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07/08/11 11.52
Why the Top Priority of Vegans Should be Human Extinction, Not Veganism
If you dont want to die, dont be born! Child soldiers in Johnny Mad Dog. In Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming Into Existence, lovable curmudgeon David Benatar argues that life always contains suffering and death and so we cause An ex-vegan on veganism. By Rhys Southan letthemeatmeat [ at ] gmail [ dot ] [ com ]. unnecessary harm by having children. Harm is only possible through existence, and though life contains pleasures, the good almost never outweighs the bad. And even if it does, its still a harm to be born, because life will inevitably contain some suffering, whereas non-existence contains no suffering and yet the lack of pleasures cannot be missed by the non-existent. It is always wrong, then, to bring harm-experiencing beings into existence. If pregnant, please abort. The problem and solution, as Benatar sees them, are clear-cut: Although sentience is a later evolutionary development and is a more complex state of being than insentience, it is far from clear that it is a better state of being. This is because sentient existence comes at a significant cost. In being able to experience, sentient beings are able to, and do, experience unpleasantness. (2) In the ordinary course of events [parents] will experience only some of the bad in their childrens and possibly grandchildrens lives (because these offspring usually survive their progenitors), but beneath the surface of the current generations lurk increasingly larger numbers of descendents and their misfortunes. Assuming that each couple has three children, an original pairs cumulative descendants over ten generations amounts to 88,572 people. That constitutes a lot of pointless and avoidable suffering. (6 - 7) Is existence really so bad? In case youre not convinced, Benatar succinctly describes the mundane tortures that inevitably befall any unwitting human thrust into life on this overrated, loathsome orb: As a matter of fact, bad things happen to all of us. No life is without hardship. It is easy to think of the millions who live a life of poverty or of those who live much of their lives with some disability. Some of us are lucky enough to be spared these fates, but most of us who are, nonetheless suffer ill-health at some stage during our lives. Often the suffering is excruciating, even if it is in our final days. Some are condemned by nature to years of frailty. We all face death. We infrequently contemplate the harms that await any newborn childpain, disappointment, anxiety, grief, and death. For any given child we cannot predict what form these harms will take or how severe they will be, but we can be sure that at least some of them will occur. None of this befalls the non-existent. Only existers suffer harm. (29) [W]e tend to ignore just how much of our lives is characterized by negative mental states, even if often only relatively mildly negative ones. Consider, for example, conditions causing negative mental states daily or more often. These include hunger, thirst, bowel and bladder distension (as these organs become filled), tiredness, stress, thermal discomfort (that is, feeling either too hot or too cold), and itch. For billions of people, at least some of these discomforts are chronic. These people cannot relieve their hunger, escape the cold, or avoid the stress. However, even those who can find some relief do not do so immediately or perfectly, and thus experience them to some extent every day. In fact, if we think about it, significant periods of each day are marked by some or other of these states. For example, unless one is eating and drinking so regularly as to prevent hunger and thirst or countering them as they arise, one is likely hungry and thirsty for a few hours a day. Unless one is lying about all day, one is probably tired for a substantial portion of ones waking life. How often does one feel neither too hot nor too cold, but exactly right? (71 72). Boy he sure left out a lot. Nevertheless, its safe to say that Benatar does not look on the bright side of life. He believes that even an impossibly charmed life in which everything is orgasmic pleasure save for a single pinprick is worse than never coming into existence, because the non-existent can neither experience pain nor lament lost pleasure. What intrigues me about his anti-natalism, besides that its outrageous and I love his chutzpah, is that this is the exact argument vegans make when they criticize humane animal farming on suffering reduction grounds. Veganism seeks to reduce demand for animal products so that fewer (and ideally zero) farm animals are born. The idea is that we do a disservice to these animals by bringing them into existence even if its the best kind of humane farming and the animals are treated well and killed painlessly since their lives include suffering and then death. When vegans talk about humanely raised animal products, they may admit that it is at least slightly better than factory farming, but they tend to be like Benatar and focus on the harms. Even if the animals get to wander around, play and eat a natural diet, and are eventually killed painlessly, such a life is worse than never coming into being. While humane farm life may be relatively pleasant overall, the incidents of suffering farm animals often face branding, dehorning, the separation of the calf from the mother, castration, artificial insemination, and early death hopelessly taint the life beyond
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are going to suffer only a little then be killed before their natural lifespan is up, they just shouldnt have been born. Fair enough, but when vegans use any amount of suffering to disqualify the legitimacy of bringing a life into existence, this creates some unintended philosophical consequences. If they are going to be so strict about any amount of suffering ruling out the desirability of starting a life, their priority shouldnt be merely the end of animal farming their priority should be ending humans. There are a few reasons for this. One is that even the self-proclaimed ethical humans cause more suffering than even the most unrepentant carnivore species. As Benatar says: Although the arguments I have advanced have not been misanthropic, there is a superb misanthropic argument against having children and in favour of human extinction. This argument rests on the indisputable premiss that humans cause colossal amounts of sufferingboth for humans and for non-human animals. In Chapter 3, I provided a brief sketch of the kind of suffering humans inflict on one another. In addition to this, they are the cause of untold suffering to other species. Each year, humans inflict suffering on billions of animals that are reared and killed for food and other commodities or used in scientific research. Then there is the suffering inflicted on those animals whose habitat is destroyed by encroaching humans, the suffering caused to animals by pollution and other environmental degradation, and the gratuitous suffering inflicted out of pure malice. Although there are many non-human speciesespecially carnivoresthat also cause a lot of suffering, humans have the unfortunate distinction of being the most destructive and harmful species on earth. The amount of suffering in the world could be radically reduced if there were no more humans. (223 224) Some vegans already agree with Benatar here and wish for the extinction of humans for the sake of other animals. But even these vegans are overlooking another reason for wanting the end of humans; its not just that humans cause more suffering than other animals they also suffer more. If vegans believe that the life of a humanely raised farm animal is not worth living because of the sufferings endured, then we especially shouldnt be bringing humans to life, since we suffer even more.
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Most vegan philosophers provide a survival exemption to veganism, allowing for the consumption of animal products when human life immediately depends on it. Their justification for this apparent discrepancy is that human lives are richer than the lives of other animals, since we have a greater appreciation for nuance and a wider variety of pleasures. In other words, our lives are more complicated and thus better. The problem with this is the flipside: due to our complexity and wider range of potential experiences,
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humans also endure a greater variety of sufferings than other animals do. So why do vegans generally believe that the pleasures humans experience outweigh our sufferings and make our lives worth starting, but the same is not true for animals humanely raised for food? Clearly there comes a point when life has too much suffering to be worth experiencing, but if life and death on a humane farm goes beyond the tolerable suffering threshold, then life as a modern human must too. Is life worthwhile if it includes suffering and ends in death? If the answer is no, we shouldnt be raising animals for food, but then we shouldnt be raising humans either. No doubt it hurts like hell to be castrated as a young pig. But is it that much more painful and scary than being circumcised or getting vaccinations? Maybe so, but after that early agony, pigs on humanely raised farms are likely to have a relatively tranquil life that is free of major pains and anxieties, and then theyre ideally killed before they know what is happening to them, without ever having to suffer much if any stress about their mortality. Humans dont have it so easy. An oyster doesnt suffer because it is so simple an organism; humans suffer the most because we are perhaps the most complex animal organism. From a suffering reduction paradigm, the more complex you are, the greater your suffering and the harder it is to justify your existence. Benatar provides the general outlines of human misery, but Im surprised he didnt devote an entire chapter to all the bad things most lives contain. Sit down and think about your past for a minute or two and a chapter like that writes itself. Here are just a few of the standard unpleasantries I can think of that even the most privileged humans face, some of them shared by other animals, but many of them unique to humans: Work suffering. Being out of work, having a job you hate, tedium, stress, lamenting disregarded ambitions, wasted time, fears of not being productive or good enough and being fired, identity suppression to fit in the work culture, resenting others for getting away with doing less than you, the drive to be successful and impress your peers,
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Relationship suffering. Unrequited love or lust, the passion paradox, sexual frustration or disappointment, being stuck in an unhappy relationship, STDs, long distance woes, jealousy, fears that the person you love will leave you or cheat on you, discovering lies, mutually waning love, getting dumped, feeling guilty for dumping someone, unwanted pregnancies, depression over miscarriages, post-partum depression, sleepless nights as parents, terror that something will happen to your child or that your child will misbehave, getting divorced, having parents who get divorced. Most other animals experience sexual frustration, and cats sometimes fall prey to the passion paradox, becoming more clingy and desperate the more you ignore them. And sometimes dogs can develop separation anxiety. But the rest of these are more or less human problems.
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Pain. Minor injuries like slamming your finger in a door, severe injuries from accidents or attacks, throwing up, colds, chronic sicknesses, menstrual cramps, headaches, migraines, cluster headaches, burns, puncture wounds, the emergencies that bring you to the doctor, the treatments themselves, going to the dentist, the pain of growing a baby inside of you, having the baby, passing a kidney stone, fracturing limbs, bruising your tailbone, aging, paper cuts. Its likely that animals are about even with us on this one, except that they are less likely to have psychological scars from especially traumatic pain experiences. Violence. Rape, murder, assault and fear of all of these. Animals certainly experience violence, but for them violence would go under the heading of pain, because for humanely raised farm animals, violence is most relevant as a visceral unpleasant momentary experience. Vegans sometimes call it rape when animals such as cows are artificially inseminated, but cows hardly seem to notice this as it is happening, and it certainly does not cause the long-lasting trauma that rape does for humans. Animals experience fear too, but they are less likely to experience chronic fear at the contemplation of something disturbing. Fear for animals usually means reacting to immediate threatening stimuli that they need to escape. On humane farms, this should not be a common occurrence. Self-esteem suffering. Feeling inadequate, ugly, unloved, stupid or worthless; regrets about decisions you made in the past and worries about the future. Animals can feel unloved, but probably dont experience the rest of these. Self-determination infringement suffering. Structural injustice, inequality, oppression,
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patriarchy, racism, sexism, homophobia, ableism, dirty subversives threatening straight marriage and Christmas (j/k), immigration restrictions, addiction, bullying, the freedom curtailments that come with voluntary responsibilities such as parenthood, feeling a need to conform to societys expectations, fear that the wrong people are in power and will restrict your freedoms, prison, religious demands, onerous societal or governmental restrictions, over-controlling parents, ideological summer camps, compulsory education. Just because there is not a visible fence around most of us most of the time does not mean that humans feel freer than animals on humane farms do. Other animals dont need as much freedom as we usually require to be happy because they have simpler and fewer needs. The typical humanely raised animal is probably more content with their level of freedom than the typical human living in a country such as The United States or The Netherlands. At least animals dont torture themselves by reading news stories about ideological opponents making laws they dont like, or by contemplating freer animals elsewhere. Vegans point to calves sent to auction or slaughter, and the stress they feel while being transported to a new location. But what human has not felt the stress of an uncomfortable transportation experience to a location that fills them with anxiety?
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Vegans dont like that cows are impregnated every year to keep them lactating. But is that any worse than being a woman in a religious community who is expected to produce as many children as she possibly can? Vegans also dont like that calves are separated from their mothers and confined while they are being weaned. But this is a minor inconvenience compared to separating human children from their parents on the first day of Kindergarten or, god forbid, pre-school, to initiate the next 12 years of their lives confined to a desk, in which they will be forced to memorize and re-hash information they care little about, with summers being the only reprieves, since homework keeps them chained to their desks at night. The suffering unto death. Losing a pet, losing a loved one, losing yourself; also, contemplating all these inevitable future instances of death, and the related existential
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on a humane farm, and humans often get to live to the natural end of their lives which vegans take as the gold standard for the best possible death its far from clear that death by murder is worse for other animals than death by all means (including natural causes) is for humans.
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When vegans are disturbed by an animals early demise, theyre projecting their fears about human death onto animals who dont have the same neurosis about non-existence. Even though most humans arent murdered, every aspect of death is more brutal for us. Animals dont know what their natural lifespan is, and they dont have to worry about living long enough to accomplish their goals. Surely death by common non-murderous causes like cancer or heart attacks is worse for humans than it is for an animal to die of slaughter. Even a human dying of old age has more to fret about than a slaughtered animal who has no concept of death or desire to see their great grandchildren grow up.
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Living long as a human means seeing loved ones die, an experience that hits humans harder than it does other animals. We never know how we are going to die, so even if it will be of old age, we still spend plenty of time worrying that we will die another way, or that someone we love will die before us. Even though farm animals are the ones guaranteed to die at the hands of someone else, humans stress themselves about this possibility far more than other animals do. Entering the slaughterhouse can be frightening for animals because they are in strange new surroundings, and sometimes they realize that something bad is going to happen, but this is nothing compared to the lifetime humans spend dreading the end. Keep this in mind before you have kids, vegans you are bringing a being into this world whose confrontation with the inevitability of death will be far worse than what any animal
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experiences at slaughter. Humans do at least have religion to counter the sense of existential despair that often accompanies mortality and living in an apparently meaningless world, but this is an imperfect solution to a problem that other animals simply dont have.
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Its not only that humans have to endure more kinds of suffering than humanely raised farm animals do. Even worse is that the bad things that happen to us linger longer. Humans are natures most neurotic creations. We may have invented Buddhism, but were not the most natural practitioners of it. Mother cows are said to moo sadly when their calves are taken from them, but this only lasts for a few days. Human parents suffer more by sending their children to college; if parents were to actually lose a child, they might be wrecked for the rest of their lives. Some may object that Im overlooking the cheerier aspects of human life. Well of course I am, but vegans do the same thing when they condemn humane animal farming by focusing on the worst bits. However, even if its agreed that humans suffer more and in more ways than humanely raised farm animals, there is still the question of whether humans have a greater and richer variety of pleasures to enjoy and whether this high-end pleasure explains why its okay to bring humans but not domesticated animals into existence. Even though humans have potential to enjoy a greater variety of pleasures than animals do, in many cases it is other animals who are better positioned to enjoy the pleasures of life. Humans often undercut the nice things they have through contemplation of the transitory nature of good things. Sex and food are overloaded with caveats for humans; its unlikely that other animals worry about getting fat or unhealthy because of what they eat, or feel moral guilt or regret about their food choices or who they sleep with. What animal other than a human would watch a gorgeous sunset and worry about an email they need to write? Vegans say that the pleasure of eating animal products is fleeting, and not nearly sustained enough to compensate for the suffering that animals endure. If all pleasure were ranked against suffering in that way, it would all fall short of defeating the avalanche of suffering in the world. By this standard, even love, with its comforting, slow, relatively consistent release of joy, isnt enough to make up for all the heartbreak, unhappy relationships, sexual frustration, jealousy, betrayals, dissatisfaction, boredom and waning passion we face on the way to love or after it. It seems highly implausible, then, that the balance is tipped toward suffering for humanely raised animals and toward pleasure for humans. The vegan suffering reduction argument also has major implications for wild animals. In The Importance of Wild-Animal Suffering, an anonymous utilitarian writes: The number of wild animals vastly exceeds that of animals on factory farms, in
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You dont agree with how mainstream veganism is often practiced. What do you believe is wrong with the standard consumer veganism that the most mainstream
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practically as an economic boycott, socially as a privileged consumerism, and philosophically as an equivocation with a vegetarian lifestyle.
Practically, positioning veganism as an economic boycott is a very limited tactic given the prevalence of global capitalism. Mainstream veganism only addresses the content (i.e. animal products) and not the form/structure (i.e. capitalism) of the global market that facilitates the exploitation of animals as commodities and obstructs people from transforming society. This is evident in several ways. First, many mainstream vegans tend to regard the very culprits of animal exploitation as the remedy. Veganism is now sold to people in the form of products (sometimes explicitly labeled vegan) by the very corporations (i.e. Kraft, Dean, Con-Agra, Burger King, etc.) that exist and profit off the exploitation of animals. Second, even if consumer vegans extend their boycott from the individual product consumed to the company who profits from it, without also challenging the present political-economic order of capitalism in which the interests of corporations persistently trump the interests of the general public, vegans remain complicit in the system that entitles businesses to exploit animal others (and human others as well). If consumer vegans were able to make significant dents in the national market, all this will be reversed by the rise of the affluent animal-eating class in the developing world to whom animals raised nationally will be exported, orin a race to the bottom to where the industry will be exported, displacing farmers and wildlife and externalizing production costs upon their communities. Third, veganism as an economic boycott does not even universally empower people to practice a wholly vegetarian diet. Since wholesome food is presently regarded as a commodity rather than a socio-political right, large populations of disadvantaged people who have little to no financial and/or geographic access to vegetarian food and goods are thus are severely disadvantaged from living a secure vegetarian lifestyle. In sum, mainstream vegan discourse and activisms focus on economic boycott is problematic, not because it is ineffective, but because it is insufficient. Without challenging the political, economic and social structure of society, veganism as a movement will make little progress reducing and abolishing animal exploitation. If vegans are sincere about creating a vegan society, veganism ought to be a social space to which people are generously provided access. Veganism will have limited success so long as it remains a luxury reserved for those with privilege, independent of human liberation movements. Socially, what is so troublesome about understanding veganism as primarily an abstention from the consumption of animal products is that it facilitates a number of objectionable social practices: self-righteousness, identity politics, maliciousness, colonialism, classism, and privileged consumerism. These objections to veganism, however, are not universal to all vegan practices. That veganism has been a medium for such unfavorable sociality is due to veganism being understood as a single-issue to which all other social movements are subordinated, backgrounded, or separated. For instance, consumer vegans are often content calling their food or products cruelty-free, even as human animals are exploited and tormented during the production. While I do think most mainstream vegans have very good intentions, the effects of some of their actions and discourse alienate potential allies. There needs to be a shift away from individual consumption to social relations. A politics of alliance that addresses the social structures of oppression in which the degradation of human and animal others are interrelated offers a more promising dialogical medium for vegan advocacy. Philosophically, when veganism is reduced to personal consumption or political action it becomes an instrument of morality rather than an ethics itself. If veganism is primarily a lifestyle that concerns nothing other than (an abstention from) consumption, then veganism is nothing more than a proper extension of or purification of vegetarianism: veganism is simply a vegetarian lifestyle. It logically follows that, if veganism is the moral baseline, that ones consumption is the only qualification for being vegan, then one can very well be a speciesist vegan. This may sound peculiar because it is. According to Ida Hammer, veganism is no accident. Veganism is a revolutionary praxis: an anti-oppression framework that views the abolition of animal exploitation as part of a wider struggle for social justice and leads to a way of life (or lifestyle) that is based on noncooperation with, and divestment from, exploitation. Hammers liberation and antioppression discourse is notably different from Francione and Singers discourse on suffering and equality. Francione fails to recognize how the principles and rights he advocates have not even stopped humans from being oppressed. For instance, AfroAmericans may have been emancipated from slavery, however a new institution was created, the prison-industrial-complex, to place them back into bondage. Hammer explains that [t]he property status of other animals is just one piece of the structure of human supremacy, just as human slavery was just one piece of the structure of White supremacy.
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Veganism is Not the Lifestyle of Least Harm, and Intent Does Nothing For Animals
In 2003, Steven Davis wrote a paper called, The Least Harm Principle May Require That Humans Consume a Diet Containing Large Herbivores, Not a Vegan Diet. As you might have guessed from the title, the paper intended to show that a diet including ruminant animals fed on grass would kill fewer animals than a diet based purely on vegan agriculture. Davis wrote: [A] vegan diet doesnt necessarily mean a diet that doesnt interfere in the lives of animals. In fact, production of corn, beans, rice, etc. kills many animals as this paper will document. So, in 1999, I sent an email to [animal rights philosopher Tom] Regan, pointing this out to him. Then I asked him, What is the morally relevant difference between the animals of the field and those of the farm that makes it acceptable to kill some of them (field mice, etc.) so that humans may eat, but not acceptable to kill others (pigs, etc.) so we may eat? His reply (Regan, 1999, personal communication) was that we must choose the method of food production that causes the least harm to animals. (I will refer to this concept as The Least Harm Principle or LHP.) In his book, Regan (1983) calls this the minimize harm principle and he describes it in the following way: Whenever we find ourselves in a situation where all the options at hand will produce some harm to those who are innocent, we must choose that option that will result in the least total sum of harm. Production of forages, such as pasture-based forages, would cause less harm to field animals (kill fewer) than intensive crop production systems typically used to produce food for a vegan diet. This is because pasture forage production requires fewer passages through the field with tractors and other farm equipment. The killing of animals of the field would be further reduced if herbivorous animals (ruminants like cattle) were used to harvest the forage and convert it into meat and dairy products. Would such production systems cause less harm to the field animals? Again, accurate numbers arent available comparing the number of animals of the field that are killed with these different cropping systems, but The predominant feeling among wildlife ecologists is that no-till agriculture will have broadly positive effects on mammalian wildlife populations (Wooley et al., 1984). Pasture-forage production, with herbivores harvesting the forage, would be the ultimate in no-till agriculture. Because of the low numbers of times that equipment would be needed to grow and harvest pasture forages it would be reasonable to estimate that the pasture-forage model may reduce animal deaths by 50% or more. In other words, only 7.5 animals of the field per ha would die to produce pasture forages as compared to the intensive cropping system (15/ha) used to produce a vegan diet. The specific numbers that Davis concocted at the end of that passage after conceding that there was no way to calculate the true numbers ended up sabotaging what would otherwise have been a salient point. He seems to have been so sure that hed won this argument that he was happy to estimate that raising animals on pasture still kills plenty of wild animals. Hey, why not? Industrial agriculture kills twice as many, so the meaties totally have this one in the bag, right? Wrong, responded Jason Gaverick Matheny. Matheny, who is now a leader in the movement to create lab-grown meat, wrote a rebuttal called, Least Harm: A Defense of Vegetarianism From Steven Daviss Omnivorous Proposal, a paper vegans cite to close the case on Davis objections, and deem this issue dead and buried. In his paper, Matheny pointed out an error in Davis calculations. Davis wasnt savvy enough to say that the ruminant animals should be raised only on marginal land not suited for crop growth. This
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Extravagance provides some insight into why some people might prefer to farm livestock,
even with the greater risk: In his diatribe against vegan agriculture, the late Mark Purdey (best known for identifying a link between BSE and organophosphates) described how he started in agriculture under the great expanse of striated sky of the fenlands, working thousands of bleak acres of vegetables: The farm workforce clearly felt estranged from what was once their indigenous native landscape. These labourers resented the fact that a mono-arable/vegetable system of farming had been installed two decades ago after a change in the lands ownership. This had left many of their former workmates jobless whilst those remaining felt divorced from an aspect of management or relationship with their work I, too, rapidly found myself unable to form any working relationship with this treeless prairescape of sterile inorganic moondust. Disillusioned, I left my friends on the fens behind. Upon arrival in the West Country, I quickly found my niche within the mixed, small farming landscape. Livestock pumped the economic heartbeat that enabled these smaller farms to survive. My first job was to muck out the yearlings house and I remember experiencing an innate sense of wholeness the first time I watched a shower of dung being flail-fountained out of the back of the muckspreader; fertile fodder. All of the farms and their staff seemed vibrant with the ethereal relationship flowing between the soil, the crops, the livestock and the landscape. A mixed farming system provides more natural landscape than pure arable farming, is less mechanized, and gives humans greater contact with nature. Why should this be so? The answer is that mixed farming, like nature, is complex, whereas pure arable farming (whether it be for animals in feedlots or for vegans in cities) removes an entire order of creation from the system. Moreover it is the order which is closest to humanity, which gallops and gives birth and suckles, which feels pain and anger and joy. Famers talk to their animals and give names to them, perhaps not to all of them but almost always to some of them. What vegetable farmer ever gave a name to a cabbage? (220 - 222) Its doubtful that one could write such a glowing tribute to describe the beauty of chopping at the screaming, half-conscious cows in an industrial-style slaughterhouse, but the standard slaughterhouse of today is not what the omnivore opposition to a purely vegan answer wants. For one thing, in a Davis-style omnivorism, or an omnivorism where animals are primarily raised on non-arable land, there would be far fewer animals to slaughter, and less of a need to rush the job through an assembly line. Most slaughterhouse jobs are miserable, and hardly anybody would choose to work in one if they had connections, an MBA and a limitless trust fund. But smaller scale and more wholesome slaughtering jobs do exist, and that sector is growing as omnivores start thinking more about where their food comes from. Larrys Custom Meats is a slaughterhouse that seems like a good model. (I defy anyone to watch this video and not beg for a hog scalder for their next birthday.) And again, even if slaughtering were a universally terrible job and could never improve, the least harm argument becomes derailed and incredibly demanding if we start going after consensual agreements between moral agents. Lameys E. coli argument is closer to the mark. With E.coli poisoning, the victims are often people who have not really consented to take that risk. Lamey cites a case where E. coli leaked into Walkerton, Ontarios improperly filtered water supply, killing seven people with E. coli. But thats an argument for properly filtering water and not having factory farms with massive pools of useless, poisonous manure, rather than an argument against eating meat. There is a similar problem with vegetables that are contaminated with E.coli tainted fertilizer, or even accidental runoff. Manure from grass-fed cows can have E.coli too, but on small scale farms, that manure is easier to manage. Anyway, if you use such severe cases to call for the disbanding of a particular industry, you need to be consistent and call for the end of any industry whose products sometimes have fatal unintended consequences. Even if we did accept Lameys premise that most animal food production was unacceptably dangerous, there are still non-vegan options that lack the hazards that worry Lamey, and which reduce the amount of sentient animals killed more than a purely vegan system. Eating roadkill, growing elevation-raised bivalves, hunting invasive animals and raising insects for food are a few examples.
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Lameys fourth human-centered objection to meat it releases a lot of methane is of course nothing more than the environmental argument for veganism. And so it fails in the usual way that argument normally does. It is inconsistent to say that we must give up animal products because farming animals releases more greenhouse gases than plant farming, but then not also say that we must give up all activities that release more greenhouse gases than other possibilities. Why do we have to be vegan, but are still allowed to drive, fly, eat more than we must to survive, buy computers and televisions, eat rice, drink coffee and wine, and maintain a civilization? If veganism is not a subsistence lifestyle, it is disingenuous to single out the main thing it dislikes animal use and object to that and only that on subsistence lifestyle grounds. Okay, new farming techniques have drastically reduced the methane released in rice production, but research is promising methane reductions in livestock too. Plus, it turns out that methane emissions from cattle may have been grossly overestimated. Furthermore, if our goal is to reduce methane emissions as much as possible, this means that not raising animals doesnt go far enough. We should also kill all the wild animals that we can, since they too release methane. Just as Mathenys logic supported invasive species hunting over a vegan diet, Lameys appeal to methane reduction is a vindication of plans like the one in Australia to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by killing feral camels. So again were led to non-vegan solutions if we want to cause the least harm possible, going by the vegan definition of harm. Why is Lamey talking about humans anyway, when the question was about animal harm? Lamey justifies this sudden switch from animal to human affairs by honing in on Davis premise that animals dont care whether they are killed in a foreseeable accident or on purpose. Lamey sees this as an equivocation, a trick on Davis part of substituting utilitarian arguments in place of Regans deontological views: As [Davis] writes in contrasting deliberately killed cows and accidentally killed mice, the harm done to the animal is the samedead is dead. This notion is central to Daviss criticism of Regan, as it is what justifies calculating accidental and deliberate harms as indistinguishable wrongs. However, Davis makes a strange remark in justifying his equal ranking of the two forms of killing. It occurs in the following passage: [Angus] Taylor says about the questions of intent, A utilitarian is likely to see no moral difference between the two, since utilitarianism holds that it is consequences that count and not intentions. The reference to utilitarianism is strange because Regans argument is based on deontological rights theory, utilitarianisms great modern rival. Davis does not cite any passage in which Regan himself calls into question the distinction between accidental and deliberate killing, and I am unaware of any instance where Regan does so. So Daviss immanent critique, it turns out, silently depends on a premise that Davis himself introduces. The real question his article raises, then, is whether it is plausible to say there is a difference between accidental and deliberate harms. I believe there is. In most legal systems, the difference between accidental and deliberate killing is the difference between manslaughter and murder. Applied to animals, surely we recognize a distinction between accidentally hitting an animal while driving on the highway and intentionally backing over it with the express aim of ending its life. Indeed we do, but before I get to that, I want to point out that just because Regan calls himself a deontologist doesnt mean that every argument that comes out of his mouth is automatically a deontological one. Thats like saying steak is vegetarian because Paul McCartney ate one. A utilitarian argument is still utilitarian even if a deontologist makes it, and thats exactly what Regan is doing when he says that we are obligated to eat a vegetarian diet because in total it causes less harm to animals: Whenever we find ourselves in a situation where all the options at hand will produce some harm to those who are innocent, we must choose that option that will result in the least total sum of harm. Regan has dropped the rights talk here otherwise, none of those foreseeable deaths of the innocent would be justifiable. Wanting to reduce harm is just the flip-side of increasing utility/happiness/pleasure, which is a utilitarian concept. I dont see any problem with Davis taking a utilitarian approach to this question when Regan, the deontologist, started it. Lamey continues: Although Regan does not rank animals on a par with people, his theory does urge us to extend many common moral notions we reserve for human beings, such as rights, to other creatures. By that standard, the most plausible version of Regans theory would be one that does make a distinction between accidental and deliberate deaths, in the case of both people and animals. If so, then the debate between Regan and Davis hinges on whether our everyday habit of distinguishing between deliberate and accidental harm
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Either way, were fussing over our own future safety here, which is a different issue. How does our intent affect the future safety of the animals? That is the only relevant question, because without a concept of intent or revenge, the only thing that matters to animals related to their interactions with us is whether they are benefitted or harmed by these interactions. Whether we say oops! and leave them to rot, or eat them and wear their skin is a non-issue to the dead animals and those left behind. Davis is right that it is consequences and not whats in our minds that matters to them. Accidental death and being killed on purpose really are the same thing for beings without an ability to distinguish between the two. Murder and manslaughter are not the same for us only because we have concepts of intent, revenge and ethics of care. A gruesome intentional death of an animal might be a revealing psychopath test, but that is for our benefit, not for the benefit of the animals. Animals dont know they are suffering for a good cause when they are being vivisected, and they dont know they are dying for a good cause when we kill them to eat plants. With humans, intent is an important measure of whether someone will be a repeat offender. Intent does not work this way when applied to animals and our food choices, because all our food choices hurt animals, and we have to keep eating and eating no matter what. When it comes to eating, we are born to be repeat offenders. Animals die as a consequence of vegan agriculture. Vegans know this, yet they are still eating seitan and nothing seems to stop them. Most of these wild animal deaths may be foreseen accidents, but vegans keep repeating the behavior that leads to them just as relentlessly as if they were killing these animals on purpose. This makes them something like the equivalent of an old man who accidentally runs over 10 people every single day on his way to work. Who cares that the old man doesnt mean it? That guy needs to be put away! Or at the very least he should never be allowed to drive again. Why are vegans allowed to eat again? If animals cannot look at our intent to determine whether they should feel vengeful, and good intent is not protecting them from future assaults, intent is absolutely useless for
the animals.
Even if intent did matter to other animals, it makes no sense to say that the intention of a vegan is the best simply because vegans wish no animal had to die, ever. Who doesnt wish that? The Davis-inspired omnivore or the invasive species hunter has the intent of causing the least harm possible, even if that requires eating animals. And in many instances, both hypothetical and actual, they would or do cause less harm than vegans. So why does that intention not count, but vegan intention does? Davis point two main points sullied as they were by poorly-chosen details and imaginary numbers were simple: it is possible to harm fewer animals by eating some animal products, and to animals, less harm is better, no matter how humans make that possible. And it seems to me that Davis was right. --Tagged under: Ethics--
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should be are vegetarians. That not all of us are says nothing about the rightness of the
cause, only that most of us are too weak and too stuck in our ways to stop eating animals. But this is basically where we started, a place not so different than where I once lived as a self-important veganabove the fray, away from sin and the pain of the world, or so I thought. Today this is absolutely no place I ever want to end up in. That place I used to live in doesnt really exist. - Via Melissa McEwen
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deserve it. I didnt see my unbelieving family members as bad people. I just thought they
were woefully ignorant of God and his stringent rules. In veganism, on the other hand, the non-believers arent passively violating a perhaps unfair technicality they are actively doing horrible things. A Christian reader once emailed me: The moral dilemma for vegans in meat-eating families is amazing. A Christian like myself may disapprove of homosexual actions, but we dont believe that a homosexual is (in all cases) doing more than moral-spiritual harm to himself and a consenting partner. We may become loathsome in trying to transmit our beliefs into social mores and taboos. But we have nothing like the psychic tension of the vegan. A vegan believes something like a crime or injustice is being committed in their face. As annoying as they can be, I almost feel bad for them, as that is a terrible burden to carry. This is not to say that all Christians actually do tolerate non-Christians better than vegans tolerate non-vegans. Its just that the Christian idea of sin often being a strictly personal problem can make it easier to tolerate sinners than in veganisms conception, where sin is more relevant for its violent external ramifications. Its easier to avoid contempt for those who are harming only themselves. I wanted to tell my family about Christ to do them a favor. Vegans want to tell us about Soy to do animals a favor. Christianity must spread in order to rescue us from becoming the tortured playthings of Satan. Veganism must spread in order to rescue animals from becoming the tortured playthings of us. Vegans dont typically believe in Hell, but many do think that meat eaters will be punished for their sinful eating with heart attacks and premature death, natures punishment for all the cholesterol, saturated fat and cruelty we consume. And as far as many vegans are concerned, we deserve it. --Tagged under: Vegan Cult--
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but just because someone commits moral wrongs sometimes, doesnt make them a grossly bad person (at least not according to act utilitarianism)."
thejoewoods
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