Against a more-than-usually-persuasive argument for eating meat
I was reading Erik Hoel’s substack and found an interesting argument on vegetarianism:
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.
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)?
For many of the animals we eat, we’d be consigning their species to oblivion if we stopped eating them… My intuition is they’d probably choose to be born, and eventually eaten, rather than not be born at all.
When I went to college and met for the first time a good number of vegetarians and vegans, I used to blow their minds with this argument—“Oh, so you say you love cows, but you also want to consign their species to oblivion?” Despite its overblown and somewhat jokey nature no one ever gave me a good counterargument. So I never stopped eating meat.
I thought it would be interesting to look a little more closely at this, but I have two quick disclaimers: first, I like Erik Hoel and his substack, which probably won’t come through that well because I don’t think much of this argument. Second, though I do still eat meat on occasion, I’d say less than one of my meals in a given week has any meat, and even then it’s more like a slice of pork in a bowl of ramen than a steak. So I’d probably identify more with vegetarians than with carnivores - do with that as you will.
Before I actually deal with the argument here, I’d like to briefly digress and say that arguments of this type tend to annoy me, because the implicit claim is that you’re eating meat because of some clever argument, when you clearly thought it up as an ex post facto justification. When I ate meat regularly, I didn’t try to pretend it was an ethical thing to do. It was an unethical thing that I did because I wanted to do it. People are allowed to not be perfect, but justifications like this are a pet peeve of mine because they seem like such a profound misuse of intelligence. Again, this isn’t meant to be a knock on Erik Hoel, it’s just that this one particular thing he wrote doesn’t sit well with me.
OK, I’m done ranting. When an argument is well-written and persuasive, I like to break it down into a list to deal with it:
- (Approximately) per Kant, we should behave according to principles that we would want everyone to adopt.
- The lives of hypothetical future livestock deserve moral consideration
- If people universally stopped eating meat or significantly reduced their meat consumption, livestock populations would fall, which corresponds to a destruction of hypothetical future livestock
This argument already looks pretty shaky to me. Hoel’s argument boils down to “we need to buy meat to fund factories that maximize livestock production.” This means that for any amount of funding, the most ethical thing to do with it is raise the maximum breeding population you can sustain, then get them to produce as many offspring as possible, euthanizing most of the babies (except those that will form the next generation of the breeding population). Any other choice counterfactually kills animals that “would probably choose to be born.” The fact that you’re killing them anyway doesn’t matter, according to Hoel - the important thing is maximizing number of births. This doesn’t seem like a good ethical system to me.
I could also point out that if, as Hoel seems to imply, humans and livestock deserve equal moral consideration (more on this later), we have the duty to breed humans, meaning that birth control of any sort, including through abstinence, is immoral (in fact, this works even if humans deserve greater moral consideration - think of the hypothetical babies you’re killing with all the sex you’re not having). I could even combine the two arguments: imagine the utopia you could create by combining constant unprotected sex with a pre-commitment to killing most babies as soon as they’re born. Any takers?
Another weird aspect of Hoel’s argument is that, above a moral duty to eat meat, it implies a moral duty to donate to livestock farmers. Surely they could raise more animals in better conditions if they didn’t have to incur the overhead of killing, butchering, packing, and shipping them - and I’m sure that’s not the whole supply chain. This isn’t an argument that eating meat is bad any more than effective altruism is an argument that donating to museums is bad, but I think it’s fair to say that anyone who claims to be eating meat based on Hoel’s argument is, by their own claimed values, behaving very inefficiently if they don’t donate money to livestock farmers.
Hoel’s argument cleverly implies by its initial analogy that there is some level of moral equivalence between livestock and humans. This makes it a lot more convincing at a surface level, because the idea of humans going extinct is scary, so we feel less comfortable with the idea of letting cows go extinct when the two ideas are tied together. But most people would agree that humans deserve greater moral consideration than cattle - under what circumstances would you be willing to eat a person, as opposed to a steak? This opens up space to examine alternatives to large-scale livestock farming more closely.
Livestock farming is significantly less space-efficient per calorie than farming produce, so when you think about large-scale replacement of livestock farming with produce farming, you have to consider that huge tracts of land will presumably, over a few hundred years, revert from farmland to biodiverse habitats appropriate to the relevant biome (grassland, old-growth forest, etc). Let’s say the land would eventually revert to being a forest. I’d argue that the hypothetical inhabitants of that forest deserve equal moral consideration to hypothetical future livestock. Or, to think of it another way: what if I told you that a new cow species had been discovered that was more resistant to disease and tasted better than the ones we have now? Would you have any problem phasing out the old cow species for the new one? I’m sure this has happened several times without triggering a moral crisis - but this situation is pretty much equivalent to replacement of farms with forests, except the new breed of cow is a bunch of wild animals.
We can also attack the Kantian aspect of Hoel’s argument: the reality is that everyone isn’t going to adopt my principles. I’d be very surprised if 20% of the US population ever becomes vegetarian on principle. As an individual person who can’t make anyone else’s choices, my options are:
- Fund an institution that brutally tortures animals for years until eventually killing them
- Pay more money for ethically raised meat (and invest time to figure out what, if any, meat is ethically sourced)
- Hunt for my meat
- Eat other things
Unlike the politician in Hoel’s hypothetical, I don’t have a “destroy the livestock industry” option any more than I have a “reform the livestock industry” option. I can choose to participate in systematic torture or not. Usually I opt not to; sometimes the pork dumpings at the restaurant look too good to resist. But I don’t convince myself that I’m doing something noble by eating them.