Your Positions

• We should eat less meat. It’s OK to use and kill animals sometimes, but we should not be factory farming. (Start over)

Things to Consider

Would you hold the same position for dogs? Is it OK to casually kill dogs to eat? What about human toddlers? Pigs show intelligence levels comparable and in some aspects exceeding those of human toddlers, so why not use and kill them sometimes? They are certainly smarter than dogs in most ways we can measure (if it even makes sense to think of our human-constructed tests as objective measures of intelligence in the first place). Should we put mentally disabled people, who perhaps have a level of intelligence comparable to a chimpanzee, in zoos for people to gawk at?

The fact that we make these artificial distinctions between animals, which don’t reflect the empirical facts about the capacities of these animals, is known as “speciesism”. We claim to base our exploitation of certain animals for the things their bodies can provide us on distinctions which do not have any firm scientific basis. The name for this philosophical criticism is known as “name the trait”. In other words: if there really is a difference between humans and other animals which justifies giving all humans a plethora of basic protections, but treating animals of other species like mere commodities, what is that trait? If you pick something like language, you quickly realize that many people are born without the capacity for language, but we do not treat them like we treat animals. If you pick something like emotion or forming strong social bonds, you quickly find that this trait is present in many other animals, including the animals we regularly farm.

The first such distinction to be proposed, historically, was the soul. It was championed by Descartes, who believe that humans are unique in possessing a soul (a thinking thing / mind). Animals, he argued, were just complicated machines (in his time, it had become popular to create life-like automatons powered by complicated systems of gears, which inspired his mechanistic theory of animals). He didn’t believe they really had minds. All scientific evidence suggests Descartes is wrong about the soul. Darwin’s theory of evolution is incredibly well supported, and shows conclusively that humans are animals, not a totally separate kind of being. Humans are related both evolutionarily and, as a result, physiologically and mentally to other animals. By studying our own brains and the brains of animals, we can see that many of the functions once thought to be unique to humans are performed by brain structures which are present in many other animals. Generally, it seems right to think of animals as someones who peer out from their eyes, and feel and think about the world around them, and exhibit intentional actions. In an attempt to cut through a lot of the bullshit myths which still persists about animals’ minds, a group of world’s top neuroscientists, psychologists, and others met at Cambridge University and issued a Declaration, known as the Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness. Their main conclusion is important enough to quote here:

The absence of a neocortex does not appear to preclude an organism from experiencing affective states. Convergent evidence indicates that non-human animals have the neuroanatomical, neurochemical, and neurophysiological substrates of conscious states along with the capacity to exhibit intentional behaviors.Consequently,the weight of evidence indicates that humans are not unique in possessing the neurological substrates that generate consciousness. Non-human animals, including all mammals and birds, and many other creatures, including octopuses, also possess these neurological substrates.

There are of course many additional stronger conclusions which have wide consensus within the scientific community on what animals’ minds are like, but this limited conclusion was chosen because it was agreed to unanimously by all in attendance. To believe in Descartes’ view of animals today is no better than still believing the Sun to revolve around the Earth.

Numerous proposals have of course been put forward to “name the trait” that separates humans from animals in a morally relevant way, but none thus far have been successful. Keep in mind, it’s important that the trait be morally relevant. There are of course mutations of genes that only humans posses, but hip bone shape and other such features are not morally relevant: we don’t think the right of human beings not to be exploited arises from the shape of their hip bones, or from their possession of opposable thumbs, but from their minds and their capacity to suffer from exploitation. We don’t deprive people with genetic deformities in their hips, or who have lost their thumbs in an accident, of basic human rights. Nor do we think it would be right to force people with fairly severe intellectual disabilities to work as slaves in the mines. The higher-level intelligence humans have, which has produced such wonders as Einstein’s General Relativity, is not possessed by all humans, but this doesn’t matter: it is not on the basis of our ability to solve physics problems that we think people shouldn’t be enslaved, beaten, or treated as commodities. Given this, it would be irresponsible to not consider the possibility that animals deserve some serious moral status in our society, since they seem to have much of the same capacity to suffer as humans do.

However, many people still argue that while there is no clear line separating all animals from all humans, there is some line that can be drawn between all humans and some “lower” animals. They might draw a line below which lie all chickens, and above which lies all humans, but which other animals species may cross. The problem is, such lines are drawn more-or-less arbitrarily in order to justify maintaining current practices. This is an incredibly biased an nonobjective way to approach things. Similar such arbitrary lines have been drawn to distinguish between Jews and Aryans, Africans and Europeans, women and men, in order to justify the exploitation of the former group by the latter. Typically, they focus on morally irrelevant and superficial features like facial structure, skin color, or waist size while ignoring the many commonalities. We argue a similar thing is happening with animals: people, for their own selfish reasons, are focusing on the differences between animals and humans, and downplaying the many commonalities they have to us in order to justify continuing to exploit them.

The question to you is, why the focus on factory farming alone? We don’t accept people being exploited or killed if they are “treated nicely”. Why should we accept animals being exploited or killed if they are “treated nicely”, whatever that is supposed to mean?

Which of the following best positions best represents your views?

1. It’s all about what’s natural, and in group versus out group. We are humans, so we should do whatever is best for humans, just like we put our family first before strangers. Of course we can consider other animals along the way and not treat them like complete garbage, but at the end of the day, it’s not the job of a lion to be merciful to a gazelle. If we were gazelles, we’d all be trying to do whatever is best for gazelles, but we aren’t. We can’t be expected to give up our natural role in the food chain when a bunch of other natural omnivores like us aren’t giving up theirs.

2. Animals may be able to perceive the world around them and feel pain and things like that, but they don’t really understand what is happening to them. If you fence an animal into a field for their entire life, they aren’t really going to notice anything is wrong in the way a human would. If one chicken dies, those other chickens aren’t really going to notice it. Other animals don’t have the ability to plan for the future, they just sort of exist in the moment. So when they are slaughtered, it’s not like there is a bunch of fear leading up to it like there would be for a human entering a death camp. It’s just: one moment they are there, the next moment they are not, and if you treat them well in life, it doesn’t really make a difference to the animal that they are going to be slaughtered at the end of it.

3. It doesn’t really matter what level of awareness animals have, because we need to eat at least some meat to be healthy. There’s no getting around this. We should of course respect the animals and not treat them like mere objects, but if we didn’t eat meat we would suffer nutritional deficiencies. We should probably try to eat the stupider animals like cows more than the smarter animals than pigs, but we can’t not any animals without suffering from potentially dangerous health consequences. We shouldn’t necessarily try to justify things just because they “natural”, but at the end of the day biological needs are biological needs. It’s just the way the world is.

4. This whole thing is a waste of my time. It’s completely normal to eat meat, and there’s no use trying to make people feel bad over it. If you argue and philosophize about anything for long enough you can make the case for any position, but there’s no point arguing with a bunch of extremists or fanatics who aren’t going to change their minds anyway, and act like perfectly normal things are the end of the world and blow them out of proportion. Might as well be talking to a religious nut-job.