"Animal Agriculture" – A Distributed Evil

How many of us would be willing to kill a non-human being whom we had raised ourselves if we had absolutely no need to eat this being?

A minority of us, I’m sure.

How many of us would be willing to pay other people to raise and kill a non-human being if we had no need to eat this being?

The answer, unfortunately, is the number of people who buy and eat flesh; that is, the vast majority of us.

In my experience, most people will admit that such an inconsistency is indefensible, and rightly so. After all, the ethical status of doing something does not depend on who carries out the action, but on what the action is — whether we kill somebody ourselves or pay someone else to do it, it is still wrong; for the victim, the result is the same: death by human hands. Yet the reality is, most unfortunately, that this inconsistency thrives untroubled and untouched by such simple observations. The reality is that we pay others, on a daily basis, to do what we could never do ourselves — to do an act that most of us would be horrified to carry out ourselves, and, in the case of many of us, even unable to ever forgive ourselves for having done. The inconsistency is striking, and more than that, it is nothing less than the source of the greatest atrocity committed by humanity today.

It is worth noting that the decisive difference between our unwillingness to kill another being and our willingness to buy the flesh from that same being does not seem to only lie in the fact that it is another person who is leading the knife, as it is probably still only a minority of us who would accept that someone else kills a non-human being if we have to watch it happen. For instance, if we stood in front of a non-human being, and someone then came to us and asked: “Will you pay me to kill this being and give you all her flesh?” I think very few of us would say "yes". In fact, I think most people would be horrified and openly condemn it if they saw it happen right before them in real life. For instance, if someone in my local park killed a wild bird there, I am sure the other people in the park would object to this action and not be very moved by the assurance that the bird will be eaten. Yet the person who sits and eats a sandwich that contains the flesh from a chicken while he condemns this bird killer and shakes his head over incomprehensible human evil can claim no moral high ground whatsoever, as he has himself paid another person to do the very thing he is condemning: the killing of a bird whom we do not need to kill or eat, and that bird might well have suffered a death far more brutal than the death he has just witnessed and condemned (many chickens are for instance boiled alive at slaughterhouses because their throats are not cut fully).

So it seems that it is not merely because others do it that we are willing to support an act so brutal and evil that we would not want to do it ourselves, but because others do it so smoothly and without letting us know anything about it. We consume “animal products” because the entire “production process” happens so conveniently out of sight.

This should give us pause. The fact that the vast majority of us are supporting something that only a small minority of us would ever be able to do simply because it happens out of sight reveals that we are completely disconnected from what it is we consume and what the process behind it is — and knowingly so, because we know that we don’t know much about it. We are knowingly looking away, and by doing this we are not only betraying the non-human victims, but also ourselves and our own values.

This is the horror of a large, distributed system. By distributing the various acts of evil — the act of raising non-human beings only for them to be killed, the act of killing them, the act of distributing and selling them, and the act of buying and eating them — we have managed to construct a system that is as evil as only the most sadistic person could be on his own. After all, many people who raise non-human beings for them to be killed report that they cannot bear seeing them get killed, and that they feel terrible when they send them to slaughter. Yet by distributing the next evil act in this great circle of evil to another person who has not seen any of these beings grow up — not seen their personalities and charming quirks, but only seen another anonymous being enter the slaughterhouse — we manage to get the job done. Collectively, together, we can do it. And it is not the case that this person whose job it is to kill the beings is especially culpable in any way; it is simply a job that exists in response to a demand. Our demand. It all comes back to us, the consumers, who merrily buy and eat the non-human beings.

As a general matter, the evil that a large, distributed system can manage to perform by virtue of splitting up a large-scale atrocity into many small tasks, each undertaken by people who are mostly good and kind individuals, is something that we should all be extremely cognizant of, as we clearly are not well-equipped to recognize such evils. However, the fact that we have such a blind spot does not provide an excuse for our blindness in any way. All it takes to cure our blindness is simply that we open our eyes and stop looking away from the fact of our exploitation of other animals and the role that we as consumers play in it. Because we are all part of this clockwork — as active a part as any. In fact, we who consume the non-human beings have taken on the most fundamental task of all. We perform the climactic end step of this entire circle of evil, the step that powerfully reinforces the ideological foundation of the entire practice of exploiting non-human beings in an act of indulgent promulgation: Yes, non-human beings are mere things. They are just things we can consume for frivolous reasons.

Collectively we are doing what none of us could do alone. We have managed to create a collective practice that is far more evil than anything we could ever dream of doing individually. How have we managed to do this? How do we stop it? I would argue that our final act of consuming “animal products” — what most people consider a relatively innocent act — is not only a crucial piece in the puzzle of our exploitation of non-human beings, and it is not only a powerful contributing factor to our moral confusion with regard to them; it is the very foundation of it all. It is the cardinal sin we commit against them. Only when we stop this will we stop our exploitation of non-human beings and all the horrors it inevitably carries with it.

My Dear Fellow Human, Why?

My dear fellow human,
Why?
Why do you fry my sisters?
Why do you eat my brothers?
Why do you support the torture
Of helpless, loving mothers?

Oh dear fellow human,
Why do you help this horror;
This great evil that we do?
These beings do have feelings
Please show me you do too

My dear fellow human, it’s all up to you

Why Not Just Be Vegetarian?

 

Source: Wikipedia

This essay is the fourth chapter of Why We Should Go Vegan.

In this post I would like to briefly answer the specific question: Why not just be vegetarian? Why should we not eat eggs or dairy? The answer is, most basically, that doing so causes immense amounts of suffering.

First, there are the reasons directly related to human life and health that were reviewed in previous chapters: Intake of eggs is strongly linked to increased all-cause mortality risk and diabetes. Dairy intake is linked to increased breast cancer mortality and prostate cancer. And exploiting billions of hens and millions of cows significantly increases the risk of zoonotic diseases, including mass killing pandemics.

Thus, we have already seen compelling reasons not to support the egg and dairy industries purely for the benefit of human beings. Yet this is far from the full story, since the “production” of dairy and eggs obviously also involves non-human beings. And when we look at the reality of the egg and dairy industries, it becomes obvious that we also have strong reasons not to support these industries for the sake of the chickens and cows who are harmed by these industries.

First of all, it is a common misconception that dairy and egg “production” does not involve killing any non-human animals. The cows exploited by the dairy industry and the chickens exploited by the egg industry all end up hanging upside down in a slaughterhouse alongside the cows and chickens who were raised for their meat, and when buying eggs and dairy, we do inevitably support this end too: the needless death of the being who had her eggs or milk stolen from her throughout her life.

This is not the only death in the egg and dairy industry, however. In both the dairy and the egg industry, males are seen as trash, and they are sadly treated as such. Male chicks are killed shortly after they have hatched, a process euphemistically referred to as “chick culling”, which usually happens by throwing them into a grinding machine while alive (not for the faint-hearted: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_u0jxi_v-w). This practice of killing male chicks is standard in the egg industry — including the part of it that provides eggs labeled “free-range”, “organic” and “humane.” Similarly, in the dairy industry, since newborn male calves will never give milk, they are taken away from their mothers shortly after they are born, usually to be killed as young calves and sold as “veal”. Again, this is the standard procedure no matter the labeling.

Yet death is not the only sad and horrible aspect of the egg and dairy industry, because so is life itself for the non-human victims. Hens are are therefore commonly “force molted” — i.e. completely starved in up to two weeks in order to provoke them into a new laying cycle — and they are typically killed after about 18 months when they are considered “worn out”.

Similarly, cows are not magic milk-providers. They, like humans and most other mammals, must have been pregnant in order to lactate. For this reason, cows exploited for their milk are made pregnant throughout their entire lives, usually through artificial insemination, which involves “a person inserting his arm far into the cow’s rectum in order to position the uterus, and then forcing an instrument into her vagina”. This is the life of the dairy cow: a perpetual cycle of painful insemination, pregnancy, and birthing of her calf who is taken away from her and killed shortly after. So not only do the egg and dairy industry involve an extreme amount of death, they also involve lives full of unimaginable — yet completely unnecessary — pain and suffering.

Lastly, just like we have strong reasons to abstain from eating meat because it reinforces a morally defunct view of non-human beings, so too do we have strong reasons to abstain from eating eggs and dairy. It reinforces the view that chickens and cows — and non-human animals in general — are mere resources whom we can take from and exploit for our pleasure and convenience. It makes us blind and indifferent to their suffering, so indifferent that we cannot be moved to act even when we see the greatest of atrocities committed against them, such as mass killings of newly hatched chicks. It all comes back to our flawed view of non-human animals: a cold and apathetic view that inevitably leads us to inflict immense amounts of suffering upon them. It is about time that we stop reinforcing that view.

Why Veganism Is Important

Veganism is perhaps the most important issue of all to be thinking about and promoting at this point in time if we want to reduce suffering in the world. Our exploitation of non-human beings for frivolous purposes, which includes tens of billions of lives lived out under the horrible conditions of factory farming, is probably the greatest source of suffering in the world that we can readily abolish. All it takes to end this suffering is that we, civilized and moral citizens, collectively decide to put an end to it, which makes it unlike, say, the unthinkable torture presently going on in North Korea, which unfortunately seems hard to stop for the ordinary, decent citizen.

Another reason veganism is important is that it is the first step toward recognizing the moral value of non-human animals, and toward transcending our speciesism — our discrimination against other beings based on their species membership. (In relation to speciesism and its pervasiveness in society, I recommend watching Speciesism: The Movie. See also Speciesism: Why It Is Wrong and the Implications of Rejecting It.)

Our notion that the pain and suffering of non-human beings cannot in any way be compared to human pain and suffering is a speciesist one. Here is David Pearce pointing out the anything but human substrates of suffering:

We often find it convenient to act as though the capacity to suffer were somehow inseparably bound up with linguistic ability or ratiocinative prowess. Yet there is absolutely no evidence that this is the case, and a great deal that it isn't. The functional regions of the brain which subserve physical agony, the "pain centres", and the mainly limbic substrates of emotion, appear in phylogenetic terms to be remarkably constant in the vertebrate line. The neural pathways involving serotonin, the periaquaductal grey matter, bradykinin, dynorphin, ATP receptors, the major opioid families, substance P etc all existed long before hominids walked the earth. Not merely is the biochemistry of suffering disturbingly similar where not effectively type-identical across a wide spectrum of vertebrate (and even some invertebrate) species. It is at least possible that members of any species whose members have more pain cells exhibiting greater synaptic density than humans sometimes suffer more atrociously than we do, whatever their notional "intelligence".

[Quoted from Pearce's 'The Hedonistic Imperative'.]

This should detonate a bomb in our thinking about ethics and unleash a Copernican Revolution in ethics that finally makes us realize that all moral concerns and obligations do not revolve around us humans alone. It should make us realize that people who fight against racism but not speciesism have taken up an arbitrarily narrow fight against discrimination — speciesism is, after all, very similar to racism, as it is also discrimination based simply on different external traits; the only difference is that racism is discrimination against our close cousins while speciesism is discrimination against our more distantly related sentient cousins.

That other animals are likely our equals in suffering should make us realize that we are committing an atrocity every day when we raise non-human animals under horrible conditions. We would never accept a practice that forcefully makes women pregnant every year, and then takes away their children right after birth in order for us to get milk from these women. Nobody would consider supporting this industry a matter of personal choice — in fact, nobody would consider supporting any exploitation of humans for frivolous purposes a matter of personal choice, no matter what minds or traits the humans who are exploited have, which just reveals that the only reason we consider veganism a matter of personal choice is speciesism.

In the case of the imagined human dairy industry, nothing would change in our attitudes if we said that we only exploit women who have a mental disability and who do not understand what is going on; the mere pain and nausea of being pregnant and the pain of labour, along with the sheer lack of necessity, makes it obvious that we should not do this. Yet this is exactly what the dairy industry that most of us happily throw our money after does to innocent cows whom we have every reason to believe suffer as horrible suffering from pregnancy and labour, not to mention the violent insemination they are subjected to, as a human would. This clearly reveals that we have a double-standard, and its source is pure speciesism. If the cows in our dairy industry had had human bodies — say we transplanted the cows' nervous system so that they had the exact same nervous system, and the exact same experiences that they presently have during their most unfortunate lives as dairy cows, but the outward appearance of human beings — people would no doubt be outraged about this practice of forced pregnancy of human-looking beings, and they would no doubt demand that those responsible for it should get the highest punishment possible.

This inconsistency clearly reveals that we need to expand our circle of compassion and ethical consideration so that we need not perform such transplants in order to care for our fellow sentient beings — so that we can stop discriminating against beings based on their outward appearances.

When it comes to human beings who have certain disabilities that make them unable to communicate what they are feeling, we rightly realize a responsibility to help and support, while in the case of non-human animals who are equally unable to speak up for themselves and report how they are feeling (even though their behavior quite clearly gives us good hints about this if we only pay attention), we somehow manage to convince ourselves that we can subjugate and use them as we please. Our speciesism and moral delusion could not be clearer. We would never be tempted to subjugate and kill a human being if we are told that s/he has the exact mental abilities of a cow or a chicken. So why would we subjugate and kill a cow or a chicken for the reason that they have the mental abilities of a cow or a chicken?

All this should make the immense importance of veganism clear: We live in a society where supporting industries that make non-human animals suffer in the most horrible ways is commonplace, and where going against it is considered extreme and something one should keep to oneself. And as long as we partake in it, that is, as long as we are not going vegan, we will fail to see anything truly wrong with it, and the above-mentioned transplant and the human form will continue to be necessary in order to ignite people's ethical concern.

Our descendants will not look upon our practice of subjugating and killing non-human animals as we do, and they will not look at us in the way we do ourselves. They will surely see our time as one where the banality of evil was more evident than ever: the Internet was there, they had the information, they could even see the footage. Yet they shrugged their shoulders and merrily took another bite. Our descendants will no doubt be far more advanced than this. Rather than harming our non-human cousins, our descendants will recognize their ethical obligation to not only avoid harming non-human beings, but to help them wherever they are. This is yet another reason why veganism is important: it is the first step toward helping relieve the suffering of non-human beings in nature.

We will not climb toward this ethical high-ground before we stop exploiting and abusing non-human animals for frivolous purposes such as palate pleasure, fashion preferences and entertainment. Because until we do, we will be inclined to defend a habit rather than do what is ethically right. It all comes back to our habit-bound nature. It seems that we find it hard to see anything wrong with that which is habit and tradition. We would probably also find it hard to find anything truly wrong with racism if it happened to be the foundation of a habit and a tradition that we all shared, and hear silly attempts to defend it. In fact, this was indeed the case back in the days where using humans of a certain race as slaves was a tradition, and one that was relied upon by certain industries.

Similarly, the day we go beyond the unnecessary habit we have of eating non-human animals and things from them, and start conceiving of them as sentient ends of moral worth rather than as mere food, we will finally begin being just as horrified and aroused by speciesism as we are by racism today. Without the habit of putting non-human animals in our mouths, there will no longer be any incentive to rationalize unnecessary suffering. This will mark the end of the acceptance of our exploitation of non-human beings, and the beginning of an era where we instead help our fellow sentient beings. Humanity will then go from living off of the bodies, suffering and death of other animals, to living for the purpose of making all sentient beings flourish and free from suffering — regardless of species. That is what it should mean to be human. The day this begins to happen is the day we go vegan, and that is how indescribably important veganism is.

Is It Objective or Subjective? – Clearing Up a Confusion

The terms 'objective' and 'subjective' are central and commonly used terms in discussions of facts, and in our discourse in general. They appear in everything from political and scientific discussions to informal conversations at the dinner table. But what do they mean? Do they have a clear and self-evident meaning?

It is seems commonly assumed that the meaning of these two terms is unequivocal and self-evident – that elaboration about what they mean is unnecessary. This is, however, far from the case.

Two distinct meanings

The root of most of the confusion over the terms 'objective' and 'subjective' is that both these terms have two distinct meanings, and the distinction between these is often overlooked. The one sense in which we use the terms can be said to be ontological, while the other is epistemological.[1] Expressed in common terms, we use both words in a sense that relates to “what is” in general – what we describe – and in another sense that relates to our knowledge of the world – how we describe something.

When we say that something is objective in the ontological sense, this means that we can describe it in third-person terms – in terms that are not about our direct experience, but about “objects” in the widest sense; for instance, an equation, a flying arrow, a firing neuron etc. In contrast to this, when something is subjective in the ontological sense of the term, it means that it relates to the first-person perspective – to our direct experience; the experience of an equation, the experience of a flying arrow, the experience of love etc.

So, for instance, if an arrow is flying over your head that is an objective fact in the ontological sense of this word, and if you experience this arrow then this – your particular experience – is a subjective fact in the ontological sense of the word.

In the other sense of the terms – the epistemological sense – these two words are each other's total opposites. When a description of something is objective, this means that it is not distorted or biased, while a subjective description is one that is exactly that: distorted and biased. Expressed in simpler terms, an objective description is simply a description that is true, while a subjective description is untrue. The term 'subjective fact', in the epistemological sense of this term, is therefore an oxymoron, since there obviously cannot be untrue truths. There can only be objective facts in the epistemological sense of this term – otherwise, we are not talking about facts in the first place. But, again, we can meaningfully talk about subjective facts in the ontological sense of subjectivity – if I, for instance, feel tired, this is a subjective fact about me, in the ontological sense of this term, but it is an objective description of my subjective state in the epistemological sense of the term 'objective'. It is not difficult to see how confusion about these terms can easily arise.

Points of confusion: Generalizable facts and unspecific questions

An objection might go something like: there really are truths that are not objective. For instance, just take the statement “Jones is beautiful.” Is this true or false? I think that Jones is beautiful, but this is not an objective fact – it is a subjective fact that is true for me, but not necessarily for everybody else. It is just my preference, ergo, it is a subjective fact.

If you think Jones is beautiful, this is indeed an objective fact about your experience, in the epistemological sense of the term objective (again, all facts are objective in the epistemological sense of the term; so the word 'fact' alone actually means 'objective fact'). First of all, this objection confuses a generalizable fact with an objective – a true – fact. Although these terms are commonly confused, they are not the same, since a description obviously need not be generalizable in order for it to be true – that a fact is specific and only true in one case does not negate its truth.
Another source of confusion in the question posed above, and in discussions about subjectivity and objectivity in general, is that the question being asked is unclear and not well-defined. To take the objection above as an example of this, asking whether someone is beautiful or not is an unclear question that overlooks that beauty is not an intrinsic feature of human beings even though we might experience it in that way. Whether something or someone is beautiful or not basically depends on what is going on inside the head of the beholder, and it is therefore an unclear, even meaningless, question to merely ask whether somebody is beautiful, because the question only has a clear meaning if we ask according to who. This does not, however, make the question about beauty a subjective one in the epistemological sense of this term; how beautiful we perceive someone to be is a fact – no matter who we ask, it does not change how pretty we find Jones in a specific moment (and if something does change how pretty we think Jones is, this change will still be a fact about our experience).

An assumption that seems to lurk in the objection and above, and which seems common in general, is that subjectivity in the ontological sense implies epistemological subjectivity – that we only can talk in a distorted and biased way about our own conscious experience – but this does not follow. We can talk about our experience as unbiased as we can talk about anything; after all, everything we can understand and speak about appears in our conscious experience, so if we can speak unbiased about anything, we can also speak unbiased about our conscious experience.

The interests behind knowledge and its “situatedness”

Another common objection against the claim that we can talk objectively, i.e. unbiased and factually, about anything is that we are always personally motivated in some way when we describe something, and that every description we make therefore is bound to be subjective – to be biased and not really factual. What this objection misses, however, is that whether a claim is true or false does not depend on how it has arisen or how it is used. Even if some people have made a discovery about the world with a certain motive, and no matter how morally and politically motivated that motive is – for instance, the motive to make a powerful weapon for war – that does not change the fact that the discovery they made is true.

A similar objection refers to the fact that our knowledge always is situated – it exists in a certain place and time – and therefore it must be subjective. Again, the same reply is true: the fact that our knowledge exists in a certain place and time does not make it untrue. For instance, the fact that the claim “the moon is closer to earth than the sun” just came out of my brain and now appears in your conscious experience – in a certain place and time in this world – does not make this claim false or biased in any way. It is simply a non sequitur to say that it does, and this non sequitur seems to arise exactly from confusing the ontological and the epistemological sense of the term 'subjective': it can be argued that all our knowledge is subjective in the ontological sense – that it appears in our conscious experience – but it does not follow from this that it should be subjective in the epistemological sense of the word, which it cannot be to the extend that we really have knowledge in the first place. This is why the distinction between the two different meanings of this same term is so important to be aware of.

The fact that there are two distinct meanings of both the terms 'objective' and 'subjective' reveals that we cannot merely use these terms as if their meaning is self-evident and as though the terms only have a single clear meaning. They clearly don't, and for that reason we should acquire the habit of making it clear in what sense we use the terms when we use them, and to ask ourselves in what sense they are used when we see them used. Are they being used in the ontological or in the epistemological sense? It is rarely unequivocal or self-evident.



[1] The same distinction can be found in John Searle's The Construction of Social Reality.

This post is a translated and edited version of a post previously published on abernesblog.net.