An uncomfortable thought experiment for anti-speciesist non-vegans

By JackM @ 2022-04-18T09:17 (+34)

(Cross-posted from my substack The Ethical Economist: a blog covering Economics, Ethics and Effective Altruism.)

EDIT: If people downvote I would find it useful to know why. I realise this is a touchy subject!

In popularising the concept of speciesism, Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation may be one of the most influential philosophical works of the 20th Century. Singer argued, drawing parallels to other forms of discrimination such as racism and sexism, that the interests of all beings should be worthy of equal consideration regardless of which species the being belongs to. Animal Liberation has had a profound impact on our treatment of animals, with many excluding animal products from their diet, campaigning for better welfare conditions for farm animals, and even looking to reduce suffering for animals in the wild. I’d rank it as the most illuminating book I have ever read.

Singer himself laments that the book did not have even more impact. “All you have to do is walk around the corner to McDonald’s to see how successful I have been”, the philosopher was quoted as saying in 1999. 23 years later Big Macs are still widespread, even if there is a (delicious!) McPlant competitor. Even within the Effective Altruism movement only about 23% of EAs are vegan and about 48% eat meat of some form.

Was Singer not convincing enough? Has the book not made it into the hands of enough people? It is true that most people haven’t read the book. Some who have read it have not been convinced by the anti-speciesist message. Others doubt that animals have interests sufficient to be considered moral patients. I disagree with these people and much has been written to counter their views, which I don’t want to summarise here. This blog post is addressed to another group that has started to emerge: those who embrace an anti-speciesist viewpoint and buy into the moral patienthood of non-human animals, yet haven’t taken the vegan plunge.

What reasons could such people have for not going vegan? A surprising reason to me is that people think that going vegan has such a small impact relative to other things they can do to improve the world, such as donating or changing career, that they feel justified in ignoring it (e.g. here, here, or similar argument here). There are a few ways to counter this argument including arguing that the absolute value of veganism remains very high even if the relative value is small, denying the relative value is small, or denying that relative value is even important in the first place. I think these counters can be strong (see some discussion here), but for now I want to hit you with a thought experiment.

Imagine through some crazy turn of events society starts farming mentally-disabled humans for meat. These humans are so severely disabled that they have comparable cognitive faculties and capacities for welfare to pigs or cows. These humans suffer in the factory farms they are raised in, but they don’t really fight back and they’re pretty tasty, so many people decide to eat them from time to time. Humans this disabled do exist - this teenage boy with a mental age of nine months is likely less cognitively advanced than most pigs. We can’t know for certain that the boy wouldn’t suffer more than the pig in the same conditions, but this isn’t actually important - this is a thought experiment after all.

I couldn’t possibly imagine eating these humans. I have a viscerally disgusted reaction to the idea of doing so. There’s a sense to which this reaction is strengthened by the fact these humans are disabled, as I tend to feel greater duty to protect those that are more vulnerable. I’m sure most readers feel exactly the same way as I do. The thought of saying “I don’t see the point in stopping eating them as it wouldn’t have as much value as using my career to do good” seems abhorrent.

The key point is that, under an anti-speciesist philosophy, there’s no clear difference between the human factory farming and the animal factory farming. In both cases the suffering is the same. If you react in horror to the human farming, you should also react in similar horror to the animal farming. You probably don’t have a similarly visceral reaction to both though. Neither do I - the human farming just seems worse. But is it actually worse? I don’t see why it would be to an anti-speciesist. 

If you’re anti-speciesist but not vegan, I hope this thought experiment gives you pause for thought. Of course you can bite the bullet and say you wouldn’t abstain from eating humans in the thought experiment, but I suspect most of you wouldn’t admit to this. If you are adamantly against eating the humans in the thought experiment, you should be similarly against eating the animals we currently farm.

There are a few possible reasons why the human farming might seem worse. For example, we are humans and naturally feel more concern towards our own group. Also, status quo bias strengthens any reluctance to move from our current situation towards one in which we farm humans (and similarly reduces motivation to stop eating meat if one already does so). These are just biases though, and all they show is that we don’t react badly enough to animal farming. They show that we’ve normalised something that is far from normal and that, if we were thinking clearly, we would never touch meat again.

Thomas Kwa @ 2022-04-18T10:58 (+29)

As a non-vegan, here's how I think about this:

MichaelStJules @ 2022-04-18T19:39 (+14)

I'm (bival)vegan and basically endorse all of this (so strong upvote).

I happen to find the idea of eating animal products uncomfortable/upsetting, feel that way when I order food (or someone else does so on my behalf) and it comes non-vegan, and am already managing my diet well with little inconvenience and I'd guess no real loss in productivity, so there isn't much reason for me to start eating animal products again. But it's less clearly worth it to pay the initial and possibly ongoing costs of going (almost) all the way vegan. "Disgust" is too strong, though.

I'm not sure I would give up my reactions of discomfort/upset, though, in case they're an important source of ethical motivation for me. I generally find guilt/shame more important for motivating big life changes. However, it's also possible guilt/shame cause me to give too much weight to the short term relative to the far future.

Zachary Brown @ 2022-04-18T22:16 (+4)

I think the virtues of moral expansiveness and altruistic sympathy for moral patients are really important for EAs to develop, and I think being vegan increased my stock of these virtues by reversing the "moral dulling" effect you postulate. (This paper makes the case for utilitarians to develop a set of similar virtues: https://psyarxiv.com/w52zm.) I've also developed a visceral disgust response to meat as a result of being vegan, which is for me probably inseparable from the motivating feeling of sympathy for animals as moral patients. 

When I was a nonvegan, I underestimated the extent to which eating meat was morally dulling to me, and I suspect this is common. It was hard to know how morally dulled I was until I experienced otherwise.

MichaelStJules @ 2022-04-18T19:52 (+8)

FWIW, I consider the large share of vegans and vegetarians in EA (about half together, according to the RP survey) pleasantly surprising, a notable success for animal protection, and more encouraging than discouraging, but maybe this is because I'm contrasting with a shitty society-wide situation.

Also, if you include vegans, vegetarians, pescetarians and people trying to reduce their own meat consumption from the RP survey, that's about 83%! Only 11.7% plainly responded "Eat meat", and 5.6% responded "Other (please specify)".

(Of course, people can say they're trying to eat less meat without really succeeding, or while increasing consumption of the worst animal products.)

SamLima @ 2022-04-18T12:54 (+5)

I agree with this "The key point is that, under an anti-speciesist philosophy, there’s no clear difference between the human factory farming and the animal factory farming."

I don't think this "I couldn’t possibly imagine eating these humans. I have a viscerally disgusted reaction to the idea of doing so." is a good argument. 

I also can't imagine being the one pulling the plug on the 16yo of the article you mentioned, and I'm viscerally repulsed by human blood and most things surgeons interact with. Visceral repulsion is the reason for many people to not eat meat, but I think falls short on being something useful for convincing others. 

I also agree that it might be the case that, actually no, the impact of being vegan yourself could be (depending on how you weigh some moral things) very big. If you were to think the entire lifetime suffering of a hen in a stereotipically bad factory farm is worth 1/100 of a human dying of malaria, it's very possible the suffering you cause by eating one chicken breast every day is extremely sizeable.

Context: I don't buy meat, and subsist on a diet that is 99% plants 1% whey. When I attend events I eat whatever they have. The reasons for my diet choices, currently, are mostly sustainability and cost related

Tyrone Barugh @ 2022-04-18T22:19 (+3)

I'm a non-vegan who is pretty confident animals are moral patients.

I would not object to humans being farmed by non-humans provided that the result is more utils being created than the counterfactual (perhaps some utils being enjoyed by the non-human farmers/eaters, but most utils being enjoyed by the humans who are being brought into existence by farming and who would not counterfactually exist).

FWIW, I do think there are instrumental reasons for humans not to subjugate other humans - and those instrumental reasons are very strong - and so of course I would not endorse slavery or cannibalism.

I am a pretty committed total view utilitarian on intuition, which is where this position comes from (but think that to be more confident I should engage at some point with metaethics and try to test how confident I am in this particular ethical framework). If you are a prior existence utilitarian or if you have some non-utilitarian tendencies, farming humans might seem much worse and I should take those intuitions seriously.

Applying this to animals, I feel very comfortable drinking milk or eating grass-fed beef raised here in New Zealand. I am soon relocating to London, and will need to reconsider the specific suffering/pleasure involved in animal products produced there.

Disclaimer: I previously worked on  a dairy/beef farm in New Zealand, so there is some risk that my thinking on this topic has been biased by that experience.

tobycrisford @ 2022-04-19T16:16 (+2)

I think this point of view makes a lot of sense, and is the most reasonable way an anti-speciesist can defend not being fully vegan.

But I'd be interested to hear more about what the very strong 'instrumental' reasons are for humans not subjugating humans, and why they don't apply to humans subjugating non-humans?

(Edit: I'm vegan, but my stance on it has softened a bit since being won round by the total utilitarian view)