Should You Starve to Death?

What if a vegan diet weren't good enough?

I.

If you’ve spent any time ever discussing ethical veganism, there is one argument you will have encountered so many times that you could probably regurgitate it in your sleep: “yOu CaN’t GeT pRoPeR nUtRiTiOn On A vEgAn DiEt!!!”

Sorry, that was childish of me… What I meant to say was: “You can’t get proper nutrition on a vegan diet” (*in a very stupid voice because it’s a dumb point*).

You’ve probably also heard it enough to be able to give the Canon response without waking up yet: That’s not true! Perhaps in the past it was close to true—it would have been hard to meet your nutritional needs. But nowadays (at least in most areas) it’s just straightforwardly false! You can meet your nutritional needs by eating fortified foods and/or thinking a little about what you eat, and the only major downside of being vegan (for most people) is that it tastes a little worse or requires a little more work.

In fact, most people would probably benefit from becoming vegan! Not because the optimal diet (nutrition-wise) is vegan, but because people are shit at eating well, and usually err on the side of too many animal products rather than too few.

But what if the premise of this objection were right? What if you really couldn’t meet your nutritional needs as a vegan?

II.

Here we’ll assume a couple of things:

1. That you literally can’t meet your nutritional needs on a vegan diet.

2. Any animal products come from mistreated animals (with net-negative lives).

3. Animals matter morally.

These assumptions still underdetermine the question a lot, but we’ll discuss that as we go. Consider now a completely unrelated story:

You are sailing the seven seas as a pirate (arrrg!). But Yo Ho!, it shouldn’t have been a pirate’s life for you, as your—along with your fellow crewmates’—gums have begun to swell and bleed more than usual, and some teeth have even begun coming loose. Yep, you guessed it: It’s scurvy! It’s not going to be lethal, but it sucks major pirate-ass nonetheless. You know you should’ve brought those oranges your mom told you to. Whelp, too late now…

Or is it? As it happens, your ship is currently right in the middle of an orange-trading-route, and orange-transports are sailing past every day, each one containing enough oranges to satisfy the crew for a day. However, the merchantmen really love their oranges, and would rather die than lose them, meaning you’ll have to torture and kill a merchant every day in order to avoid losing your teeth.

Should you do it?

I hope you agree with me that this would not be okay! It would be a major bummer to be in this situation, and I wouldn’t want anyone to lose their teeth (except for people who don’t use headphones on the bus). Anyways, even though it sucks, it probably sucks a lot more for that merchantman to be killed than for you and your friends to have scurvy for a day.

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III.

Silly me, I forgot we were talking about animal ethics and not pirates! Now that we’re here, though, that completely random story I just told you is a conveniently close analogy to the question we’re considering. Specifically cases where the malnutrition isn’t deadly (scurvy is lethal over time IRL, but it makes for a good story, so get off my back).

There are of course some things to clear up. Most importantly there is the difference that animals eaten wouldn’t exist if it weren’t to be eaten, while the merchantmen exist either way. However, we can make increasingly contrived examples to accommodate this. For example we can imagine that there is a race of dogs who poop oranges. The only way to get them to do this, though, is to keep them in horrible conditions.

Would it be permissible to breed this kind of Dog to meet your vitamin C need? Still, it seems not (to me at least). Again, it sucks to have to live off of smoothies for the rest of your life, but you still can’t keep another creature hostage in a horrible existence to avoid this!

This modification also takes care of the fact that the merchant isn’t (necessarily) an animal. This should matter somewhat, but not too much, as it’s implausible to think there’s any in principle moral difference between animals and humans—it’s just a matter of adjusting the numbers.

Then comes the crucial part: Which animal products are you eating? This will be the big difference-maker. Here I’ll look at B12, as that’s the biggest thing a vegan diet is missing (again, you’ll actually die in some years not getting this, but I think that’s besides the more general point). Let’s consider some different options (for days of suffering, I’ll assume numbers from this Brian Tomasik post—though I set the sentience-multiplier to 1 to avoid confusion):

1. Milk: An average adult needs 2.4µg B12 a day. Milk contains 0.5µg per 100g, meaning you’d need to drink 480g milk a day. This amounts to causing around 1 hour and 9 minutes of waking factory-farmed-cow-life.¹

2. Pork: Contains 0.7µg per 100g, so you’d need to eat 340g day, which amounts to 2.55 days of pig-life.

3. Eggs: Contains 1.1µg per 100g, so 218g a day, meaning 28.3 days for a hen.

4. Catfish: Contains 2.9µg per 100g, so you only need 82g a day, though that amounts to 265 catfish-days.

As you can see, the badness varies quite a lot! Not only does the amount of days of life caused in expectation vary quite a lot, but there is also quite some variation in how bad these animals have it—cows, for instance, arguably have it a lot better than chickens and pigs per day too.

So should you let yourself be malnourished? Well, it clearly depends on what is available to you. If you can get milk, then it seems like you shouldn’t—drinking milk really isn’t that bad. Going further down the list, though, it starts to look more and more and more problematic.

Are you really justified in causing a pig to live 2.55 bad days of life, or a chicken a month in a cage, to avoid some (admittedly very severe) discomfort? Certainly you’re not justified in bringing about 0.7 years of farmed-catfish life a day! All of this of course assumes that the animals in question have bad lives.

You might think this is just some braindead outcome of being a utilitarian—I mean, I’m using numbers and everything—but that’s very far from the truth! If anything the argument is strengthened by not assuming utilitarianism (obviously with exceptions).

Generally utilitarianism is demanding in the direction of positive responsibilities (having to go out of your way to do good) but more lenient on negative responsibilities (avoiding doing harm). But buying animal products is an active thing! It’s not like steaks just fall into your lap unless you do something to prevent it; rather you must do something to get them.

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IV.

How about if you would literally just die if you didn’t get animal products? Should you starve to death then? Again, this will obviously depend on a lot of factors, but there are non-crazy scenarios where this seems to be the implication. If you could only ensure your survival by eating catfish or eggs, where the fish and chickens had truly terrible lives “making” these products.

This might sound insane! Just listen to yourself! However, there are clearly similar cases where you should let yourself die. If you need to drive to the hospital to get life-saving medication, but 5 people are lying on the only road to get there (and there are no other options), it seems like you should stay home.

Likewise, if you think chickens have moral status that is not categorically lower than that of humans (as you should), maybe you should let yourself die if a bunch of chickens happen to be crossing the road. (Why do they do that anyways?)

This raises the question whether there are people who should starve to death right now. I do not want to make any firm judgement that there are, as it will depend on the intricacies of the situation. If there are, it’s probably very few.

• Many people have access to fortified foods, though it’ll definitely be harder in some places than in others.

• Many people would be able to get dairy, which I think is not very bad. This might not cover all nutrient-deficiencies on a plant-based diet, though. Additionally many people are lactose-intolerant (unluckily especially in areas where fortified foods are hard to come by), and perhaps they shouldn’t have to shit themselves constantly.

• Most people (I believe) could get ahold of bivalves (like mussels and oysters) which are somewhat unlikely to be conscious. And even if they’re conscious they probably have decent lives when farmed—unless God has cursed them to necessarily have bad lives.

• I also believe most people who do not have access to the above would have access to animal products from animals with not-terrible lives. This might include small-scale farms with better welfare, community-owned animals, or privately owned animals. Perhaps this is the most controversial part among vegans, but I believe it’s probably alright to buy/eat animals like these (especially if you starve otherwise). Though this is harder to justify if you’re a deontologist and think animals probably have rights.

For many people it would probably suck very much though, and I would really not want to be in their position! But the world might sadly very well suck a lot, and many people are in positions that I do not envy.

As a heuristic though, it would be somewhat surprising given the number of people on earth, that literally no one is in a position where they should—all things considered—starve to death. However, DO NOT STARVE YOURSELF TO DEATH AFTER READING THIS! There is most likely a better way!

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1. I factored 4 hours of sleep a day and subtracted this from the number.