Don't Half-Ass Your Beliefs

A suburban mom volunteers at a no-kill animal shelter, demands her family shut off the television whenever the sad dog commercial plays, and ensures her children consume adequate amounts of meat and dairy. A college-age activist bemoans the suffering of starving polar bears on melting ice floes and endangered birds whose nests are destroyed by deforestation over his plate of chicken wings. The United States government enshrines and enforces numerous laws against animal abuse while spending billions of dollars on meat and dairy subsidies. Much to the frustration of the ethical vegan, Western society superficially professes the virtue of animal welfare while simultaneously permitting and partaking in the industrialized torture and murder of billions of animals. Such widespread cognitive dissonance may also be frustrating to anyone who values consistency; discussing it is good practice for the aspiring rationalist.

The crux of this post is the incompatibility between the belief that animals can meaningfully suffer and accepting or causing animals to suffer. That is, if an animal’s suffering is meaningful, its suffering is not meaningless and therefore ought to be reduced. Purposefully causing meaningful suffering, particularly for convenience or personal enjoyment, is unacceptable, and accordingly must be avoided whenever possible. If an entity does not meaningfully suffer, all actions against it are harmless and therefore acceptable, and restricting harmless behaviors infringes upon the autonomy of others. Hitting your computer while muttering a variety of curses and threats after it fails to perform a task is acceptable, if silly, as a computer cannot meaningfully suffer at present; doing the same to your spouse, who can, is vile and repugnant.

It is impossible to argue that the production of animal products is painless or pleasant for animals. The greatest offender is factory farming; animals are confined to unsanitary, overcrowded warehouses, regularly subject to beatings and abuse, overfed until they cannot move, and forcefully impregnated and separated from offspring shortly after birth. Male chicks are ground alive in macerators. Cows and pigs have their tails mutilated, often without anesthesia or pain relief. Dairy and eggs are no better; egg-laying hens and dairy cows are kept in similar, if not identical, conditions. The lives of factory-farmed animals are indisputably short and miserable. Conditions on limited-scale operations, in which animals are given more space to roam and are allowed more natural behaviors, are better than factory farms, but not free of suffering; animals are confined and exploited for resources, and are killed when they are no longer useful. Improved quality of life is no justification for murder; a sadist in a first-world country who kills a woman for personal pleasure and claims, “She lived a better life than she would have in were she born in Afghanistan or North Korea!” would garner little sympathy.

If animals meaningfully suffer, then the purchase and consumption of animal products in any situation beyond absolute necessity is intolerable; if animals do not meaningfully suffer, then factory farming is simply the most efficient manner of producing a useful and pleasurable resource. There is no logically consistent middle position; either an animal meaningfully suffers or does not. If an animal meaningfully suffers, causing such suffering is unacceptable; if it does not, avoidance of something meaningless sacrifices efficiency, and mandating such avoidance infringes upon other’s autonomy. (I hope I have repeated and restated the crux to your satisfaction; from this point onward, it will be assumed.) To believe that animals can meaningfully suffer is to take the position of militant veganism, and to believe that animals cannot meaningfully suffer is to condone animal abuse. In other words, it is inconsistent to endorse animal welfare by using animal products.

One caveat to the above statement is that “animals” are not a monolith; the kingdom encompasses ants, chickens, dolphins, and humans alike. Just about nobody rallies against the injustices of ant extermination; just about everyone (hopefully) finds intentionally inflicting suffering upon other human beings unacceptable. Whether an animal meaningfully suffers or not might depend upon neuron count, sentience, self-awareness, consciousness, language use, social behavior, and a variety of other qualities; if the delineator is definitive and directly corresponds with an animal’s capacity for suffering (i.e. not “cuteness” or “aesthetic appeal”), the exact attribute is irrelevant to this post, as are my personal views on the matter. However, the original argument still stands, albeit in a modified form; one must take the position of militant veganism in regards to all animals that meaningfully suffer, and to condone the so-called abuse of all animals that do not. By any measure which directly corresponds with an animal’s capacity for suffering, if a dog or a cat can meaningfully suffer, a cow, a pig, and a dolphin is capable of such as well, and abuse inflicted upon these creatures for the purposes of taste or entertainment is unacceptable.

Of course, it is possible to take other positions. For instance, when I discussed this belief with a friend of mine, he offered a third option: he believed animals possessed the capacity for meaningful suffering, and admitted that continuing to consume animal products contradicted his beliefs, but found the subject of our conversation to be unpleasant, and so resolved to simply not think of it further. However, it is important to acknowledge our inconsistencies as to avoid mistaking personal preference for true and enforcing our aesthetics in law. Considering our beliefs regarding animal welfare, an issue for which the dominant cultural position is somewhat contradictory, serves as good practice for accepting, or at least acknowledging, consistent positions in spite of potential discomfort.

Don’t Half-Ass Your Beliefs