This depends on the price, I would say. If itâs also 50% cheaper, I would probably come around. As for why, because I prefer real meat over fake meat.
Woops, ya, I forgot price. Why would you prefer real meat over fake meat, even if they were indistinguishable and had the same price?
On extending rights to animals, I find it poorly motivated and deeply counterintuitive to only count (moral) agents or those sufficiently intelligent as moral subjects or worthy of rights or count their interests lexically more (although the nature and strength of those rights could depend on the individual; dogs donât need rights to elementary and high school education). This would mean our obligations to conscious and suffering non-person (and not future-person) humans are only (or primarily) indirect, circumstantial and sometimes completely absent, because what we owe them for their own sake is dominated by whatâs owed to human persons. It wouldnât be wrong for their parents to abuse them (e.g. treat them like farmed animals) for their own trivial interests, unless itâs a useful rule to protect human persons, not because the human non-persons matter as much in themselves.
I also suspect that placing extra importance on intelligence will lead to counterintuitive conclusions for humans who are usually intelligent or rational, because we arenât always intelligent or rational (or these capacities might be artificially reduced for one reason or another), so the interests that come from these moments of unintelligence/âirrationality wouldnât deserve more weight in themselves than similar nonhuman animal interests. For example, I would assume your interests in not being tortured are strongest while youâre being tortured and because of the torture, but if youâre not intelligent during those moments, that might not be the case. Actually, itâs plausible to me that you canât be intelligent or rational past a certain intensity of torture; youâd break down. (This is setting aside long-term effects.)
Korsgaard also makes the case for animal rights under a Kantian framework in âFellow Creatures: Our Obligations to the Other Animalsâ. I havenât read it myself, and am not familiar with the arguments, though.
Yes, and also you have to have the political capital to ban it, which isnât free, and the black markets will have further costs like mafia bosses killing people to secure their illegal meat infrastructure, like we have now with cocaine. Youâd have a War on Meat akin to the War on Drugs. Much easier and cheaper for governments to tax meat rather than ban it. But even when you ban it, you wonât have 100% market share for the substitutes.
I think that black markets will be rare if the substitutes are close enough. Few people would accept the risks of going to the black market in the long-term just for authenticity. At least cocaine offers a different kind of experience from whatâs legal to buy. I agree that we canât guarantee 100%, but thatâs the same for human trafficking and slavery, too. I think the share could be brought up past 99%, and thatâs fine to round to 100% for the sake of discussion.
If there were popular support for a ban over nothing, I think people would accept significant government costs, and a ban would be more likely than a tax. Maybe a tax is preferable as you suggest; I donât know.
âWhy would you prefer real meat over fake meat, even if they were indistinguishable and had the same price?â
Why wouldnât I? I donât believe in animal rights. Perhaps if no animal rights activists had ever condoned human rights violations against me, I might be indifferent. But they did, and the substitutes wonât be indistinguishable during my lifetime anyway.
âThis would mean our obligations to conscious and suffering non-person (and not future-person) humans are only (or primarily) indirect, circumstantial and sometimes completely absent, because what we owe them for their own sake is dominated by whatâs owed to human persons.â
I have a hard time imagining conscious suffering non-person humans. But yeah, I do believe that if you were never a person, will never be a person and arenât a person, I donât need to respect your rights. What would the point be? Human rights are a coordination tool for humans to benefit humans, and even thatâs not really working very well.
âI think that black markets will be rare if the substitutes are close enough. Few people would accept the risks of going to the black market in the long-term just for authenticity. At least cocaine offers a different kind of experience from whatâs legal to buy.â
I donât know. Alcohol is legal and people still buy the illegal marihuana.
âI think the share could be brought up past 99%â
Not in your lifetime. I think youâre underestimating how culturally entrenched (animal) meat production and consumption is. Itâs common for vegans to think incorrectly that other people also donât care (much) about meat.
Why wouldnât I? I donât believe in animal rights. Perhaps if no animal rights activists had ever condoned human rights violations against me, I might be indifferent.
Shouldnât the burden be the other way? Why should you care that itâs real if itâs otherwise indistinguishable? It sounds like you prefer real meat just to spite animal advocates. There are reasons to break the tie the other way:
1. Moral uncertainty. You might assign some possibility to it being wrong. Are you 100% sure animals donât matter? If youâre 100% sure or close to it, is that confidence justified? Also, you donât have to believe in animal ârightsâ per se to recognize that animal farming causes harm to animals, and itâs better to avoid this, all else equal.
2. The harm it causes other humans who care about animals because they care about animals. Imagine if we started farming children with severe intellectual disabilities and torturing them. Itâs horrifying for us in the same way.
3. Environmental harms.
4. Public health.
5. Injuries, PTSD and other mental health issues caused by slaughterhouse work.
6. Increased crime rates in areas with slaughterhouses. (Iâm not sure how strong the causal relationship is here, though, but itâs plausible given mental health effects.)
I have a hard time imagining conscious suffering non-person humans.
Infants (<1 year) and many nonverbal humans who are nonverbal because of intellectual disability.
But yeah, I do believe that if you were never a person, will never be a person and arenât a person, I donât need to respect your rights. What would the point be? Human rights are a coordination tool for humans to benefit humans, and even thatâs not really working very well.
They still have interests, e.g. in not suffering involuntarily If my own involuntary suffering is bad in itself, and I recognize that at least one other individualâs involuntary suffering is bad in itself, then itâs on me to justify treating some involuntary suffering as bad in itself and others not, and if I canât do this, then I should accept that itâs always bad in itself, or that no other individualâs suffering is bad in itself (and maybe not my own, either).
Are you not concerned with othersâ welfare for their sakes, and not just how it benefits you to be concerned with their welfare in other ways? What are the things that, at a fundamental level, make a person better or worse off? Donât those (or at least some of those) also apply to nonhuman animals?
I donât know. Alcohol is legal and people still buy the illegal marihuana.
I donât think alcohol is a good substitute for marijuana. People might still buy illegal stuff when they can buy the same products legally anyway, but there would have to be significant enough differences that make up for the risks for them to do this in large numbers.
Not in your lifetime. I think youâre underestimating how culturally entrenched (animal) meat production and consumption is. Itâs common for vegans to think incorrectly that other people also donât care (much) about meat.
So the relevant attachment here is to (specific) real animal products in particular, which I think will give way much more easily, especially if the substitutes end up as good and cheaper, since I think most people donât have any special attachment to the authenticity of animal products regardless of quality or price or specifically want to buy them to support animal farming (although this might be common among conservatives or in rural areas). And again, you donât need anywhere near 100% support for a ban, which could make it prohibitively risky for people to farm animals or buy real animal products.
Check out this survey and its replication (pages 4-6), in which a third of respondents (Americans) said they supported a ban on animal farming. If and when substitutes become as good and cheaper, people will eat them by default instead of real animal products, and I think theyâll become less speciesist.
Moral uncertainty doesnât give you what you want. It gives you everything and nothing. You donât use it to question your own values, but only as a rhetorical device to get other people to question their values, and only those that disagree with your current values. Maybe the Logic of the Larder goes through. Maybe animal farming is good for wild animals. Maybe animal suffering is intrinsically morally good. You canât point to uncertainty to privilege your current moral preference.
The costs to slaughterhouse workers are internalized by the voluntary nature of slaughterhouse work. People make mistakes but by and large you have to pay them to compensate for risk and unpleasantness in the workplace, or else theyâll find a different job.
I didnât know about the crime rates near slaughterhouses. A possible hypothesis might be that sociopaths or people with a penchant for violence are more likely to work in slaughterhouses, due to the violent nature of the work. If they also live nearer, this could explain the difference. If so, these people might commit crimes elsewhere in a world without slaughterhouses. But Iâm only speculating.
Health and environmental effects are probably good arguments. It would have been better for us all if China had banned live markets in 2017. However, the unhealthy nature of overeating animal products are internalized also. No one is forced to eat more meat than is good for them. The current vegan substitutes arenât healthy either. Too much soy can cause infertility, to name just one example.
I do want to spite animal advocates. I didnât appreciate that they declared I should have human rights only if I support chicken rights. This was after they advocated bans on animal products even though we have no good substitutes. In fairness to the EA movement, this hasnât happened here, but it did happen. This was the exact opposite of âgains from trade through compromiseâ and âcooperating with other value systemsâ. My response to it is to boycott their ideological goals.
My general observation is that animal rights advocates feel morally superior to omnivores, and expect the world to treat them accordingly. It virtually never occurs to them that other people simply donât share their pro-animal preferences, and if they want us to forgo consumer surplus, they have to compensate us for that. Youâre free to produce vegan food as a non-profit and sell it at cost, if you want to shift the indifference curves of omnivores.
I donât intrinsically care about the suffering of others. I just want to live in a society that leaves me alone, according to norms that we donât have to harass, backstab and torture each other. That requires human rights (or something functionally equivalent like trustworthy alliances). I donât see what chicken rights can possibly do for this end. Looking at the statements of animal activists, all it did was make them more hostile to omnivores.
Moral uncertainty doesnât give you what you want. It gives you everything and nothing. You donât use it to question your own values, but only as a rhetorical device to get other people to question their values, and only those that disagree with your current values. Maybe the Logic of the Larder goes through. Maybe animal farming is good for wild animals. Maybe animal suffering is intrinsically morally good. You canât point to uncertainty to privilege your current moral preference.
I think if you reflect more on the alternatives (which you should try to fit within whole views, not just judge claims in isolation), some will seem more satisfactory to you than others, so you would give them more weight. The logic of the larder might go through or animal farming might be good because of the effects on wild animals, but, all else equal, it still seems (to me) far more plausible for more suffering in farmed animals to be worse than less suffering than for the opposite to be true, which would count against factory farmed animals, or at least chickens and pigs (theyâre among the worst treated, in my view).
Maybe animal suffering is intrinsically morally good.
Do you find views according to which this is true more satisfactory than those according to which animal suffering is intrinsically morally bad? I think it would be hard to justify that human suffering is not intrinsically morally good if animal suffering is intrinsically morally good.
or else theyâll find a different job
I think itâs often not so easy for people to just leave their job and find another, especially if they have children to take care of.
A possible hypothesis might be that sociopaths or people with a penchant for violence are more likely to work in slaughterhouses, due to the violent nature of the work. If they also live nearer, this could explain the difference. If so, these people might commit crimes elsewhere in a world without slaughterhouses. But Iâm only speculating.
Yes, a priori, I think that could plausibly account for the effect. This study found an association at the county-level, so for self-selection effects to account for all of it, it would mean people would be moving between counties (which can be pretty big) to work at slaughterhouses, which is of course still plausible, but makes it seem less likely. Some other studies are listed here. I think the fact that they are at higher risk for PTSD is pretty suggestive that slaughterhouse work could affect people in this way, too.
I didnât appreciate that they declared I should have human rights only if I support chicken rights.
I donât think this is at all representative of animal advocates. I think they tend to be more progressive and supporting of human rights generally:
Youâre free to produce vegan food as a non-profit and sell it at cost, if you want to shift the indifference curves of omnivores.
I think for-profits, or donating to or otherwise supporting the Good Food Institute would be more cost-effective in shifting demand, and this is exactly what many animal advocates do. Iâve donated to GFI.
I donât intrinsically care about the suffering of others.
Do you care about others or their wellbeing for their own sake at all for any other reason?
âł I think itâs often not so easy for people to just leave their job and find another, especially if they have children to take care of. â
Yes, elasticity isnât absolute, but in the long run it matters a lot. In the extreme, you can walk out and be jobless rather than accepting bad conditions. That alone puts a cap on how bad conditions can be, although perhaps some risks can be hard to estimate.
âł Do you care about others or their wellbeing for their own sake at all for any other reason? â
Yes, if I have positive personal relationships with them or they have earned it. However, I also do the negative version (revenge), and in many cases I find that more motivating. So thereâs no benevolence bias on my end. I have yet to find a philosophical reason why I should have one.
Thanks for the interesting discussion, Iâll end it at this point.
Woops, ya, I forgot price. Why would you prefer real meat over fake meat, even if they were indistinguishable and had the same price?
On extending rights to animals, I find it poorly motivated and deeply counterintuitive to only count (moral) agents or those sufficiently intelligent as moral subjects or worthy of rights or count their interests lexically more (although the nature and strength of those rights could depend on the individual; dogs donât need rights to elementary and high school education). This would mean our obligations to conscious and suffering non-person (and not future-person) humans are only (or primarily) indirect, circumstantial and sometimes completely absent, because what we owe them for their own sake is dominated by whatâs owed to human persons. It wouldnât be wrong for their parents to abuse them (e.g. treat them like farmed animals) for their own trivial interests, unless itâs a useful rule to protect human persons, not because the human non-persons matter as much in themselves.
I also suspect that placing extra importance on intelligence will lead to counterintuitive conclusions for humans who are usually intelligent or rational, because we arenât always intelligent or rational (or these capacities might be artificially reduced for one reason or another), so the interests that come from these moments of unintelligence/âirrationality wouldnât deserve more weight in themselves than similar nonhuman animal interests. For example, I would assume your interests in not being tortured are strongest while youâre being tortured and because of the torture, but if youâre not intelligent during those moments, that might not be the case. Actually, itâs plausible to me that you canât be intelligent or rational past a certain intensity of torture; youâd break down. (This is setting aside long-term effects.)
Korsgaard also makes the case for animal rights under a Kantian framework in âFellow Creatures: Our Obligations to the Other Animalsâ. I havenât read it myself, and am not familiar with the arguments, though.
I think that black markets will be rare if the substitutes are close enough. Few people would accept the risks of going to the black market in the long-term just for authenticity. At least cocaine offers a different kind of experience from whatâs legal to buy. I agree that we canât guarantee 100%, but thatâs the same for human trafficking and slavery, too. I think the share could be brought up past 99%, and thatâs fine to round to 100% for the sake of discussion.
If there were popular support for a ban over nothing, I think people would accept significant government costs, and a ban would be more likely than a tax. Maybe a tax is preferable as you suggest; I donât know.
âWhy would you prefer real meat over fake meat, even if they were indistinguishable and had the same price?â
Why wouldnât I? I donât believe in animal rights. Perhaps if no animal rights activists had ever condoned human rights violations against me, I might be indifferent. But they did, and the substitutes wonât be indistinguishable during my lifetime anyway.
âThis would mean our obligations to conscious and suffering non-person (and not future-person) humans are only (or primarily) indirect, circumstantial and sometimes completely absent, because what we owe them for their own sake is dominated by whatâs owed to human persons.â
I have a hard time imagining conscious suffering non-person humans. But yeah, I do believe that if you were never a person, will never be a person and arenât a person, I donât need to respect your rights. What would the point be? Human rights are a coordination tool for humans to benefit humans, and even thatâs not really working very well.
âI think that black markets will be rare if the substitutes are close enough. Few people would accept the risks of going to the black market in the long-term just for authenticity. At least cocaine offers a different kind of experience from whatâs legal to buy.â
I donât know. Alcohol is legal and people still buy the illegal marihuana.
âI think the share could be brought up past 99%â
Not in your lifetime. I think youâre underestimating how culturally entrenched (animal) meat production and consumption is. Itâs common for vegans to think incorrectly that other people also donât care (much) about meat.
Shouldnât the burden be the other way? Why should you care that itâs real if itâs otherwise indistinguishable? It sounds like you prefer real meat just to spite animal advocates. There are reasons to break the tie the other way:
1. Moral uncertainty. You might assign some possibility to it being wrong. Are you 100% sure animals donât matter? If youâre 100% sure or close to it, is that confidence justified? Also, you donât have to believe in animal ârightsâ per se to recognize that animal farming causes harm to animals, and itâs better to avoid this, all else equal.
2. The harm it causes other humans who care about animals because they care about animals. Imagine if we started farming children with severe intellectual disabilities and torturing them. Itâs horrifying for us in the same way.
3. Environmental harms.
4. Public health.
5. Injuries, PTSD and other mental health issues caused by slaughterhouse work.
6. Increased crime rates in areas with slaughterhouses. (Iâm not sure how strong the causal relationship is here, though, but itâs plausible given mental health effects.)
Infants (<1 year) and many nonverbal humans who are nonverbal because of intellectual disability.
They still have interests, e.g. in not suffering involuntarily If my own involuntary suffering is bad in itself, and I recognize that at least one other individualâs involuntary suffering is bad in itself, then itâs on me to justify treating some involuntary suffering as bad in itself and others not, and if I canât do this, then I should accept that itâs always bad in itself, or that no other individualâs suffering is bad in itself (and maybe not my own, either).
Are you not concerned with othersâ welfare for their sakes, and not just how it benefits you to be concerned with their welfare in other ways? What are the things that, at a fundamental level, make a person better or worse off? Donât those (or at least some of those) also apply to nonhuman animals?
I donât think alcohol is a good substitute for marijuana. People might still buy illegal stuff when they can buy the same products legally anyway, but there would have to be significant enough differences that make up for the risks for them to do this in large numbers.
So the relevant attachment here is to (specific) real animal products in particular, which I think will give way much more easily, especially if the substitutes end up as good and cheaper, since I think most people donât have any special attachment to the authenticity of animal products regardless of quality or price or specifically want to buy them to support animal farming (although this might be common among conservatives or in rural areas). And again, you donât need anywhere near 100% support for a ban, which could make it prohibitively risky for people to farm animals or buy real animal products.
Check out this survey and its replication (pages 4-6), in which a third of respondents (Americans) said they supported a ban on animal farming. If and when substitutes become as good and cheaper, people will eat them by default instead of real animal products, and I think theyâll become less speciesist.
Many good points.
Moral uncertainty doesnât give you what you want. It gives you everything and nothing. You donât use it to question your own values, but only as a rhetorical device to get other people to question their values, and only those that disagree with your current values. Maybe the Logic of the Larder goes through. Maybe animal farming is good for wild animals. Maybe animal suffering is intrinsically morally good. You canât point to uncertainty to privilege your current moral preference.
The costs to slaughterhouse workers are internalized by the voluntary nature of slaughterhouse work. People make mistakes but by and large you have to pay them to compensate for risk and unpleasantness in the workplace, or else theyâll find a different job.
I didnât know about the crime rates near slaughterhouses. A possible hypothesis might be that sociopaths or people with a penchant for violence are more likely to work in slaughterhouses, due to the violent nature of the work. If they also live nearer, this could explain the difference. If so, these people might commit crimes elsewhere in a world without slaughterhouses. But Iâm only speculating.
Health and environmental effects are probably good arguments. It would have been better for us all if China had banned live markets in 2017. However, the unhealthy nature of overeating animal products are internalized also. No one is forced to eat more meat than is good for them. The current vegan substitutes arenât healthy either. Too much soy can cause infertility, to name just one example.
I do want to spite animal advocates. I didnât appreciate that they declared I should have human rights only if I support chicken rights. This was after they advocated bans on animal products even though we have no good substitutes. In fairness to the EA movement, this hasnât happened here, but it did happen. This was the exact opposite of âgains from trade through compromiseâ and âcooperating with other value systemsâ. My response to it is to boycott their ideological goals.
My general observation is that animal rights advocates feel morally superior to omnivores, and expect the world to treat them accordingly. It virtually never occurs to them that other people simply donât share their pro-animal preferences, and if they want us to forgo consumer surplus, they have to compensate us for that. Youâre free to produce vegan food as a non-profit and sell it at cost, if you want to shift the indifference curves of omnivores.
I donât intrinsically care about the suffering of others. I just want to live in a society that leaves me alone, according to norms that we donât have to harass, backstab and torture each other. That requires human rights (or something functionally equivalent like trustworthy alliances). I donât see what chicken rights can possibly do for this end. Looking at the statements of animal activists, all it did was make them more hostile to omnivores.
I think if you reflect more on the alternatives (which you should try to fit within whole views, not just judge claims in isolation), some will seem more satisfactory to you than others, so you would give them more weight. The logic of the larder might go through or animal farming might be good because of the effects on wild animals, but, all else equal, it still seems (to me) far more plausible for more suffering in farmed animals to be worse than less suffering than for the opposite to be true, which would count against factory farmed animals, or at least chickens and pigs (theyâre among the worst treated, in my view).
Do you find views according to which this is true more satisfactory than those according to which animal suffering is intrinsically morally bad? I think it would be hard to justify that human suffering is not intrinsically morally good if animal suffering is intrinsically morally good.
I think itâs often not so easy for people to just leave their job and find another, especially if they have children to take care of.
Yes, a priori, I think that could plausibly account for the effect. This study found an association at the county-level, so for self-selection effects to account for all of it, it would mean people would be moving between counties (which can be pretty big) to work at slaughterhouses, which is of course still plausible, but makes it seem less likely. Some other studies are listed here. I think the fact that they are at higher risk for PTSD is pretty suggestive that slaughterhouse work could affect people in this way, too.
I donât think this is at all representative of animal advocates. I think they tend to be more progressive and supporting of human rights generally:
https://ââwww.washingtonpost.com/ââpolitics/ââ2019/ââ07/ââ26/ââwho-supports-animal-rights-heres-what-we-found/ââ
https://ââwww.emerald.com/ââinsight/ââcontent/ââdoi/ââ10.1108/ââBFJ-12-2014-0409/ââfull/ââhtml
I think for-profits, or donating to or otherwise supporting the Good Food Institute would be more cost-effective in shifting demand, and this is exactly what many animal advocates do. Iâve donated to GFI.
Do you care about others or their wellbeing for their own sake at all for any other reason?
âł I think itâs often not so easy for people to just leave their job and find another, especially if they have children to take care of. â
Yes, elasticity isnât absolute, but in the long run it matters a lot. In the extreme, you can walk out and be jobless rather than accepting bad conditions. That alone puts a cap on how bad conditions can be, although perhaps some risks can be hard to estimate.
âł Do you care about others or their wellbeing for their own sake at all for any other reason? â
Yes, if I have positive personal relationships with them or they have earned it. However, I also do the negative version (revenge), and in many cases I find that more motivating. So thereâs no benevolence bias on my end. I have yet to find a philosophical reason why I should have one.
Thanks for the interesting discussion, Iâll end it at this point.