These darn philosophers—how dare they make you think, even when you disagree with much of what they say? Peter Singer is one of those infuriating people who sometimes sounds so silly, but still makes a strong case.
He has an interview in Salon—if you don’t want to fuss with their ads, I’ve put an interesting excerpt below the fold. Maybe it’s time for me to get back to vegetarianism…
Second factoid: 284 gallons of oil go into fattening a 1,250-pound cow for slaughter?
That’s a figure from David Pimentel, a Cornell ecologist. The fossil fuel goes into the fertilizer used to fertilize these acres of grain, which are then harvested and processed and transported to the cattle for feed. We get back, at most, 10 percent of the food value of the grain that we put into the cattle. So we are just skimming this concentrated product off the top of a mountain of grain into which all this fossil fuel has gone.
So even if we all started driving Priuses we’d still have these cows to worry about.
Yes. In fact, there’s a University of Chicago study that shows that if you switch from driving an American car to driving a Prius, you’ll cut your carbon-dioxide emissions by one ton per year. But if you switch from a typical U.S. diet, about 28 percent of which comes from animal sources, to a vegan diet with the same number of calories, you’ll cut your carbon-dioxide emissions by nearly 1.5 tons per year.
Third factoid: We have more people in prison in the United States than people whose primary occupation is working on a farm?
Isn’t that amazing? Just as an example, when I wrote “Animal Liberation” 30 years ago or so, there were more than 600,000 independent pig farms in the U.S. Now there are only about 60,000. We’re still producing just as many pigs, in fact more pigs, but there has been such concentration that we are now producing more pigs with a tenth as many pig farms. The same has happened in dairy and many other areas.
And finally, it turns out that a wood chipper is not the best way to dispose of 10,000 spent hens?
Yes, this also came to mind when you asked me what most shocked me. This was in San Diego County, in California. Neighbors noticed that a local chicken farm was getting rid of hens at the end of their laying period by throwing them by the bucketload down a wood chipper. They complained to the Animal Welfare Department, which investigated, and the chicken farmer told them that this was a recommendation that had been made by their vet, a vet who happens to sit on the Animal Welfare Committee of the American Veterinary Medical Association. The American Veterinary Medical Association, I should say, does not condone throwing hens down a wood chipper, but it is apparently done. We’ve also had examples of hens being taken off the conveyor belt and simply dumped into a bin, where by piling more hens on top, the hens on the bottom were suffocated. These old hens have no value, that’s the problem, and so people have been killing them by whatever means is cheapest and most convenient.
Sounds like another good arguement for a carbon tax to me. If people have to pay for the carbon they release into the air then it will all be factored into the final price. And eat more Australian beef. Our cows are more solar powered than yours.
Our cows are more solar powered than yours.
Yeah, but they’re less tasty, and I’ve eaten both, so I know.
But a carbon tax seems like a great idea, as long as there’s a mechanism in place to ensure that people who are too poor to buy a Prius don’t get screwed.
Good Lord that is an inhumane way of killing birds. It paints a nasty picture, but having read Fast Food Nation, it doesn’t surprise me.
BTW, another side benefit from eating more vegetables is the fact that the fewer animals we have to feed, the less the toxic dung lagoons (also detailed in FFN) affect our environment.
Moral of the story kids? Eating vegetables is not only good for you, it’s good domestic and international policy, and good for the environment.
But old hens DO have value! A poule au pot is a great way to eat an old hen. I guess most Americans have rejected cooking – it’s easier to buy McNuggets.
A culture out of control, all the evidence points to it.
Singer’s premise of minimising suffering is an impoverished and arguably contrary basis for ethical determinations.
Surely celebrating the best that life can achieve is a much better starting point.
In isolation, it would seem better a lamb gets to be a lamb chop than that lamb doesn’t get to live at all. I’m sure you can start from there and finish up with numbers that would indicate that maximising the rewards of life would not require the whole planet to become too like New Zealand.
“The fossil fuel goes into the fertilizer used to fertilize these acres of grain, which are then harvested and processed and transported to the cattle for feed.”
I’d like to see the maths behind the figure. I’ve got this feeling that they’re assuming you use your barrels of oil soley for the production of the fertiliser, when most of the oil would be used for other things. Or to put it another way, the feedstocks for your fertiliser production can be waste from the production of other feedstocks and fuels.
It’s a good point in qualitative terms, I’m just not sure about the quantification.
Well if the following factoid from the interview is true then it may really be time to think about becomming a vegan.
Or start raising my own chickens in the living room…
The chicken industry produces a vast amount of litter that the chickens are living on, which of course gets filled with the chicken excrement, and is cleaned maybe once a year. And then the question is, what you do with it? Well, it’s been discovered that cattle will eat it. But the chickens get some slaughterhouse remnants in their feed, and some of that feed they may not eat, so the slaughterhouse remnants may also be in the chicken litter. So that could be a route by which mad-cow disease gets from these prohibited slaughterhouse products into the cattle, through this circuitous route.
Besides bringing up reasonable environmental and health problems caused by factory farms, however, Singer unfortunately makes the typical stupid animal rights error. He compares our treatment of animals to the actions of slave owners, Nazis, and racism in general. The reason why “specism” is not the same as “racism” is that in the latter, the difference between the oppressor and oppressed is purely arbitrary, but this just isn’t true in the former case — humans really *are* more clever than other animals. So his analogy taken at face value is really an insult to Blacks and Jews.
We consume grass-fed organic beef raised on on Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) farm. The cattle are part of the whole process of raising organic vegetables. As the cattle are moved from field to field they deposit natural fertilizer and work it into the soil with their hoofs. Chickens follow the cattle from field to field consuming the insects that arise from the cattle dung. Chickens are ultimately consumed as well.
The argument that Peter Singer is making is a strong condemnation of factory farming, but is not very pertinant to regional organic farms in the US.
Is this supposed to be a bad thing? “concentration” in this context could be called “productivity growth”.
This is a bad thing. Ever been a few miles downwind of a modern pig farm? Ever seen the lakes of fecal slurry they produce? They aren’t sustainable — they are generating that rapid growth and short-term efficiency by large scale destruction of the land.
I am so glad to see this discussion! I have been a vegan for 3 years and it was one of the best decisions I ever made. Leaving aside the ethical considerations, I have lost a lot of weight (at 48!) and am healthier than I have been in decades. People often see vegetarianism as deprivational but it actually is one of the best things you can do for yourself, the planet, society (because the animal industries are among the very worst labor exploiters) and of course the animals. it is win, win, win…win.
Vegetarianism is is also a deeply **rational** decision, and I know all Pharyngulists (Pharyngulars? Pharyngulatists?) pride themselves on their rationality. :-) btw, another science blog I follow is inventor Ray Kurzweil’s longevity blog, kurzweilai.net. Some of you may know that Kurzweil is now seriously into life extension technologies including nanotech, prostheses, and enhanced nutrition. he doesn’t recommend a vegan diet, but comes VERY close to doing so. (During a recent NYT interview, he’s eating tofu.) He pulls his punches, I think…I think for anyone wishing to living the longest possible lifespan, flooding your body with the hormones, pesticides, antibiotics, heavy metals (from fish), cholesterol, etc., is a bad bet.
I will be happy to answer any questions people have on vegetarianism and veganism. ask me here or email me at lifelongactivist at yah00. In the meantime, below are some resources for those who wish to learn more.
Dawn
Resources:
-there is probably a vegetarian club in your local community. check it out
-The China Diet by T. Colin Campbell is the largest epidemiological nutrition study ever conducted, and he comes out firmly on the side of vegetarianism.
-Here is a Website by an M.D. that is chockablock filled with scientific information on the advantages of veganism and disadvantages of animal products: http://www.veganmd.com. click over to his “newsletters” and start reading the archives.
– Becoming Vegan by Brenda Davis. She is a nutritionist and a great writer.
-There are also tons of other websites, books etc.
-again, feel free to email me at lifelongactivist at yah00 for more information, or with any questions…
Besides bringing up reasonable environmental and health problems caused by factory farms, however, Singer unfortunately makes the typical stupid animal rights error. He compares our treatment of animals to the actions of slave owners, Nazis, and racism in general. The reason why “specism” is not the same as “racism” is that in the latter, the difference between the oppressor and oppressed is purely arbitrary, but this just isn’t true in the former case — humans really *are* more clever than other animals. So his analogy taken at face value is really an insult to Blacks and Jews.
Ethics doesn’t depend on the cleverness of the subject. Animals too feel pain, and too often are tortured by their human owners. In that utter lack of empathy, this is like slave owners, Nazis, etc. BTW, unless you believe in commandments from God telling you what is good and what is bad, one of the sources of ethics is empathy.
So as long as there is a non-arbitrary difference between the oppressor and the oppressed, it’s okay? That permits oppression of women, various ethnic minority groups, all religious groups, sexualities, political affiliations, etc. I wouldn’t want to be a Libertarian lesbian black Jewish woman meeting you in a dark alley.
Or is it just being cleverer that makes atrocity all right? So it’s all right for me to commit atrocities against everyone dumber than I am?
What’s your real name and address? I’d like to come over and ‘discuss’ these issues further with you.
Fred – the realities of industrial agriculture are as bad, or worse, than Singer describes. there’s a reason most factory farms and slaughterhouses are located out in the hinterlands and most meat comes packaged and labeled in such a way as to disguise its true nature and origins.
Dlanod – agree. Singer himself is on record (in a NYT Magazine story of a couple of years ago saying that buying meat from small organic farms instead of big industrial farms is an acceptable ethical compromise. In fact, he said something like, “If everyone did this, it would end a universe of suffering.”
Everyone – a key insight for me was the realization that the agribusinesses that produce almost all meat, packaged foods, etc., don’t give a *damn* about people’s health and welfare. they will sell whatever chemicals and shit (<- sometimes literally) they can to make a profit, and will also spend billions brainwashing people into shoveling that shit into their mouths. that's a big part of the reason why America is swimmning in obesity, diabetes, cancers, and other maladies, etc. in such a situation, more and more people are coming to the realization of ignoring the propaganda and taking control of your diet is an intense act of personal and societal liberation. Dawn
And yet a large part of the justification for both slavery and the nazi’s treatment of jews (and others) was that they were dealing with inferior creatures. Furthermore, I’m at a loss to link requisite cleverness with the capacity for suffering.
SORRY – HERE’S THE FULL POST.
Fred – the realities of industrial agriculture are as bad, or worse, than Singer describes. there’s a reason most factory farms and slaughterhouses are located out in the hinterlands and most meat comes packaged in such a way as to disguise its true nature and origins.
Dlanod – agree. Singer himself is on record (in a NYT Magazine story of a couple of years ago saying that buying meat from small organic farms instead of big industrial farms is an acceptable ethical compromise. In fact, he said something like, “If everyone did this, it would end a universe of suffering.”
Everyone – a key insight for me was the realization that the agribusinesses that produce almost all meat, packaged foods, etc., don’t give a *damn* about people’s health and welfare. they will sell whatever shit (<- sometimes literally) they can to make a profit, and will spend billions brainwashing people into believeing that that shit is good for them. that's a big part of the reason why America is swimmning in obesity, diabetes, cancers, and other maladies, etc. in such a situation, more and more people are coming to the realization of ignoring the propaganda and taking control of your diet is an intense act of personal and societal liberation. Dawn
How to become vegetarian in 3 easy steps
1. visit your supermarket and familiarize yourself with the vegetarian options. There are probably many more of them than you realize, and there are probably vegetarian substitutes for many of the foods you like to easy (e.g., veggie burgers for burgers; vegan “spread” for butter; tofutti for ice-cream). Check out frozen foods, international foods, the dairy section (for dairy substitutes) and also produce.
2. choose 2 foods or ingredients you regularly eat and start eating the vegetarian equivalents. For example, substitute vegan spread for butter (probably the least healthy common food in our diets), tofu for meat dishes in Chinese takeout, or soy milk for cow milk in your coffee.
3. Then, only when you’re comfortable with the above change, make two more substitutions.
I know that in their zealotry a lot of veg*ns can be obnoxious, but veganism or vegetarianism is not an all-or-nothing thing. Make the change at your own pace, and to the degree that’s comfortable for you. Remember that a balanced vegetarian diet with a bit of dairy or meat or eggs can give you all the nutrients you need, including all the protein you need. And for a vegan diet (no animal products at all) the only nutrient you will lack (and need to supplement for) is B12. But it’s always a good idea to take a supplement no matter which diet you follow.
Again, I’m available to answer any questions Pharyngulists have either in the comments or at lifelongactivist at yah00.
Dawn
PZ, if you have a chance, pick up a copy of the latest Harper’s, as it has a fascinating article about modern pork production in it that dovetails nicely with what Singer says.
Here’s the article:
Swine of the Times — The making of the modern pig
by Nathanael Johnson
FWIW, for me the biggest rap on modern farming isn’t the carbon production, but the soil erosion. Even with no-till and contour planting, a tremendous amount of topsoil washes off millions of acres of farmland every year, a resource that can never be replaced just as coal and oil can never be replaced. And it isn’t just happening here in the U.S., it’s happening in Brazil, Canada, Russia, etc. We need to move towards a more sustainable model of agriculture, rather than mindlessly focus on production alone.
If some people choose to be vegan, I have no problem with that choice. But if someone says ANY meat eating is wrong, I do have a problem. My ancestors are from a part of the world where they had no option but to eat meat if they wanted to live. Vegetarian offerings were just not available year-round to keep them fed. If I choose to responsibly eat meat, it’s part of my cultural heritage and not wrong.
>>Is this supposed to be a bad thing? “concentration” in this context could be called
>>”productivity growth”.
Maria – first of all, consider the implications of increasing productivity on a product that is fundamentally unhealthy and destructively produced. would we celebrate tobacco farmers increasing their productivity?
second, there are other “externalities” (love that word!) besides the pig feces environmental problem PZ mentions. Factory farms exist to minimize labor cost and concentrate profit. Each factory farm employs the minimum amount of workers and treats those workers very badly. (See some citations, below.) Each factory farm has, in fact, displaced dozens of smaller and family farms, with resulting devastation to not just the environment, but small agricultural communities and economies. And most factory farms, or all, benefit from government subsidies and tax-breaks.
So factory farms represent productivity growth in only a very narrow sense, and a productivity drain in a much broader sense.
Dawn
Citations: In an article entitled “Finger-Lickin’ Bad” in the February 21, 2006 issue of the online environmental publication Grist, author Suzi Parker documents the exploitive and antiquated sharecropper-type business model used by poultry agribusinesses to dominate the small farmers who actually raise many of the birds sent to slaughter. And an article entitled “The Chicken Hangers” in the February 2, 2004 online publication In the Fray documents not only the horrific working conditions in the poultry industry but management’s hostile (and often unlawful) resistance to unionizing efforts or even basic workers’ rights. Finally, a January 26, 2006, The New York Times article entitled “Rights Group Condemns Meatpackers on Job Safety,” begins, “For the first time, Human Rights Watch has issued a report that harshly criticizes a single industry in the United States, concluding that working conditions among the nation’s meatpackers and slaughterhouses are so bad that they violate basic human rights.”
The points of Mr. Smith and Mr. Badger combine to make an *excellent* argument in favor of baby eating.
Bill’s reliance on “cultural heritage” seems misbegotten. The fact is, Bill’s options are different from those of his ancestors. In particular, he has the option to ameliorate suffering by modifying his eating habits, in relatively trivial ways.
Yes — that was my *point*. Nazis and slaveowners made an assumption that slaves and Jews were subhuman animals. That was incorrect. Assuming subhuman animals are subhuman animals is simply stating a fact.
Singer’s always an interesting read, and I’m happy he does what he does just to make people reconsider their values occasionally, but his straightforward, logical arguments from utilitarian postulates to sometimes horrifying conclusions mostly makes me think I’m not a utilitarian.
I think he has a stronger case here than he does talking about other things. For instance, he’s argued elsewhere on grounds of maximizing utility that all Westerners have a moral obligation to reduce their standard of living all the way to that of marginally surviving people in underdeveloped countries, and send all the surplus money overseas to save the lives of many others. There’s certainly a rich tradition behind it–Jesus said something similar. And most of us could stand to do a little more of that, which I think is Singer’s real goal in advocating this. But it leads to weird consequences if taken seriously. The sciences and arts as we know them would have to simply shut down, for instance; a society in which everyone is living on the edge of survival can’t do much of that. Also, the surpluses we’d be sending over would dry up pretty quickly as our economy stopped functioning. (I suppose, on the other hand, that you could argue that since obviously not everybody is really going to do this, those of us who know better can sacrifice our own comfort knowing that the rest of society will keep churning away.)
Singer argued from the analogy of a situation in which somebody has to destroy his fancy car in order to save a child from a speeding train; anyone would say he has the obligation to do it. But I then read someone (on LiveJournal, I think) pointing out that if you take his logic a step further, actually the person’s obligation is to let the kid die, sell the car and send the money to UNICEF to save hundreds of kids somewhere else.
Dawn, PZ,
Ok, I guess he’s not objecting to the increase in productivity, but in how it came about. Fair enough. I care more about the sort of thing PZ describes, than for Dawn’s concerns, though.
Dawn,
You recommend the vegan products in the supermarket aisles. I must say, I’m relatively familiar with them because I think meat in the US is pretty disgusting (except for some very expensive organic chicken I’ve seen around). Are they really healthy? I mean, what *exactly* do you do to create fake bacon? I assume lots of chemicals must be used to create the color and consistency of that. And in my mind, that doesn’t really scream “health” as much as a nice salad would.
Thanks for the replies,
Maria
Given the amount of suffering seen in nature as it is, I find it self-indulgent to point fingers at anyone for simply eating other animals. Now if you can demonstrate how there may be a degree of needless cruelty involved (as is the case with modern pork production, IMO), that’s another matter.
As for the economic impact of modern farming on small towns, so what? You might as well bemoan how the economic impact of machine tools and robotics has impacted the traditional blue collar neighborhood or how technology has vastly reduced the number of workers involved in fishing and depopulated many an old fishing town. I’m more concerned about the impact on the natural environment by the intensive application of technology on the land and sea than I am on the human impact, which for the most part is not that devastating to anyone other than those who sentimentalize such things. I’ve seen small burgs fade away and pass on in my own life, and noted how thousands of midwestern hamlets that were once shown on old maps aren’t there anymore. I personally think the depopulation of large portions of the northern high plains is to be expected, and that the people who leave generally move on to better things than they left behind. I see no reason to preserve them as some sort of historical theme park.
Assuming nonhuman animals are somehow subhuman is not really a fact. If came along and said You are subMe, therefore I think i’ll eat you, I think you might have a problem with my logic. I love(d) meat, I ate it three times a day, but I cant accept that those animals are not unhappy about being kept locked up and killed they way they are.
Certainly most people would agree that it would unethical to eat elves or wookies if such things existed — those would be good examples of non-human animals that weren’t sub-human. And many science fiction stories bring up the problem of artifical intelligences — if intelligent programs existed, it would be unethical to delete them or even to turn off the computer they were running on. But in all these cases, there is a common reason why people would agree that killing them would be unethical — that they have human levels of intelligence.
And perhaps the most ironical thing about this discussion is that I *don’t* eat meat (well, I have been known to eat crabs and shrimp sometimes) — but that’s mostly because I don’t like the texture or taste of meat, combined with a lesser concern for the environmental and health issues involved with the meat industry.
Maria – you make a totally valid point about the vegan processed foods in the frozen foods aisle not being as healthy as, say, a salad or home cooking. (and many of the “cutesy” sounding companies that produce them are owned by agribusinesses.) i hate to cook, so I probably somewhat overrely on them compared with other veg*ns, many of whom love to cook. Still, veg processed foods are still going to be *way* healthier than their meat equivalents…
David – you raise a good point about economic dislocation. ask yourself, however, how food differs from machine tools, buggy whips, etc. What we eat – what we literally put into our mouths and bodies – is incredibly fundamental to who we are and our experience of being human. so the implications of industrial agriculture are much broader – and at the same time more intimate – than those for other products and technologies.
I would also urge you to consider whether these issues are all linked. Factory farms are symptoms of a hyper-capitalist (or hyper-corporatist, if you prefer) ethic that a lot of people on the left AND right believe has gone out of control. Enron, Halliburton, our “bought and sold” government, the meat industries, etc. – all symptoms of a system that has lost its checks and balances, and ethical grounding. In Enron, we had those young twerp traders boasting (on tape) about their ablity and willingness to impoverish “widows and orphans.” In agribusiness, we have corporate execs strategizing on how to sell junk food to kids. Same disease, different context.
The fundamental fact is that factory farms are *unhealthy* – for humans, animals, the environment, human societies, our “souls” (in the secular sense). The reason they are unhealthy to all these disparate spheres is because those spheres are all linked. We – our very bodies – are the link.
Dawn
bill’s point is almost correct, though. A vegetarian diet is not practical in the Arctic, for example, at least not for anyone but the fabulously wealthy. Even there one would be paying the massive fuel costs Singer talks about.
Singer also has a recipe for lentils in one of his books. Feuerbach (“people are what they eat”) would have been proud.
Still, veg processed foods are still going to be *way* healthier than their meat equivalents…
Dawn, you don’t have a clue. The worst fats in the Western diet (trans) come predominantly in the form of partially-hydrogenated VEGETABLE oil. They are perfectly vegan, and far worse than lard.
Your “ethical” veg*nism is a false choice, just like racism, because there’s no clean bifurcation between animal and vegetable foods on the basis of health, the environment, or animal cruelty. As an example of the last, if I offered you a choice between a one-pound elk steak (wild) and a pound of organic rice, you would smugly choose the latter, despite the fact that an average of 50 vertebrate animals died nasty deaths to produce the rice. You can rant all you want about factory farms, but it is trivially easy for anyone to avoid meat from them.
IOW, the dishonest thing about “ethical” veg*nism is that its practicioners only express a concern for the animals if their bodies are eaten in recognizable chunks after death. All the other animals are safely ignored. It’s esthetics falsely presented as ethics.
PZ, I’m really disappointed that you would tout Singer as an ethical authority given his lies about biomedical research.
“I’d like to see the maths behind the figure.”
I believe this is the paper they’re referencing:
http://laweekly.blogs.com/judith_lewis/files/diet_energy_and_global_warming-1.pdf
Jonathan,
Singer’s point is that what it makes it wrong to make something suffer is not whether its intelligence matches yours, but simply whether it suffers.
(Twain made a similar point in Huckleberry Finn, where Huck wonders how the assumed inferiority of negroes justifies making their lives worse—if they’re stupid, that makes their lives harder, but does not justify other people making them harder still.)
Even if black people or Jews were demonstrably inferior, their suffering would still be real and should be quite important. If you could show that they really had a much lower capacity for suffering—as many racists used to think—that might be relevant, but it would only be part of the equation. You could only come close justify large inflictions of suffering if you showed that their capacity for suffering was so slight that the total suffering was actually very low.
Singer is not arguing that humans don’t deserve different treatment than most nonhuman animals. For example, it’s wrong to kill a person and eat him or her in a way that it is not wrong to kill and eat a cow. To Singer, it doesn’t matter if you have 1 chicken that you kill after 2 years, or expend the same resources to raise 2 chickens that you kill after 1 year. Chickens don’t know the difference, and the main issue is their total life times their quality of life, not how it’s distributed among how many chickens.
Humans do know the difference, and if we killed them all after 30 or so years, instead of letting them live 60 or so, in a Logan’s Run kind of scenario, it would be wrong. People plan and expect on that timescale, and the prospect of being killed at 35 would degrade the quality of life for most of those 35 years. (It would also be an incredibly dangerous power to grant the state, of course.)
That’s why Singer is leery of talk about “animal rights.” (He’s not like some PETA folks, who think it’s intrinsically wrong to kill an animal for optional food.) The kinds of rights that humans have only make sense for animals fairly like humans.
(What’s a chicken going to do with free speech? Not much. Would giving it social security make it feel more secure throughout its working life? No. Does it feel pain? Yes.)
The fact that animals can’t have and enjoy rights in the same sense(s) as humans does not mean that they don’t have morally significant interests. You shouldn’t torture or neglect retarded people, and you shouldn’t torture or neglect cows just to make the meat cheaper, either.
I think Singer’s right about that. He’s also right that growing meat and dairy—humanely or inhumanely—is tremendously expensive, but the costs are hidden. We don’t make people pay for all the nonrenewable resources they’re consuming. Our policies about fuel and land use are effectively subsidizing what should be a small sustainable industry and making it a huge and destructive one. That’s crazy; we will pay dearly for those cheap cheeseburgers.
Whitey –
Of course, partially-hydrogenated vegetable oils are dangerous – I never said all plant foods were healthy and I emphasized “balanced” diet in my post. the resources I mention discuss this, trans fats, over-processed grains, and other unhealthy vegetable products that should be avoided.
Your point about veganism/carnism being a false choice has some merits and there are vegans workiing on it. At the cutting edge of veganism is something called freeganism that addresses this concern in toto. You can read about at http://www.freegan.info .
However, the evidence is overwhelming and widely accepted that animal agriculture is intrinsically and in practice far more wasteful of resources, and far more cruel to all involved, than plant agriculture.
Dawn
Dear PZ:
Some things to consider:
I’m a vegetarian, but I come from a culture with a long tradition of vegetarian cuisine. I imagine American vegetarianism might be quite bland. All those fabulous spices for which Columbus and Vasco da Gama set sail will probably have enter your repertoire.
To meet nutritional needs one needs to have a wide and varied vegetarian diet – you’ll be spending a lot more time on cooking.
Unless you eat locally grown organic food, there is a significant energy cost in transportation and storage; also you have to worry about pesticides depending on where the food was imported from.
Many processed foods add bad stuff (like trans-fats) and lose nutritional value. (That’s part of the reason why you’ll have to cook a lot, you can’t rely on processed foods.)
Therefore, while I applaud a decision to become vegetarian, if it is purely for ecological reasons rather than ethical reasons of not wanting to eat animals, it might be more practical to first see if there is any wastage that can be cut down, and second, to become less carnivorous.
Your point about veganism/carnism being a false choice has some merits…
It doesn’t merely have some merits, it is true. “Ethical” veg*nism is a perfect example of the classical fallacy of denying the antecedent. It is just as stupid as this argument:
1) All poodles are dogs.
2) My dog is not a poodle.
3) Therefore, my dog is not a dog.
… and there are vegans workiing on it.
See, Dawn, if they were actually working on it, they would reject the label “vegan.” Your motivation is not concern for animals, it is maintaining the fiction that you are morally superior to the majority of people. That’s why you’ll choose 50 animal deaths/pound (rice) over 1 animal death/500 pounds (a succulent elk steak). The animals and their suffering are simply tools for you to use.
However, the evidence is overwhelming and widely accepted that animal agriculture is intrinsically and in practice far more wasteful of resources, and far more cruel to all involved, than plant agriculture.
Pure BS, because you simply can’t be bothered to assess the impact of plant agriculture. I live in central Montana, and trout-filled rivers flow through ranches and hay farms, only to be ruined by the silt produced by barley farming (most of it goes into Budweiser).
The evidence is overwhelming that ranching maintains native flora and fauna far better than farming.
Wow, PZ, I didn’t realize that this post was an invitation for the Church of Vegan Harmony to come and witness to the masses. *rolling eyes extensively*
Arun wrote:
Unless you eat locally grown organic food, there is a significant energy cost in transportation and storage; also you have to worry about pesticides depending on where the food was imported from.
“Organic” is a false bifurcation, too. Here, Arun exhibits a complete ignorance of organic standards. “Organic” in no way means “no pesticides.” There are plenty of nasty organic pesticides (such as rotenone), because evolution does a far better job of producing toxins than our intelligent design. In fact, many synthetic pesticides are modifications of natural ones to make them more labile.
That being said, Arun’s point about local food is a good one.
I swear, I’m not trying to troll or raise a ruckus or anything… but is this the same Peter Singer who encourages the infanticide of disabled children? I’ve always found it a bit odd for him to complain about things like killing hens by the most convenient method when he seems to be okay with euthanizing blind kids (IIRC, that’s more or less an example from the first edition of Practical Ethics).
If I’m completely mistaken here, please let me know.
I have a small question for all the vegetarians/vegans out there. Ya’ll are stating that the main reason for not eating meat is animal suffering. Others have pointed out that the degree of suffering must be taken into account etc.
In your animalcentric universe, you are assuming that plants do not suffer when you eat their children (seeds) or ovaries (fruit) etc. I’m sorry, but that’s not something any of us have the experience to speak about. It is very difficult to understand the suffering of animals that are very different from us (like all non-mammals). I have even heard some people claim that lobsters cannot feel pain, so it is okay to cook them alive. These kinds of ethical arguments are simply window dressing on life. Lions do not agonize over the pain of the gazelle when they kill, not because they are cruel, but because death is part of life.
Second, there are real nutritional dangers of being vegan, particularly to children. The genus Homo is characterized through time by an increased reliance on meat as part of the diet. Increased use of animal protein has provided raw material for encephalization. Without meat or other animal products, in the diet, many children suffer cognitive delays in development that take years to alleviate.
I believe there is a very good ethical and evironmental argument against industrial farms of both the vegetable and animal kind. I eat less meat than I did because now I only buy local beef where I know the cows are pastured most of the year, and that beef is more expensive than the stuff at Wal-Mart. I also replaced much of the beef in my diet with venison (naturally organic!). But I still eat meat.
In your animalcentric universe, you are assuming that plants do not suffer when you eat their children (seeds) or ovaries (fruit) etc.
It’s even more hypocritical than that. They completely discount the suffering of any animals that are shredded by a combine or killed by rotenone (an allowed organic pesticide). The animal’s suffering only merits consideration if its body is eaten after death. Clearly, some animals are more equal than others.
You’d think a committed atheist like PZ would see through religious irrationality like that.
I don’t think most vegetarians realize what industrialized agriculture is really like.
As a side note, an organic, vegetarian diet is prohibitively expensive for many people including broke grad students.
It hasn’t come out yet that Singer’s argument hinges on what he calls “exceptional marginal cases”. Of course there is a clear difference in mental capacity between an average human and a chimp. But what about a severely autisitic human? In that case, the chimp might be more self-aware than the human. Thus, it becomes impossible to construct a set of criteria based on mental capacity that simultaneously includes all humans and excludes all animals. The only way to to this is to say that everyone who is genetically human deserves full ethical consideration, and all other organisms do not. But if this is acceptable, if arbitrary, then it would be equally acceptable, if arbitrary, to say that only humans with an X and a Y chromosome deserve full ethical consideration and that those with two X chromosomes do not.
I’m only a mostly-vegetarian (mostly vegan, too), but I’ll respond anyway.
Vegetarians’ motivations vary quite widely. There’s usually some mix of the following three:
1. Wanting to reduce animal suffering.
2. Wanting to reduce ecological damage.
3. Wanting to be healthier.
Most of us are not just assuming this; we’re making an educated guess.
Plants do not appear to have emotions. They do exhibit various kinds of adaptation, but not of the kind or complexity that seems necessary to support emotions.
It’s a good guess that they don’t suffer, because suffering is something that happens in brains (or similarly complex and similarly-structured information processing systems).
Some of us do have relevant scientific knowledge.
I certainly wouldn’t say that, nor would most vegetarians I know. It’s not clear what it’s like to be a lobster, or whether it’s like anything at all to be one, but if you don’t know and have a good argument that they don’t suffer, I’d definitely err on the side of not doing it. A lobster is cognitively far more complex than a plant, even if it’s nowhere near as complex as a human.
Huh?
Lions are amoral. We don’t have to be.
But I’m not sure what you’re getting at.
Certainly. If you’re going to be a strict vegan, you should be very, very careful about your diet.
Animal products are the easiest way to make sure you get all of your amino acids, but my impression is that a properly balanced vegan diet is just fine. (If you eat a good combination of incomplete proteins and take your vitamins.)
One of Singer’s main arguments is that animal farming is generally several times more expensive in several ways than plant farming, because it requires 3-10 times as much plant farming to feed the animals. In most respects, animal farming amplifies the damage of plant farming by a factor of 3 to 10.
(For example, if you’re worried about the animals that get caught in combines, you should realize that 3 to 10 times as many will have that happen to them if you eat meat instead of plants. If you’re not worried about those critters, but are worried about fossil fuel consumption and global warming, roughly the same multiplier applies.)
Up to a point, I think that’s fine. And I think Singer would say so, too. If you really, really enjoy the luxury of eating meat, eating some humanely-grown-and-harvested meat is a reasonable way to spend your discretionary income. (Given his ideas about income disparities, Singer would draw some important lines in different places than most people—meat would be a “very luxurious” luxury item, not just a luxury item. I myself buy his basic argument that meat should be regarded as more of a luxury and less of a staple, even if I don’t go as far.)
Unfortunately, things like wild venison or organic free-range beef are just not cost-effective for most people most of the time, and there’s no way we can sustainably support the kind of meat consumption we’re used to. (If everybody replaced their farmed meat with wild venison, deer would quickly disappear from the wild. If we switched to free-range beef, we’d tie up a lot of land as pasture that would be better used for more efficient agriculture or left more or less wild.)
If you really, really enjoy the luxury of eating meat, eating some humanely-grown-and-harvested meat is a reasonable way to spend your discretionary income.
The problem for your pseudoethical stance is that such meat causes far less animal suffering than most of the vegetables and grains you choose to eat. How can you justify eating them instead of reducing the animal suffering you cause?
Unfortunately, things like wild venison or organic free-range beef are just not cost-effective for most people most of the time,…
I’d like to see your math on this point. Wild venison can be obtained with a hunting license, gun, and ammo. How did you calculate that it is not cost-effective?
(If everybody replaced their farmed meat with wild venison, deer would quickly disappear from the wild.
Unfortunately for you, ‘I won’t bother to do it because if everyone did it, there might be a problem’ is ethically irrelevant. But nice try–we all know that not everyone will do it, so there’s nothing to stop you from going right ahead, except lame-ass rationalizations like that.
If we switched to free-range beef, we’d tie up a lot of land as pasture that would be better used for more efficient agriculture or left more or less wild.)
I’d like to see your calculations on this, given that here on the prairie, cattle ranches are land that is left more or less wild. There’s nothing more efficient in agriculture. Even the Nature Conservancy runs cattle on their preserve because intensive grazing is an integral part of the prairie ecosystem. Ever heard of bison, Paul?
But what about a severely autisitic human? In that case, the chimp might be more self-aware than the human.
Why assume that the more severly autistic are less self-aware? In the past decade or so some of the less verbal set of those with that disorder have been shown to be aware of their outside environment with alternative forms of communication, not all of them facillitated. And even if other people out there are so severly disabled they can’t take advantage of writing or type writing, you’re still operating from an assumption based on evidence you do not have. But anyway…
Anyway, the problem isn’t meat, the problem is capitolism and the industrialization of the food supply. The meat industry is only a part of what is affecting our environment in a negative fashion. Over 85 percent of soy on the US market is now genetically modified. Forests in the Amazon is now being cut down for soy crops. Even the companies raising organic soy aren’t always run by hippies, they have to make money off a target market, and can exploit workers as much as the actual land. (Much of the same can be said about crops such as corn, wheat, fruit and so forth, albiet in somewhat different fashions.) And even before capitolism, plant based agriculture has always had its affects on the environment. Land must be cleared, and can affect the surrounding environment in a negative fashion.
As for ethics, I find it mostly questionable. We evolved to eat meat, and to say that animals only kill out of necessity is ridiculous. Predators have been shown to sometimes kill their prey and never eat it, sometimes playing with the corpse at most. Death by predators in the wild can be very painful and slow, depending on the circumstances. And to say that animals such as foxes and lions be allowed to eat meat, and that humans should not is in my opinion speciest and hypocritical.
I used to be a vegetarian for years due to concerns over factory farming, and I, like most people who get involved in that lifestyle, inevitably went back to meat eating. This is natural, considering how human beings have evolved, and I have no regrets going back. In the end I feel that people concerned with animal welfare should attack the system that creates these problems instead of shaming and guilting people into a lifestyle that will most likely not work for them in the long run.
My disagreements with Singer are often about things where I’m more of a utilitarian than he is.
He isn’t a straight utilitarian, IIRC; he’s more of a Rawlsian minimaxing egalitarian. (If I don’t recall correctly, I hope somebody will correct me!)
I agree up to a point with a lot of minimaxing arguments, e.g. about the marginal utility of money, but not about minimaxing utility itself. Overall utility (happiness) has to matter a lot, not just maximizing the minimum, i.e., helping the worst-off. Minimaxing other things often makes sense, up to a point, mostly as a way of maximizing utility per se, precisely because of the greater marginal utility at the low end. I think there’s a good “veil of ignorance” argument about this, such that most people would not share Rawls’s or Singer’s intuitions about minimaxing utility itself. It’s only plausible because people are conflating utility with marginal utility. I could explain that if anybody cares. :-)
That said, I think Singer makes a lot of good and important arguments, most of which bear a lot more weight than his critics acknowledge, and he is a very worthwhile philosopher to read. (Writings on an Ethical Life is a good sampler.)
But what about a severely autisitic human? In that case, the chimp might be more self-aware than the human. Thus, it becomes impossible to construct a set of criteria based on mental capacity that simultaneously includes all humans and excludes all animals.
So what? There’s no dilemma here, because the criterion isn’t mental capacity, it’s reciprocity.
I will never be a chimp. I may become a disabled human. Therefore, I want all disabled humans to have rights. If a human fails to reciprocate, disabled or not, she/he loses basic human rights.
For an interesting alternative viewpoint to Singer’s, I recommend Michael Pollan, whose recent book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, touches on some of these issues.
I haven’t read the book, but one of the things that Pollan points out in articles I’ve read is that modern farm animals owe not only their natures but their very existence to the fact that people eat them (or their eggs, or their milk). Cows, pigs, and chickens have been bred to be food, and if they weren’t being raised for food, no one would be raising them at all.
In an article in the NYT Magazine, he promoted the notion that consuming animals that have been raised in a more traditional farming environment than is used under modern industrial agriculture is somehow truer to the nature of those animals than either factory farming or allowing those animals to disappear from the Earth, the natural outcome of universal vegetarianism.
Here’s a review of his book, from Salon.
Re Dawn:
* Meat is not “a product that is fundamentally unhealthy.” As a matter of fact meat is very nutrient-rich. The very fact that you have to take a B12 supplement when you stop eating meat should suggest that the opposite is true. It’s just like sugar, or fat, or any of the other foods that people demonize for religi-nutritious reasons – none are fundamentally unhealthy, but you can be unhealthy if you eat too much of them, or don’t eat them at all. *
I once had a conversation with a vegetarian who claimed that a fat person walking by was fat because of how much meat they ate. Show me the science. And then tell me why all the fat in vegan cookies that people devour is not a problem!
Personally, I try to buy grass-fed beef, and free-range chickens. I used to raise sheep for food/auction when I was young, and they were treated very well. Currently, I have honeybees and believe it or not, people actually campaign against beekeeping for ethical reasons. Do a search for honey bee and “rape rack” to see some of the inanity. If I have land in the future, I might raise a couple sheep and have a spearmint patch nearby. My point is it is possible to reduce animal suffering and still eat meat.
Dlanod is right on when it comes to organic agriculture – I would go further and say that organic agriculture is dependent upon animals for manure. Some organic folks are also trying to go back to using animals for plowing again. Sick ’em, Singer!
I’ve often wondered, though, for reasons of ethics, as one person mentioned above, aren’t they suggesting that these animals which are raised for meat not be born at all? What about animals that are hunted in the wild, aren’t we obligated, therefore, to end their suffering? What if we simply replaced their predators with ourselves… doesn’t that result in the same amount of animal death?
Finally, Lions are not amoral. They are social animals that can have social relationships even beyond their own species.
One more comment about Singer…
I recently heard a maxim, with unknown (to me) source: “One person’s counterintuitive conclusion is another person’s reductio ad absurdum.”
For me, some of Singer’s arguments and conclusions fit this maxim quite nicely… :-)
I don’t know — that sounds rather cerbocentric. I’ve recently written a grant to study the genomes of predatory bacteria — bacteria that can track and attack other bacteria. Despite lacking a brain, they seem to have nearly as complex behavior as do many animals. Maybe they suffer too, if suffering is a function of information processing of stimuli.
PZ,
I’m very glad to hear you’re reconsidering vegetarianism. You should read Singer’s book A Darwinian Left sometime, if you haven’t already.
I’m particularly glad you’re reconsidering it since just yesterday my roommate and I got into an argument about my vegetarianism (he’s about to graduate with a degree in cell biology), and he made the case that very few biologists are vegetarians. Help prove him wrong!
Well, I don’t think I’d ever be a full-blown vegetarian — but I think it would be a good idea to moderate the consumption of meat.
One difficulty, though, is that rascally kid of mine who is coming home for the summer: his idea of a good meal is waving a match somewhere near a dead cow.
That’s the guy, but I think you’re misstating his view by calling month-old infants “children.”
A month-old infant is arguably not a child in the same sense that a year-old infant is. Developmentally, it’s pretty much a fetus, delivered “prematurely” (even if that’s normal for our species).
I think Singer makes a pretty good argument for his position. It’s counterintuitive, but if you really look at the issues, it makes sense.
Consider an example situation, where a couple plans to have and raise exactly one child, because that’s all they can afford. If they have a disabled child, they are choosing that child over the other child that they would otherwise have, later.
Why should they choose the disabled child over the non-disabled child?
Here’s the veil-of-ignorance argument. Put yourself in the position of each of the possible children whose futures are at stake. Assume that you might be either, with equal probability, but you don’t get to pick. Without knowing which person in the situation you’ll be, what would you have the parents do?
(This is a standard thought experiment structure, implementing the basic moral idea of impartiality. We are deciding what to do based on the interests of the possible children, NOT on the “selfish” interests of the parents.)
If the couple chooses the disabled infant, you have a 50/50 chance of being that child, and growing up disabled—and a 50/50 chance of being the other child, and never existing at all.
If they choose the non-disabled child, you have a 50/50 chance of growing up not disabled, and a 50/50 chance of existing briefly as the disabled infant and being painlessly euthanized to make way for the other child.
Which would you have them choose? I’d rather they chose the non-disabled child.
They’d do more harm to the non-disabled child by failing to conceive, gestate, and raise it than you do to the disabled child by killing it as an infant, and not raising it.
You have a Sophie’s choice between the two children, and if you have one, you will not have the other. Does the fact that one has been conceived and partly gestated give it the right to grow up, in preference to the one that hasn’t been conceived yet?
Singer doesn’t think so, and neither do I. Neither is really a person yet, or even a child in the relevant sense. Each is still a possible person, and one just happens to be 10 months closer to personhood than the other.
Does that head start give it the right to grow up, at the expense of another child who never gets to exist at all?
I don’t think so. I think people have strong intuitions about this primarily because they ignore alternatives, and the not-yet-conceived child is out of sight and out of mind.
If they choose the disabled child and can’t afford another, they are eliminating a person’s entire future life just as surely as if they’d actively killed that one instead.
It only seems obvious that it’s better to raise the disabled child because we ignore the other child we could have instead, and its even greater interest in existing—it would not only get a shot at life, but a shot at a better life.
Of course, this is a simplistic example, but I think it’s closer to reality on average than people generally realize.
Of all the possible people we could bring into the world, we can only afford a finite number. Each person we create uses scarce resources, and on average, for each person we do create, there’s another we don’t. Or if not, we run into a problem—increasing the number of people beyond a certain roughly optimal number means that on average, each person we bring into the world degrades the quality of life on average by about as much as it increases the quantity of life.
Unless you think the world is underpopulated, it has to be morally neutral at best, on average, to bring a new person into the world.
For most moral purposes, we choose to pretend that all lives of already-existing people are equally worth living. Nobody wants to live in a world in which other people make the decision whether your life is worth living. So we pretend all lives are equally valuable, and worth living, or that it’s not our job to make the call. Not because all lives really are equally worth living
But when you’re talking about bringing new people into the world, you can’t avoid Sophie’s choices. We must choose whether to bring people into the world, and which ones, whether we do so explicitly or implicitly.
We can take the “easy” way out, and raise whichever “children” are conceived, or whichever ones are birthed, at the expense of those who’d have a better shot in life. Or we can recognize the Sophie’s choice implicit in that kind of decision, and choose to have better-off children over disabled ones.
Either is a hugely important moral choice—there’s a whole (future) human life at stake. Some possible future person is going to win, and some other is going to lose.
I agree with Singer that it’s morally preferable to have non-disabled children, if you have a choice. And you do have that choice, in such situations, whether you face up to it or not.
Before somebody screams “Eugenics!” and makes comparisons to Nazis, let me state that this is not eugenics in the strong, core sense—only in the sloppy sense that many people casually toss around.
The goal is not to improve the gene pool or the race, and the justification is not selfish on the part of the parents, or a society that would condone infanticide in such cases. The justification is based on the recognition of the true costs to the possible future people whose lives are at stake, taking their interests into account.
(So, please, if you do object, at least respect the argument structure. Do not assume any selfish motives. There are none in the argument, which either works or doesn’t for other reasons—e.g., the crucial issue of personhood, and whether an actual infant is a person with a right to live but an alternative possible infant isn’t.)
Whitey –
I will never be a chimp. I may become a disabled human. Therefore, I want all disabled humans to have rights. If a human fails to reciprocate, disabled or not, she/he loses basic human rights.
That argument, though, still lets you discriminate in ways we would find morally unacceptable. I will never be black or a woman. Does that I don’t owe blacks and women equal ethical consideration?
Eukarya –
We evolved to eat meat, and to say that animals only kill out of necessity is ridiculous.
Don’t get caught up in the naturalistic fallacy. Just because something happens in the natural world, that doesn’t make it ethical.
And it should be noted that I don’t agree with Singer’s argument in total, and I’m not a veg*. He’s a fairly strict utilitarian, and I’ve seen him concede in interviews that if animals were raised in such a way that the happiness they received throughout their lives exceeded the suffering caused by slaughtering them, it would be acceptable to do so, since there would be an overall increase in happiness.
That argument, though, still lets you discriminate in ways we would find morally unacceptable. I will never be black or a woman. Does that I don’t owe blacks and women equal ethical consideration?
No, because blacks and women reciprocate. You don’t owe equal consideration to whites, blacks, or women who don’t reciprocate. This is how a society can improve by integration; the folks with power gradually realize that their alleged inferiors are capable of adhering to the social contract. That’s why I treat my dog as though she has rights (she protects my house and family), but you are under no obligation to treat my dog that way–she is simply my property.
That doesn’t look too good–substitute “Reciprocation” for “That’s” in my last sentence above.
I am so glad to see this discussion! I have been a vegan for 3 years and it was one of the best decisions I ever made. Leaving aside the ethical considerations, I have lost a lot of weight (at 48!) and am healthier than I have been in decades. People often see vegetarianism as deprivational but it actually is one of the best things you can do for yourself, the planet, society (because the animal industries are among the very worst labor exploiters) and of course the animals. it is win, win, win…win.
While it’s great that being a vegan has benefitted you so much, I think it’s a huge mistake to think that there is any ONE way all people respond to a vegan diet, and that everyone would benefit from it the same way. Human bodies actually have very different dietary needs and responses, and there are some people who simply DO NOT thrive on a vegan or even vegetarian diet. My brother became a radical vegan for a few years (pretty much as a response to other emotional stuff happening in his life), even going so far as to try purge all fat from his diet. In a few years his hair turned gray (he was in his early 40’s) and his behavior and personality changed radically, for the worse. He went through a couple years of being very hard to reason with and becoming very hostile to most people. I think it basically made him a little nuts for a few years, in my opinion. He later shifted to being a simple vegetarian who eats a reasonable amount of fat, and he’s basically recovered now. His pre-vegan personality is back.
Another big problem with the vegan/vegetarian diet for some people is that some people simply need lots of protein, and that there are very few good ways to get that in a meat-free diet without a big increase in carb consumption. My wife fits in that category — her energy levels plummet if her protein intake is low, but she has a huge raft of health problems if her carb consumption is high. So a meat free diet isnt a realistic option for her, not if she wants any decent quality of life.
In dietary matters, one size most definitely does not fit all.
Tony Smith makes a referece to New Zealand that I don’t understand. Here we have animals raised on grass in the open, and the taste is fantastic! Actually I think the problem is actually ECONOMICs. America and Europe’s subsidy of agriculture is what leads to environmental poor outcomes. Subsidies lead to over-production. When New Zealand unilaterally removed its agriculture subsidies stock numbers fell. And the environmental outcomes were great – marginal, high biodiversity land was no longer economic to farm. If America and Europe gave up subsidies for crops that 3rd world can grow (rice sugar etc.) there would be less energy input overall, and it would raise the developing countries standard of living.
Actually, you’re quite wrong if you’re referring to factory-farmed meat. That cow was fattened up with a large quantity of grain — probably enough to feed you for quite a while. Quoting Paul W. from earlier in the thread: “it requires 3-10 times as much plant farming to feed the animals.” So you still can’t get around the fact that consuming such meat does more damage than being vegetarian.
Granted, there is grass-fed beef available, but that was likely raised using more humane methods.
Well, the problem with your argument Paul is that, first of all, it legitimises the couple’s descision to have only one child.
If they planned to have two, and ended up with a spread like this:
Disabled, abled, abled
Then my chances of being the disabled and subsequently aborted child are much greater. Therefore, morally, they should have two children, or really, as many as they can economically sustain.
On the other hand, if they do decide to have one child, and the spread is:
Disabled, disabled, abled
Then my chance of being the kid that actually gets born is only 1 in 3. In this case, your argument supports keeping the disabled kid.
There’s also this:
Mentally able/physically disabled, mentally disabled/physically able
In this situation, you have to make a judgement call about which body you’d prefer, even though both have signifigant drawbacks.
Lastly, I’m not sure I follow the logic of disregarding all possible births. If the decision not to have a child is morally equivalent to aborting a child, then how can we ever justify it?
Or, to put it another way, why are we assuming we’d only be the child that would be born post abortion, and not every other child that could possibly be born to this couple?
Let’s assume that they can afford to send one child to a posh private school, but that they’ll barely scrape by with two children.
In this case, isn’t their moral obligation to have two children, since never getting to exist at all must be worse then simply getting a public education.
Not to mention all the kids they could’ve had and set up for adoption; clearly their minor emptional distress is less important then existing, right?
And don’t even get me started on those bastards who never have kids at all.
Of course, if we legitimise that the parent’s own selfish interests, then we have to admit that the selfish love they have for their disabled child is more important then a hypothetical child’s interest in existing.
What I was trying to say there is that ethical arguments over whether it is okay to eat meat are a luxury of our modern society that is dependent on industrialized agriculture. When there is not an excess of food, people eat what is available for the most part. In point of fact, many human cultures abandon their food taboos in times where food is scarce.
If you haven’t eaten in a week, you’re going to eat whatever you can including meat. If you really think you won’t, I’d love to use you in an experiment where we starved you and put a plate of meat in front of you. My guess is you’d eat it.
Lion morality is irrelevant. You are under the impression that meat eating in humans should be a moral issue. Meat consumption is part of our natural adaptation. Very few people are better off in the long run on vegan diets, and most meat eaters are better off biologically.
Let me provide a well known example of the adaptive advantage of animal product consumption. Most of the population of the world is lactose intolerant. Like all mammals, in most humans the gene to produce lactase ceases functioning after weaning. However, in some populations (most notably Europe, Middle East) the gene for lactase continues to function throughout life. This variant is now the most prevalent one in Europe. That is because it conferred an adaptive advantage to those who could consume dairy products throughout life over those who could not. The ability to consume animal products made some individuals better adapted to their environment.
The lactose tolerance gene is only common in populations that have historically relied on dairy products from cows, sheep and goats. In other populations, lactose tolerance is not selected for because they don’t utilize dairy products as a significant food source. Alternatively, some Tibetan groups adapted culturally to the use of dairy products by fermenting them into things like yogurt.
The point here is that using animal products (milk)as a food source confers an advantage over those who could not because animal products are a more concentrated nutrition source. You’re eating what the cow ate, but it doesn’t take as long!
Actually, you’re quite wrong if you’re referring to factory-farmed meat.
Actually, I’m quite right, because I was directly responding to your statement about “humanely-grown-and-harvested meat,” not anything about “factory-farmed meat,” which is a useless polemic term anyway.
Sheesh. So what is your justification for choosing vegetables over grass-fed beef or wild game?
Do you choose among vegetables by the criterion of the animal suffering involved in their production, or do you not really care about animals?
Me:
Jonathan Badger:
I certainly don’t rule out the possibility that something brrainless could have intelligence of a sort, and emotions of a sort—and certainly don’t rule out the possibility that some simple nervous systems are computationally simpler than the genetic regulatory networks of the underlying cells. It’s certainly an interesting idea.
But how much computation is a unicellular organism really doing? My impression is that it has a few thousand, or tens of thousands of genes, most of which are fairly simple and slow switches.
In contrast, a human brain has tens of billions of neurons, each of which is a rather more complicated switch than a gene.
Question: how fast do genes switch? How much raw computational power could a microbe have in its genetic regulatory networks? (And, I guess, in other catalytic reactions… are there other computational mechanisms I should be considering?)
My guess would be that genes switch more slowly than neurons, because they typically rely on transcribing to proteins enough times to significantly alter concentrations of factors which must diffuse to binding sites of genes they’re “inputs” to. (Direct single-molecular switching could be a whole lot faster.)
I would guess that the total amount of computation going on would only be a few hundreds or thousands, or maybe tens of thousands, of “instructions per second.” (A few thousand genes times a few switchings per gene per second.) That’s orders and orders of magnitude less computation than a typical PC can do—about a billion instructions per second, each of which actually requires a bunch of binary switches to switch—and that, in turn, is orders of magnitude less than the human brain can do.
This makes me think that a microbe couldn’t have a very rich mental life, or experience much per second; more likely, it’s like an exquisitely evolved ensemble of relatively simple reflexes than something more “cognitive” or “emotional”—rather like an ant, much of whose “complex” behavior can be characterized by a few dozen simple responses interacting with regularities in its environment. Given the right ensemble of “reflexes” in the right environment, you can get a lot of adaptive mileage without much thinking going on inside.
BTW, if you’re not familiar with Rodney Brooks et al.‘s work on bug robots and “situated behavior” and “reactive planning,” you might want to check that out. It may be relevant to understaning how microbial predators could get by with very little computation.
It might also be relevant to understanding the difference between an infant and a person—young infants process information in very different ways than we do—but that’s a different discussion. :-)
But would you get the same nutritional benefit from consuming the grain? This is not simply a caloric equation. Animals make protiens and vitamins etc. from the raw materials they consume. We get the benefit of their digestive system without the cost by consuming the animals. Human digestive systems are adapted to an omnivorous, cooked diet.
If you eat only vegetable matter, you must consume more for the same nutritional value. This leads to the excess of carbs mentioned earlier. Further, think about the digestive track of a cow. Do you have multiple stomachs to digest all that grain? Or we can look to other primates, Gorillas eat terrestrial herbaceous vegetation (THV) or essentially wild celery. They spend most of their time chewing and digesting their food. Most humans don’t have that luxury. Also, the digestive requirements of raw foods are why exclusively raw food diets result in chronic energy deficiency. People need cooked food. This is particularly important with vegetables as the cooking process weakens the cell wall for nutrient extraction.
And, cooked animal bones are a great source of calcium!
“If the couple chooses the disabled infant, you have a 50/50 chance of being that child, and growing up disabled—and a 50/50 chance of being the other child, and never existing at all.”
Sorry, I thought of a better way to put this.
Using your argument, there’s no justification for this 50/50 figure in the first instance.
Instead, you either have to chose between the born child and all other children the couple could have which makes your chances of existing so infinitesimal that it almost doesn’t matter WHAT happens, Or, you have to assume that we will, in fact, turn out to be an actual child, in which case the first example gives us not a 50% chance of existing, but a 100% chance. This certainty of existence may well be preferable to some people then a random choice between existence and non-existence.
Umm, you were definitely not responding to my statement, since you’re quoting the only comment I’ve made prior to this one.
And if you read carefully, you’ll note that the person who commented regarding “humanely-grown-and-harvested meat” was implying that’s a fine thing to eat; now I’m not really sure what your point was in attacking that post, if you weren’t arguing that farmed meat is somehow equally or more humane than vegetables.
That wasn’t the point to my statement; rather, Whitey had been commenting on how vegetable/grain farming causes quite a few deaths. I was making the point that you compound this by eating farmed, non-grass-fed beef. My interpretation was that Whitey was arguing vegetarianism is no better (or even worse) than carnivorism in preventing animal suffering, but it seems he was only concerned with special cases (I think).
Umm, you were definitely not responding to my statement, since you’re quoting the only comment I’ve made prior to this one.
I was directly responding to the statement regarding humanely-grown-and-harvested meat; whether the statement was yours or not, the context was clear.
And if you read carefully, you’ll note that the person who commented regarding “humanely-grown-and-harvested meat” was implying that’s a fine thing to eat;
I agree.
… now I’m not really sure what your point was in attacking that post, if you weren’t arguing that farmed meat is somehow equally or more humane than vegetables.
Why don’t you bother to respond to what I actually wrote, Davis? The variation of animal suffering caused within the categories animal and vegetable is huge. This is why there is no ethical basis for the bifurcation of veg*nism.
Notice how Davis slimed his way from “factory-farmed” to “farmed.” One characteristic of those who push this bogus religion is their reluctance to acknowledge the existence of ranches. Try calling a rancher a farmer sometime…
That wasn’t the point to my statement; rather, Whitey had been commenting on how vegetable/grain farming causes quite a few deaths.
And the numbers of those deaths per calorie or pound varies wildly, but so-called ethical veg*ns don’t bother to choose among vegetables.
I was making the point that you compound this by eating farmed, non-grass-fed beef.
There’s that polemic BS “farmed” again. Most beef consumed in the US starts on ranches (environmentally friendly) and ends up on feedlots (environmental nightmares brought to you by grain subsidies). Neither location can be accurately described as a farm.
My interpretation was that Whitey was arguing vegetarianism is no better (or even worse) than carnivorism
Damn, you’re dishonest. I’m a firm believer in omnivorism for health reasons.
… in preventing animal suffering, but it seems he was only concerned with special cases (I think).
You think wrongly. I am pointing out that it is a false choice, a false bifurcation, a beautiful example of denying the antecedent. If I had been attacking racism, you’re analogous to an idiot who would claim that I had been asserting the superiority of people of color, instead of assailing it as a false choice.
Can you wrap your dogma-addled mind around the notion that it is a FALSE choice, not simply a wrong choice?
But would you get the same nutritional benefit from consuming the grain? This is not simply a caloric equation. Animals make protiens and vitamins etc. from the raw materials they consume. We get the benefit of their digestive system without the cost by consuming the animals.
We also get the benefit of their ability to digest cellulose, which is why any attempt to quantitate grain consumption in units of mass or weight (see Pimentel cited by Singer above) is a priori dishonest. Much of the grain fed to livestock is the remainder after processing for human desires.
Actually, there is, but which is better depends on what points you’re trying to bring out.
The 50/50 thing is realistic under most circumstances for most people in our culture right now. While there is a vast number of other possible children, which other child you will have is typically a crapshoot—you’ll just throw the genetic dice again, and if there’s nothing obviously and disastrously wrong with the next fetus, you’ll probably keep that one. So typically it’s a choice of the obviously seriously disabled child vs. some particular other child who would happen win the next lottery.
Your point is well taken, though. The fact that that other child is the result of another crapshoot with many losers is important. How does random luck bestow a particular combination of an egg and a sperm with right to a huge and risky investment by the parents and by society? What’s morally exceptional about that one, as opposed to the next one or the next? Why do any of these possible children especially deserve to grow up?
My answer is that they are all equally deserving; it’d be nice if all possible people could become actual people and get whatever it takes to have a great life. The more the merrier.
Unfortunately, the world isn’t remotely like that, so we have to make some very hard choices, because we’re faced with something very close to a zero-sum game.
Infanticide for such good reasons only seems monstrous because we generally manage to ignore the monstrousness of the situation, which is that people are forced to make Sophie’s choices all the time. (That’s one of the things that convinces me there’s no omnibenevolent almighty.)
Paul:
It only seems obvious that it’s better to raise the disabled child because we ignore the other child we could have instead, and its even greater interest in existing—it would not only get a shot at life, but a shot at a better life.
This is my basic problem with his argument: where does Peter Singer get off claiming that the disabled people will intrinsically have a worse life than nondisabled people? My friend Uriah is an officer at the Disabled Student Cultural Center at the U of Minnesota, and led a protest when Singer came here. The reason for the protest was not that he argued that they should have been killed at birth (and yes, I acknowledge that he argues that this should be allowed for all infants; my point of umbrage is that he only encourages it for the disabled), but that he did so because he believed that the disabled should be pitied.
And that’s ultimately the flaw in the argument for me. He’s drawn an essentially arbitrary line in the sand: people on this side can lead more fulfilling lives, people on the other side lead less fullfilling lives. I admit that it isn’t equivalent to eugenics in the sense that it is not some crazy attempt to clean out the gene pool; but I would argue that it IS equivalent to eugenics in the sense that I see minimal distinction between the arbitrariness in deciding to kill an infant because he was born blind and deciding to kill an infant because he was born with a genetic tendency towards developing myopia, homosexuality, or even because of its race or gender.
Actually, there is, but which is better depends on what points you’re trying to bring out.
The 50/50 thing is realistic under most circumstances for most people in our culture right now. While there is a vast number of other possible children, which other child you will have is typically a crapshoot—you’ll just throw the genetic dice again, and if there’s nothing obviously and disastrously wrong with the next fetus, you’ll probably keep that one. So typically it’s a choice of the obviously seriously disabled child vs. some particular other child who would happen win the next lottery.
Your point is well taken, though. The fact that that other child is the result of another crapshoot with many losers is important. How does random luck bestow a particular combination of an egg and a sperm with right to a huge and risky investment by the parents and by society? What’s morally exceptional about that one, as opposed to the next one or the next? Why do any of these possible children especially deserve to grow up?
My answer is that they are all equally deserving; it’d be nice if all possible people could become actual people and get whatever it takes to have a great life. The more the merrier.
Unfortunately, the world isn’t remotely like that, so we have to make some very hard choices, because we’re faced with something very close to a zero-sum game.
Infanticide for such good reasons only seems monstrous because we generally manage to ignore the monstrousness of the situation, which is that people are forced to make Sophie’s choices all the time. (That’s one of the things that convinces me there’s no omnibenevolent almighty.)
Hey asshat, I wasn’t even trying to argue with you, aside from my initial comment based on a misinterpretation. I was trying to figure out what exactly you were arguing, though, because that was unclear to me.
And I notice you’re crediting me with a position I never even implied I held. I’m going to ignore the rest of your post, because you’re being a shrill jackass, you’re putting bullshit words into my mouth (dogma-addled?), and I’m not even disagreeing with you on anything.
So far as I know, he doesn’t claim this all; he doesn’t say or believe that every disabled person’s life will turn out worse than every non-disabled person’s, or that every disabled person’s life will be worse for the disability. I certainly don’t believe those things, and I buy his argument.
BTW, I myself am somebody who wouldn’t exist if my parents had thought the way I do about such things. I don’t think that invalidates Singer’s argument in any way; if I was in my parents’ position when they had me, I’d have opted for abortion. (As they themselves likely would have a couple of decades later.)
I won the lottery, and as it happens, I think I turned out okay. Still, I wonder who lost that lottery, and what their life would be like, and don’t think it was a particularly good gamble that my parents took; they got lucky, and I got very lucky. I don’t especially deserve my good luck, and whoever lost didn’t deserve their bad luck.
But that’s the situation we’re all in; the vast majority of possible people didn’t get lucky enough to exist. We are not morally superior to them. We don’t deserve our good luck because we were conceived, or birthed, any more than they deserve their bad luck that they weren’t conceived, or weren’t carried to term.
And I think prospective parents are justified in playing the odds, at least in certain respects. A serious disability such as Down syndrome or even blindness justifies picking a different child to bring into the world. Not because that other child is morally superior, or because it will definitely turn out better, or because it will necessarily be happier, but because its chances are somewhat better, and one way or another, you’re making a bet with huge stakes and it makes sense to play the odds.
It’s rather like house odds in a casino. The odds may only be in favor of the house by a few percent, such that the variance is much higher than the mean for any individual bet, but in the long run and overall, the house wins. The fact that there are many individual exceptions to the trend does not invalidate playing the odds.
This kind of reasoning does make it impossible to avoid lots of hard problems. That’s one reason I find it an interesting subject.
There really is a slippery slope, and scary things to leave up to prospective parents, and there are commons problems.
For example, I’m somebody who for my own first-order purposes would rather have male children, or heterosexual children, than female or gay ones. Not because I like boys better than girls, or straights better than gays—if anything, the opposite is true—but because I think my job as a parent would be easier, and my kids would likely have an easier lot in life because of other people’s fucked-up attitudes.
But I would think it wrong to pick prospective offspring on that basis. Not because it’s wrong to pick among possible children, but because it’s wrong for people to pick on such a self-interested basis, or even a narrowly child-centered basis. There are larger moral issues, and they’re very, very real. In the next few decades, they’ll become important issues in practice.
I think it’s a cheap dodge to punt and just leave it up to random chance, rather than thinking about what is or isn’t a disability, and what is or isn’t a commons problem.
So, for example, I don’t think it would be right to abort a female or likely-gay fetus because (a) being female or gay isn’t in itself a defect and (b) if other people tend to do that, it’s morally preferable to oppose that trend.
I would likely choose a female or gay child over a male and straight one.
And that is quite scary to me.
It is scary to me that parents will have so much control, and such poorly-thought-out reasons for selecting children that I’d be motivated to oppose the trend.
But mental retardation or even blindness is different. There’s much better reason to think that those are disadvantages, pure and simple, even if there are many good-enough outcomes, and some “paradoxically” better ones.
For example, it’s likely the case that some blind musicians are better musicians because their career options and choices of perceptual foci are limited; being blind channels them into things they turn out to be good at, and limits their distractions from other sensory modalities.
Does that make it good to choose a blind kid over a non-blind one? No. There’s a slippery slope the other way, too. (Most slippery slopes go both directions, which is one reason slippery slope arguments aren’t valid.) Most blind people aren’t especially musically gifted, or otherwise particularly suited to being blind; they’re just blind and have to deal with it, and the advantages of blindness don’t outweight the disadvantages.
Consider the slippery slope in that direction.
Being a boy without functioning testicles does not necessarily mean that you won’t have a fine life, or even a better one than you’d have with testicles. But does that justify removing testicles from boys, to give them a better shot at being great castrati, or finding some other “different” lifestyle that works for them, sans testicles? Does it even justify being neutral about whether your male child has testicles, and accepting the results of a genetic or developmental lottery? I really don’t think so.
Similarly, if given a choice of a sighted or congenitally blind child, I’d pick the sighted one. It’s more likely to work out well for the child, and for society, not just for me. And not just because of people’s fucked-up attitudes toward blind people—those attitudes do indeed make things worse, but blindness itself really is a drag, on average.
To me, this is rather like financial poverty. There are many fine poor people, and a fair number for whom poverty seems to work out especially well—they rise above it in a way that maybe they wouldn’t if they’d had a seemingly “better” shot in life. Does that make it okay to impoverish your children, depriving them of things that are likely to be good for them, and which you could easily afford, just because it might not matter much, and might even turn out better for them? No—not unless you have very good reason to think it probably will benefit them, all things considered; you should play the odds, and on average, poverty kinda sucks, without compensating benefits to anyone else. Blindness, too, it seems to me.
Do I “pity” blind people? Sure, I guess, in some sense and to some degree—I think that on average, it is unfortunate that they’re blind. (Should I not?) But then, I “pity” most people for some reason or other, in some sense and to some degree.
Do I let blindness define the person, in a humiliating way? I don’t think so. Would I avoid inflicting it on my children if I had the choice? Of course.
Phil, I had hoped anyone from New Zealand might read past my antipodean anti-literalism. If only the rest of the world could be more like your country.
Whitey –
Your point about how traditional ranching is less destructive of ecosystems than farming may well be true. However, the vast majority of meat currently sold in this country is produced not in a traditional ranch setting but in industrial feedlots and factory farms, and that is what people here have been discussing. It is disingenuous of you to gloss over this to support your views. Fyi, Singer himself – and I have mentioned this – says that eating organically produced and if possible locally grown meat such as grass-fed ranched beef is an acceptable compromise.
There are also methods of plant agriculture that are far less destructive than agribusiness-supported monocultures.
Re other of your points:
>See, Dawn, if they were actually working on it, they would reject the label “vegan.”
I *did* say they call themselves freegan. However, I don’t see a problem with the term vegan as the term itself is ethics-neutral.
>re runoff from a Budweiser plant
that is not a vegan/non-vegan issue. That is an issue of controlling factory runoff.
Nowhere do I claim veganism is a perfect solution to anything, because it’s not true, and nor do I state (for the same reason) that all vegans think and act the same way. But you are conveniently misrepresenting my statements to imply that I do state these things, to bolster your own arguments. Assuming that you are interested in honest dialogue and are not just spouting off, I suggest you stop the overgeneralizations, oversimplifications and ad homonym attacks.
Oh, and please do not make assumptions about me and what I know and don’t know. You don’t know me at all.
Dawn
Hi Pygmie L –
To answer your points:
1) I don’t worry too much about plants feeling pain. You’re correct, I don’t know for sure. But given what I do know about biology I don’t worry too much. If there were evidence that a particular plant species felt a lot of pain I would stop eating it. If I had evidence that a lot of plants did, I would be in trouble. But I’m not too worried.
2) It is not dangerous being vegan. It is dangerous to follow an unbalanced vegan diet, just as it is dangerous to follow an unbalanced carnist diet.
It is absolutely untrue that a balanced vegan diet is dangerous to young children. There are plenty of resources and references related to this on the Web. Btw, Dr. Spock (the pediatrician not the Vulcan) came out strongly against cow’s milk for babies and children in the last edition of his famous book.
3) Would love to hear your basis for this statement:
“The genus Homo is characterized through time by an increased reliance on meat as part of the diet.”
PZ or other evolutionists might want to weigh in on this, but my understanding is that there is some biological evidence that meat was not a major component of our ancestors’ diets, including our inability to process cholesterol and our lack of the pronounced canine teeth that are found on most (all?) carnivores. I know chimps eat meat, but not sure how much they eat (and whether they handle cholesterol, have bigger canines, etc.), or whether any of our other primate cousins do.
Dawn
Hi Alex –
The question of whether, if we started eating meat, “food” species would disappear, is a false choice. It is certainly possible to not eat (say) chicken, and yet keep chickens as pets – lots of people already do. Or, to allow wild chickens to thrive in the wilderness. As it is, large numbers of wild species are going extinct because of industrial agribusiness.
Dawn
Inoculated Mind –
I appreciate the reasonable tone of your note.
The B12 question is interesting in that it is an artifact of modern sanitation. In less developed countries, vegetables are often dirtier when eaten, and the microorganisms, occasional bugs, and (yes) bits of adherent fertilizer provide adequate B12. US vegans eat cleaner food (which is a good thing) and so we have to supplement for it. I wouldn’t use that fact to negate an otherwise healthy diet, tho, or to validate an unhealthy one.
>It’s just like sugar, or fat, or any of the other foods that people demonize >for religi-nutritious reasons – none are fundamentally unhealthy, but you >can be unhealthy if you eat too much of them, or don’t eat them at all.
With respect, I think the exact opposite is true at least part of the time. Objections to, for instance, processed white sugar and flour are not religious – the stuff is fundamentally unhealthy and nutritionists recommend that you eat 0 of it, to my knowledge. Not that small quantities will kill ya, but they serve no nutritional purpose except perhaps in highly specialized situations like eating a candy bar before a marathon.
It is the reflexive and self-righteous defense of these unhealthy foods that I find “religious.” (I don’t mean you in particular.) Although I agree that meat is not as clearcut a case as white sugar and flower.
Again, I refer you to the nutrition books I mentioned earlier in this thread. (See below.)
Re the bees. Some of my friends don’t eat honey and I try (but do not always succeed) to limit my honey consumption out of respect for them. It’s not something I feel viscerally however. An important point is that you don’t really need honey – maple syrup works just as well in many uses. In the end, for many of us, it comes down to an ethic of causing as little harm and suffering as possible.
>My point is it is possible to reduce animal suffering and still eat meat.
I think that is an entirely admirable goal.
Dawn
Recommended books:
Campbell’s The China Study
Willett’s Eat, Drink and Be Healthy
Davis, Becoming Vegan
And http://www.veganmd.com newsletter archives
Best,
Dawn
Hi George –
Thanks for your note. I don’t know what happened to your bro, of course, but most people who experience adverse reactions to veganism are not following a balanced diet. Many are “pastafarians” – not the good FSM worshipping kind but ones who live on pasta, bagels and other white flour – NOT a good idea. Radically reducing the amount of fat in one’s diet is not a good idea and it’s not part of veganism. I personally eat lots of avocados and nuts, which are both very fatty foods. Most nutritionists, vegan or not, recommend you eat a wide variety of foods so as to ensure adequate nutrition and intake of micronutrients.
However, I’m very glad your brother is doing better physically and mentally now.
Re the protein issue, it is overplayed by the meat industries. There are very successful vegan athletes out there and they do just fine. Cambell’s The China Study includes a good overview of the negative health consequences of excessive protein intake.
I would urge your wife to consult a GOOD vegan nutritionist, or read one of the books on that topic, and on vegetarianism as a disease cure. It is possible that some of her health problems are caused by her meat based diet. I’m not diagnosing this, but suggesting it as a possibility.
Remember, the problem isn’t just the meat per se, it’s also the additives (hormones, pesticides, antibiotics, etc.) that industrial meat is laden with. I don’t know if it is still true, but for years the European Community would not import our beef because they considered it unhealthy not because it was meat but because of the way we treated the animals and resulting product.
Best,
Dawn
Pygmie,
>>You are under the impression that meat eating in humans should be a moral issue. Meat consumption is part of our natural adaptation.
Labeling things “natural” and “unnatural” is not useful as the notions are vague and subjective. 150 years ago it was considered “natural” that blacks and women were inferior to white males – with lots of scientific “data” to prove it.
Also, just because something is “natural” doesn’t mean we should ignore its moral implications. Warring chimpanzee bands kill each other; should we, too?
Also, the fact that lactose tolerance once offered a competitive advantage (assuming you’re right, and it does sound plausible) doesn’t mean that it still does. (Think sickle cell – adaptive in one environment, horribly misadaptive in another.) And just because you can tolerate something hurtful doesn’t mean you should subject yourself to it. I know from my family’s experience that even many supposedly “lactose tolerant” people are less tolerant than they realize. A lot of people who ate dairy without apparent extreme problem nevertheless feel much better when they give it up.
Furthermore, don’t forget that the problem isn’t just dairy, per se, but industrial dairy – again, laden with hormones, antibiotics, etc.
Dawn
Jonathan Ehrich: (snarky answer) No, it is the Peter Singer that advocates that parents should be legally allowed to euthanize extremely disabled infants.
The above raises another issue of interest – namely that the discussion was about vegetarianism and agriculture and such topics. It could be that Singer’s positions on other matters are false and the current ones true (or conversely). Bringing such other matters up is irrelevant. Of course, it would also help if people actually read what he’d wrote about such things too …
Pygmy Loris: I too have reduced my meat intake, so we are in some what of a similar situation. That said – you ask two questions. About plant suffering, no, plants don’t suffer because they don’t have a nervous system. There is a fashion in which they do get their interests (in a weak sense of interest) frustrated when we slice them into pieces and rip their ovaries off and what not. As for veganism’s danger to children – it is true, it is more difficult to get a nutritionally complete diet as a vegan. But it is not impossible. (One of the reasons I have not totally sworn off meat is because of that reason – I admit to being lazy and do not want to have to think more about my food preparation.)
Paul W: Strictly speaking one doesn’t even have to take vitamin supplements with a vegan diet, it just helps.
(And if one wants a carnivorious diet, apparently making sure one eats raw meat, not cooked, is vital. Supposedly that’s how the Inuit survive with otherwise next to no fruits, especially in winter.)
Incidentally, the biologists can correct me if I’m wrong, but wouldn’t a no-fat diet would be impossible, given that : aren’t cell membranes made from fatty materials?
Whitey,
You seem to think that all vegetarians and vegans are extreme and think alike, Singer is representative, and I’m one of “them.”
As I’ve said, I don’t agree with everything Singer says, and on many points, I don’t go as far. (And he doesn’t go as far, in some respects, as many people think he does.)
I’m only a mostly-vegetarian, on principle. I am not the kind of absolutist that you seem to assume that everyone who disagrees with you is. Maybe that’s my fault because I wasn’t clear enough, but I think you are beating up a straw man.
I do not think that all forms of vegetable consumption are morally superior to all forms of meat consumption.
About free-range meat: I’m fine with it, up to a point. I do not have a problem with grazing cattle in ecosystems where they fit in, e.g., as a reasonable replacement for bison.
I see nothing wrong with harvesting natural meat, e.g., responsible deer hunting, keeping deer populations reasonable in roughly the sense natural predators would.
(My brother is a responsible deer hunter, and that’s fine with me; I’ll even eat some venison sometimes, with no qualms whatsoever. I just don’t think that’s going to be a big part of my diet, or feed a lot of people a lot of meat; it’s just not going to make a big dent in the meat supply problem.)
I likewise see nothing wrong with growing and harvesting sustainable pseudo-natural meat, e.g., cattle-as-buffalo-replacements, for similar reasons. (Assuming it’s done humanely, of course.)
My impression—and I do not claim to be an expert—is that this won’t provide nearly enough meat to sustain our current enormous meat consumption. Our expectation of cheap meat means that we depend on grain-fed beef, and intensive plant agriculture to produce a whole lot of grain to achieve the necessary increase in meat output. (And a whole lot of fossil fuels to produce that grain.)
My impression is that the intensive agriculture could be made less intensive and more sustainable, or simply reduced, if people ate the right vegetable products instead of feeding cattle several times as much food to get a pound of meat.
Perhaps I am wrong about that. Feel free to enlighten me, but please don’t misrepresent my position. I am not the kind of holier-than-thou vegan moralizer you seem to think I am. (I do think animal suffering is significant, but not in all the ways you seem to assume.)
Maybe this problem would mostly go away if we got away if the true costs were factored in properly—e.g., penalizing people for wrecking land, and stopping the grain subsidies that provide incentives to grow grain and feed it to cattle.
Maybe then the price of beef would go up to its natural level, reflecting its true cost, and demand would come down significantly.
And maybe more land would be used as cattle range, and that’d be a good thing; I’d expect that would be less efficient than intensive plant agriculture, but more sustainable. I’m cool with that. I’m skeptical that there’s enough appropriate land for that, but I’m not averse to it where it’s appropriate.
An underlying problem that complicates this kind of analysis is that our current world population levels are not sustainable. We depend heavily on intensive and unsustainable agriculture, which basically uses lots of oil to make lots more food.
That complicates things because one technology may be more sustainable than another, but less efficient, such that if you use it, you must make up the deficit somewhere, using unsustainable agriculture, likely with a net loss in sustainability.
So, for example, where free-range cattle are not an ecological problem in themselves, but are an inefficient producer of food, the difference has to be made up by more intensive plant farming somewhere else—either to produce vegetable food for people, or to boost meat output in feedlots.
Perhaps I’m intuitively “running the numbers” wrong on this, but I don’t think you’ve given a particularly careful counterargument, either.
Dawn,
I am a biological anthropologist and quite familiar with hominid evolution, maybe more so than PZ because he studies invertebrates I do believe or maybe fish. Hmmm, now I can’t remember what kind of research PZ does. Anyway…..
Microwear analysis on lithic (stone) tools from the Plio-Pleistocene onward indicates they were used in processing meat. Furthermore, ecological evidence suggests during the Neandertal occupation of Europe, meat would be the only abundant resource for a good portion of the year. Also, many hominid sites are littered with the bones of animals that have been butchered for food. Finally, very few (if any) human cultures have been found that are habitual vegetarians. There’s lots of other evidence for meat consumption as a significant part of the diet in ancient hominids, but that’s what I could pull off the top of my head.
I never said we shouldn’t examine the morality of natural behaviours, but consuming a normal hominid diet is not a moral issue for most of us. Treatment of our food is. You’re conflating a moral problem with the treatment of our food, the health costs of industrialized agriculture including hormone and antibiotic additives, and the morality of simply taking another life to support your own.
The lactose tolerance example is very real. Although for some people cow’s milk may be bad, it is very nutritious and calorie laden, which is good when you don’t have supermarkets at which to get food (like our ancestors).
Pygmy
Ooooh! cell membranes are made from phospholipids right!
Anyway Keith, the problem with veganism for children is that it is not impossible to get a complete diet from only vegetables, children have a more difficult time manufacuting complete proteins from the less complete animal proteins (at least that how I understand the research), and that the variety necessary to get everything you need without meat is problematic for most people.
Paul W,
You’ve hit the nail on the head. Current world populations cannot be supported without intensive, industrialized agriculture. That being said, vegetarianism is not a real answer. When we run out of oil (however long that takes) there will be mass starvation (in some parts of the world) if there is no alternative energy source. Most of the plant foods we consume today are harvested using machines that run on oil products. Without oil those crops won’t be planted or harvested. Population growth cannot be sustained without oil. We’re looking at some huge problems in a few years regardless of what we eat.
Davis wrote:
Hey asshat, I wasn’t even trying to argue with you, aside from my initial comment based on a misinterpretation….and I’m not even disagreeing with you on anything.
If you were arguing in your initial comment, how could you not be disagreeing with me on anything?
Dawn wrote:
Your point about how traditional ranching is less destructive of ecosystems than farming may well be true.
It clearly is on the prairie.
However, the vast majority of meat currently sold in this country is produced not in a traditional ranch setting but in industrial feedlots and factory farms,
The majority of BEEF in this country IS started on ranches and finished on a feedlot, neither of which fits the term “farm.” This is done for economic reasons, and depends completely on government subsidies that make grain ridiculously cheap. End the subsidies, and feedlots become economically expendable.
… and that is what people here have been discussing. It is disingenuous of you to gloss over this to support your views.
The disingenuousness here is from you. Reread my first response: “You can rant all you want about factory farms, but it is trivially easy for anyone to avoid meat from them.”
True or false, Dawn?
There are also methods of plant agriculture that are far less destructive than agribusiness-supported monocultures.
There sure are, but they have nothing to do with your false bifurcation of veg*nism.
>re runoff from a Budweiser plant
that is not a vegan/non-vegan issue. That is an issue of controlling factory runoff.
Dawn, you aren’t even reading what I wrote. The issue was environmental damage caused by farming vs. ranching. There’s no Budweiser plant here; I was referring to irrigated barley farms.
But you are conveniently misrepresenting my statements to imply that I do state these things, to bolster your own arguments. Assuming that you are interested in honest dialogue and are not just spouting off, I suggest you stop the overgeneralizations, oversimplifications and ad homonym attacks.
It would help if you quoted an example, instead of pretending that when I was writing about barley farms, I was writing about a Budweiser plant. My main point is that veg*nism itself is an overgeneralization and oversimplification; it’s all about labeling people.
Oh, and please do not make assumptions about me and what I know and don’t know. You don’t know me at all.
Oh, but I do! I have a hypothesis that makes clear experimental predictions: you care less about the animals than you do about labeling people.
Keith wrote:
Incidentally, the biologists can correct me if I’m wrong, but wouldn’t a no-fat diet would be impossible, given that : aren’t cell membranes made from fatty materials?
It’s a lot more complicated than that. The main nutritional point is that children must devote a lot of their metabolism to myelination of their nervous systems, and making myelin involves a lot of fat, particularly cholesterol.
Paul wrote:
You seem to think that all vegetarians and vegans are extreme and think alike, Singer is representative, and I’m one of “them.”
No. I have found that virtually all “ethical veg*ns” make the same logical errors (denying the antecedent) and ignorantly spout the same propaganda because it makes them feel superior to other people. I can predict the dodges with great accuracy.
Here’s an experiment: would you eat a crop that had been subjected to massive radiation mutagenesis, and hybridized with plants that were not only from another species, but another genus?
I’m only a mostly-vegetarian, on principle.
As vegetarianism is a false bifurcation, I don’t see how that it is possible to be one on principle. That’s analogous to saying that you are a racist on principle.
I am not the kind of absolutist that you seem to assume that everyone who disagrees with you is.
You seem to be missing my point, which was pointing out the hypocrisy of only giving moral consideration to those animals whose bodies are eaten after death. I don’t see how hypocrisy can be conflated with absolutism.
… it’s [wild game] just not going to make a big dent in the meat supply problem.)
I was unaware that there was any meat supply problem, Paul. It seems to me that we have an oversupply. Perhaps you would be so kind as to outline it for me?
My impression—and I do not claim to be an expert—is that this won’t provide nearly enough meat to sustain our current enormous meat consumption.
But ethically, that’s BS if you use it as a reason not to change your own choices, as we don’t live under a centrally-planned economy. Surely you see that. Moreover, why do we need to sustain our current meat consumption?
Our expectation of cheap meat means that we depend on grain-fed beef, and intensive plant agriculture to produce a whole lot of grain to achieve the necessary increase in meat output. (And a whole lot of fossil fuels to produce that grain.)
Wrong. It’s simply the subsidizing of grain that drives its use as feed. The other stuff is secondary.
Feel free to enlighten me, but please don’t misrepresent my position.
Haven’t I quoted you?
And maybe more land would be used as cattle range, and that’d be a good thing; I’d expect that would be less efficient than intensive plant agriculture, but more sustainable.
I don’t see how grazing cattle on the prairie is inefficient in any relevent way. Would you please define “efficient” in this context?
An underlying problem that complicates this kind of analysis is that our current world population levels are not sustainable.
Sure they are, especially since population growth rates are declining. The fact that environmental stewardship should be improved doesn’t justify Chicken Little claims like yours.
Re the protein issue, it is overplayed by the meat industries. There are very successful vegan athletes out there and they do just fine. Cambell’s The China Study includes a good overview of the negative health consequences of excessive protein intake.
I don’t doubt it. And I don’t doubt the existence of vegan athletes. But that wasn’t my point. My point was that it’s a fallacy to assume that everyone can thrive on the same diet. There are people who can thrive on a vegan or vegetarian diet, and those who do quite poorly on one. It is a fallacy to say that since person A can be a wonderfully happy, healthy marathon runner on a vegan diet that it can be made to work for everyone. And whatever the meat industry says, some people do need more protein than others, and some people can handle more carbs than others can. (I predict there are evolutionary reasons for this, based on what kind of diet people had over the past several thousand years, and where they lived.) From 20 years of carefully watching herself, my wife knows quite well what happens if her protein intake goes way down, and what happens if her carb intake gets too high, and I wouldn’t dream of telling her she’s just imagining things.
That said, I agree that a big part of why my brother sort of lost it on his vegan diet was his incredibly ill-advised attempt to eat no fat whatsoever. I think he mostly recovered when he started eating dairy, and thus getting a reasonable amount of fats and protein.
I would urge your wife to consult a GOOD vegan nutritionist, or read one of the books on that topic, and on vegetarianism as a disease cure. It is possible that some of her health problems are caused by her meat based diet. I’m not diagnosing this, but suggesting it as a possibility.
Actually, she has no desire whatsoever to become a vegan or vegetarian. She does now mostly eat organic meat, tho, which makes her feel better than if she eats regular meat.
Do you really not understand the difference between past tense and present tense? Maybe that’s why your idiocy is so infuriating.
I’ve run into “Whitey” before, I’m fairly certain, although under a different name. Exact same arguments, exact same tone, exact same messianic delusions.
Not much one can say. A good deal of the argument centers on the idea that eating grains (rice is the favored example) kills more individual animals per serving than eating, say, chicken.
Of course, most people who eat chicken also eat rice, and whatever other meat and dairy products are available (e.g., a chicken, cheese, and rice dish). Seems logical that when you remove the chicken (or beef, or pork) from your fried rice dish, you’re implicated in the demise of fewer animals. Especially when you consider the amount of crops which are fed to those animals before they make their way to your plate…I’m not sure that any of us will eat as much industrially produced grain in our entire lifetimes as a couple of cows do in theirs.
Toss in the environmental issues – pesticide use and run-off, energy use, the problems with taxpayer-funded subsidies, illegal immigration, and other externalities – and it seems pretty likely that an organic, locally sourced vegan diet would be the lesser of two evils.
The other part of the argument here is a more rarefied one: “really” caring about animals, versus being a smug hypocrite. One must be a hypocrite, I suppose, unless one wants to go the supererogatory route of committing suicide through starvation. But the fact is, applying Whitey’s logic to ethics undermines quite a bit more than veganism. Most of us won’t let a baby starve if one is left on our doostep. Most of us will let one starve across town, or across the world. Does that cheapen the impulse to help the baby that’s nearest us? Maybe it does, at that. I suppose we should also attempt a cost/benefit analysis of survival versus starvation…what will be the effect on other people if a given infant lives or dies? Hell, we can factor in the amount of rice or meat they’ll eat, while we’re at it! At what point does the misery, death, and environmental degradation caused by a single human life justify snuffing it out, in a utilitarian sense? At birth, probably.
But of course that’s not the view we take, unless we’re nihilists. Ethics are and always will be largely improvisatory, partially because that’s how people are, and partially because we can’t take a God’s-eye view of nature and know with perfect certainty how our choices will play out. The belief that an ethical stance must be perfectly consistent to be valid is a childish one in some ways, and a dangerous one in others. Until we’ve achieved perfect knowledge – and I’m not holding my breath – I think it’s reasonable to believe that factory farms are unnecessarily brutal, and that they squander resources, poison the earth, and produce an inferior and unhealthy product.
We could outlaw factory farms tomorrow, and I still wouldn’t eat meat. (Don’t like it, for one thing.) But I do think a huge argument in favor of not eating meat will have been removed. In the meantime, people have to make their own decisions based on their own consciences and their own imperfect knowledge. That’s life.
At any rate, “Whitey” apparently considers smugness and a certain tone of moral superiority to be a cardinal sin. All I can say is, physician, heal thyself.
Keith: You may have noticed that I specifically referred in my post to the first edition of Practical Ethics by Peter Singer. You may take that as implication that I’ve read the relevant section of the book (admittedly in the distant past), except for the fact that I’m now explicitly saying so.
Further, when the discussion is about a philosopher’s balancing of the needs/desires/suffering of humans and animals, and part of that balance includes stances towards human beings that some might find objectionable, it’s relevant. To put it in other terms, it’s not an ad hominem if it directly relates to the topic being discussed. And even though these are two separate topics, they’re springing from the same root lines of thought–at least in my mind, and I think in Dr. Singer’s as well.
Phila wrote:
Not much one can say. A good deal of the argument centers on the idea that eating grains (rice is the favored example) kills more individual animals per serving than eating, say, chicken.
I would never offer chicken as an optimal choice if one’s goal is to reduce animal suffering. The fact that you choose chicken in this case speaks volumes about your sincerity.
Of course, most people who eat chicken also eat rice, and whatever other meat and dairy products are available (e.g., a chicken, cheese, and rice dish).
What other people eat is irrelevant if your goal is to reduce the animal suffering caused by your own choices. I suspect that you know that.
Seems logical that when you remove the chicken (or beef, or pork) from your fried rice dish, you’re implicated in the demise of fewer animals.
It’s just as obvious that the same occurs if you remove the rice from your dish. The question is, which omission yields a larger reduction in animal suffering? In your case, the answer is that you don’t care.
Especially when you consider the amount of crops which are fed to those animals before they make their way to your plate…I’m not sure that any of us will eat as much industrially produced grain in our entire lifetimes as a couple of cows do in theirs.
I prefer grass-fed beef or lamb, myself. Why don’t you consider it as an alternative to rice?
Toss in the environmental issues – pesticide use and run-off, energy use, the problems with taxpayer-funded subsidies, illegal immigration, and other externalities – and it seems pretty likely that an organic, locally sourced vegan diet would be the lesser of two evils.
You’re arguing in bad faith, because there are far more than two choices. That’s why I keep pointing out that “ethical veg*nism” is a false bifurcation.
The other part of the argument here is a more rarefied one: “really” caring about animals, versus being a smug hypocrite. One must be a hypocrite, I suppose, unless one wants to go the supererogatory route of committing suicide through starvation.
No, one could be honest enough to admit that killing animals for mere convenience is morally acceptable. This, of course, would be inconsistent with claiming that killing them to eat them is unacceptable.
But the fact is, applying Whitey’s logic to ethics undermines quite a bit more than veganism.
Not really.
Most of us won’t let a baby starve if one is left on our doostep. Most of us will let one starve across town, or across the world. Does that cheapen the impulse to help the baby that’s nearest us?
You’re trying to make an analogy between passively letting something die and actively killing something. Even a child can see a large moral gulf between the two.
The belief that an ethical stance must be perfectly consistent to be valid is a childish one in some ways, and a dangerous one in others.
We’re talking about black/white hypocrisy here. Moreover, the idea that inconsistency should be lauded is morally repellent.
Until we’ve achieved perfect knowledge – and I’m not holding my breath – I think it’s reasonable to believe that factory farms are unnecessarily brutal, and that they squander resources, poison the earth, and produce an inferior and unhealthy product.
But one can eat meat at every meal without ever consuming meat from a factory farm, so there’s no argument for veganism there.
We could outlaw factory farms tomorrow, and I still wouldn’t eat meat. (Don’t like it, for one thing.)
That’s a perfectly valid reason. Why gussy it up with fallacious, dishonest arguments?
At any rate, “Whitey” apparently considers smugness and a certain tone of moral superiority to be a cardinal sin. All I can say is, physician, heal thyself.
I’m only challenging your claim to moral superiority by pointing out that you don’t care about the animals that suffer and die for your convenience. I’m only claiming logical superiority for my position.
Pygmy –
Thanks for your note; lots of fascinating stuff there. I of course defer to your professional experience and expertise. Why do you think we don’t have many of the standard adaptations if meat is a traditional heavy part of our diet?
“normal hominid diet” there’s that word normal again. And I really don’t see why there is a separation between morality and our food choices – or any of our choices.
Everything we do affects others, so we should strive to be conscious of our impact. This is particular true in the US I think – we’re so wealthy and powerful (at the top of the food chain, as it were) we need to be extra careful. That’s only my opinion of course.
btw, everyone, I’m traveling for two days, so won’t be commenting. But I hope to return to this thread so long as others are interested in doing the same. Whitey – thanks for catching my error re barley/bud; you were right to call me on it.
Dawn
Pygmy –
Thanks for your note; lots of fascinating stuff there. I of course defer to your professional experience and expertise. Why do you think we don’t have many of the standard adaptations if meat is a traditional heavy part of our diet?
“normal hominid diet” there’s that word normal again. And I really don’t see why there is a separation between morality and our food choices – or any of our choices.
Everything we do affects others, so we should strive to be conscious of our impact. This is particular true in the US I think – we’re so wealthy and powerful (at the top of the food chain, as it were) we need to be extra careful. That’s only my opinion of course.
btw, everyone, I’m traveling for two days, so won’t be commenting. But I hope to return to this thread so long as others are interested in doing the same. Whitey – thanks for catching my error re barley/bud; you were right to call me on it.
Dawn
Dawn wrote:
Why do you think we don’t have many of the standard adaptations if meat is a traditional heavy part of our diet?
I’m just a cell biologist and neuroscientist, but it’s obvious that we don’t have the standard adaptations because we are an evolutionary anomaly (which explains a lot of our success, defined in this biological context merely as numbers). Pygmy noted encephalization, which is a big reason. Unlike other mammals, our nervous systems continue developing long after birth, because the size of the head at birth is a huge barrier. That development involves a lot of myelination, requiring at a minimum, a very calorie-rich diet. Since the myelin is made of fats, a fat-rich diet is even better for myelination.
And I really don’t see why there is a separation between morality and our food choices – or any of our choices.
OK, but I don’t see why you should sell esthetics as ethics in singling out meat, when all of our food choices have varying consequences wrt the environment and animal suffering.
Whitey – thanks for catching my error re barley/bud; you were right to call me on it.
You’re welcome. If you’re interested, I can point you to satellite photos–the silt is that obvious.
Here’s an excellent trashing of Singer’s argumentative methods:
http://www.nd.edu/~afreddos/papers/berkowitz.htm
I would never offer chicken as an optimal choice if one’s goal is to reduce animal suffering. The fact that you choose chicken in this case speaks volumes about your sincerity.
Unlike you, I’m not a mindreader. I’ll say beef, instead. OK?
What other people eat is irrelevant if your goal is to reduce the animal suffering caused by your own choices. I suspect that you know that.
You’re confusing me with the idealized – or demonized – vegan with whom you obsessively quarrel.
It’s just as obvious that the same occurs if you remove the rice from your dish. The question is, which omission yields a larger reduction in animal suffering? In your case, the answer is that you don’t care.
Sheesh. Again with the telepathy. You are the guy who was making the exact same claims on Adventus a couple years back, yes? Under “Da Trufe,” or some other alias?
I prefer grass-fed beef or lamb, myself. Why don’t you consider it as an alternative to rice?
Well, ’cause for starters, I don’t like meat. In the second place, meat isn’t an “alternative” to rice, or vice versa. In the third place, I don’t really eat rice much. I have sushi once a month, on average. Other than that, I don’t really go in for it.
You’re arguing in bad faith, because there are far more than two choices. That’s why I keep pointing out that “ethical veg*nism” is a false bifurcation.
No, I’m arguing that “ethical veganism” is a valid, defensible choice among other valid, defensible choices…including those which involve eating meat.
This is what happens when you obsessively insist on having the argument you want to have, rather than the one that’s actually going on. To a lot of people, it sounds like zealotry.
But the fact is, applying Whitey’s logic to ethics undermines quite a bit more than veganism.
Not really.
Oooh. Good comeback! I’m wriggling in the crushing grip of reason.
You’re trying to make an analogy between passively letting something die and actively killing something. Even a child can see a large moral gulf between the two.
Actually, I’m making a point about the ubiquity of ethical hypocrisy. But whatever…help yourself to this point, if you really feel it’s worthwhile.
We’re talking about black/white hypocrisy here. Moreover, the idea that inconsistency should be lauded is morally repellent.
Human nature frequently involves black/white hypocrisy, and there are also boundary conditions to knowledge that can make it impossible to judge outcomes on a utilitarian basis. To point this out is not to “laud” it. It’s to be realistic, which I think involves casting aside utopianism on the one hand and nihilism on the other.
That’s a perfectly valid reason. Why gussy it up with fallacious, dishonest arguments?
Again, you seem to think that I’m advancing veganism as a moral obligation. Actually, I’m defending it as an ethical choice, on the basis of a wide variety of issues that include, but are not limited to, animal suffering. Does that mean I approve of every argument for veganism? No. Does that mean I think vegans are inherently better people than meat eaters? No. Does that mean I consider myself “morally superior”? No. You’re battling strawmen and caricatures.
I’m only challenging your claim to moral superiority by pointing out that you don’t care about the animals that suffer and die for your convenience.
Problem is, I never made that claim, so your “challenge” to it is kind of irrational. And saying “you don’t care” is more mindreading.
There are many issues of much greater importance than animal suffering; if pressed, most of us will say we care about them a great deal. Whether our daily choices truly reflect that “caring” is another matter entirely.
If you’ve managed to harmonize knowledge, ethics, and lifestyle seamlessly in your own life, so that nothing you do leads to witting or unwitting hypocrisy, more power to you. But from your rather messianic, often irrational tone, you strike me merely as the tedious mirror image of the vegan zealots who enrage you so much.
One man’s opinion.
I’ll say beef, instead. OK?
OK, what kind? Supermarket or bought directly from the ranch?
You’re confusing me with the idealized – or demonized – vegan with whom you obsessively quarrel.
I’m addressing someone who claims that “it seems pretty likely that an organic, locally sourced vegan diet would be the lesser of two evils.” The idea that there are only two choices is idiotically simplistic.
Sheesh. Again with the telepathy.
I’ll take that as an acknowledgment that you don’t care how many animals suffer and die for your veggies and grains.
You are the guy who was making the exact same claims on Adventus a couple years back, yes? Under “Da Trufe,” or some other alias?
Nope. Does the fact that “ethical veg*ns” routinely make the exact same claim of a “cruelty-free diet” have any bearing on the veracity of their claims?
Well, ’cause for starters, I don’t like meat.
So esthetics is more important than ethics.
I wrote: You’re arguing in bad faith, because there are far more than two choices. That’s why I keep pointing out that “ethical veg*nism” is a false bifurcation.
No, I’m arguing that “ethical veganism” is a valid, defensible choice among other valid, defensible choices…including those which involve eating meat.
No, you argued that “it seems pretty likely that an organic, locally sourced vegan diet would be the lesser of two evils.” Why did you write “two” when you meant more than two?
This is what happens when you obsessively insist on having the argument you want to have, rather than the one that’s actually going on. To a lot of people, it sounds like zealotry.
No, it means that “two” means two. That’s why I point out that there are more than two choices.
Human nature frequently involves black/white hypocrisy,…
We consider ethics to overcome such hypocrisy. It’s human nature not to be scientific, but if we just went with that, we’d lose all we get from science.
… and there are also boundary conditions to knowledge that can make it impossible to judge outcomes on a utilitarian basis. To point this out is not to “laud” it.
I’m attacking your false bifurcation by pointing out that the relevant knowledge is easy to obtain.
Again, you seem to think that I’m advancing veganism as a moral obligation.
No, you are claiming that “it seems pretty likely that an organic, locally sourced vegan diet would be the lesser of two evils.” I’m attacking your misrepresentation of it as a binary choice.
Actually, I’m defending it as an ethical choice, on the basis of a wide variety of issues that include, but are not limited to, animal suffering.
It doesn’t matter how many ethical issues you include, it’s still a false choice.
Does that mean I consider myself “morally superior”? No. You’re battling strawmen and caricatures.
No, I’m simply attacking your claim that “it seems pretty likely that an organic, locally sourced vegan diet would be the lesser of two evils,” and laughing at your denial that you presented a host of complex issues as a false choice between two things.
And saying “you don’t care” is more mindreading.
It’s a confident statement of my hypothesis. You provide plenty of data points.
There are many issues of much greater importance than animal suffering; if pressed, most of us will say we care about them a great deal. Whether our daily choices truly reflect that “caring” is another matter entirely.
I agree. When we advocate our choices to others, we take on an additional burden to study the questions in great detail.
If you’ve managed to harmonize knowledge, ethics, and lifestyle seamlessly in your own life, so that nothing you do leads to witting or unwitting hypocrisy, more power to you.
I don’t claim to have the answers, but I’ve clearly considered the questions more carefully than anyone who claims that “it seems pretty likely that an organic, locally sourced vegan diet would be the lesser of two evils.”
But from your rather messianic, often irrational tone, you strike me merely as the tedious mirror image of the vegan zealots who enrage you so much.
I’m claiming that the question isn’t a binary one, so it doesn’t fit your irrational metaphor of a mirror image. Are people who oppose racism (another false choice) the mirror images of racists?
It seems like you, like many people, resent any rational questioning of your irrational, binary position.
Dawn,
This will be my last post on the subject. The current theory regarding meat eating and our biological evolution is that instead of developing carnivore type teeth, hominids developed tools to process their food for them. This is why microwear shows that even the earliest stone tools were being used to cut and process meat. Using fire to cook the meat is another cultural adaptation to our not so great digestive systems.
Humans and our immediate ancestors are characterized by a complex interplay of biological and cultural adaptations to the environment: the biocultural interaction. However, cultural adaptation to the environment, in the form of shelters, clothing, tool use etc., is seen as the hallmark of humanity and one of the most important trends of hominid evolution.
But sometimes culture is just culture.
Christopher,
I missed your comment from May 8 at 5:08 and only just noticed it. I didn’t mean to ignore it.
If I understand you correctly, I think you’re making some good points, but I’m not sure I do understand you correctly. Part of what you’re saying seems to be a criticism of how my argument could be taken and run with, rather than your actual position, but I’m having trouble sorting it all out.
It may have sounded like I don’t think the parents’ own interests matter. I was just showing that my basic argument doesn’t require any selfish interests at all—we may decide to abort a fetus or even off a newborn altruistically based solely on the interests ofall possible offspring.
And I agree that my focus on this-one-vs.-the-next-one can obscure the bigger-picture issues; it’s tempting to say “hey, have them both,” etc. I think there is a more basic refutation of that, which I sketched too briefly before.
I was addressing the prior issue of whether a possible child has a greater interest in the matter, and I think it does. Every possible child has an interest in being born. (And almost all of them are going to get hosed.)
But everybody else who is born, or might be, also has an interest in that decision—it’s in everybody’s best interest that too many people are not brought into the world. Whoever does make the cut, you don’t want too many other people to.
If we had an underpopulation problem, I’d say there was positive moral value to bringing an additional person into the world, on average. (Whether anybody in particular would be “obligated” to do so is a different matter.)
But we are not in that situation; each person we bring into the world is, on average, neutral or slightly negative overall—there’s a benefit to that person, or so we generally assume, but corresponding large total costs of various sorts to everybody else.
For already existing, actual people of the usual sort—e.g., adults and most children, we pretend that each person’s life is intrinsically a very good thing, and generally deny people the right to take someone else out of the world. Once you’re in the already-existing-persons’ club, you’re in, and nobody can throw you out again.
We don’t do that because it’s deeply true that every life is good, or that one person’s life is never a net loss for the world, or even for that person. Many individual people do in fact make the world a worse place, decreasing the quality of life for others more than their own life benefits them.
The sad fact is that some people are miserable and/or make other people miserable more than they themselves are happy. Some of these people are fucked up, and many others are just in the wrong place at the wrong time, in a world of scarce resources.
For adults and most children, we ignore this for several good reasons. One is that we do not trust any individual or government with the power of life and death—deciding whose right to live should be revoked “for their own good” and/or “for the good of society.” It’s likely to be done wrong, with disastrous consequences.
Another good reason is that even if we could trust somebody to do that reasonably well on average, it would be very disturbing to whichever actual people there are. Few people would want to live in a world in which some individual or committee might decide their life is not worth living and take it away, even if the decisions are typically right.
So for the obviously actual persons who are already in the club, we just don’t go there. Every member is a life member, and we don’t blackball, because we want people to be able to relax about that and go about the business of living, and we hope they can be happy doing it.
For the vast number of possible people who have an interest in getting into the club, we can’t afford that comforting fiction. There are way, way too many of them. We have to limit admissions to the club rather than saying “the more the merrier.”
And that has to be true unless the world is underpopulated. If we let a bunch of additional people into the world, because we think “the more the merrier,” we’ll fuck up the world.
More importantly but less obviously, that principle applies in individual cases as well.
It’s not just the case that bringing a lot more people into the world is bad. It’s also true that bringing the next individual person into the world is about as likely to be bad as good, overall, degrading various people’s quality of life in various ways.
As the antiabortionists say, the fetus you abort could be the next Einstein—but likewise, it could be the next Hitler, or more likely, the next fairly cool and productive person or the next hopeless miserable junkie, or just somebody who struggles passably through life. It’s pretty much a wash overall.
(That’s also mostly true of already-existing people—the average person isn’t much of a net win for the world, taking everyone’s interests into account. We have about as many people as we can afford in the world, if not more, such that the average life degrades the quality of other lives by a comparabe amount. We are so good at ignoring this that it messes up discussions of the “value” of future lives.)
My point here is that a possible person’s interest in existing is not irrelevant, and is not small—the “pro-lifers” are right about that—it is large, but is generally canceled out by an equally large interest on the part of everyone else in that person not existing.
When it comes to reproductive policy, we can’t afford the convenient fiction that every life is very valuable. Every life is terribly important, but its net value is nonetheless roughly zero, because every life is horrendously expensive, as well.
That has a lot of implications for prospective parents. Each additional child they might bring into the world is terribly important, and the life they create may be very valuable, but on the other hand, it’s going to be terribly expensive as well, and the expected net value overall is roughly zero.
That is the main reason it makes any sense at all to allow people to freely choose whether to become parents, based on their personal preferences and preferred lifestyle. Not because their personal freedom of choice is the paramount, but because the larger and more important issues about other people’s lives mostly cancel out, on average.
It also destroys the argument that parents who want one child should keep a disastrously defective one and try again, too.
This raises the issue of when we decide that somebody is a “life member” of the club of actual people.
The main reasons we keep adults and most children in the club do not apply to fetuses—or even newborn infants.
A fetus or newborn doesn’t know it’s in the club; it has no expectation of long life. It can’t be disappointed by revoking its membership, or disturbed by the possibility of being ejected from the club.
(In that respect, it’s like a chicken; Singer is consistent about that. Fetuses are uncomprehending animals like chickens, so they can’t have rights in the same sense as adults and most children. They are replaceable and interchangeable, and it doesn’t matter whether you grow four of them for three months, two of them for six months, or one for a year, if the outcome and total utility are the same.)
Based on that reasoning alone, we should be able to decide whether to keep the zygote/fetus/newborn, or kill it, up until the point that it’s aware enough of its situation that it would suffer from understanding its vulnerability, in the way an older child or adult would.
Singer makes a pretty good argument for drawing the line somewhere short of that, based on a tradeoff of two other significant issues.
One is that it’s difficult to assess the likely net value of the possible future life until a few weeks after birth, when disastrous developmental anomalies may become apparent.
Because human babies are born premature—they’re more fetuses than babies—there’s are a lot of major things that can go wrong in the first few weeks after birth, or only become apparent then. So there’s an advantage to waiting and seeing if there’s a developmental disaster that would dramatically shift the proability of the life in question being a good one. (Being good for itself and the world, all things considered.)
But there’s an advantage to making that decision pretty soon, too; it’s important for parents to bond with their children, and love them as people who they are committed to. So within a few weeks, or at most a few months, they should decide whether to commit to the child, and develop a serious, committed personal relationship with it. Whether or not a newborn is “really” a person yet—or more like a pet that may develop into a person—it is useful to begin regarding it as a member of the family and forming a committed bond. (If you’re going to keep it, the sooner you bond with it, the better; that funny little animal may not be a “real person” yet, but how you treat it may affect the person it develops into.)
Some people find this utterly repugnant. They think it’s unnatural to see a newborn as still a maybe-baby rather than a child to be loved without reservation, and a person whose life is “sacred.”
Like Singer, I can’t see it that way, for three reasons:
(1) a fetus or newborn isn’t really much like a person, and
(2) it is no more deserving of a whole human life than any of the myriad other possible people waiting in the wings—it’s just more visible, and
(3) each admission to the club has tremendous costs that too many people find easy to ignore.
Very interesting thoughts, Paul. Thanks for pointing me over here. I wanted to let you know that I replied to you on the Plan B post and also on your xanga guest book, if you haven’t seen those. My deepest apologies again. Please forgive my mixup. I plan to post some of my pro-choice questions mid-next-week. (I would do it right now but I have a very busy long weekend ahead and won’t have much time to be online.)
miller_schloss, sorry for jumping to what seemed the obvious conclusion; no hard feelings, I hope.
Paul W, miller_schloss has an excellent post on her blog right now. It outlines her reasons for being pro-life, yet acknowledges the pro-choice position as one where she would genuinely like to learn from.
miller_schloss, Thanks for writing that very open post on your blog. I realize you did not ask me personally for my reasons for being prochoice, but I’m writing you a small reply anyway for your blog. I am really glad that you are sincere in your quest to learn both sides, more people should do the same. :)
Hard to believe there are still people who delude themselves into thinking that if you don’t eat cows or dogs then you shouldn’t eat carrots either, “because carrots are alive too.”
One wonders whether they were absent that day in 2nd grade when the difference between animals and vegetables was explained.
Yes, it just may be that vegetarians are more intelligent and therefore more capable of making sound moral decisions.