Eating meat is good, says the philosopher

What a load of rubbish.

1. Plant-based diets are good for the environment. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6316289/

2. Animals are sentient. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4494450/

3. The "thought experiment" is flawed. See https://erikhoel.substack.com/p/eating-meat-is-good-says-the... - good rebuttal here

Keeping animals alive in the worst possible conditions on the promise that "we'll do better!" just so the species don't die out is utterly ridiculous.

Debates like this are a waste of time and this one even has a clickbait title. They ignore the obvious animal suffering today and instead offer a "what if we just stopped over night, what then?".

This essay gets worse as it goes.

This will never happen. So instead we should focus on limiting or entirely removing the consumption of animals and animal products in our lifestyle which will gradually reduce the number of animals bred for premature death.

Most won't and will cling to clickbait essays like this and the distant hope of widespread, affordable, lab-grown meat while continuing to ignore the obvious abuse to animals in their day to day life today.

Slavery is good, says the philosopher. Think of those millions of slave children that would have not existed if not for the slave trade. Sure, had their predecessors remained in Africa they would have had different progeny, but that is an abstraction; those children didn't exist. We are considering actual children who lived, and of course tens of millions of their offspring that resulted, many of them alive today. If you could wave a magic wand and get rid of slavery, would you? What kind of monster would you be to vanish and nullify millions of people who are currently living meaningful lives?

Would anyone actually agree with the above sentiment? How is it different than what this thinkpiece is putting forth? It is a post-hoc justification for the status quo.

The reasonable counterargument to this is that you are comparing the actual pain and suffering of real, existing animals, to the potential life of animals who do not currently exist. "What happens if we stop raising livestock?" means that no further cows will be born to a life of suffering. That's...really it. Those hypothetical animals aren't floating around in the aether wishing someone would just have let them be born.

The question comes down to this: is a life full of suffering, torture, violence, and misery better than no life at all? For me, the answer is no.

Are animals people? For most of human history, the answer has been no.

I'm sure that there have always been humans that thought of their favorite animals as people (or similar), but the scientific and social acceptance of animals having consciousness and emotions similar to humans is VERY recent. Look at the pushback that Jane Goodall got for her research for context.

Anyway, I don't have a good ethical argument in favor of eating animal, other than history and my personal rights. This is similar to my feelings on abortion - women have personal rights, but other than that, abortion is not good.

I'm sure people will have problems with these statements, but please consider that I am not trying to change your mind or morality.

If our meat animals didn't exist, a lot of other animals would. Animals eat a lot of food that would be available calories for other animals instead, after all.

Also, never existing at all is not a negative, it is null. There is nobody to experience a negative effect of not existing.

So I don't think this is a very good argument.

> I’ve written before about longtermism, the idea that future lives carry moral weight—in this case, there will be millions of humans on this alien world that never exist if you choose (b) and abandon them to their fate on the hostile planet.

The idea of it automatically being better to choose the outcome where more future lives will exist seems problematic to me.

If it is better to have animals living miserably in factory farms if it means more future animals will be born (even if those animals will live miserably in factory farms) and that has moral weight, is there also a moral obligation to give birth to as many children as possible even if you are going to mistreat, neglect or abuse them?

I think most people would agree that it is better not to have children unless you will be able to avoid mistreating, neglecting, or abusing them, so wouldn't the same apply to animals?

Most humans on earth are essentially already being treated as livestock by other humans... The only difference is that the product is not their meat or their milk, but their "blood, sweat and tears". So the scenario outlined at the start of the article is not exactly hypothetical.

The first two paragraphs present such a blatant false dichotomy that I won't be doing myself the disservice of reading any further. If you're going to announce yourself as a philosopher in the title of your blog post, the least you can do is avoid basic fallacies.

Seems like a stretch to justify meat eating with species preservation.

Maybe in 100 years you can bring up this argument when plant- and lab-based substitutes are widely available and the cows are at the brink of extinction. But at this point of human history, the vegetarian can credibly argue that they want to reduce animal suffering while meat eater can not similarly counter that they eat meat to preserve the species.

I know the argument is supposed to be on a philosophical level, but I just can't suspend my disbelief to an extent required to seriously engage with the argumentation.

Will be interesting to revisit this in 50-100 years perhaps. But one would hope that humanity then has created nature reserves for wild cattle and so on.

It really boils down to: "Is humans acting as their squishy biology dictates" good or does our "goodness" derive from striving to be more than that biology?

I'm on the "accept that we are made to eat meat and probably should on occasion" end of the spectrum, but that doesn't make the current state of how we make and consume meat an ok thing. Factory farming isn't a necessary evil, and the level at which we eat meat (and the animals we choose to eat) are evil not just on method, but in costs to our descendants.

Let's start with the philosophical thought in the article about aliens eating humans. I would not advocate for those two options but a third option. Aliens should stop eating humans, bring them all back to earth and release them. The rest is up to humans.

The author then uses this philosophical thought to argue in favor of our existing state of affairs that we raise animals for food and that we eat them. The biggest issue for me with eating animals is that most of them are raised in cruel conditions and their death is not quick but prolonged and painful. Nowadays there are many plant-based sources of protein in a myriad of flavors and shapes. You can get all the protein and the rest of the nutrients without having to eat animal flesh.

What to do with all the animals if we stop eating them? Release them into the wild. Some would die or be eaten by other animals, but that's life. Most should have no trouble adapting to living in the wild. That's what happened in the Chernobyl.

The rest of the article goes into this ridiculous idea of eating animals based on whom we perceive to be bad. Majority of the humans judge and apply human criteria to animals when most of this is false. If you're going to eat animals then just eat all of them or exclude some based on more objective criteria like not eating those that are about to go extinct.

I've stumbled upon some of the same thoughts: cows would be fucked if we stopped eating beef; animals wouldn't give two shits about devouring my ass if the conditions were right, turnabout is fair play; fuck crabs; etc.

But I also recognize some the points raised by vegetarians/vegans: we do eat way too much meat; we do treat livestock horribly; fuck crabs; etc.

And I think the answer is closer to vegetarianism than it is to all meat all day. We should eat less meat and probably far less beef, but we eating some is fine. Especially due to the B12 issue. It's something our bodies don't synthesize and our best source is animal products.

It would also let us slowly cut down the cattle livestock as we wean off of beef to lower levels.

Of course, the problem, as always, is "the growth mindset". That we always need to be improving everything quarter after quarter. If you sold 100 hamburgers today, you need to sell 200 tomorrow. How about we sell enough to be profitable and you know, just like chill the fuck out for once.

- "For many of the animals we eat, we’d be consigning their species to oblivion if we stopped eating them."

- "[In college] I used to blow [veg and vegans'] minds with this argument—“Oh, so you say you love cows, but you also want to consign their species to oblivion?”"

First, with that level of discourse, that is one college to avoid. But why does he keep suggesting that a species would disappear just because we stopped farming it? By his own analogy, humans would continue populating the earth if aliens chose that option. Even in the same paragraph he argues it would just mean fewer animals but then proceeds to presume their extinction.

What's wrong with only 1 billion chickens instead of 25? By his future-lives-carry-moral-weight logic we should still be vegetarian, breeding but not eating them, because 250 billion is even better.

Just dumb.

> If you were an alien politician concerned about the ethical mistreatment of humans, would you advocate for (a) the continuation of the system but with better treatment for humans (quicker death, better living conditions, longer life), or (b) to stop the system entirely, although this would mean that humans would soon die out in one generation as they’d be unable to survive on the alien planet. Quick, which would you advocate: (a) or (b)?

Am I missing something or is the obvious quick answer to this, the opposite of what he expects?

And that's even giving the benefit of the doubt to the setup, like, how can you be raised 'free range' on a planet that you'll instanttly die on if people stop eating you?

As with every philosophy questions have no answers and every argument is drowned in assumptions.

Just planting row crops results in much more cruel death than most people realize I think.

> is oblivion really the preferable alternative to net suffering?

Well, here's another thought experiment: you are being tortured, very slowly, but kept alive, well fed and sentient. There is nowhere to go. In the end you will be killed, and you know it. You have watched all your siblings be killed, your parents, your children.

You have a button next to you. If you press it, you will die instantly and with no pain. You will be sent into "oblivion", but you will end your suffering.

How long will you resist pressing the button?

becoming a prey item or a pet is an excellent strategy for human survival in the world dominated by extra terrestial intelligence. As OP mentions, there is vested interest in keeping us around, albeit in some form of domesticated state.

the alternative would be to battle the enemy on equal terms and be inevitably exterminated (i.e, predators in todays world), or exist in some way at the margins of the system our new alien overlords have created and find a way to grift off of it (i.e pests in todays world)

> The basic claim, to put it crudely at first, is that eating meat is morally good primarily because it benefits animals.

What is the definition benefit here? Would not being able to live freely, freely choose your food, choose your mate, choose (or chosen by nature) when you die, is benefit?

I'm usually right leaning, but in the issue of the environment, like clean energy and the meat industry, the wood industry, I'm left leaning.

Still not vegan yet though. Really hard to be vegan.

but overall I enjoyed the article.

The argument is verb independent and thus wrong.

What about killing for sport or beastiality.

Asserting that existence is better than oblivion is nonsensical. Adding up fake utility values is bad logic.

Animals eat other animals. We sometimes eat animals that other animals eat. We should eat animals sometimes, and only those that other animals eat.

Seems logical..

from the first paragraph: "Imagine a dystopian future in which aliens with a taste for human flesh kidnapped a bunch of people from Earth and raised them as livestock on their alien planet. Humans on the alien planet are kept alive “free-range,” able to interact and live their life, but only for their first 20 years. Then they are harvested for food."

yeah, its "The Promised Neverland"

So the author is pro life I would assume...?

I've never seen a reasonable counter-argument to this.

Isn't the whole point of Philosophy that there are no firm answers? Otherwise it would become science, maths, history etc).

So you can argue in circles or just move on.

(The obvious exception being Stoicism which is quite well provable and really more of an approach to life than a philosophy)