Adrian Kreutz has an angry post- denouncing Zangwill's argument that we should eat animals if we care about them- at 'Practical Ethics' which- being written for those 'in the profession'- nicely exposes that profession's utter idiocy.
That eating animals constitutes a harm has by now largely leaked into public opinion.
It is generally accepted that being scolded or bullied or prevented from doing what one wants to do constitutes a harm- one which, however, we may have to put up with if the scolder or busybody in question is more powerful and ruthless. Preventing a person from doing what he wants to another person or animal may cause such grave harm to the the person intervening that they desist from doing so by reason of having had their head kicked in. The question of 'rights' only arises where there is an enforcement mechanism which can prevent harm to the one asserting a right or seeking for its institution. For this reason, this branch of ethical inquiry is supervenient on the question of violence which is a 'learned skill' with economies of scale and scope and significant barriers to entry. This means that if those who kill animals are better at killing, then such killers will have asymmetric power and thus be part of a 'stationary bandit' or 'stationary psycopath' coalition. In other words, humans will to some extent be 'domesticated' by those with a higher propensity to kill other types of animal. Thus the Law and Philosophy and even Poetry (which, as Hazlitt observed, somehow always ends up on the side of power) are likely to be on the side of butchery not bleeding hearts. True, as part of a wider program of antagonomia and the creation of nuisance value, dysfunction in the academy and civil society might generate an Animal equality movement. But this may merely represent misology and McKelvey chaos- i.e. intense stupidity, envenomed polemics, and a ceaseless struggle for 'agenda control' till a 'heresthetic' leader intervenes and imposes an essentially Fascist ideology.
In Indic thought 'Ahimsa' (not harming) is the rubric under which both human, communal, animal, plant, mineral and other rights are subsumed. Indian law grants rights even to rivers and mountains which are thought to suffer injury by pollution, deforestation etc. However, Indians accepted that violence can only be understood game theoretically because it is strategic not univocal. To implement dharma (eusebia or pious conduct) the Just King must do the 'reverse game theory' that is 'mechanism design'. Incentive compatible remedies provided under a vinculum juris are an example. However, these have to be defeasible and correspond to perturbations around an 'evolutionarily stable strategy' of a regret minimising type. We are dealing with classes of beings which evolved by natural selection, it must always be the case that there will be phenotypal diversity which is so to speak 'dammed up', not channelized. Thus, where 'domestication' occurs we notice that some portion of the original stock 'hedges its bets' or else some portion of an imported domesticated variety- e.g. horses in America- become feral. Interestingly, after the Japanese lifted their beef ban, some cows ran off and became feral!
Only rarely do meat eaters deny that. Those who deny it usually do so on the grounds of an assumed variance in consciousness or ability to suffer between human and non-human animals.
Nonsense! People think they are doing a wounded or sick animal a favor by 'putting it down'. Meat eaters justify themselves by saying 'we merely eat animas we find tasty and nutritious. You guys fuck animals and eat their poo. Don't deny it. When you are not sodomizing dogs, you are eagerly collecting and consuming their turds. That's why you look like shit. Moreover....argh!' At this point the meat eater keels over from a stroke because of all the red meat he has consumed.
Hardly anyone, however, has the audacity to argue that killing animals actually does them good, and that therefore we must continue eating meat and consuming animal products.
I think this is quite a common argument. In India it goes like this 'if we ate beef, our cows would be well fed. We do eat buffalo meat, which is why our buffaloes look sleek. If we persist with the beef ban, sooner or later, buffaloes will replace cows. Compare States where the cow is not sacred to those where it is. The latter has a falling proportion of cows.' There have been similar arguments here in the UK in the context of the Animal Sentience Bill.
Hardly anyone apart from UCL philosopher Nick Zangwill, that is, who in a recent article published in Aeon argues that “eating animals’ benefits animals for they exist only because human beings eat them”. One’s modus ponens is another’s modus tollens, right?
I suppose he means 'if these animals exist, it is because we eat them' is equivalent to 'if we didn't eat them, these animals would not exist.' Obviously, we aren't really talking about any species going extinct. The population held for commercial purposes may go down. But that might happen for purely commercial reasons anyway. That would be a matter of preferences and profitability not morality or ethics.
Consider the class of beings raised for the butcher's knife. Would they exist if they were not slaughtered? Yes. They'd be alive. Might they starve to death because it would not be in any human's economic interest to feed and protect them? Yes. But the chance that they might survive means they are better off than when they were certain to go under the knife. Clearly, there is no valid modus ponens here. There is only a fallacious 'affirming the consequent'. The fact that some animals are kept alive for the butcher's knife does not mean they wouldn't be alive if that purpose disappeared. There is a possibility, which has been ignored, that they might be able to survive on their own or else they may thrive as a result of the altruism or loving care of those who don't want to eat them.
Modus tollens or denying the consequent is a valid type of inference. It is perfectly proper to deny that just because some animals are reared for food, they would not be alive at all if they were not food.
Let me unpack and debunk his argument.
I've done that above. We can apply modus tollens to debunk Zangwill's fallacious 'affirming the consequent' which isn't modus ponens or 'affirming the antecedent' at all. If animals are eaten it does not mean those animals were necessarily reared for that purpose. It only means that animals pre-existed the practice of eating them- and therefore the existence of animals does not depend on the existence of the meat industry.
Kreutz has not unpacked or debunked shit. God alone knows why he mentioned modus tollens.
Nick Zangwill’s argument hinges on the anticipated pleasure of hypothetical animals – future animals – that will someday exist because of animal breeding for meat production.
No. Zangwill's argument hinges on 'affirming the consequent'- a logical fallacy. He dresses up his peroration with a sort of faux Utilitarianism and then drags in some supposed taboo against eating things above a certain level of rationality or whose conditions of rearing fall below some threshold of comfort. However, such considerations were obviously brought in for instrumental purposes- viz. to widen the scope of 'animal welfare' and what counts as 'sentience'. This is perfectly sensible. We want to stop our neighbor's kid from torturing his cat and chopping up his dog because, as he gets older, we might become his next target.
The idea is that ‘having a life’ is better than ‘not having a life’,
So abortion is always wrong as is contraception. This is 'Natalism' extended to animals. However, this is only consistent if complete celibacy is the first step towards practicing Ahimsa. Otherwise, your actions give rise to a lineage which, sooner or later, will have to contend with different lineages and species because resources are scarce, territory is scarce. You have to violently chase away the animals which would otherwise eat up your crops or take over your house and eat your babies.
and life, if only temporarily, is what we grant those animals when we breed them only to be eaten.
Parents raise kids so those kids can have sex and then raise kids. This does not mean that without incest our species would not exist though, no doubt, some incest may feature in extant blood lines.
In Hinduism, the first person to die is Yama. But this is only because he won't consent to commit incest with his twin sister Yami so as to increase the population. The 'Niyama'- moral injunction- only arises if some restriction is placed on how Life may burgeon. But this brings death into the world. Yama becomes the King of the Dead, deciding whether their good deeds outweighed their evil actions.
Because there are animals that in some sense exist only because of the meat industry, and that existence is valuable in and of itself (under certain conditions to which I will respond below), we “owe it to the animals to eat them”, says Zangwill.
Zangwill is being silly. Expected Net Utility is irrelevant at any point in 'species' life. Disutility can be greater than Utility for ten thousand years provided the species survives to a point where there is some probability that the reverse would henceforth be the case. In any case, it is only utile to impute utility or experience disutility if doing so has survival value. It is foolish for philosopher's to use an outdated economic theory which, in any case, only applies if there is no Knightian Uncertainty- i.e the future fitness landscape is probabilistically known. But, in that case, everything should be genetically engineered even moral philosophy or rather its prohibition.
I will now dissect Zangwill’s argument into its components. First, let’s have a look at the idea that a possible life – i.e., the life of an animal existing in the future – has actual moral valence.
It has economic and ecological valence. If that animal exists in the future it can pass on its genes. By the extended phenotype principle, some genes of ours benefit by that possibility. This is, Price equation, 'first order' good and perfectly moral.
Basing one’s arguments on hypothetical future existence – possible people, for example – is a common practice in moral philosophy. For instance, when we consider the effects of climate chance, moral philosophers urge us to anticipate the moral responsibility we have towards people living in the future.
Since we display kin selective altruism- i.e. conform to the Price equation- this is perfectly sensible. The thing is already biologically hard wired and provided moral philosophers are told to fuck off and sciencey guys and mathsy guys and 'Law & Econ' mavens are left to hammer out the details- the rest of us will go along with it.
Because we have a certain responsibility to our great-grandchildren,
we must get rid of useless University Departments like the one this cretin inhabits.
the argument goes, we must act now to reduce carbon emissions and avoid climate catastrophe. That’s all fine as an argument.
It's fine as an option people go along with. It is not fine as any sort of philosophical argument because the thing is ideographic, not nomothetic. There is no universal principle or law here.
Zangwill’s point, however, is not whether we should consider preventing future disaster for the sake of the wellbeing of future animals. The author’s point is that we should breed and kill animals for the sake of gustatory satisfaction,
we've been doing that for thousands of years. Had boars not been domesticated and turned into delicious porkers, they would have gone the way of the Anglo Saxon Wolf.
for that maximises existence – as in, there will be animals that wouldn’t otherwise, without incentive from the meat industry, exist – and maximising existence – ‘net life’ – is good. The only caveat: existence has to pass certain thresholds of what constitutes the good life, such as not being tortured; a standard of ‘goodness’ the life of most farmed animals will not meet.
If that is what the law, or consumer preference's decide- sure. But that has nothing to do with moral philosophy.
But assuming some animal’s life passes the ‘goodness’ test, if ‘net life’ is to be maximised, then why kill animals at some arbitrary point in time?
Kreutz is a fucking Kretin. The solution to a constrained optimization problem is non arbitrary. As a matter of fact, through out the ages, livestock are culled at different phases of their lifecycle. Some are killed as babies- so their meat is tender. Others are killed after they have been through their reproductive life cycle or else after their usefulness as draught animals etc has come to an end.
Since Zangwill concludes that we owe the animals their death, maximising ‘net life’ cannot be what motivates the argument.
Yes it can. Indeed, we can imagine a 'Utilitarian' utopia where stupid proles like me are killed soon after we hit our peak productivity while geniuses- who, typically, continue to be highly productive into their nineties- are kept alive at an increasing cost to the State. The good news is that grannies too would be kept alive coz grannies are super wonderful and greatly contribute to good outcomes for grand and great grand children. As for me, I should have been painlessly put down at 26.
What else does?
Maybe Zangwill thinks that a life which’s
whose- Kreutz isn't a native English speaker
sole purpose is death at some human’s hand is a life is worth living,
Zangwill is incapable of having so sensible a thought. All life is worth living- even mine. Indeed, suppose the sole purpose of my life were revealed to me, as it ends, to have taken the bullet meant for another, none would say, thanks to the Grace of the Great God Fuck, my existence on earth had been a complete waste not just of time but good enough wine.
and it is precisely that life which ends in the slaughterhouse which, according to Zangwill utilitarian calculus, must be maximised.
This kretin doesn't get that Evolutionarily Stable Strategies already do that for all species. That's why both my grandfathers died in their late forties or fifties while both my grandmothers lived into their eighties or nineties. 'Net life' burgeoned in a Hannan consistent (regret minimizing- i.e. 'maximization under Knightian Uncertainty or with respect to 'machine learning' type heuristics) manner such that, once demographic transition occurred- i.e. my parent's cohort had only two or three babies- daddies become more mummy-like and achieved an equal longevity.
This life of the livestock then is not only worth living (even if unnecessarily limited in time), but also, according to Zangwill, worth bringing about.
It is worth living a fucking horrible life if this is the only way to ensure the survival of your species or even some other species.
But is the life of a livestock, a life that is terminated at some others’ arbitrary will really worth living?
It is worth keeping worthless shitheads like me alive just so, when we die, Medical Science can learn something which preserves the lives of those who justify the existence of our Race upon its, perhaps uncaring, fitness landscape.
Even if it were, wouldn’t the life of livestock be manifoldly better without the doom of ultimate death at the hands of a human?
Kreutz comes from a Continent where Life was made immeasurably better, by reason of an 'incarnating' and 'making human' of that All Mighty God at whose hands death comes to us all.
The fact is there is some evidence that the lives of 'livestock' becomes better where there is a better conception of the Good Shepherd gains or a more incentive compatible habitus or Tardean imitatio Dei.
We can, after all, decide whether an animal which was (granting the validity of the first premise of Zangwill’s argument) in fact supposed to be slaughtered, whose existence is in some sense conditional on humans’ desire for meat, actually be slaughtered or not.
The state may have the capacity and willingness to enforce laws relating to animal slaughter. However, this becomes difficult if a large community within the country is determined to break those laws.
There’s an is-ought gap here:
Surely such a gap always exists? The point of mechanism design is that we can give agents a self-regarding motive for implementing an altruistic program.
even though some animals do in some sense exists (sic) solely for the sake of meat consumption
we are speaking of animals raised by the meat industry for slaughter. I imagine that any change in the law would permit such operations to be wound down gradually.
it doesn’t follow that those animals should be slaughtered and their flesh consumed.
That may indeed be the reason that laws in this respect are introduced gradually so that animals are not abandoned and forced to fend for themselves.
There is nothing essentialist about life as a livestock.
Yes there is. Essences exist in all possible worlds. The moment you use the collocation, or merism, 'life as livestock', you are positing such an essentialism. It is unlikely that animals raised as livestock would be viable if suddenly liberated. Some may successfully become feral. Others are likely to die.
We can imagine livestock to live a life not premised on untimely death,
No we can't unless we can imagine a way to defeat all predators, parasites, diseases etc which might cause 'untimely death'. But why would we imagine any such thing with respect to mere livestock? We can't achieve it for ourselves- indeed the thing is incompossible for evolutionary reasons- so fuck we'd fantasize about it for fucking chickens?
and that doesn’t constitute a harm done to the animal, does it?
It may do. This stupid cunt is 'affirming the consequent'. The fact is, if we owe anybody anything at all, we do owe all sentient beings death if the alternative for them is worse. At least, such is the thinking in the West where humans are considered to have a duty to 'put down' suffering animals.
Alternatively, without prejudice or obligation we may with a Tolstoy character aver- 'if you cavil at sickness, God won't grant you death.'
We don’t owe animals their death. Why would the author think otherwise?
Some of us may indeed have such an obligation by law established.
Here’s one idea for how Zangwill might try salvage the argument: it is one’s past intention to create a life that makes it morally right to terminate that life at one’s will.
Surely that is not the 'pro choice' argument? We may be sympathetic to those who wish to terminate accidental pregnancies or those which are the result of rape. But is it not repugnant for a person to deliberately get pregnant so as to experience the pleasures of infanticide?
That’s hardly convincing.
It may be or it may not. Perhaps the guys who are gonna defeat COVID or Cancer or whatever need to 'create life'- i.e. do 'gain of function' research- but we need to be sure they can terminate that life quickly and utterly.
Consider this: are parents morally permitted to slaughter their children?
Yes. This is the plot of 'Mother India'. A woman shoots her own son because he was going to abduct a girl (who loved him) belonging to an enemy sept, or class. Grown old, she is honored by the Nation.
More generally, any purely deontic 'atomic proposition' which has demographic effects must involve some such thing.
Their existence is premised on an intentional act of creation on the side of the parents, after all. What if someone ‘breeds’ puppies to use them as firewood replacement?
I believe dogs were bred for the Soviet Space program. Laika, the dog, was shot off into Outer Space never to return. I doubt any such thing would happen now.
Imagine the puppies have a good life by the standards of what constitutes a good puppy-life, but their existence’s sole purpose is to be pushed into the furnace at some arbitrarily chosen time? The fact that Zangwill has to resort to all sorts of caveats for why, for instance, dogs, albeit in some sense bread solely for human purposes, should not be consumed highlights that what’s flawed with Zangwill’s argument: certain forms of human intentionality influencing the process of creating life doesn’t warrant the moral permissibility of ending this life at humans’ will.
It is permissible to 'end this life at human's will' provided that will is acting disinterestedly or from a motive recognized to be vital to the commonweal- e.g. killing dogs which appear to be rabid. The problem is not that 'human will' supervenes, the problem is the motive and method of that will.
Anticipating objections like ‘You wouldn’t do that to humans either’, Zangwill forestalls that “there are no human beings who owe their existence to a cannibalistic meat-eating practice.
At least, that is our devout hope.
And even if there were, they could survive without it, if liberated, which is radically unlike domesticated animals”.
A baby reared by a cannibalistic cult may not be able to survive on its own. Come to think of it, neither would I.
But how does that imply that we are permitted – or even encouraged – to eat animals otherwise unable to survive ‘in the wild’?
We are permitted or even encouraged to eat good food which will make us strong and healthy. Unless specific taboos or religious or legal injunctions obtain, this pretty much means any animal we can get our hands on which we think might be tasty and nutritious.
Ownership is a different matter. To take an example, swans or other noble animals may belong exclusively to the monarch. However, if a woodsman kills and eats a wounded swan which would not have otherwise survived, this may be a mitigating factor in assessing his punishment.
Why not care for those animals, for that’s what we should be expected to do when humans are, for whatever reason, old age or disability, unable to survive in the wild? One’s modus ponens is another’s modus tollens.
We may be expected to care for some humans in this condition but not all such humans. In particular, we have no obligation to cross deserts or climb mountains to succor invalids who have chosen to reside there. More generally, moral obligations are defeated by cost, feasibility, and considerations of oikeiosis. It would be foolish to say we had an equal obligation to an aged parent living next door as an incontinent badger living a hundred miles away.
The author also seems to have anticipated the rebuttal above, arguing that humans and non-human animals have different moral worth, grounded in different claims to rights perhaps, so that even unconscious humans have moral value different (and greater than, I suppose) to non-human animals. There’s too much going here for me to unpack it carefully enough. Suffice it to say, the animals-don’t-have-rights line is unconvincing. We can always, in form of an open-question argument, ask a follow-up normative question, ‘Should animals have rights?’. Imagine a world in which we no longer draw lines of rights (or the lack thereof) between races, genders, and yes, species…
This is in fact the world we live in. A few fools talk nonsense about rights. Then they discover no one is listening. Laws may change but laws may also become ineffective. Custom is King but Customs change.
Imagine there’s an animal that exists only for the purpose of meat consumption.
There are phenotypes of that sort. We don't have to imagine them. We can see them. We know that if such animals are abandoned, most will die out but a more robust feral phenotype may prevail.
Were there no meat industry, that animal would never have existed.
That particular phenotype would not have existed.
What if by mere chance this animal dies a natural death at old age? What if by mere chance it ends up not being eaten. In what sense has this animal been harmed? Do we really owe the animal the ‘pleasure’ of untimely death? This is what Zangwill wants us to believe.
If there is an outbreak of 'foot and mouth', I think the State has to ensure there is plenty of 'untimely death' and burning of carcasses otherwise a particular type of livestock may go extinct or lose its economic viability for the meat industry.
It isn't too much of a stretch to say to 'look, if everybody goes vegan- which they may wish to do for health reasons- then lots of land currently devoted to livestock will find another use. There will be a big fall in the animal population. When you eat meat, you help ensure the rearing of livestock is economically viable.' This isn't a particularly good argument but then no argument in moral philosophy aint stupid.
Zangwill calls “human beings a rare light in the darkness of the animal kingdom (for they) nurture some animals in order to eat them”.
They also nurture some animals as pets or ensure their survival in the wild for ecological and aesthetic reasons. The Mahabharata points out that 'Without Tigers, the forest would not survive. If the forest disappears, Tigers will perish.' It was already known that where forest cover is reduced, the rain cycle is affected, floods and droughts alternate with increasing frequency. Polities break down. Anarchy spreads. The condition of human life becomes nasty, brutish and short as 'matsanyaya' prevails and the big fish eats the little fish.
I call this a cruel practice. Suggesting that “vegetarians and vegans are the natural enemies of domesticated animals that are bred to be eaten”
may well be true. It depends on whether those 'vegetarians and vegans' are prepared to do incentive compatible mechanism design such that the stock of 'domesticated' or formerly domesticated and now feral animals are safe and have a good quality of life. Sadly, 'vegetarians and vegans' may not be prepared to do any such thing. The result would be a mounting nuisance from stray dogs and stray cattle etc. till the rule of law collapses and the nuisance is curbed by a bunch of sociopathic mercenaries. At this point some animal rights advocates are beaten to death while the animals they championed look on with studied indifference.
is a slap in the face of animal welfare activists
better a slap in the face than having your head kicked in
who have struggled to point out what should be uncontroversial: that animal life without the doom of premature slaughter is preferable to an existence with the sole purpose of supplying meat.
And a world without antagonomic activists is preferable to one's where they run amok till they make any political party they are associated with utterly unelectable while turning 'safe spaces' for cretins on University Campuses into so glaring a nuisance that the Higher Education establishment decides to get rid of non-STEM subject instruction. After all, it is the Bio-engineering Department which brings in the big bucks and which wins the Nobel Prizes whereas the Philosophy Dept. is a dumping ground for 'affirmative action' hires and the Grievance Studies mob.
Sometimes, a modus ponens just shouldn’t be turned into a modus tollens.
Modus ponens is useless unless there is at leas one true atomic proposition with 'cash value'. But we know of no such thing. That's a modus tollens right there. It says don't bother with useless bullshit of the sort that Kreuz and Zangwill have wasted their time with.
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