order to protect crops in the fields, in the orchards, in the processing plants and in the warehouses. A friend who grows olives and almonds in California once said he kills on average 3 to 5 ground squirrels per acre every month in order to protect his tree roots. He said this is typical among California orchardists. There are roughly 1,600,000 acres planted in almonds in California. Multiply that by three (we'll go with the low number) and that's 4,800,000 ground squirrels killed in one month to protect California's almond crop. And that's just almonds and ground squirrels.
Endangered animals are also killed to protect crops. This includes endangered primates killed in countries that produce your bananas, pineapples, papayas, mangoes and other tropical fruits.
There is no food without death. That is just a fact of life.
2. Some 86% of livestock feed is not human consumable. This includes crop residues (leaves, stems, seeds, hulls, etc.) Very little of the phytomass produced by crops can be consumed by people, but we can and do feed it to livestock. By feeding crop residues to livestock we increase the amount of food that can be produced by existing crop land. Remove livestock from the equation and we would have to destroy more habitat... killing and displacing wild animals... in order to create more cropland.
Livestock also consumes the waste that comes from food processing such as pulp, shells, peels and rinds, oil meals and nut meals (including the almond meal that is a waste product of faux "milks") and from the production of alcoholic beverages (brewer's waste and distilling grains). This is one of the environmental services that livestock provides. Yep, that's right. Unlike most crops, livestock provides environmental services. (One of the very few crops that provides an environmental service is alfalfa, which is grown as a fodder crop.)
Which brings me to pastures, rangelands and hay, the primary source of food for ruminant livestock (cattle, goats, sheep, etc.). When properly managed, grazing ruminants will improve the land and increase biodiversity. (You will find more species living in a pasture than you will in a bean field.) Pastures also act as carbon sinks for those who believe in the CO2 theory of "climate change". These are some of the other environmental services provided by livestock.
3. I could go on... there are other issues to consider, including the lack of arable land, or the cost of shipping, say, bananas to New York... but I'll keep it short. Yes, it's good to put some thought into what you eat and where it comes from but it's also important to make informed choices. This requires more than simplistic notions of meat=bad / plants=good. And guilt is never a positive motivator if only because it encourages a narcissistic approach to a dilemma. Instead of focusing on the ins and out of an issue, one focuses on how an action may make one feel and how one appear to others, and in doing so may only make things worse.
Your comment blew my mind
Ruminants are herbivores... maybe. (There are videos of deer chasing down field mice and eating them, although I've never seen my goats eat mice.) Geese are mostly herbivorous too, but pigs, chickens, turkeys and ducks are omnivores.
They certainly could be considered sentient.
I remember reading an article in the 90s called Plants First! It talked about this exact topic, except I noticed it was published on April 1. Guess we have come full circle.
There is some evidence suggesting that bacteria may also be sentient. You might find this interesting.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/listening-to-bacteria-833979/
Your list of evil animals also happens to be similar to the list of intelligent animals.. what does that mean about us? 🤔 Also, you should probably add Orcas to the list. They play with their prey in the same way cats do.
Perhaps we should consider the possibility of whether a farmed animal knows what's up. Somehow the idea of an animal living a peaceful life and then being killed without it ever knowing that was going to happen is much more palatable than the idea of an animal dying in sudden terror and realization of its situation, as pigs often do.
Temple Grandin dedicated her life to making cows less terrified. Good movie about her, too.
https://templegrandin.com/
All of these thought experiments on food remind me of the 2nd episode of Netflix's Midnight Gospel (highly recommended).
Satiating appetites is plain weird from nearly any perspective or scale, as you've pointed out. Human morality is certainly different than octopus/crab/hyena morality, but are we the best judges of best or even better. The aliens who would capture us for livestock would certainly question our morality, and be motivated to do so (if we don't beat them to the punch).
Is there a threshold level of consciousness, sentience, Phi, that we can justify consuming on behalf of negative entropy? If so, what is it? Is there any reason to think that plants and fungi might escape this level of scrutiny?
Given these questions, I think the philosopher points to something akin to the Hippocratic Oath: while it is impossible to do no harm, one can aim to "eat just enough, and no more".
Ok but what if you are ok to let the cows die, because that would make life better for humans? (In Utah all of our water goes to watering feed for cows, if we didn’t need cows, we would have water. Also the carbon thing, and the whole bad for our health thing, yadda yadda yadda...)
I think the aliens would choose themselves over us 😝👽
“So what can you eat, if you only eat evil creatures?
Crabs
Honestly, fuck crabs.”
The deep belly laugh this transition gave me.
Despite your assertion this essay is “mostly crazy”, the thought experiment gives me pause. Great read. (And indeed, fuck crabs.)
In the spirit of "mostly crazy" here you go. Life on this planet has already made it through 5 mass extinctions. Crabs, clams and snails are some of the few creatures that have SURVIVED them all. We, the very best of the creatures from trial six found it perfectly reasonable to exterminate the whales. Even once we discovered kerosene as a better lamp oil, we still drove many species of whale to extinction because the oil was real good as a lubricant for our clocks. The earth is in good hands since we invented philosophy :)
Unless I missed it, nobody has pointed out the cow that wants to be eaten from Hitchhiker's:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5HLy27bK-wU