How to Be a Carnivore and Get away with it

Eating animals is generally wrong, but are there circumstances where it is permissible?

In recent years, veganism has become a widely discussed topic, and it has become a more widespread position than earlier in recent history. I think that this is a positive change, and that there are good reasons for this. I do, however, not think that veganism is the only moral choice, and I shall here defend veganism, but also show what I think is a permissible alternate lifestyle.

I will not concern myself with environmental arguments here, nor can I cover all possible cases in this post. So this will be a more general overview.

Base Argument

Let us start with an argument for veganism. I will here use an abridged version of Alastair Norcross’ argument “Fred’s Basement”:

Consider the case of Fred. Fred is found by the police to be keeping puppies in his basement. These puppies are bred, kept alive for six months, and then slaughtered. During the time they are alive, he mutilates them by pulling out their teeth, cutting off their tails etc., all without anesthesia. When in the courtroom, Fred explains that there is a perfectly good explanation for him doing this. The thing is, Fred is a huge lover of chocolate, but it just so happens that he had a brain injury a while ago that made him unable to taste chocolate, since his brain now lacks the hormone “cocoamone”, which is responsible for the experience of the taste of chocolate. After some research he finds out that distressed puppies are the only known source of this hormone. Thus by torturing and killing these puppies he gets to enjoy the taste of chocolate.

So. End of story, Fred’s innocent! Of course not! I doubt anyone is really going to accept Fred’s defense; the harm he is causing the puppies is not nearly outweighed by the pleasure he gets from eating chocolate. Now the argument runs:

1. If it’s wrong to torture puppies for gustatory pleasure, it’s wrong to support factory farming.

2. It is wrong to torture puppies for gustatory pleasure.

3. Therefore it’s wrong to support factory farming.

Premise 2 just amounts to the claim that what Fred did was wrong, which seems very obvious. Some might try to reject this for reasons involving animals not having moral value. It is however very hard to defend such a principle. For example, most people would say that kicking a cat on the street for no reason is immoral, and not just because it is reflective of a vicious character, but because it is bad for the cat. I think the only reasonable way to avoid this argument is to try to reject premise 1.

At first it should be very obvious why this premise should be right: In both cases, humans are greatly harming animals for their own gustatory pleasure, and this seems to be the thing that is wrong about Fred’s situation. So to avoid the argument, we need to find a disanalogy.

Rejecting Premise 1

What reasons are there then for rejecting the first premise?

Virtue Ethics

One objection to the premise might go something like this:

“It is not wrong for the consumer of factory farmed meat to buy the meat, since they are not killing the animals; Fred is displaying a vicious character by killing the dogs himself.”

This objection is obviously virtue-ethical in nature. We might have doubts about whether virtue ethics is correct, but we need not reject virtue ethics to see that this is not a good objection to the impermissibility of supporting factory farming. Imagine that you hire a hitman to kill a person (or maybe to kill the neighbors cat). This is obviously vicious. But this case has the same structure as you buying factory farmed meat: You financially support an agent in order that the agent might perform an immoral act. Thus we might amend the argument:

1. If it’s wrong to support Fred’s actions financially for gustatory pleasure, it’s wrong to support factory farming.

2. It’s wrong to support Fred’s actions financially for gustatory pleasure.

3. Therefore it’s wrong to support factory farming.

Here we avoid the disanalogy of who is performing the act. And here premise 2 still seems very much correct: You would be doing something wrong by paying Fred to kill dogs. Thus the argument still goes through.

Expected Outcome

Another possible objection might be more utilitarian in nature:

“Even if we suppose that harming animals is immoral, when you buy meat there is no direct causal connection between you buying the meat and the animal being killed. In other words: You refraining from buying meat will not change how many animals are being killed by the meat industry, since your individual impact is negligible, and thus there is no harm done in buying meat.”

This objection is better than the previous, in my opinion, although I do still not think that it will succeed. First off, if you are a Kantian, this objection will obviously not go through since, if you “act only according to that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it become a universal law”, refraining from buying meat would, as a universal law, mean the end of meat production.

This very obvious consideration, that no demand for meat means no meat industry, can also be the start of a more utilitarian argument against this objection. To show this, let me introduce a beautiful mathematical model for the supply and demand in the meat industry:

Here the white line represents the theoretical equilibrium for supply and demand, the grey lines represent the uncertainty, and the red dot represents the place where we currently are. Every time you buy meat, the red dot moves right and climbs the white line, and every time you refrain from buying meat, the opposite happens.

This is of course only in theory, and in reality there is not an exact proportionality between supply and demand, and it is more approximate. The factory farms can pretty confidently say how much meat they produce, and thus the supply is not very uncertain. The demand, on the other hand, is much more abstract, and thus the red dot should really be a red line:

If the theoretical red dot is located close to the middle of the red line, you buying or refraining from buying meat will not really do anything. But if the dot is located far to the right on the line, you buying meat might very likely cause farms to produce more meat, since they now begin to see the disparity between supply and demand, and vice versa. In other words, there needs to be a certain “critical mass” of change in demand for a change in supply.

We of course have no way of knowing where on the red line the red dot is really located (how close we are to critical mass), so we can only go off of probability. So what will the average outcome be, if you refrain from buying meat? Well this will quite obviously be that the supply decreases proportionally to the demand, since the relationship of supply and demand is on average a proportional one. This means that the average outcome of a person eating meat will be the animals that they eat being killed, and vice versa the average outcome of people becoming vegan will be that the animals they would have eaten would not be killed. Thus each time you buy a steak, the average moral harm you are doing is the harm done to the cow multiplied by the price of the steak divided by the total price of the products produced from the cow.

A Carnivore’s Way Out

From here you might assume that I would advocate that everyone become vegan, and I do think this would be preferrable to the current state of affairs, but this is not my final position. The above argument has been assuming that the animal product was produced through factory farming, but this is of course not the only option. I am of course thinking of free-range and organic farming.

While it is very clear to me that the lives of factory farmed animals are not worth living in general (I do not think you have to do very much research to be convinced of this), it is not nearly as clear in the case of organic or free-range farming. I will here be going off of the rules for organic animal production in Denmark, since this is where I live, but similar things will hold in other countries. For example, the requirements for eggs to be classified as organic in Denmark are (source):

• Flocks cannot exceed 3000 hens.

• Hens must live in conditions which allow them to exercise their natural behavior.

• The henhouse must have daylight; 1/3 of the area must be sand, or straw, to allow for dust bathing; and there can at most be 6 hens pr. m².

• The hens must have year-round access to outdoors areas, covered with grass or other vegetation. Each hen must have a minimum of 4 m² outdoors area. Every year the hens must be moved to another location, to prevent the spread of parasites, and to allow the area to recover.

• The hens cannot be debeaked, and instead the chickens must be provided roughage and material to churn up to prevent them from pecking each other.

The requirements for organic slaughter-chickens are roughly the same, although not quite as strict. It seems very clear to me that the life of a chicken living in these conditions would very much be worth living. If this is true, it is at least not prima facie morally wrong to keep chickens in these conditions.

Wrongness of Killing

But this does not mean that it is not wrong to kill them. Imagine that Fred bred human babies in his basement, and gave them a good life for 4 years, after which he killed them to eat them. This still seems very wrong.

At this point it would be relevant to look at the moral differences between humans and animals. Imagine that Fred instead artificially bred human babies in his basement, which he sold to other adult humans after some time. The babies would then go on to live with families, although not on an equal footing. They would sleep on a mattress in the living room, have a plate on the floor to eat from, only be allowed outside in a leash for short durations, or maybe be allowed to roam the garden. Even if these babies would have lives worth living, this practice would still be abhorrent, and not much better than slavery. But substitute babies for dogs, and I am just describing what having a pet is. What is the difference?

To me the difference looks very much to lie in a difference of autonomy: Humans have a degree of autonomy over their life and body which animals do not have. This provides a lot of explanatory power. It explains why we are allowed to keep animals as pets and not humans, why we are allowed to force animals to take medicine and not humans (at least not mentally sound humans), why we may euthanize animals without consent and not humans etc. In other words, we are allowed to take paternalistic decisions about the lives of animals in a way that we are not in the case of humans. Especially the last example of euthanasia is interesting, since what I am arguing might be taken as a sort of “planned euthanasia” for animals.

In normal circumstances, an animal is euthanized if we judge that the animal would be better off dying now than living out the rest of its natural life. So we judge that killing the animal is a better outcome for the animal than not killing it. What I am proposing is that animals be given lives that are worth living, and then killed before their natural lifespan ends. This would be preferable to the animal, since the animal would not have come into existence, were it not to be killed (there would be no farm, if it did not produce a product), and thus the animal being killed entails the animal having a life worth living, and is thus preferable to the animal.

My argument is not that it is not bad to kill the individual animal; the animal loses all the potential pleasure of the rest of its life. Instead it is permissible to kill the animal since the practice that involves killing the animal also involves bringing a huge amount of new animals into existence which all (or nearly all) have lives worth living. In this sense the animal would have been better off not being killed, but if it had not been killed, it would not have existed at all, and this would have been even worse for the animal.

Conclusion

So if given the choice between a plant based meal and a factory farmed meal, you should pretty much always choose the plant based one. And if everyone did this, I think the world would be a much better place. But if given the choice between a plant based meal and an ethically sourced, carnivorous meal, the choice is not so clear. In fact you might even be doing animal-kind a service, by choosing the carnivorous option.