Vegetarianism is not about making sure animals have good lives, it's about not eating them or participating in the intentional destruction of them by humans as much as possible. Stopping nature from taking its course in the world outside of human action is not a concern of vegetarians. Moving them to farms seems to be something very much against what a vegetarian would do.
It's specifically talking about ethical consequentalism, which is related to utilitarianism -- the idea that you should act in a way to maximize happiness and minimize suffering.
Some vegetarians are not consequentialists, and so they can reject this argument for the reason you describe, but I know many who are.
I've been around a lot of hardcore vegans, and literally none of them would subscribe to the bizarre abstract philosophy of "minimizing suffering" in the wild. It's an absurdity.
The idea is to remove human causes of destruction, not to intervene in nature to manufacture some kind of utopia. Again, absurd. Essentially nobody would actually believe this, aside from philosophical masturbation.
I am a vegan and I believe there's an important qualitative distinction between the suffering that we cause and the suffering that we fail to prevent, but I still think the suffering in nature is bad and would like to see a way that we could reduce it.
There must be different cultures and views within veganism. :-)
That's the point of the paper, though, right? The paper compels them to explain why they find it okay to dismiss the idea as absurd, if they want to consider themselves as being ethically consistent regarding animal suffering.
This article explicitly states that it only applies to a subset of Vegetarianism, namely Ethical Consequentialist Vegetarianism. Ipso facto, it does not apply to the entirety of Vegetarianism, hence the explicit disclaimer in the introduction.
I reject that as an appropriate or meaningful subset of what it means to be vegetarian, hence my comment. It's basically nonsense as far as I'm concerned. Do you have any supporting view of ethical consequentialist vegetarianism as a sound philosophical position or argument?
The foundational work that advances this view is Peter Singer's Animal Liberation, from 1975, and a whole bunch of other philosophers have written about it since then.
Nobody moves animals to farms. Farm animals were specifically created by humans and could not exist outside that context.
I eat farmed meat but I also go hunting and try to take down a deer each year and maybe some grouse. Since this is just nature taking its course, I assume vegetarians won't care much about this.
> From the abstract: "Ethical consequentialist vegetarians believe that farmed animals have lives that are worse than non-existence."
This article assumes that people are vegetarians because they are sad for farm animals... Absolutely untrue. The largest concentrated majority of vegetarians in the world are vegetarians for religious reasons, under the belief that eating animals is an act of violence we have a moral responsibility to avoid.
It doesn't assume that. Those religious vegetarians are not "Ethical consequentialist vegetarians". Consequentialism is an ethical framework, so consequentalist vegetarians are vegetarian for ethical reasons.
The paper assumes that people are vegetarians because they believe farm animals have worse lives than wild animals... which is a heftily false assumption to begin with.
> "Ethical consequentialist vegetarians believe that farmed animals have lives that are worse than non-existence."
Nonsense. There are plenty of "ethical consequentialist" vegetarians who don't care about animal welfare but believe eating meat is unethical because it harms the environment or exacerbates human poverty and hunger.
"Some consequentialists may be vegetarian because of environmental concerns, and others for non-consequentialist reasons, but these are not my main focus here."
I did read it. The author makes an arbitrary distinction between "consequentialist" and "ethical consequentialist" vegetarians and implies the second category is comprised entirely of those concerned with animal welfare.
> Some consequentialists may be vegetarian because of environmental concerns, and others for non-consequentialist reasons, but these are not my main focus here.
as acknowledging that there are other kinds of consequentialists, those that have other ethical reasons for not eating meat, but that he's not talking about them.
I think "ethical vegetarian" in academic philosophy has specifically been used to refer to people motivated by animal rights or welfare, and that's still what academic philosophers themselves talk about most in connection with vegetarianism.
Animal rights might be a more philosophically interesting motivation than concern with, say, climate change both because it's more controversial and because it's harder to sort of trade off with other interventions/solutions. Like with climate change, maybe a random person could, in practice, focus their efforts elsewhere more productively. (I'm a vegan but I fly a lot, so my carbon footprint is far larger than even the developed world average; I could make a bigger impact in that regard by just flying less than I do by being vegan.)
With animal rights or welfare, not engaging in or supporting specific uses of animals seems like the most obvious thing that one can do to promote or respect these values (but if papers like this are right, maybe that's an illusion!).
Animals are beyond sustainable - they are an integral part every ecosystem on the planet. The crime is our factory methods of raising animals. If we reintegrated livestock into their natural roles in the environment and treated meat as culling for population management, while the price would rise it would ethically sound and good for the planet.
His comparison of very low estimates of livestock population (a 2004 estimate of 17B chicken compared to the 2009 estimate of 50B https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poultry_farming#World_chicken_... ) to the entire wild animal population is a particularly negligent simplification, and the cherry-picked stats and inexplicable use of scientific notation for 60B and common notation for 17B show his motive for it.
The fact is, chickens would not exist if not for human captivity/breeding, so it is irrelevant to compare 17 or 50 Billion to 60 billion wild "land bird" populations. The comparison should be to zero chickens. These chickens would not spontaneously be wild fowl of another species under any circumstances.
I think the two estimates you mention are different things: 17B is the population of chickens alive in a single moment, 50B for number slaughtered in a year. (Broiler chickens live much less than a year.)
The comparison of farm and wild population sizes is relevant, because humans have control over both the size of the chicken population (through choice of eating habits) and the size of wild animal populations (through habitat reduction or conversion).
I took this xkcd https://xkcd.com/1338/ at the time as an argument that people's decisions about farming may affect a lot of the overall animal suffering in the world, but I guess if you include even some non-mammals the direction of the comparison will reverse!
How do I have control over wild animal population? Hunting?
Is the implication that hunting a wild bird whose individual suffering I have ascertained is somehow a preferable alternative to picking a box from the shelf that says chikn nuggets instead of one which says chicken nuggets?
Or am I to believe that all wild animals suffer equivalently because of some hand wavey quantification of an academic in some no name journal?
You personally have less control over habitat sizes, perhaps, beyond subtle effects from consumption choices (e.g., using a car will, in expectation, convert some nature to parking spaces; beef consumption converts forests to graze land). Collectively we may have more choices (such as conducting research).
What a stupid paper. The whole point of "ethical consequentialist vegetarianism" is to allow for an untouched wild domain where animals can suffer in a way consistent with environment and evolution. Becoming a human vegetarian is, after all, consistent with environment and evolution. We can be vegetarian from an evolutionary position and we maybe should be vegetarian from an environmental position (i.e. our high population)
"Nature" and "natural" are very culturally salient in vegetarianism over all (when I travel, I look for a "natural foods" store, where I might then buy highly processed foods like Daiya...!), but I think in philosophical debates "suffering" has been more controversial. I don't think the significance of "natural" suffering has been accepted by western philosophy, or at least people would then have a significant debate about what it means for something to be natural!
Consequentialism in particular I think is very averse to arguments that natural things are good or OK. Quite a few philosophical consequentialists are interested in radically anti-nature views like transhumanism because of the idea that we can do much better than nature has.
I didn't mention nature, but rather domain, environment, and evolution. The goodness of the action of vegetarianism is that one species limits interference of other species in their own domain, consistent with their environment and evolution.
I'm a long-term vegetarian animal rights supporter and I support the publication of work like this, even though many people take it as a sort of anti-vegetarian propaganda, because I think this is how we make progress in understanding issues!
Very often in academic philosophy people write papers that say "relatively widespread position X seems to have weird consequence Y", which then provides possible evidence against X, possible evidence in favor of Y, or an opportunity to think about why the implication might be unsound. That helps clarify how we think about things. (Toby Ord wrote a similar paper about opposition to abortion where he pointed out that spontaneous abortion, especially before people are aware of the pregnancy, is much more common than induced abortion, so maybe many abortion opponents should be concerned with medical research on how to prevent it. While Ord seemingly thought the modus tollens side of this argument was stronger, ... maybe they should!)
Although I don't embrace the act/omissions symmetry that the theory here is based on, I support the modus ponens side of the argument that wild animals' suffering is a horrific thing that it would be good to find a way to mitigate. This has led to some pretty long flamewars in the past; I remember a particular incident when the "Tetrapod Zoology" blog discovered David Pearce, a transhumanist who sees it as urgent (and feasible) to re-engineer nature to eliminate all suffering. Fireworks ensued.
Overall, I don't think this argument is particularly new. I heard substantially the same point presented as an anti-vegetarian argument at least 15 years ago. At the time I thought "predators aren't moral agents, accidents aren't moral agents, there's no wrongdoing here, there's no problem". But now I think there is a problem after all, even if it isn't our "responsibility" or "obligation" to solve it.
Hi Seth! I'm reminded of an Aaron Swartz story that I suppose we could share:
==
During my first few years in Cambridge, Aaron was one of my favorite people to scheme with. We started and — then usually abandoned — a whole string of projects. We would argue for hours and hours about sociology, economics, technology, and ethics.
I remember one time I took Aaron to the Boston vegetarian food festival to see a talk by Peter Singer who is an ethicist at Princeton who many people credit as the intellectual founder of the modern animal rights movement. Aaron went to ask Singer if we (humans) have an ethical obligation to keep animals from hurting each other?
As Aaron approached Singer, I sort of shrunk back a little bit. Embarrassed. The question just seemed, I don't know, “troll-ish” and I figured it would just annoy Singer. But, to my surprise, Singer sighed, thought for a bit, and said something like, “yes, if we can do it without causing more suffering in the process, I suppose we should.”
That that's the Aaron I knew. A recklessly creative intellectual refusing to be hemmed in by what most of us take for granted. And in that process, always thinking about the greater good.
Predators are in a sense moral agents - assuming you accept that maintaining equilibrium of the system in which they exist is good - because without predators prey invariably destroy their habitats.
"Moral agents" are usually taken to be those beings that can make moral judgements. Wikipedia says: 'Moral agency is an individual's ability to make moral judgments based on some notion of right and wrong and to be held accountable for these actions. A moral agent is "a being who is capable of acting with reference to right and wrong."' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_agency)
I understand your point, but don't you think that referring to "ethical consequentialist vegetarians" as "consistent vegetarians" or simply "vegetarians" is a bit dishonest? I'm also a long-term vegetarian and animal rights supporter, same my family and many of my friends; I think I have never met an ethical consequentialist vegetarian in my entire life... I believe this article says more about consequentialism than vegetarianism in "general" (if there is such a thing).
This article appeared in an academic philosophy journal, so maybe the background expectations there are a bit different. Consequentialism may be a (much?) more widespread position among academic philosophers than among the general public.
I agree with your observation and other people's observation here that it doesn't really reflect on "vegetarianism" worldwide, or necessarily meant to. For example, in Singapore I met tons of religious vegetarians who didn't necessarily have any commitments one way or another about these academic debates, and of course in the U.S. there are lots of folks who hope it will help with their weight or cardiovascular health or something.
Many people have ethics like yours, but these are not consequentialist ethics, which is what the article is discussing. In consequentialism, an act's rightness is determined by the goodness of what happens, not other factors.
As I said above, I don't think that view is associated with the "ethical consequentialist vegetarianism" questioned here and often defended in academic philosophy. In fact part of the point of the consequentialist idea here is that maybe it doesn't matter who or what was responsible for something (e.g., a human or an ecosystem) in order to decide if the thing itself was good or bad.
Although not all consequentialists afford any moral status to animals, I think consequentialists would find it super congenitally difficult to say "oh, but that's OK -- nature did it!".
Why would a human hunting deer be a problem at all? As long as the numbers are right you should be able to hunt. Meat, as it is consumed by most people, is probably not sustainable. Hunting exists outside that system
I've made a similar argument here. The goal of elimination of suffering leads to a future very different from the world we inhabit today, but definitely better for it. A world of limited beings who all suffer is amenable to improvement on many levels.
Suffering is not only human, however. The natural world from which we evolved continues to be as bloody, terrible, and rife with disease as it ever was. Higher animal species are certainly just as capable of experiencing anguish and pain as are we humans, and the same is true far further down into the lower orders of life than we'd like to think is the case. We ourselves are responsible for inflicting great suffering upon animals as we harvest them for protein - an industry that is now entirely unnecessary given the technologies that exist today. We do not need to farm animals to live: the engineering of agriculture has seen to that. The future of paradise engineering could, were we so minded, start very soon with an end to the farming and harvesting of animals. That would be followed by a growing control over all wild animal populations, starting with the lesser numbers of larger species, in order to provide them with same absolute control of health and aging that will emerge in human medicine. Taken to its conclusions, this also means stepping in to remove the normal course of predator-prey relationships, as well as manage population size by controlling births in the absence of aging, disease, and predation.
Removing suffering from the animal world is a project of massive scope, as where is the line drawn? At what point is a lower species determined to be a form of biological machinery without the capacity to suffer? Ants, perhaps? Even with ants as a dividing line, consider the types of technology required, and the level of effort to distribute the net of medicine and control across every living thing in every ecosystem. Or consider for a moment the level of technological intervention required to ensure a sea full of fish that do not prey upon one another, and that are all individually maintained in good health indefinitely, able to have fulfilling lives insofar as it is possible for fish. General artificial intelligences and robust molecular manufacturing technologies, creating self-replicating machinery to live alongside and inside every living individual in a vast network of oversight and enhancement might be the least of what is required.
At some point, and especially in the control of predators, the animal world will become so very managed that we will in essence be curating a park, creating animals for the sake of creating animals, simply because they existed in the past - the conservative impulse in human nature that sees us trying to turn back any number of tides in the changing world. It seems clear that the terrible and largely hidden suffering of the animal world must be addressed, but why should we follow this path of maintaining what is? What good comes from creating limited beings for our own amusement, when that same impulse could go towards creating intelligences with a capacity equal or greater than our own? Creating animals, lesser and limited entities that will be entirely dependent on us, to be used as little more than scenery, seems a form of evil in a world in which better can be done.
Given this, my suspicion is that when it comes to the animal kingdom, the distant future of paradise engineering will have much in common with the goals of past religious movements and today's environmentalist nihilists, those who preach ethical extinction as the best way to end suffering. Animals will slowly vanish, their patterns recorded, but no longer used. If animals are needed as a part of the world in order to make the human descendants of the era feel better, then that need can be fi...
It seems like you were influenced by David Pearce, especially in your terminology, but you don't seem to have mentioned him here. Maybe you could add a link?
This is a great reductio ad absurdum of utilitarianism. However, I find it very worrying that the so-called "effective altruism" movement takes this kind of thing seriously. Look up the EA-affiliated "Foundational Research Institute" -- it's an entire pseudo think tank whose philosophy is based on negative utilitarianism, the idea that all that matters is minimizing suffering, and we should do so by any means necessary (not excluding the extinction of all life). There are other organizations that support habitat destruction on utilitarian grounds, such as "Sentience Politics" and "Animal Ethics", but FRI is the brains of the operation, so to speak. (Animal Ethics is the propaganda wing, and Sentience Politics is trying to make it policy.) Brian Tomasik, who is cited in the OP, is the founder of FRI and has written a lot about "wild animal suffering" on his blog. His conclusions are very counter-intuitive; for example, he thinks forest fires are good because they reduce the number of suffering animals in existence. That said, his articles on the possibility of sentience in reinforcement learning algorithms are pretty interesting!
This can't possibly have anything to do with utilitarianism as it is impossible for us to understand domesticated animal utility preference curves beyond "being fed and warm = good". If one is being pedantic, I'm sure one could find many wild species which fare will in confinement, and make a case that it is cruel to contain wild animals in cases where utility from our entertainment does not outweigh their dis-utility from being imprisoned (such as zoos). I'm not convinced that such an argument could be made for domesticated or feral animals.
Utilitarianism is primarily about maximizing utility of a wide spectrum of the population as it pertains to humans and societies and has nothing to do with animals, wild or domestic except for the utility they provide humanity with.
Negative utilitarianism separated from the general concept of utilitarianism is, of course, a nonsense concept in and of itself, since its end goal is non-existence, which makes utility unable to exist.
I'm not familiar with other pseudo-think tanks, so I'll defer to you on that one.
> Utilitarianism is primarily about maximizing utility of a wide spectrum of the population as it pertains to humans and societies and has nothing to do with animals, wild or domestic except for the utility they provide humanity with.
Actually, utilitarianism is about maximizing the welfare (i.e., happiness minus suffering) of all beings that can be said to have a "welfare". This goes back to the father of utilitarianism, Jeremy Bentham, who argued that any being capable of suffering deserves moral consideration. (more extensive discussion can be found in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utilitarianism) More recently, the most prominent living utilitarian philosopher is Peter Singer, who has argued extensively for the moral consideration of animals. Utilitarianism in the philosophical sense is distinct from the anthropocentric economic interpretation.
Is this a big troll? The author moves directly from
> "reducing harm to these animals without reducing their numbers"
to
> "support reducing the number of wild animals, for instance through habitat destruction or sterilisation"
WHY at all would that make sense?
It's a giant IF they believe reducing harm is better than non-existence.
So... er, ok... the author is saying (to put it succinctly) that IF an existence of suffering as a farmed animal is better than non-existence, then clearly vegetarians should want to
> "support reducing the number of wild animals, for instance through habitat destruction or sterilisation"
This follows from the assumption "If wild animals’ well-being is indeed below the threshold for a life worth living", which is argued in the passage:
> One reason to suspect that on average this pleasure is outweighed by suffering is that most species use the reproductive strategy of r-selection, which means that the overwhelming majority of their offspring starve or are eaten shortly after birth and only very few reach reproductive age (Horta 2010; Ng 1995). For instance, ‘in her lifetime a lioness might have 20 cubs; a pigeon, 150 chicks; a mouse, 1000 kits’ (Hapgood 1979), the vast majority of which will die before they could have had many pleasurable experiences. Overall, it seems plausible that wild animals have worse lives than, say, free-range cows. If vegetarians think it’s better for the latter not to exist, they must believe the same thing about wild animals.
The "giant if" you mention is stated explicitly in the section you quote: "More precisely then, ethical consequentialist vegetarians believe that farmed animals have lives so bad they are not worth living, so that it is better for them not to come into existence. Vegetarians reduce the demand for meat, so that farmers will breed fewer animals, preventing the existence of additional animals. [...] I will argue that if vegetarians were to apply this principle consistently, the suffering of wild animals would dominate their concerns, and would plausibly lead them to support reducing the number of wild animals, for instance through habitat destruction or sterilisation."
According to this paper, vegetarian philosophers argue that livestock live lives not worth living because of the cruel treatment they receive. The paper then argues that wild animals receive worse treatment from nature. Therefore, their lives are similarly not worth living. Reducing suffering is the goal, and not living is better than living, so reducing the number of wild animals is best.
There are a number of good arguments to this. One would be that humans breeding livestock increases the amount of suffering, whereas wild animals are not bred. Another is about directly benefiting (eating) from this suffering verses not benefiting. Yet another is that active harm from cruel treatment is different from passive harm by "not helping" the wild animals.
Note that none of of these are consequentalist arguments, though. A consequentialist argument would focus on the relative amounts of suffering, not on the beneficiaries or agents of it.
Isn't this effectively the same argument pro-slavery advocates used? "(Slaves|Animals) would live brutal, worse off lives if they weren't owned by their masters. Therefore (vegetarians|abolitionists) want more suffering in the world."
Nice trolling. Wild animals don't experience 24/7 discomfort from a confined, crowded unnatural space before ultimately marched to a mechanized execution. The last possible confused thought the numb animal has: "well that fucking sucked".
Suffering in the wild is not sustained or imposed to support a cheap-ass burger industry.
Vegetarians want animal welfare taken seriously, and environmental concerns guiding the regulations around animal agriculture.
In response to the point about animal non-existence, the vegetarian could argue that favoring non-existence might motivate the livestock industry to address environmental and animal welfare concerns. Respect is earned and more meat sold to the "mostly vegetarian" crowd as a result, and less young people flocking to vegetarianism after watching the latest meat-bad doco. A means to an end for the vegetarian rather than a fixed philosophical position.
The argument he makes hinges on the empirical suffering of wild animals vs. domestic.
As he admits, there is not sufficient evidence to conclude that wild suffering is indeed greater, so the case is not strong.
That said, I do happen to identify with the sort of vegetarian logic here. If there were strong evidence that wild animal suffering were much greater than domestic, that would be very important to me.
So I agree with his conclusion that more research into the lives of wild (and domestic) animals should be a priority.
However, given what I know of the literal sausage factory that is industrialized food production, I fear the suffering of domestic animals is very great, and unlikely to be topped.
69 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 123 ms ] threadSome vegetarians are not consequentialists, and so they can reject this argument for the reason you describe, but I know many who are.
The idea is to remove human causes of destruction, not to intervene in nature to manufacture some kind of utopia. Again, absurd. Essentially nobody would actually believe this, aside from philosophical masturbation.
There must be different cultures and views within veganism. :-)
I eat farmed meat but I also go hunting and try to take down a deer each year and maybe some grouse. Since this is just nature taking its course, I assume vegetarians won't care much about this.
This article assumes that people are vegetarians because they are sad for farm animals... Absolutely untrue. The largest concentrated majority of vegetarians in the world are vegetarians for religious reasons, under the belief that eating animals is an act of violence we have a moral responsibility to avoid.
Nonsense. There are plenty of "ethical consequentialist" vegetarians who don't care about animal welfare but believe eating meat is unethical because it harms the environment or exacerbates human poverty and hunger.
> Some consequentialists may be vegetarian because of environmental concerns, and others for non-consequentialist reasons, but these are not my main focus here.
as acknowledging that there are other kinds of consequentialists, those that have other ethical reasons for not eating meat, but that he's not talking about them.
With animal rights or welfare, not engaging in or supporting specific uses of animals seems like the most obvious thing that one can do to promote or respect these values (but if papers like this are right, maybe that's an illusion!).
The fact is, chickens would not exist if not for human captivity/breeding, so it is irrelevant to compare 17 or 50 Billion to 60 billion wild "land bird" populations. The comparison should be to zero chickens. These chickens would not spontaneously be wild fowl of another species under any circumstances.
The comparison of farm and wild population sizes is relevant, because humans have control over both the size of the chicken population (through choice of eating habits) and the size of wild animal populations (through habitat reduction or conversion).
Is the implication that hunting a wild bird whose individual suffering I have ascertained is somehow a preferable alternative to picking a box from the shelf that says chikn nuggets instead of one which says chicken nuggets?
Or am I to believe that all wild animals suffer equivalently because of some hand wavey quantification of an academic in some no name journal?
Consequentialism in particular I think is very averse to arguments that natural things are good or OK. Quite a few philosophical consequentialists are interested in radically anti-nature views like transhumanism because of the idea that we can do much better than nature has.
Very often in academic philosophy people write papers that say "relatively widespread position X seems to have weird consequence Y", which then provides possible evidence against X, possible evidence in favor of Y, or an opportunity to think about why the implication might be unsound. That helps clarify how we think about things. (Toby Ord wrote a similar paper about opposition to abortion where he pointed out that spontaneous abortion, especially before people are aware of the pregnancy, is much more common than induced abortion, so maybe many abortion opponents should be concerned with medical research on how to prevent it. While Ord seemingly thought the modus tollens side of this argument was stronger, ... maybe they should!)
Although I don't embrace the act/omissions symmetry that the theory here is based on, I support the modus ponens side of the argument that wild animals' suffering is a horrific thing that it would be good to find a way to mitigate. This has led to some pretty long flamewars in the past; I remember a particular incident when the "Tetrapod Zoology" blog discovered David Pearce, a transhumanist who sees it as urgent (and feasible) to re-engineer nature to eliminate all suffering. Fireworks ensued.
Overall, I don't think this argument is particularly new. I heard substantially the same point presented as an anti-vegetarian argument at least 15 years ago. At the time I thought "predators aren't moral agents, accidents aren't moral agents, there's no wrongdoing here, there's no problem". But now I think there is a problem after all, even if it isn't our "responsibility" or "obligation" to solve it.
==
During my first few years in Cambridge, Aaron was one of my favorite people to scheme with. We started and — then usually abandoned — a whole string of projects. We would argue for hours and hours about sociology, economics, technology, and ethics.
I remember one time I took Aaron to the Boston vegetarian food festival to see a talk by Peter Singer who is an ethicist at Princeton who many people credit as the intellectual founder of the modern animal rights movement. Aaron went to ask Singer if we (humans) have an ethical obligation to keep animals from hurting each other?
As Aaron approached Singer, I sort of shrunk back a little bit. Embarrassed. The question just seemed, I don't know, “troll-ish” and I figured it would just annoy Singer. But, to my surprise, Singer sighed, thought for a bit, and said something like, “yes, if we can do it without causing more suffering in the process, I suppose we should.”
That that's the Aaron I knew. A recklessly creative intellectual refusing to be hemmed in by what most of us take for granted. And in that process, always thinking about the greater good.
-- Benjamin Mako Hill, https://mako.cc/talks/20130311-bmh-aaron_swartz_memorial_rem...
I agree with your observation and other people's observation here that it doesn't really reflect on "vegetarianism" worldwide, or necessarily meant to. For example, in Singapore I met tons of religious vegetarians who didn't necessarily have any commitments one way or another about these academic debates, and of course in the U.S. there are lots of folks who hope it will help with their weight or cardiovascular health or something.
Although not all consequentialists afford any moral status to animals, I think consequentialists would find it super congenitally difficult to say "oh, but that's OK -- nature did it!".
https://www.exratione.com/2016/06/the-hedonistic-imperative-...
Suffering is not only human, however. The natural world from which we evolved continues to be as bloody, terrible, and rife with disease as it ever was. Higher animal species are certainly just as capable of experiencing anguish and pain as are we humans, and the same is true far further down into the lower orders of life than we'd like to think is the case. We ourselves are responsible for inflicting great suffering upon animals as we harvest them for protein - an industry that is now entirely unnecessary given the technologies that exist today. We do not need to farm animals to live: the engineering of agriculture has seen to that. The future of paradise engineering could, were we so minded, start very soon with an end to the farming and harvesting of animals. That would be followed by a growing control over all wild animal populations, starting with the lesser numbers of larger species, in order to provide them with same absolute control of health and aging that will emerge in human medicine. Taken to its conclusions, this also means stepping in to remove the normal course of predator-prey relationships, as well as manage population size by controlling births in the absence of aging, disease, and predation.
Removing suffering from the animal world is a project of massive scope, as where is the line drawn? At what point is a lower species determined to be a form of biological machinery without the capacity to suffer? Ants, perhaps? Even with ants as a dividing line, consider the types of technology required, and the level of effort to distribute the net of medicine and control across every living thing in every ecosystem. Or consider for a moment the level of technological intervention required to ensure a sea full of fish that do not prey upon one another, and that are all individually maintained in good health indefinitely, able to have fulfilling lives insofar as it is possible for fish. General artificial intelligences and robust molecular manufacturing technologies, creating self-replicating machinery to live alongside and inside every living individual in a vast network of oversight and enhancement might be the least of what is required.
At some point, and especially in the control of predators, the animal world will become so very managed that we will in essence be curating a park, creating animals for the sake of creating animals, simply because they existed in the past - the conservative impulse in human nature that sees us trying to turn back any number of tides in the changing world. It seems clear that the terrible and largely hidden suffering of the animal world must be addressed, but why should we follow this path of maintaining what is? What good comes from creating limited beings for our own amusement, when that same impulse could go towards creating intelligences with a capacity equal or greater than our own? Creating animals, lesser and limited entities that will be entirely dependent on us, to be used as little more than scenery, seems a form of evil in a world in which better can be done.
Given this, my suspicion is that when it comes to the animal kingdom, the distant future of paradise engineering will have much in common with the goals of past religious movements and today's environmentalist nihilists, those who preach ethical extinction as the best way to end suffering. Animals will slowly vanish, their patterns recorded, but no longer used. If animals are needed as a part of the world in order to make the human descendants of the era feel better, then that need can be fi...
Utilitarianism is primarily about maximizing utility of a wide spectrum of the population as it pertains to humans and societies and has nothing to do with animals, wild or domestic except for the utility they provide humanity with.
Negative utilitarianism separated from the general concept of utilitarianism is, of course, a nonsense concept in and of itself, since its end goal is non-existence, which makes utility unable to exist.
I'm not familiar with other pseudo-think tanks, so I'll defer to you on that one.
Actually, utilitarianism is about maximizing the welfare (i.e., happiness minus suffering) of all beings that can be said to have a "welfare". This goes back to the father of utilitarianism, Jeremy Bentham, who argued that any being capable of suffering deserves moral consideration. (more extensive discussion can be found in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utilitarianism) More recently, the most prominent living utilitarian philosopher is Peter Singer, who has argued extensively for the moral consideration of animals. Utilitarianism in the philosophical sense is distinct from the anthropocentric economic interpretation.
> "reducing harm to these animals without reducing their numbers"
to
> "support reducing the number of wild animals, for instance through habitat destruction or sterilisation"
WHY at all would that make sense?
It's a giant IF they believe reducing harm is better than non-existence.
So... er, ok... the author is saying (to put it succinctly) that IF an existence of suffering as a farmed animal is better than non-existence, then clearly vegetarians should want to
> "support reducing the number of wild animals, for instance through habitat destruction or sterilisation"
It doesn't follow logically at all.
> One reason to suspect that on average this pleasure is outweighed by suffering is that most species use the reproductive strategy of r-selection, which means that the overwhelming majority of their offspring starve or are eaten shortly after birth and only very few reach reproductive age (Horta 2010; Ng 1995). For instance, ‘in her lifetime a lioness might have 20 cubs; a pigeon, 150 chicks; a mouse, 1000 kits’ (Hapgood 1979), the vast majority of which will die before they could have had many pleasurable experiences. Overall, it seems plausible that wild animals have worse lives than, say, free-range cows. If vegetarians think it’s better for the latter not to exist, they must believe the same thing about wild animals.
According to this paper, vegetarian philosophers argue that livestock live lives not worth living because of the cruel treatment they receive. The paper then argues that wild animals receive worse treatment from nature. Therefore, their lives are similarly not worth living. Reducing suffering is the goal, and not living is better than living, so reducing the number of wild animals is best.
There are a number of good arguments to this. One would be that humans breeding livestock increases the amount of suffering, whereas wild animals are not bred. Another is about directly benefiting (eating) from this suffering verses not benefiting. Yet another is that active harm from cruel treatment is different from passive harm by "not helping" the wild animals.
Suffering in the wild is not sustained or imposed to support a cheap-ass burger industry.
Vegetarians want animal welfare taken seriously, and environmental concerns guiding the regulations around animal agriculture.
In response to the point about animal non-existence, the vegetarian could argue that favoring non-existence might motivate the livestock industry to address environmental and animal welfare concerns. Respect is earned and more meat sold to the "mostly vegetarian" crowd as a result, and less young people flocking to vegetarianism after watching the latest meat-bad doco. A means to an end for the vegetarian rather than a fixed philosophical position.
I read just a little further and also have to nitpick, that good times can be experienced before reaching adolescence.
it is still an interesting argument.
As he admits, there is not sufficient evidence to conclude that wild suffering is indeed greater, so the case is not strong.
That said, I do happen to identify with the sort of vegetarian logic here. If there were strong evidence that wild animal suffering were much greater than domestic, that would be very important to me.
So I agree with his conclusion that more research into the lives of wild (and domestic) animals should be a priority.
However, given what I know of the literal sausage factory that is industrialized food production, I fear the suffering of domestic animals is very great, and unlikely to be topped.