The more you love animals, the more of them you should eat

Summary of the argument:
1. Many consequentialists advocate veganism because they think farming practices are overly harmful to animals.
2. Millions of humans live in poverty or in war zones and believe their lives to be worth living: if they didn’t believe this, they would commit suicide.
3. Conditions in free-range farms are no worse than conditions in places stricken by poverty and war. Conditions in factory farms might also be no worse.
4. So the lives of animals in some farms are worth living.
5. So the consequentialist ideal should actually be one of the following:
(i) Eat as much meat as possible to fund the lives as maximally many animals.
(ii) Remain vegan, but only because rearing animals is more expensive than growing crops. The money saved can be used for human welfare, or for animal welfare projects independent of meat production.


The extendend argument:

I. Consequentialism and meat eating
Consequentialists, especially utilitarians, commonly advocate vegetarianism or veganism. A standard argument for veganism goes like this: the rearing of animals for meat production has consequences sufficiently bad that they are not outweighed by the pleasure humans derive from eating meat. For this argument to work, it must be the case that the lives of the relevant animals involve more suffering (or negative utility) than they do pleasure (or positive utility). In other words, the lives of these animals must not be worth living, making it better, in consequentialist terms, that they be dead, rather than alive and suffering.

It is plausible that some lives are not worth living. Some humans commit suicide because their lives consist mostly of pain caused by inescapable abuse, indignity, disease, degeneracy, or poverty. These humans are surely making the correct decision when they decide to kill themselves. Yet suicide is not very common. Billions of people currently live in conditions of abuse, disease and poverty, but only a minute proportion end their own lives.

We might feel that people in such dire conditions have lives that are not worth living. But if these people would be better off dead, why don’t they commit suicide? I can think of a number of reasons. A person may feel a moral duty to stay alive for the sake of family or friends. A person may avoid suicide because of religious or cultural proscriptions. A person may irrationally believe that life will get better in the future. None of these reasons is overwhelmingly compelling. If a person has a dreadful life, then the person’s family and friends probably have similarly bad lives. Moreover, people frequently ignore moral duties and cultural proscriptions when it suits them to do so. For the sake of carnal pleasure people ignore proscriptions against prostitution and paedophilia. For minor material gain, people ignore proscriptions against stealing. Having a life bad enough to not be worth living seems like a much stronger justification than carnal pleasure or material gain for ignoring moral duties or cultural proscriptions. So it seems unlikely that such duties and proscriptions prevent very many suicides. The irrational belief in a better future may be an important explanation for the dearth of suicides. But there are many cultures without substantive beliefs in a positive afterlife, and some cultures and sub-cultures with predominantly pessimistic views of the future.

There is much more to be said on the subject of suicide. My aim has been only to make plausible the claim that people in dire conditions do actually have lives that are worth living. My justification is that if they had lives that were not worth living, then it is unclear why they would not commit suicide. If a consequentialist accepts this claim that humans in dire conditions have lives worth living, then this should have a major impact on how the consequentialist evaluates the rearing of animals for meat. Animals reared in free-range or organic farms surely having living conditions at least as good as the poorest people in Africa and the Subcontinent. These animals have sufficient food and shelter, safety from predation, and some space to move around in. They live in an artificial environment, but there is no reason to think that this makes them worse off. Nearly all humans, given the choice, prefer a somewhat artificial environment. That is, an environment with protection from dangerous predators, protection from extreme weather conditions, and protection from various pathogens. Free-range animals might also experience a painful death, but so do many humans who feel certain that their lives are worth living. So it seems that the consequentialist will have to accept that free-range animals have lives worth living. This undermines the argument against meat eating that I introduced above. If the reared animals have lives worth living, then the consequentialist will have to put forward other considerations to show that eating free-range meat is wrong.

An analogous point can be made about non-free-range meat. The conditions in factory farms may be reprehensible, but they are not obviously worse than the conditions of poor humans in countries with much violence and poverty. If the consequentialist decides that the conditions in factory farms are acceptable enough that the animals reared in them have lives worth living, then he will have to give a different argument against eating both free-range and factory farmed meat.

For some consequentialists, believing that farmed animals have lives worth living should have an even more significant impact on the moral status of meat eating. Some consequentialists think that, all other things being equal, the world would be better if it contained ten thousand fairly happy people than if it contained one thousand fairly happy people. So if farmed animals have lives worth living, lives which overall have positive utility, then such consequentialists should, all other things being equal, prefer a world with more farmed animals than fewer. As a result of this, it is tempting to draw the following conclusion: instead of being strict vegans, such consequentialists should be devoted meat eaters. (Assuming, as I will for the first part of this essay, that an individual consequentialist always does the action that he would do if he were in a society where everyone was a consequentialist and does not worry about consequentialist strategy in a society like our own where almost no-one is a consequentialist). By eating meat, consequentialists fund the rearing of animals that have lives worth living, just as state funding for orphanages makes possible the rearing of humans whose lives will be worth living.

Consequentialists may object to the claim that they have a moral imperative to eat meat. Rearing animals for meat requires considerable funding and takes up lots of land, and it might be better to use the money and land in different ways. This seems to be a reasonable position for the consequentialist, but it does come with potential problems. Whichever way the money saved from eliminating meat is spent, some fraction of it has to fund the production of the various plant-based products that substitute for meat in the human diet. Yet converting land into fields for crops comes with a number of costs in terms of utility. Destroying a natural habitat results in the death of lots of animals, and prevents future generations of those animals from living in the habitat. Moreover, many of the animals that survive the destruction of the habitat will face more dangerous lives. Mice and other small mammals will be at risk of death during harvesting. Various animals will be threatened by the introduction of pesticides and fertilizers into the food chain. Thus, getting rid of farmed animals not only prevents generations of farm animals from living, but it also eliminates or retards the lives of numerous wild animals. Of course, meat farming also damages natural habitats, by using land for farm buildings and by killing off local predators like wolves and foxes. Yet the costs for animals of crop farming seem more severe.

Despite these downsides of eliminating animal farming, some consequentialists may still be justified in advocating veganism. Consider a consequentialist who weighs the welfare of humans much more heavily than the welfare of animals. If such a consequentialist can save even a small amount of money by ceasing to rear animals, then this money could be spent directly on human welfare. Since the harm done to animals by veganism would have little weight relative to the human welfare benefit, this consequentialist would still be morally correct in being a vegan. Yet it is obvious that many consequentialists do not weigh human welfare much more heavily than animal welfare, otherwise they wouldn’t be so concerned with meat eating in the first place! For the consequentialist who weighs animals not so differently from humans, the choice between veganism and devout meat eating is not a simple one. Eating meat funds the rearing of lots of animals with lives worth living. Not eating meat results in fewer animals and worse lives for existing animals, while possibly freeing up money for human welfare projects.

II. Implications for practical consequentialism
The discussion above considers what a consequentialist should do about meat eating in a society of consequentialists. I will now look at what the infinitesimal set of consequentialists in the world at present should do about meat eating. Today’s consequentialists live in a world where many societies consist almost entirely of meat eaters. While some of these meat eaters could be convinced to change their habits, it is implausible to suppose that large numbers of people could be turned vegan solely by rational argumentation. Because of this, I have devised some strategies that may be useful for the more practical-minded consequentialist activist.

If you (a consequentialist) are convinced that most people in a country will never fork out for free-range or organic meat, then you need to find ways to minimize the negative effects of factory farming. You might be able to push for slightly improved welfare in factory farms that is not very expensive and that makes factory-farmed animals have lives worth living. Some Western countries already have a number of significant restrictions on factory farming that provide a model for such regulation. If this is not possible, then you need to focus on reducing animal suffering in factory farms. There are three variables to take into account: cost of meat production, amount of meat produced, and amount of animal suffering/pleasure. You want the most meat for the smallest cost in money and animal suffering. An ideal solution would be cheap in-vitro meat, which has zero cost in terms of animal suffering. An alternative would be to bring back woolly mammoths, and make them the most common form of meat. A single mammoth would produce about 60 times the meat of a single pig. Yet despite the difficulty of making such comparisons, I don’t see any reason why mammoths should have much more potential for suffering than pigs. The mammoth would need more space. But space would increase only as a function of the area of ground that the mammoth takes up, whereas the amount of meat would increase as a function of the volume of the mammoth. (Farm land is sold by area and not by volume and building slightly taller buildings is cheap). Mammoths would also be comfortable without heating, and would produce wool and ivory as well as meat. If bringing back mammoths is too expensive, then an existing animal (e.g. cow, sheep, turkey) may be selected for similar reasons.

In countries where lots of people are already willing to pay extra for free-range or organic meat, then as a consequentialist, you should aim to make people eat animals that have the maximal potential for pleasure (or positive utility) and to make people eat as many of these animals as possible. Apes would presumably have the most potential for pleasure, but they are probably hard to domesticate, and they would be hard to convince some people to eat. An alternative would be an animal that needs very little space but has a reasonable potential for pleasure. Consider a rat in comparison with a buffalo. The buffalo produces about 150 times more meat than the rat. But for a buffalo to be genuinely free-range, it may need 200 or 300 times more space than the rat. The rat might live happily in a multistory building, without much light, whereas the buffalo would need land of the appropriate kind some distance from human settlements. Yet, despite the size differences, there is not much reason to suppose that the rat has less potential for pleasure than the buffalo. Moreover, scientists know a huge amount about rats, and so selectively breeding them for enhanced cognitive faculties (and hence potential for pleasure) should not be too difficult. Of course, not many people currently eat rat. But even if promoting rat over other forms of meat is a futile task, there will be common farm animals that are superior to buffalo in the way that rats are.

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