Consistent Vegetarianism and the Suffering of Wild Animals
jpe.ox.ac.uk
jpe.ox.ac.uk
Very often in academic philosophy people write papers that say "relatively widespread position X seems to have weird consequence Y", which then provides possible evidence against X, possible evidence in favor of Y, or an opportunity to think about why the implication might be unsound. That helps clarify how we think about things. (Toby Ord wrote a similar paper about opposition to abortion where he pointed out that spontaneous abortion, especially before people are aware of the pregnancy, is much more common than induced abortion, so maybe many abortion opponents should be concerned with medical research on how to prevent it. While Ord seemingly thought the modus tollens side of this argument was stronger, ... maybe they should!)
Although I don't embrace the act/omissions symmetry that the theory here is based on, I support the modus ponens side of the argument that wild animals' suffering is a horrific thing that it would be good to find a way to mitigate. This has led to some pretty long flamewars in the past; I remember a particular incident when the "Tetrapod Zoology" blog discovered David Pearce, a transhumanist who sees it as urgent (and feasible) to re-engineer nature to eliminate all suffering. Fireworks ensued.
Overall, I don't think this argument is particularly new. I heard substantially the same point presented as an anti-vegetarian argument at least 15 years ago. At the time I thought "predators aren't moral agents, accidents aren't moral agents, there's no wrongdoing here, there's no problem". But now I think there is a problem after all, even if it isn't our "responsibility" or "obligation" to solve it.
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During my first few years in Cambridge, Aaron was one of my favorite people to scheme with. We started and — then usually abandoned — a whole string of projects. We would argue for hours and hours about sociology, economics, technology, and ethics.
I remember one time I took Aaron to the Boston vegetarian food festival to see a talk by Peter Singer who is an ethicist at Princeton who many people credit as the intellectual founder of the modern animal rights movement. Aaron went to ask Singer if we (humans) have an ethical obligation to keep animals from hurting each other?
As Aaron approached Singer, I sort of shrunk back a little bit. Embarrassed. The question just seemed, I don't know, “troll-ish” and I figured it would just annoy Singer. But, to my surprise, Singer sighed, thought for a bit, and said something like, “yes, if we can do it without causing more suffering in the process, I suppose we should.”
That that's the Aaron I knew. A recklessly creative intellectual refusing to be hemmed in by what most of us take for granted. And in that process, always thinking about the greater good.
-- Benjamin Mako Hill, https://mako.cc/talks/20130311-bmh-aaron_swartz_memorial_rem...
I agree with your observation and other people's observation here that it doesn't really reflect on "vegetarianism" worldwide, or necessarily meant to. For example, in Singapore I met tons of religious vegetarians who didn't necessarily have any commitments one way or another about these academic debates, and of course in the U.S. there are lots of folks who hope it will help with their weight or cardiovascular health or something.
The fact is, chickens would not exist if not for human captivity/breeding, so it is irrelevant to compare 17 or 50 Billion to 60 billion wild "land bird" populations. The comparison should be to zero chickens. These chickens would not spontaneously be wild fowl of another species under any circumstances.
The comparison of farm and wild population sizes is relevant, because humans have control over both the size of the chicken population (through choice of eating habits) and the size of wild animal populations (through habitat reduction or conversion).
Is the implication that hunting a wild bird whose individual suffering I have ascertained is somehow a preferable alternative to picking a box from the shelf that says chikn nuggets instead of one which says chicken nuggets?
Or am I to believe that all wild animals suffer equivalently because of some hand wavey quantification of an academic in some no name journal?
Nonsense. There are plenty of "ethical consequentialist" vegetarians who don't care about animal welfare but believe eating meat is unethical because it harms the environment or exacerbates human poverty and hunger.
> Some consequentialists may be vegetarian because of environmental concerns, and others for non-consequentialist reasons, but these are not my main focus here.
as acknowledging that there are other kinds of consequentialists, those that have other ethical reasons for not eating meat, but that he's not talking about them.
With animal rights or welfare, not engaging in or supporting specific uses of animals seems like the most obvious thing that one can do to promote or respect these values (but if papers like this are right, maybe that's an illusion!).
This article assumes that people are vegetarians because they are sad for farm animals... Absolutely untrue. The largest concentrated majority of vegetarians in the world are vegetarians for religious reasons, under the belief that eating animals is an act of violence we have a moral responsibility to avoid.
Some vegetarians are not consequentialists, and so they can reject this argument for the reason you describe, but I know many who are.
The idea is to remove human causes of destruction, not to intervene in nature to manufacture some kind of utopia. Again, absurd. Essentially nobody would actually believe this, aside from philosophical masturbation.
There must be different cultures and views within veganism. :-)
I eat farmed meat but I also go hunting and try to take down a deer each year and maybe some grouse. Since this is just nature taking its course, I assume vegetarians won't care much about this.
Suffering in the wild is not sustained or imposed to support a cheap-ass burger industry.
Vegetarians want animal welfare taken seriously, and environmental concerns guiding the regulations around animal agriculture.
In response to the point about animal non-existence, the vegetarian could argue that favoring non-existence might motivate the livestock industry to address environmental and animal welfare concerns. Respect is earned and more meat sold to the "mostly vegetarian" crowd as a result, and less young people flocking to vegetarianism after watching the latest meat-bad doco. A means to an end for the vegetarian rather than a fixed philosophical position.
As he admits, there is not sufficient evidence to conclude that wild suffering is indeed greater, so the case is not strong.
That said, I do happen to identify with the sort of vegetarian logic here. If there were strong evidence that wild animal suffering were much greater than domestic, that would be very important to me.
So I agree with his conclusion that more research into the lives of wild (and domestic) animals should be a priority.
However, given what I know of the literal sausage factory that is industrialized food production, I fear the suffering of domestic animals is very great, and unlikely to be topped.
Utilitarianism is primarily about maximizing utility of a wide spectrum of the population as it pertains to humans and societies and has nothing to do with animals, wild or domestic except for the utility they provide humanity with.
Negative utilitarianism separated from the general concept of utilitarianism is, of course, a nonsense concept in and of itself, since its end goal is non-existence, which makes utility unable to exist.
I'm not familiar with other pseudo-think tanks, so I'll defer to you on that one.
Actually, utilitarianism is about maximizing the welfare (i.e., happiness minus suffering) of all beings that can be said to have a "welfare". This goes back to the father of utilitarianism, Jeremy Bentham, who argued that any being capable of suffering deserves moral consideration. (more extensive discussion can be found in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utilitarianism) More recently, the most prominent living utilitarian philosopher is Peter Singer, who has argued extensively for the moral consideration of animals. Utilitarianism in the philosophical sense is distinct from the anthropocentric economic interpretation.
Although not all consequentialists afford any moral status to animals, I think consequentialists would find it super congenitally difficult to say "oh, but that's OK -- nature did it!".
> "reducing harm to these animals without reducing their numbers"
to
> "support reducing the number of wild animals, for instance through habitat destruction or sterilisation"
WHY at all would that make sense?
It's a giant IF they believe reducing harm is better than non-existence.
So... er, ok... the author is saying (to put it succinctly) that IF an existence of suffering as a farmed animal is better than non-existence, then clearly vegetarians should want to
> "support reducing the number of wild animals, for instance through habitat destruction or sterilisation"
It doesn't follow logically at all.
> One reason to suspect that on average this pleasure is outweighed by suffering is that most species use the reproductive strategy of r-selection, which means that the overwhelming majority of their offspring starve or are eaten shortly after birth and only very few reach reproductive age (Horta 2010; Ng 1995). For instance, ‘in her lifetime a lioness might have 20 cubs; a pigeon, 150 chicks; a mouse, 1000 kits’ (Hapgood 1979), the vast majority of which will die before they could have had many pleasurable experiences. Overall, it seems plausible that wild animals have worse lives than, say, free-range cows. If vegetarians think it’s better for the latter not to exist, they must believe the same thing about wild animals.
According to this paper, vegetarian philosophers argue that livestock live lives not worth living because of the cruel treatment they receive. The paper then argues that wild animals receive worse treatment from nature. Therefore, their lives are similarly not worth living. Reducing suffering is the goal, and not living is better than living, so reducing the number of wild animals is best.
There are a number of good arguments to this. One would be that humans breeding livestock increases the amount of suffering, whereas wild animals are not bred. Another is about directly benefiting (eating) from this suffering verses not benefiting. Yet another is that active harm from cruel treatment is different from passive harm by "not helping" the wild animals.
Consequentialism in particular I think is very averse to arguments that natural things are good or OK. Quite a few philosophical consequentialists are interested in radically anti-nature views like transhumanism because of the idea that we can do much better than nature has.
I read just a little further and also have to nitpick, that good times can be experienced before reaching adolescence.
it is still an interesting argument.
https://www.exratione.com/2016/06/the-hedonistic-imperative-...
Suffering is not only human, however. The natural world from which we evolved continues to be as bloody, terrible, and rife with disease as it ever was. Higher animal species are certainly just as capable of experiencing anguish and pain as are we humans, and the same is true far further down into the lower orders of life than we'd like to think is the case. We ourselves are responsible for inflicting great suffering upon animals as we harvest them for protein - an industry that is now entirely unnecessary given the technologies that exist today. We do not need to farm animals to live: the engineering of agriculture has seen to that. The future of paradise engineering could, were we so minded, start very soon with an end to the farming and harvesting of animals. That would be followed by a growing control over all wild animal populations, starting with the lesser numbers of larger species, in order to provide them with same absolute control of health and aging that will emerge in human medicine. Taken to its conclusions, this also means stepping in to remove the normal course of predator-prey relationships, as well as manage population size by controlling births in the absence of aging, disease, and predation.
Removing suffering from the animal world is a project of massive scope, as where is the line drawn? At what point is a lower species determined to be a form of biological machinery without the capacity to suffer? Ants, perhaps? Even with ants as a dividing line, consider the types of technology required, and the level of effort to distribute the net of medicine and control across every living thing in every ecosystem. Or consider for a moment the level of technological intervention required to ensure a sea full of fish that do not prey upon one another, and that are all individually maintained in good health indefinitely, able to have fulfilling lives insofar as it is possible for fish. General artificial intelligences and robust molecular manufacturing technologies, creating self-replicating machinery to live alongside and inside every living individual in a vast network of oversight and enhancement might be the least of what is required.
At some point, and especially in the control of predators, the animal world will become so very managed that we will in essence be curating a park, creating animals for the sake of creating animals, simply because they existed in the past - the conservative impulse in human nature that sees us trying to turn back any number of tides in the changing world. It seems clear that the terrible and largely hidden suffering of the animal world must be addressed, but why should we follow this path of maintaining what is? What good comes from creating limited beings for our own amusement, when that same impulse could go towards creating intelligences with a capacity equal or greater than our own? Creating animals, lesser and limited entities that will be entirely dependent on us, to be used as little more than scenery, seems a form of evil in a world in which better can be done.
Given this, my suspicion is that when it comes to the animal kingdom, the distant future of paradise engineering will have much in common with the goals of past religious movements and today's environmentalist nihilists, those who preach ethical extinction as the best way to end suffering. Animals will slowly vanish, their patterns recorded, but no longer used. If animals are needed as a part of the world in order to make the human descendants of the era feel better, then that need can be filled through simulations, unfeeling machinery that plays the role well enough for our needs. The resources presently used by that part of a living biosphere will instead be directed to other projects.