From Today's New York Times

To the Editor:

The sentence in your Sept. 9 editorial “Justice on the Farm” describing a “visit to a duck farm in Sullivan County where workers toil through exhausting shifts to force feed poultry for foie gras” encapsulates one of the fundamental problems facing agriculture today: the perpetual chain of exploitation that occurs on many farms.

The exploitation of farm workers reverberates in the treatment of farm animals and degradation of the environment. New York’s protection of laborers should be a first step toward recognition of the other systemic abuses that occur on farms that, like the long-ignored rights of farm workers, have been constantly disregarded by legislators.

Deborah Dubow Press
Washington, Sept. 9, 2009
The writer is on the staff of the Farm Animal Program, Animal Welfare Institute.

Gene Baur's Bloggings

Here is a blog for your consideration.

Campaign Whale

See here.

Canis Lupus

Here is a New York Times blog post about wolf hunting. This passage puzzles me:

Unsurprisingly, I believe it is wrong to inflict pain and death unnecessarily on a creature capable of suffering. (Peter Singer more broadly examines the moral standing of animals here.) While this belief might not compel us to be vegetarians, it does demand significant changes in the way we raise animals for food, and it forbids wolf hunting as a form of entertainment.

Why does this belief not "compel us to be vegetarians"? Is meat-eating necessary? If so, in what sense and for what purpose? How much do you want to bet that Randy Cohen eats cows and pigs?

Reasons Consistently Applied

I suspect that many regular readers of Animal Ethics are already vegetarians. That's because those who read Animal Ethics with regularity know that there are many compelling reasons to adopt a vegetarian lifestyle.

There are moral reasons to go vegetarian:

• Recognition that it is wrong to contribute to unnecessary animal suffering.
• The injustice of exploiting animals and killing them for no good reason.
• If human have rights, then many nonhuman animals also have rights, and confining and killing these animals for food violates these rights.

There are environmental reasons to go vegetarian:

• The production of animal-derived foods is implicated in every major environmental problem.
• According to the Food and Agricultural Organization's own report entitled Livestock's Long Shadow: "The livestock sector emerges as one of the top two or three most significant contributors to the most serious environmental problems, at every scale from local to global. . . . Livestock's contribution to environmental problems is on a massive scale."
• This FAO report goes on to note that livestock production is a major contributor to "land degradation, climate change and air pollution, water shortage and water pollution and loss of biodiversity."

There are self-interested, health-based reasons to go vegetarian:

• The major killers of Americans—heart disease, cancer, and stroke—are all strongly positively correlated with meat consumption.
• Plant-based diets significantly reduce one risk of these chronic degenerative diseases.
• According to the American Dietetics Association's Position Paper on Vegetarian Diets:

It is the position of The American Dietetic Association that appropriately planned vegetarian diets, including total vegetarian or vegan diets, are healthful, are nutritionally adequate, and may provide health benefits in the prevention and treatment of certain diseases. . . . [A] vegetarian diet is associated with a lower risk of death from ischemic heart disease. Vegetarians also appear to have lower low-density lipoprotein cholesterol levels, lower blood pressure, and lower rates of hypertension and type 2 diabetes than nonvegetarians. Furthermore, vegetarians tend to have a lower body mass index and lower overall cancer rates. [Journal of the American Dietetics Association 109(7), July 2009: 1266-1282.]

And there are religious reasons:

• According to the Bible, the original divinely-prescribed diet was an entirely plant-based, vegan diet: "And God said, 'Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is on the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit. You shall have them for food.'" Genesis 1:29
• The First Ethical Precept of Buddhism states: "I will be mindful and reverential with all life, I will not be violent nor will I kill." This precept is variably stated as follows:
• Avoid killing or harming any living being.
• I undertake the precept to refrain from destroying living creatures.
• I shall endeavor to protect and take care of all living creatures.

Taken together, these reasons make a very compelling cumulative case for becoming a vegetarian. What might be less obvious is that each of these reasons actually gives us a reason to adopt an entirely plant-based vegan diet, devoid of animal products. One cannot produce eggs or dairy products on a large scale without the wholesale exploitation of animals. Layer hens spend their entire lives permanently confined in battery cages with 6-9 other hens and have only half a square foot of living space per bird. These birds are some of the most abused animals in agriculture. Since the male offspring of dairy cows don't produce milk, they are sold to veal farms, where they are permanently confined in veal crates that prevent them from moving or turning around. So, by purchasing dairy products, one is indirectly supporting the inherently cruel veal industry. One might think that eggs and dairy products are still preferable to meat on the grounds that "At least I am not contributing to the unnecessary killing of animals," but that too is false. After two or three laying cycles when their egg production begins to wane, the layer hens are inhumanely loaded onto trucks and sent to slaughter, where they are processed into chicken soup and pet food. After several years of confinement and continual reimpregnation on a dairy farm, spent dairy cows are sent to slaughter where they are processed into ground beef. The reality is that by purchasing eggs and dairy products, one is supporting the unjust exploitation and slaughter of hens and cows (which ipso facto violates the First Ethical Precept of Buddhism).

Eggs and dairy products also contribute to all the environmental problems listed above. Plus, vegans tend to have lower body mass indexes than lacto-ovo vegetarians and lower rates of heart disease, cancer, and stroke than their egg-and-dairy-eating vegetarian counterparts. And, as noted above, the original divinely-prescribed diet was a vegan diet.

Given all the compelling reasons to go vegan, why don't more people do it? In particular, why don't more lacto-ovo vegetarians (who are already aware of the reasons in favor of plant-based diets) go vegan? I suspect that more people don't go vegan because they mistakenly think that it must be incredibly difficult to eat vegan. I was a vegetarian for 12 years before going vegan in 1996, because I thought giving up eggs and dairy products would be incredibly difficult. But when I did make the change in 1996, I couldn't believe how easy it was to be vegan. I centered my diet around whole grains, fruits, vegetables, and beans. I replaced cow's milk with soy milk. I quit eating cheese, opting for ethnic cuisine that didn't call for cheese. I started experimenting with tofu scrambles till I found how to make ones that I like, and these are every bit as tasty as scrambled eggs and are far less likely to cause salmonella poisoning.

It really is easy to go vegan, and most people who go vegan report that they have more energy and feel better and more healthy almost immediately. But don't take my word for it. Why not try it for yourself for 21 days? Now is the perfect time to try out a vegan diet, because tomorrow marks the start of the PCRM's 21-Day Vegan Kickstart Challenge. Check out PCRM's 21-Day Vegan Kickstart Resource Page, where you will find meal planners; recipe suggestions for breakfast, lunch, and dinner; healthy snack alternatives; and tips on how to make over your diet. This 21-day program is designed for anyone who wants to explore and experience the health benefits of a vegan diet, and its free! That's right, free! During these three weeks, you will have access to:

• Daily e-tips that will put you on the path to weight loss, better health, and greater well-being.
• A delicious, easy, and satisfying recipe sent every day that will help you break your cravings for unhealthy foods.
• Weekly motivational nutrition webcasts featuring Dr. Neal Barnard, President of the Physician's Committee for Responsible Medicine.

All you need to do to get these recipes and have access to the webcasts is register, which you can do here. Just click on "login" or "profile" and you'll be able to register. Then you will discover the delicious, healthful culinary world open to vegans.

Bon Appetit!

Statistics

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Call for Papers

Lori Gruen, who attended graduate school with Mylan and me at the University of Arizona, asked me to publicize a special issue of Hypatia devoted to "animal others." Lori is one of the guest editors.

Abstention

Some people abstain from meat for religious rather than moral reasons. See here.

Moral Vegetarianism, Part 10 of 13

For an explanation of this feature, click on “Moral Vegetarianism” at the bottom of this post.

The Argument from Superior Aliens’ Invasion

John Harris advances the following consideration to show the immorality of eating meat.

Suppose that tomorrow a group of beings from another planet were to land on Earth, beings who considered themselves as superior to you as you feel yourself to be to other animals. Would they have the right to treat you as you treat animals you breed, keep, and kill for food?

The implication is certainly that it would be inconsistent for us to think that it is morally permissible for us to eat nonhuman animals but wrong for superior aliens to eat us.

But it is not clear that it is inconsistent if there is a relevant moral difference between animals and humans not found between humans and superior aliens. Our discussion above of the concept of person suggests a difference. Most human beings and presumably all of Harris’s aliens are persons. Most animals are probably not persons. Consequently, if personhood is the ground for the right to life, there need be no inconsistency in maintaining that it is morally permissible for us to kill and eat most animals, given that we cause them no pain, preserve the ecological balance, and so on, and that it is wrong for the aliens to kill and eat us, even though they kill us painlessly and so on.

KBJ: The following three propositions are inconsistent:

1. There is no morally relevant difference between humans and animals that would (a) justify the eating of animals by humans without (b) justifying the eating of humans by superior aliens.

2. It is wrong for superior aliens to eat humans.

3. It is not wrong for humans to eat animals.

The truth of any two of these propositions entails the falsity of the third. Since the propositions are inconsistent, every rational person must reject at least one of them. Harris rejects 3. Martin rejects 1. Do you know of anyone who rejects 2? Please don’t say that there aren’t any superior aliens. We don’t know that; and even if there aren’t, there could be, and it therefore makes sense to ask what one would say about them if they came here and wanted to eat us.

J. J. C. Smart on the Moral Status of Animals

In the past I have been concerned to advocate a normative utilitarian theory from the point of view of a non-cognitivist meta-ethics. I assumed that Hume was right in thinking that ultimately morality depends on how we feel about things. In advocating utilitarianism to a group of people I therefore had to express my feelings and appeal to their feelings. I described the feelings to which I wished to appeal as "generalized benevolence." I described generalized benevolence as a desire for the happiness, or at any rate in some sense the good, of all mankind, or perhaps of all sentient beings. I now think that the "perhaps of all sentient beings" should be much more uncompromising. It is a merit of utilitarianism, with its stress on happiness and unhappiness, that lower animals must be considered along with human beings, so that they are not debarred from full or direct consideration because they are not "rational." Utilitarians will of course be equally mindful of the higher animals, some of which, such as whales and dolphins, for all we know may be about as rational as we are, and also of course of any creatures which are higher and more rational than we are and which we may conjecture exist in outer space, and, we may hope, in future times here on earth.

(J. J. C. Smart, "Utilitarianism and Generalized Benevolence," Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 61 [January-April 1980]: 115-21, at 115 [italics in original; endnote omitted])

Note from KBJ: Smart is mistaken if he thinks that only utilitarianism accords moral status to animals. Many prominent animal-rights advocates (such as Tom Regan) are deontologists rather than consequentialists. Perhaps Smart was still thinking (in 1980) of Kant versus Bentham, rationality versus sentience. If so, then he is to be excused; but nobody today can think that any particular moral theory has an advantage over the others based on the status it accords animals. Peter Singer, like Smart, is a utilitarian, but he told me personally several years ago that his argument for animal liberation is independent of utilitarianism. This is good, because if animal liberation depended on or presupposed utilitarianism, there would be far fewer people who believe that animals have moral status.

CritterBlog

Here is a blog for your consideration.

Henry S. Salt (1851-1939) on Academic Hypocrisy

To the so-called ethical, no less than to the political school of thought, the question of Vegetarianism is unwelcome, obtruding as it does on the polite wordiness of academic discussion with an issue so coarsely downright: "You are a member of an Ethical Society—do you live by butchery?" But the ethics of diet are the very last subject with which a cultured Ethical Society would concern itself, and the attitude of the modern "ethicist" towards the rights of animals is still that of the mediæval schoolman. The ethicist does not wish to forego [sic] his beef and mutton, so he frames his ethics to avoid the danger of such mishap, and while he talks of high themes with the serene wisdom of a philosopher, the slaughter-houses continue to run blood.

(Henry S. Salt, The Logic of Vegetarianism: Essays and Dialogues [London: The Ideal Publishing Union, 1899], 108 [footnote omitted])

Note from KBJ: Sadly, not much has changed in the past 110 years. Many philosophers who rail against torture, capital punishment, war, racism, and indifference to human poverty have no qualms about consuming animal flesh. Can you say "cognitive dissonance"?

Save the Chimps

Here.

The Bilby

One of our readers sent a link to this story about the Australian bilby.

Trudy

Reasonable Humans and Animals

Here is a crisp (but badly edited) essay by philosopher Nathan Nobis. I like Nathan's distinction between "Oh yeah?" and "So what!" as replies to an argument. Suppose you claim that proposition C follows, logically, from propositions P1 and P2. There are two mistakes you can be making. First, one or more of your premises may be false. Second, your conclusion may not follow, logically, from your premises, even if the premises are true. If I reject one of your premises, I'm saying, in effect, "Oh yeah?" If I deny that your conclusion follows from your premises, I'm saying, in effect, "So what (if your premises are true)!"

"The Chicken Craze"

Here is a New York Times story about the growing number of people who raise chickens.

Peter Singer

Here is an interview with Peter Singer.

Vegetarianism

This man argues that vegetarianism is immoral. Why is it immoral? Because it is "based . . . on the principle that animals are morally equivalent to humans." Vegetarianism is based on the principle that animals matter, morally. It says nothing about whether animals are "morally equivalent" to humans (whatever that means). The author seems to grasp this point in his penultimate paragraph, but doesn't notice that it undercuts his argument. Let me put it bluntly: If animals matter at all, they win, because there is no weighty interest on the other side of the scale. How sad, that such bad reasoning as this man's should see the light of day in a prominent place.

Statistics

This blog had 1,743 visits during July. That's an average of 56.2 visits per day. Traffic is always lower during the summer months.