Throughout my time searching for an argument against Veganism, I have been unable to find any major responses that counter notable books such as Animal Liberation.
My argument fundamentally revolves around the idea of a 100% shitty life being exponentially better than no life. even If I was an animal, I would rather be factory farmed, over just not living.
Mass Veganism would mean that a LOT less animals are given the opportunity to live, something that should be cherished, even if suffering is involved.
Are you specifically looking for an argument for eating meat within a hedonic utilitarian moral framework, and taking as given that animal suffering is commensurable with human suffering? That stacks the deck in favor of veganism somewhat, and your rebuttal seems to be just to bite the bullet on the Repugnant Conclusion.
Stronger would be to reject those premises. Meat eating is the default position, since humans are omnivorous animals, and we and evolved to depend on a diet that includes meat. The burden is on those arguing we should change to make the case; we don’t need moral arguments to continue being the animals we are, we would need moral arguments to justify changing. If we reject the premises of those arguments, the status quo is to keep eating meat.
“I would rather be factory farmed, over just not living.”
This is a decision you are making from the point of view of something that is already living.
An unborn cow, on the other hand, would not be able to favor factory life over not living at all because to do so, it would have to be born, live, and then reflect on the question.
In less long-winded words, if non-existence sucks, anything that isn’t existing can’t know this.
As someone living with higher intelligence than the unborn cow, I’m making the decision for them. It may not be their choice, but this is also inline with my political position on democracy;
not to go off topic, but I think it sucks as people don’t know what they want. same could be seen to apply here.
The logic of the vegan argument works, I just reject the premises. If morality is all about the sum of hedonic utils, and animals’ hedonic utils are fungible with human hedonic utils, there’s good reason to believe that eating meat is a moral wrong (I’m on the fence about @promethean75’s point about the preferences of the unborn, though your rebuttal seems correct and I lean towards rejecting Benetar’s asymmetry argument).
But I don’t think morality is about the sum of hedonic utils, nor do I think animal suffering is commensurable with human suffering. Your argument is a conditional, and if the antecedent it false the consequent may also be false. There could of course be other arguments against eating meat, but the burden is squarely on veganism. In the absence of such an argument, being a hungry ape justifies eating the things hungry apes eat.
I will say more about why I reject the premises, but my general points are that 1) one need not accept the premises of the argument, and 2) meat-eating is presumptively justified in the absence of a compelling argument to the contrary.
With respect to the premises, rejecting either is sufficient to reject the argument. I reject both, though I am more confident of my rejection of the first premise (hedonic utilitarianism), and rejecting that premise does more work in rejecting the argument.
Maximizing hedonic utils is often a useful heuristic for morality, but it is not morality itself. Pleasure/pain and morality are separately evolved instincts that serve related but distinct purposes: the former to signal damage to the individual’s body, the latter to enable group cooperation. Pleasure/pain will motivate others to the extent it motivates ourselves, so it is a useful Schelling point for moral reasoning. But the group is more than the sum of the bodies of its members, so we should expect the instincts to diverge on certain questions. In particular, we should not expect pleasure/pain to be a useful heuristic when applied edge cases like non-human animals, who are not moral agents and cannot be cooperative partners or full members of the group in the way that humans can.
Human suffering is different in kind from animal suffering. Even to describe it as ‘suffering’ is to anthropomorphize animals: we don’t know what their internal experience is like, so we substitute our own. It’s true we can see that in some ways they react similarly to some stimuli that we find painful (e.g. physical avoidance), but we know they lack the intelligence to understand them in the way we do. For humans, pain can be positive experience (e.g. hot sauce, working out, certain fetishes), and pleasure a negative one (e.g. heroin, infatuation). We have very good reason to believe that animals do not have these higher-order experiences.
Eating meat is a key part of human evolution. Whatever you might think about how we all got here (unless you are an out and out creationist), then you have to admit that the the largest part of human history we thrived on, and are fully adatped to consume meat. That is to say for 99% of evolution we are selected for those best able to thrive on meat, with some vegetation of oppoirtunity. But hunting was always primary and that go us out of Africa to full the entire world.
From the Innuit and Masai who still thrive on 100% carnivore until the last half century.
Agriculture only started about 10kbp, and spread sporadically to nearly all corners of the globe. This has had serious consequences for health and in the last 150 years or so this has got to serious proportions of ill health culminating in the pandemics of the 21st century - obesity, diabetes and artery/heart disease, as procecssed foods now dominate our lives.
IN our ancestral past we simply could never have thrived as vegans. modern vegetables were never availiable, and their legacy species are smaller, harder, less tasty and much harder to digest. Everything on the Vegan’s table is a domesticant; everything from apples to zuccinni are nothing like their orignal size and shape.
Following a vegan diet results in deficiencies in vitamins, amino acids and essentail fatty acids.
I do, however think that animals ought to be treated better- simply because we can wuth little effors.
And, in fact the life of the average domesticated animals is safer, more comfortable and more secure from disease and predation that any of their wold counter parts.
No wild version of our domesticants were from the the horrors of the weather ,injury, and being torn linb from limb by a big cat, wolf or other predator.
Domesticated animals that get sick are either cured with a vet, or painlessly killed, as they would in the slaughter house.
So the arguements so often used by vegans to shame meat eaters, “meat is murder” is not accepted.
I love meat and respect it as the most highly and naturally nutritious forms of food, and find no shame in comsuing it with relish.
This overstates things quite a bit. The Innuit and Masai are not representative. The Innuit live in a harsh location with little vegetation, and adopted a carnivorous diet out of necessity. The Masai similarly live in arid climates with few edible plants, and they get most of their meat from domesticated cattle, which, as you yourself note, could not have been the case for more than 10k years.
A better datapoint is modern non-human primates: chimps, gorillas, orangutans, and baboons. These animals are very similar to us, and their diets have not been dramatically changed by agriculture and animal domestication. All of them are omnivorous, their diets highly diverse, and they get a minority of their nutrients from meat.
Unlike fully carnivorous species, our guts are poorly adapted to eating raw meat. We need to cook it to extract most of the nutirents, which limits the amount of meat we could consume in the time prior to refrigeration, as meat spoils quickly after death. And our mouths are also adapted to an omnivorous diet – compare human dentition with baboons, the most carnivorous of our relatives, with elongated snouts, powerful jaws, and prominent canines. Humans, by contrast, have flat faces, weak jaws, and a mix of cutting and grinding teeth.
I agree with the point that meat is and long has been a staple of the human diet, but the average human in the modern West eats much more meat than most of our ancestors did.
Eating meat is natural and healthy. It is both good for you, and what you have evolved to do. Case closed.
If someone wants to not eat meat, that is their choice. Great, good for them. Fuck off. More meat for us.
But when they try to guilt everyone else or make policies to prevent meat eating, that’s when it gets funny.
You know how much more nutritious meat is compared to vegetables or grains? Way more. Minerals, vitamins, proteins, caloric efficiency, glycemic index. Yeah.
Youe weird arguments from suffering aren’t needed. We should limit the suffering of animals when they are killed for food. That is obviously moral. No one would disagree. But thinking a cow has more value out there mindlessly munching some grass than feeding my body and mind to be healthier, is just weird. Maybe humans are the only apex predator that hates itself.
Beyond evolutionary principles, the passage ‘dog ear dog’ is unfortunately not to be taken literally, along a wide spectrum of man’s best friend.
The deal is based on a higher called bet, built around the premise that life really is not built on a collapsible house of cards that’s managed by a landlord who can’t play games.
Life is built upon life. The entire natural world is constructed upon itself. Each individual living thing, each group of them, each species, each ecosystem, are all part of the larger whole and all interact and function in complex inter-dependent ways.
For higher lifeforms to exist they are required to consume lower lifeforms. Cows consume grass, even though the grass is alive. Humans consume cows, even though the cows are alive. Does anything living survive purely on non-living materials? Even worms eat living beings, dead or alive.
Maybe bacteria is the only level of life that doesn’t eat living things? Well they do eat living things, just indirectly… they are consuming molecules or elements individually, but that is still stripping them away from other living beings. If a bacterium consumes some carbon, and that carbon exists inside the body of another lifeform, it could be interpreted that the bacterium is consuming some part of the larger organism. I think bacteria can eat other bacteria too.
Anyway, the point is that life is some kind of complex and summative process of consuming other living beings. The self-consuming nature of it is interesting to think about. Since we have morality and higher understanding we can go further in trying to understand this and steer it in the best possible direction. If vegans want to avoid all animals products that’s great, good for them. Most vegans I know are stick skinny and look not all that healthy, but more power to them for sticking to their values even when it harms them. As for me, a juicy steak for dinner or a nice sausage and cheese omelette for breakfast are always going to be options. I feel bad for people who don’t get to experience good food like that. But hey, it’s their choice.
Masai and Innuit are representative is the norms of the Paleolithic. The time that the human race evolved to spread across the entire world.
The poorly adapted to raw meat is both false and irrlevant.
It is false because we are perfectly able to digest raw meat with no problems. You should try it sometime. Sauce tatar, sushi. In raw form you avoid some of the AGEs, and it provides a slightly slower release of nutrient which is of benefit. Paleolithic people would have also had eggs, grubs, and seafood- all eaten raw with no problem.
Yet, this is irelevant, since humans have had the ability to cook their meat from long before we were homo sapiens, as the first homonid to leave Africa - erectus did so with FIRE.
The human jaw argument is also false and irrelevant for the same reasons. FIrst, the human jaw and dentition is subuct to phenotypic plasticity, and grows stronger in respose to usage. One reason why teens have to have their wisdon teeth removed in modern times is because we eat soft food all the time, and jaws grow too small to accomodate all our teeth…Palaeolithic man had much bigger jaws and teeth - this is not a genetic difference but to do with livving practice.
And once again technology comes to the rescue. Homo habilis and erectus and all homonids after had the benefit of stone technology with which to butcher meat. This is going back 3 million years. Fire is at least 1 million years ago.
Nothing beats a thick juicy ribeye steak, cooked to medium but seared on the outside. Little salt and pepper is all you need. And a nice glass of whiskey on the side, of course.
I don’t think this is necessarily the end of the discussion, only that it creates a presumption that eating meat is morally acceptable. There are plenty of things we did in the ‘state of nature’ that we now find morally abhorrent.
They are not. The Inuit are obviously not, because very little of humanity has even lived in the far north. And again, the Masai’s meat comes from domesticated cattle, something that didn’t exist in the Paleolithic.
Wiki notes that humans didn’t live in cold climates until 30k-50k years ago, and archaeological sites in Africa show that we weren’t very good at hunting until pretty recently. This seems a reasonable summary:
Anthropologists have diverse opinions about the proportions of plant and animal foods consumed. Just as with still existing hunters and gatherers, there were many varied “diets” in different groups, and also varying through this vast amount of time. Some paleolithic hunter-gatherers consumed a significant amount of meat and possibly obtained most of their food from hunting, while others were believed to have a primarily plant-based diet. Most, if not all, are believed to have been opportunistic omnivores.
This isn’t true. Homo Sapiens have smaller jaws and teeth and shorter guts. These adaptations differentiate us from other human species, and are due to our use of fire, which made food easier to chew, and made it easier to extract nutrients. Our jaws are smaller because they can be.
It’s true that our jaws are plastic, but just as no amount of weight lifting will make a human as strong as a gorilla, no amount of meat eating will give a human an ape-like jaw.
Why would we think that eating something according to the way “nature” “intended” (or, if you prefer, for which we are naturally adapted) would be morally abhorrent?
How does it violate the golden rule? For example, if it could not be avoided, I would hope that someone would eat me if they were starving. I’m hovering over my body, dead, everyone around my dead body is starving, and they’re not eating me? I would be offended!
The issue isn’t the eating, it’s the killing++ that generates the meat we eat. Would you submit to being factory farmed if it meant a starving person would eat?
That’s a distinction worth noting though: while humans have long hunted wild animals for meat, factory farming is new and has no parallel from our evolutionary history. Even since the advent of domesticated animals, most of them lived much better lives than the animals that provide our meat today.
I still think my response holds: the default position is that non-human animals are not moral patients, and without a compelling argument otherwise there’s no further need to justify continuing to act that way.