The author starts from the position that animals have rights but does not identify what those rights are. Domestic animals are not free to be themselves since their only reason for "being" is to provide products for humans and, sometimes, other animals. Through generations of selective breeding, domestic animals cannot survive and reproduce without human intervention.
The overarching questions are: What rights do domestic animals have and are those rights "self evident" or granted solely by humans who breed them? Wild animals have the right to live as long as they can before they are killed by other animals, starve to death or die of some unpleasant disease. Alas, many humans on this planet are still living with only the same rights as wild animals.
I also found the use of the stereotype of Jews and chicken soup to be mildly offensive.
On chicken soup: I'm sorry if you found the example offensive; I'm not out to offend. I didn't, and don't, claim that chicken soup is important for all Jews, just as I didn't, and don't, claim that meat is important for all foodies. I used the particular example of chicken soup (rather than any other food potentially important to any other religious group) because I was thinking about this paper -- https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10677-019-09978-6 -- in which a Jewish vegan philosopher reflects on the tensions that she herself experiences around chicken soup. Perhaps I should have included a link to the paper in the article.
On rights: No, I didn't provide a list of rights in this article. In my view, as I said, precisely which rights animals have will come down to their particular interests. But I'm not sure I fully understand your point about animals being created for human purposes. It's true that many domestic animals have been brought into existence solely because people want to use them for something. But that doesn't seem to be a very good argument for ignoring their interests. Equally (I borrow this argument from Robert Nozick) we wouldn't be impressed with someone who claimed that a child didn't have rights because this child had been brought into existence for some sinister purpose.
Do humans have an obligation to maintain domestic species even if we no longer find them useful as domestic species only exist because they are or were useful to humans? Humans may have different obligations to domestic animals than we have to wild animals.
I and probably the vast majority of people on this planet believe that a child has more rights than, for example, a chicken no matter how humanely we decide to treat that chicken. The operative word here is "humanely" because humans are the only species on earth with the ability to consciously decide how to treat a different species.
Your question about maintaining domestic species is a good (and difficult) one. I don't really have space to answer it here, but, in a sentence: I can't make sense of the idea that we have obligations to species (or breeds, or what-have-you), though we certainly can have obligations to individual animals to provide them with a decent home. Actually, I think that the chance to find a 'home' for animals is one of the advantages of the non-vegan food system I propose in the article above over a simple plant-based food system. (I go into this in some detail in my forthcoming book.)
I absolutely agree with you that humans may have different obligations to domesticated animals than wild animals, just as we may have (for example) different obligations to our family than to strangers. Indeed, that's the central thesis of my first book, but I didn't talk about it in this article, as I was more interested in exploring questions about future food systems.
I also agree with you (and I think I said this in the article above) that humans and chickens may have very different interests, and thus very different rights. The point of the child/chicken comparison in my previous reply was to challenge the suggestion (if this was your suggestion) that because we have created (say) a chicken we can choose to ignore her interests.
And I agree with you that, as far as we know, it's only humans who make conscious decisions about morality. But, again, I don't think that means that we can just choose to ignore the interests of others if it is convenient. Quite the opposite, I'd have thought.
An interesting, thoughtful, and provocative essay. In general, I agree with it, and look forward to science, technology, and the marketplace catching up with the demands of humanistic ethics. My only criticism of the essay is that I believe "libertarian" should replace his use of the term "liberal;" however, since the author is a political philosopher and I am not, then maybe my own understanding is deficient?
I understand 'liberalism' as capturing a wide range of political perspectives, some of which are very close to libertarianism, and some of which verge on the socialist. Naturally, then, when talking about liberalism in the abstract, we might sometimes sound like we're veering towards libertarianism. I champion a more expansive state than libertarians do, as well as more extensive array of rights, but I won't deny that I'm more sympathetic to libertarianism than some others!
Huemer, who I cite in the article above, is certainly a libertarian, as is Robert Nozick, another vegetarian philosopher about whom I've written. I think there's a lot to be said about animal rights and libertarianism, but that's for another time!
What are you comparing animal agriculture to? Animals are killed in the process of growing plants too. The farmer must kill all the animals that look to eat their crop. This can be rabbits, gophers, bugs, etc. This can be outright targeting, as in the case of the "gopher killer" weapon. Or it can be a pestiCIDE. Even the tilling will kill animals. And where are you getting the fertilizer from? My understanding is that a farmer either needs to use a fossil fuel based fertilizer or an animal based one. I heard James Cameron completely failed to find non-animal organic fertilizer that worked on his farm. Now he has a dairy farm. All that said, my point is that both animal and non-animal based agriculture are harmful to animals. It's all a question of degree. I'm a fan of regenerative agriculture, especially as practiced at White Oak Pastures. As for lab-grown meat, that's all a play for companies to patent and make what is otherwise a low profit margin food (such as meat) and turn it into something extremely profitable. It is also really unknown the health consequences on the human body. We have been eating meat for a long, long time. I'm not going to trust some $cience coming from a corporation that has a financial interest in supposedly "proving" their products are safe. Yeah, ok, and cigarettes are safe too because the tobacco industry funded science says so.
I agree with you that arable agriculture negatively impacts animals, and that we need to be asking questions about this. This might include championing less harmful forms of arable agriculture, and/or championing atypical forms of meat production (such as farming oysters). I've defended both of these things elsewhere.
However, the harm in arable agriculture is not a good argument for most forms of pastoral agriculture. Most forms of pastoral agriculture rely on arable agriculture to feed farmed animals, so concern for 'field deaths' actually provides further argument to move away from pastoral agriculture. One possible exception are certain limited forms of 'grass fed' beef. That's what Steven Davis defends (https://link.springer.com/article/10.1023/A:1025638030686). Of course, the kind of diet Davis is defending is basically vegan with a limited amount of beef. There's no room for pork, chicken, eggs, etc.
Unfortunately, Davis's argument doesn't really work, either. That's for several reasons, but the most important is that his numbers don't really add up. (A bunch of people have made this point. One of the earliest was Gaverick Matheny -- https://link.springer.com/article/10.1023/A:1026354906892.) If we're serious about reducing harm to animals, grass-fed beef doesn't seem particularly promising, either.
I'm not sure what to make of your scepticism about cultivated meat. Yes, there are people who hope to make a profit out of this, but if you think that there aren't already people making megabucks out of producing meat, you've been mislead. There are also lots of people in the cultivated meat space who are advocating open source science, precisely because they want to change the world for the better. I'm not saying the current cultivated meat industry is perfect, but I am saying that it could be part of deeply desirable vision for the future, and we've reason to hope it might be.
As for the safety of cultivated meat: Yes, there are more tests to be done and questions to be asked about safety, as there is for any new way to produce meat. (And let's be clear -- assuming a North American/Western European perspective -- that the meat we eat today, and the means we use to produce it, are very, very different from those prevalent even a century ago. And we certainly haven't been eating the QUANTITY of meat we eat today for very long at all. Beware of universalising our current practices.) But it sounds like you've already made your mind up your mind that cultivated meat isn't safe, and findings to the contrary are the result of motivated reasoning. I'm not really sure why you've done that, and not really sure how I can respond.
My cultivated meat argument is that it is very new. Feels like a frankenfood to me. Hence I am skeptical around putting it into my body. It is a bodily autonomy issue. Yes, people are making a buck off of meat, and they are inclined to increase the profit at the expense of the quality of the product. And yes, cows are fed grains. But again, that is why I'm pointing to regenerative agriculture as practiced at White Oak Pastures. My point only is that I could eat a grass fed steak from there and there could be fewer overall animal deaths in the production of that steak than the average "vegan" meal. In my opinion, veganism is too often focused on whether the food itself is an animal product, and *not* on how many animal deaths occurred to make that meal. I constantly hear vegans claim that their meal is cruelty free, when they have not done any checking to make sure all the food came from the highest standard vegan farm. To be honest, I am not even convinced one can make food without some form of animal product or death.
But it sounds to me like we are agreeing somewhat on grass-fed (and finished) beef.
I wish Matheny's paper were open-source. I'd rather not pay the $40 to read it. What is the argument? Is it a land problem?
As for quantity of meat eaten today, I believe the quantity varies widely historically based on location. Take the Maasai of Africa. They eat more meat TODAY than the average person in the U.S. does. I have seen vegetarian sources saying that Native Americans took in less than 2% of their overall calories from meat, but I would point out that it is a biased source of information, and that is assuming all Native American tribes ate the same. Sort of like the water arguments I hear from vegetarians, but then they neglect to remove the quantity of water that would have been used anyway. It is very easy to manipulate numbers and cherry pick.
My understanding is that eating meat is evolutionarily what allowed our brains to grow in size, due to the high density of calories. Do you agree? Or do you think there is an alternate story?
Thank you for taking the time to respond to me. Looking forward to learning more from your perspective.
I'm all for bodily autonomy. If you don't want to eat cultivated meat, I'm not going to say you should. But that doesn't change the fact that other meat products might be morally suspect, of course.
Again, I'm far from convinced that a steak from White Oak Pastures IS going to be more animal friendly than the 'average' vegan meal. If you're defining animal-friendly-ness in terms of animal deaths (too-simple, in my view, for a variety of reasons), we're going to have to crunch the numbers. But, as indicated in my last post, I sincerely doubt the steak is going to come out on top. Yes, vegans can fixate on whether there are animal products present, but this is often going to be a good heuristic for the number of animal deaths, at the very least! (Of course, the whole point of my article above is that I /don't/ think that veganism is the be-all and end-all.)
Sorry about the open source issue. I linked Matheny just because he did a bit of early number-crunching. Land use is certainly a factor; off the top of my head, one of Davis's mistakes that Matheny points out is that he assumes that the same amount of land is needed to produce grass-fed beef as is needed to produce protein-rich plant products -- but that's not true. Beef takes more land. (Like I say, this is from memory of Matheny's arguments.) But part of the trouble here is that it just isn't clear how many animals are killed to produce plant-based foods. (Here's an open-source version of the paper that convinced me of that latter point: https://philarchive.org/archive/FISFDI.)
It's absolutely right that the amount of meat historically eaten varies depending on location, time period, culture, class, etc. My only point is that it's very easy to imagine that how we do it now is how it has always been done, and thus that changing how we produce meat (e.g., switching to plant-based or cultivated meat) is to end tens of thousands of years of continuous practice. I don't think it's that simple.
And even if it was, so what? While we shouldn't be blind to history in our ethical reasoning, neither should we use history as a textbook. We collectively have gotten a lot of things wrong in the past. This includes some things that are now considered obviously wrong, but were mainstays incredibly recently. (I'll not give examples. I'm sure you can think of some.)
I don't really have a view on the 'meat made our brains big' argument, as I'm not an evolutionary biologist. But I suppose I must ask, with my ethicist hat on, 'so what?' Even if we did evolve in such-and-such a way because we were engaging in such-and-such a practice, that doesn't prove that the practice is something we should continue with today!
As for land use, are we not comparing apples and oranges? My understanding is that ruminant animals could be raised on land that we wouldn't be able to grow plants (for human consumption) on? Do you know if that's true?
The evolutionary arguments are just hints as to where we need to be careful. I believe there is very much a lack of epistemological humility in the sciences. Scientific papers are often treated like mathematical proofs! When in fact tomorrow's science will refute a significant portion of today's science. So I keep that evolutionary information in mind while skeptically looking through a lot of today's science.
Also, agreed we would need to crunch numbers on deaths and that's it not that simple anyway.
I guess overall we are agreeing there is nuance everywhere here. Thanks again!
Yes; it's definitely the case that ruminants can thrive on land that is not well-suited to typical forms of arable agriculture. Of course, that land could have non-agricultural uses, too. An obvious one is that it could be rewilded, which would have all kinds of benefits. (I'm thinking specifically of the sheep who are grazed on mountaintops here in the UK. Before human use, though, these mountains would have been forested. Reforesting large amounts of Britain could naturally have very postive impacts when in carbon terms.) But that's a side issue from the Davis/Matheny debate, which wasn't about effective land use as such, but about which forms of food production are less harmful to animals.
I agree about caution and epistemic humility. But it's a lack of caution and a lack of epistemic humility that's gotten us into the mess we are in today. Massive changes in our food systems and diets in the last century have massively increased the risk that we (humans and animals!) face from the likes of climate change and pandemics. (Between chatting to you, I've been reading Jeff Sebo's Saving Animals, Saving Ourselves, which makes this point very well.) Put simply, even people who don't give a jot about animals need to be thinking about how we can change our food system, given the impacts that it's having on humans. I'd like to see the kinds of things I'm talking about in the article above -- e.g., cellular agriculture -- a part of that conversation, too. Put simply, my proposals aren't JUST about animals. I'm trying to keep lots of factors in mind. But, of course, I can't prove that one envisioned food system is the all-things-considered best in the space of one article. I can't even do it in the space of a book -- but I can, hopefully, point down a path we could go down, and offer some reasons that we should want to.
I agreed that the goal of minimizing suffering to animals is a worthy one. But am skeptical that endowing them with human rights is the solution.
You highlight the "immense harm" that we "inflict upon animals" up to and including killing them. But I think we need to take a step back.
Trillions of animals are killed every year by other (nonhuman) animals. It is practically the nature of being an animal. They are not born with any inalienable right to not be killed. If anything their birthright is the opposite. The few at the top of food chains are the exception.
Failure to acknowledge this crucial context leads us down the road to utopian thinking, and in my view utopian thinking never fails to make things worse.
I agree that lots of animals are killed by other animals, and we could explore some challenging questions about this topic. But I don't really understand why you think this means that animals don't or can't have rights. Lots of humans are killed by non-humans, too: by wild animals, by extreme weather and natural disasters, by disease. We don't take that to mean that humans can't have rights.
To be clear, I am not arguing that we should typically stop wild animals from killing each other. Wild animals are not moral agents, and so are unable to violate rights. (Equally, we don't arrest babies if they bite people, even if I'd expect to be arrested if I bit you.) If a gazelle has a right not to be killed, that means that we cannot shoot the gazelle. It doesn't mean that lions can't hunt gazelles.
What I mean is their natural state is to be killed by other animals - whether human or non-human, I don't think it really matters. Such is the nature of life.
I wonder if you'd apply the same reasoning to other humans? Or does the 'natural state' of life only matter when it's animals we're talking about?
To be blunt: The natural isn't necessarily good -- the natural isn't necessarily right. This is obvious when it comes to our interactions with other humans. (A lot of classic works of politics, Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan being a paradigm example, have been explicitly about getting us OUT of a 'state of nature'.) But it's also the case when it comes to our interactions with other animals.
It may not be good or right, but animal predation on other animals is more than default - it is fundamental to the world and the cycle of life. Attempting to change such a thing is the sort of hubristic utopianism that always makes things worse, not better.
Yes, but viewed in the larger context one there is nothing inherently morally problematic about humans killing animals for food and other practical purposes, as far as I'm concerned.
The author starts from the position that animals have rights but does not identify what those rights are. Domestic animals are not free to be themselves since their only reason for "being" is to provide products for humans and, sometimes, other animals. Through generations of selective breeding, domestic animals cannot survive and reproduce without human intervention.
The overarching questions are: What rights do domestic animals have and are those rights "self evident" or granted solely by humans who breed them? Wild animals have the right to live as long as they can before they are killed by other animals, starve to death or die of some unpleasant disease. Alas, many humans on this planet are still living with only the same rights as wild animals.
I also found the use of the stereotype of Jews and chicken soup to be mildly offensive.
On chicken soup: I'm sorry if you found the example offensive; I'm not out to offend. I didn't, and don't, claim that chicken soup is important for all Jews, just as I didn't, and don't, claim that meat is important for all foodies. I used the particular example of chicken soup (rather than any other food potentially important to any other religious group) because I was thinking about this paper -- https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10677-019-09978-6 -- in which a Jewish vegan philosopher reflects on the tensions that she herself experiences around chicken soup. Perhaps I should have included a link to the paper in the article.
On rights: No, I didn't provide a list of rights in this article. In my view, as I said, precisely which rights animals have will come down to their particular interests. But I'm not sure I fully understand your point about animals being created for human purposes. It's true that many domestic animals have been brought into existence solely because people want to use them for something. But that doesn't seem to be a very good argument for ignoring their interests. Equally (I borrow this argument from Robert Nozick) we wouldn't be impressed with someone who claimed that a child didn't have rights because this child had been brought into existence for some sinister purpose.
Do humans have an obligation to maintain domestic species even if we no longer find them useful as domestic species only exist because they are or were useful to humans? Humans may have different obligations to domestic animals than we have to wild animals.
I and probably the vast majority of people on this planet believe that a child has more rights than, for example, a chicken no matter how humanely we decide to treat that chicken. The operative word here is "humanely" because humans are the only species on earth with the ability to consciously decide how to treat a different species.
Your question about maintaining domestic species is a good (and difficult) one. I don't really have space to answer it here, but, in a sentence: I can't make sense of the idea that we have obligations to species (or breeds, or what-have-you), though we certainly can have obligations to individual animals to provide them with a decent home. Actually, I think that the chance to find a 'home' for animals is one of the advantages of the non-vegan food system I propose in the article above over a simple plant-based food system. (I go into this in some detail in my forthcoming book.)
I absolutely agree with you that humans may have different obligations to domesticated animals than wild animals, just as we may have (for example) different obligations to our family than to strangers. Indeed, that's the central thesis of my first book, but I didn't talk about it in this article, as I was more interested in exploring questions about future food systems.
I also agree with you (and I think I said this in the article above) that humans and chickens may have very different interests, and thus very different rights. The point of the child/chicken comparison in my previous reply was to challenge the suggestion (if this was your suggestion) that because we have created (say) a chicken we can choose to ignore her interests.
And I agree with you that, as far as we know, it's only humans who make conscious decisions about morality. But, again, I don't think that means that we can just choose to ignore the interests of others if it is convenient. Quite the opposite, I'd have thought.
An interesting, thoughtful, and provocative essay. In general, I agree with it, and look forward to science, technology, and the marketplace catching up with the demands of humanistic ethics. My only criticism of the essay is that I believe "libertarian" should replace his use of the term "liberal;" however, since the author is a political philosopher and I am not, then maybe my own understanding is deficient?
Thank you; I appreciate the comment.
I understand 'liberalism' as capturing a wide range of political perspectives, some of which are very close to libertarianism, and some of which verge on the socialist. Naturally, then, when talking about liberalism in the abstract, we might sometimes sound like we're veering towards libertarianism. I champion a more expansive state than libertarians do, as well as more extensive array of rights, but I won't deny that I'm more sympathetic to libertarianism than some others!
Huemer, who I cite in the article above, is certainly a libertarian, as is Robert Nozick, another vegetarian philosopher about whom I've written. I think there's a lot to be said about animal rights and libertarianism, but that's for another time!
What are you comparing animal agriculture to? Animals are killed in the process of growing plants too. The farmer must kill all the animals that look to eat their crop. This can be rabbits, gophers, bugs, etc. This can be outright targeting, as in the case of the "gopher killer" weapon. Or it can be a pestiCIDE. Even the tilling will kill animals. And where are you getting the fertilizer from? My understanding is that a farmer either needs to use a fossil fuel based fertilizer or an animal based one. I heard James Cameron completely failed to find non-animal organic fertilizer that worked on his farm. Now he has a dairy farm. All that said, my point is that both animal and non-animal based agriculture are harmful to animals. It's all a question of degree. I'm a fan of regenerative agriculture, especially as practiced at White Oak Pastures. As for lab-grown meat, that's all a play for companies to patent and make what is otherwise a low profit margin food (such as meat) and turn it into something extremely profitable. It is also really unknown the health consequences on the human body. We have been eating meat for a long, long time. I'm not going to trust some $cience coming from a corporation that has a financial interest in supposedly "proving" their products are safe. Yeah, ok, and cigarettes are safe too because the tobacco industry funded science says so.
I agree with you that arable agriculture negatively impacts animals, and that we need to be asking questions about this. This might include championing less harmful forms of arable agriculture, and/or championing atypical forms of meat production (such as farming oysters). I've defended both of these things elsewhere.
However, the harm in arable agriculture is not a good argument for most forms of pastoral agriculture. Most forms of pastoral agriculture rely on arable agriculture to feed farmed animals, so concern for 'field deaths' actually provides further argument to move away from pastoral agriculture. One possible exception are certain limited forms of 'grass fed' beef. That's what Steven Davis defends (https://link.springer.com/article/10.1023/A:1025638030686). Of course, the kind of diet Davis is defending is basically vegan with a limited amount of beef. There's no room for pork, chicken, eggs, etc.
Unfortunately, Davis's argument doesn't really work, either. That's for several reasons, but the most important is that his numbers don't really add up. (A bunch of people have made this point. One of the earliest was Gaverick Matheny -- https://link.springer.com/article/10.1023/A:1026354906892.) If we're serious about reducing harm to animals, grass-fed beef doesn't seem particularly promising, either.
I'm not sure what to make of your scepticism about cultivated meat. Yes, there are people who hope to make a profit out of this, but if you think that there aren't already people making megabucks out of producing meat, you've been mislead. There are also lots of people in the cultivated meat space who are advocating open source science, precisely because they want to change the world for the better. I'm not saying the current cultivated meat industry is perfect, but I am saying that it could be part of deeply desirable vision for the future, and we've reason to hope it might be.
As for the safety of cultivated meat: Yes, there are more tests to be done and questions to be asked about safety, as there is for any new way to produce meat. (And let's be clear -- assuming a North American/Western European perspective -- that the meat we eat today, and the means we use to produce it, are very, very different from those prevalent even a century ago. And we certainly haven't been eating the QUANTITY of meat we eat today for very long at all. Beware of universalising our current practices.) But it sounds like you've already made your mind up your mind that cultivated meat isn't safe, and findings to the contrary are the result of motivated reasoning. I'm not really sure why you've done that, and not really sure how I can respond.
My cultivated meat argument is that it is very new. Feels like a frankenfood to me. Hence I am skeptical around putting it into my body. It is a bodily autonomy issue. Yes, people are making a buck off of meat, and they are inclined to increase the profit at the expense of the quality of the product. And yes, cows are fed grains. But again, that is why I'm pointing to regenerative agriculture as practiced at White Oak Pastures. My point only is that I could eat a grass fed steak from there and there could be fewer overall animal deaths in the production of that steak than the average "vegan" meal. In my opinion, veganism is too often focused on whether the food itself is an animal product, and *not* on how many animal deaths occurred to make that meal. I constantly hear vegans claim that their meal is cruelty free, when they have not done any checking to make sure all the food came from the highest standard vegan farm. To be honest, I am not even convinced one can make food without some form of animal product or death.
But it sounds to me like we are agreeing somewhat on grass-fed (and finished) beef.
I wish Matheny's paper were open-source. I'd rather not pay the $40 to read it. What is the argument? Is it a land problem?
As for quantity of meat eaten today, I believe the quantity varies widely historically based on location. Take the Maasai of Africa. They eat more meat TODAY than the average person in the U.S. does. I have seen vegetarian sources saying that Native Americans took in less than 2% of their overall calories from meat, but I would point out that it is a biased source of information, and that is assuming all Native American tribes ate the same. Sort of like the water arguments I hear from vegetarians, but then they neglect to remove the quantity of water that would have been used anyway. It is very easy to manipulate numbers and cherry pick.
My understanding is that eating meat is evolutionarily what allowed our brains to grow in size, due to the high density of calories. Do you agree? Or do you think there is an alternate story?
Thank you for taking the time to respond to me. Looking forward to learning more from your perspective.
I'm all for bodily autonomy. If you don't want to eat cultivated meat, I'm not going to say you should. But that doesn't change the fact that other meat products might be morally suspect, of course.
Again, I'm far from convinced that a steak from White Oak Pastures IS going to be more animal friendly than the 'average' vegan meal. If you're defining animal-friendly-ness in terms of animal deaths (too-simple, in my view, for a variety of reasons), we're going to have to crunch the numbers. But, as indicated in my last post, I sincerely doubt the steak is going to come out on top. Yes, vegans can fixate on whether there are animal products present, but this is often going to be a good heuristic for the number of animal deaths, at the very least! (Of course, the whole point of my article above is that I /don't/ think that veganism is the be-all and end-all.)
Sorry about the open source issue. I linked Matheny just because he did a bit of early number-crunching. Land use is certainly a factor; off the top of my head, one of Davis's mistakes that Matheny points out is that he assumes that the same amount of land is needed to produce grass-fed beef as is needed to produce protein-rich plant products -- but that's not true. Beef takes more land. (Like I say, this is from memory of Matheny's arguments.) But part of the trouble here is that it just isn't clear how many animals are killed to produce plant-based foods. (Here's an open-source version of the paper that convinced me of that latter point: https://philarchive.org/archive/FISFDI.)
It's absolutely right that the amount of meat historically eaten varies depending on location, time period, culture, class, etc. My only point is that it's very easy to imagine that how we do it now is how it has always been done, and thus that changing how we produce meat (e.g., switching to plant-based or cultivated meat) is to end tens of thousands of years of continuous practice. I don't think it's that simple.
And even if it was, so what? While we shouldn't be blind to history in our ethical reasoning, neither should we use history as a textbook. We collectively have gotten a lot of things wrong in the past. This includes some things that are now considered obviously wrong, but were mainstays incredibly recently. (I'll not give examples. I'm sure you can think of some.)
I don't really have a view on the 'meat made our brains big' argument, as I'm not an evolutionary biologist. But I suppose I must ask, with my ethicist hat on, 'so what?' Even if we did evolve in such-and-such a way because we were engaging in such-and-such a practice, that doesn't prove that the practice is something we should continue with today!
This is all great info. Thank you.
As for land use, are we not comparing apples and oranges? My understanding is that ruminant animals could be raised on land that we wouldn't be able to grow plants (for human consumption) on? Do you know if that's true?
The evolutionary arguments are just hints as to where we need to be careful. I believe there is very much a lack of epistemological humility in the sciences. Scientific papers are often treated like mathematical proofs! When in fact tomorrow's science will refute a significant portion of today's science. So I keep that evolutionary information in mind while skeptically looking through a lot of today's science.
Also, agreed we would need to crunch numbers on deaths and that's it not that simple anyway.
I guess overall we are agreeing there is nuance everywhere here. Thanks again!
Yes; it's definitely the case that ruminants can thrive on land that is not well-suited to typical forms of arable agriculture. Of course, that land could have non-agricultural uses, too. An obvious one is that it could be rewilded, which would have all kinds of benefits. (I'm thinking specifically of the sheep who are grazed on mountaintops here in the UK. Before human use, though, these mountains would have been forested. Reforesting large amounts of Britain could naturally have very postive impacts when in carbon terms.) But that's a side issue from the Davis/Matheny debate, which wasn't about effective land use as such, but about which forms of food production are less harmful to animals.
I agree about caution and epistemic humility. But it's a lack of caution and a lack of epistemic humility that's gotten us into the mess we are in today. Massive changes in our food systems and diets in the last century have massively increased the risk that we (humans and animals!) face from the likes of climate change and pandemics. (Between chatting to you, I've been reading Jeff Sebo's Saving Animals, Saving Ourselves, which makes this point very well.) Put simply, even people who don't give a jot about animals need to be thinking about how we can change our food system, given the impacts that it's having on humans. I'd like to see the kinds of things I'm talking about in the article above -- e.g., cellular agriculture -- a part of that conversation, too. Put simply, my proposals aren't JUST about animals. I'm trying to keep lots of factors in mind. But, of course, I can't prove that one envisioned food system is the all-things-considered best in the space of one article. I can't even do it in the space of a book -- but I can, hopefully, point down a path we could go down, and offer some reasons that we should want to.
Anyway, yes, good to talk to you!
I agreed that the goal of minimizing suffering to animals is a worthy one. But am skeptical that endowing them with human rights is the solution.
You highlight the "immense harm" that we "inflict upon animals" up to and including killing them. But I think we need to take a step back.
Trillions of animals are killed every year by other (nonhuman) animals. It is practically the nature of being an animal. They are not born with any inalienable right to not be killed. If anything their birthright is the opposite. The few at the top of food chains are the exception.
Failure to acknowledge this crucial context leads us down the road to utopian thinking, and in my view utopian thinking never fails to make things worse.
I agree that lots of animals are killed by other animals, and we could explore some challenging questions about this topic. But I don't really understand why you think this means that animals don't or can't have rights. Lots of humans are killed by non-humans, too: by wild animals, by extreme weather and natural disasters, by disease. We don't take that to mean that humans can't have rights.
To be clear, I am not arguing that we should typically stop wild animals from killing each other. Wild animals are not moral agents, and so are unable to violate rights. (Equally, we don't arrest babies if they bite people, even if I'd expect to be arrested if I bit you.) If a gazelle has a right not to be killed, that means that we cannot shoot the gazelle. It doesn't mean that lions can't hunt gazelles.
What I mean is their natural state is to be killed by other animals - whether human or non-human, I don't think it really matters. Such is the nature of life.
I wonder if you'd apply the same reasoning to other humans? Or does the 'natural state' of life only matter when it's animals we're talking about?
To be blunt: The natural isn't necessarily good -- the natural isn't necessarily right. This is obvious when it comes to our interactions with other humans. (A lot of classic works of politics, Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan being a paradigm example, have been explicitly about getting us OUT of a 'state of nature'.) But it's also the case when it comes to our interactions with other animals.
It may not be good or right, but animal predation on other animals is more than default - it is fundamental to the world and the cycle of life. Attempting to change such a thing is the sort of hubristic utopianism that always makes things worse, not better.
Again, I'm not attempting to change such a thing. I am talking about humans killing animals, not animals killing each other.
Yes, but viewed in the larger context one there is nothing inherently morally problematic about humans killing animals for food and other practical purposes, as far as I'm concerned.