Let Them Eat Meat

An ex-vegan on veganism. By Rhys Southan letthemeatmeat [ at ] gmail [ dot ] [ com ].

[letthemeatmeat]

Why #NameTheTrait is the Worst Argument for Veganism Around: Guest Post by Philosophical Vegan

Daniel Dennett is quoted, “There's nothing I like less than bad arguments for a view I hold dear.” For me, that view is veganism, and there's no worse argument for it than #NameTheTrait.

There are of course other poor arguments for veganism, but those are usually either silly and easily dismissed as appeals to nature or gross-outs ("Chicken periods"), or more openly based on ethical concepts that most people don't agree with (like equal-rights deontology) but would otherwise more or less follow from that.  #NameTheTrait is different in how professional it looks to a layman, and how sneaky its hidden premises really are.

The argument has taken flight on youtube with large vegan channels like Vegan Gains using and promoting it in debates, and an understanding of why that is can provide a little insight into its problems: #NameTheTrait claims to be a silver bullet of vegan argumentation.  It is promoted as something that avoids all of the difficult homework involved in a good empirical argument, and beyond that claims that it even works no matter what your views on morality are (even for subjectivists) as long as you think humans (or even just you) have moral value.

Isaac Brown, the author of #NameTheTrait, said:

All the vegan argument requires is logical consistency and a personal belief in human moral value, veganism will follow logically from that position ... the objectivity or subjectivity of morality is irrelevant. Unless you deny the importance of logical consistency then veganism will follow.

It's an extraordinary claim.  Is there any evidence for it at all?  Well, no.  Plenty of assertions, and no evidence.  However, while that which can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence, that won't necessarily help you in a debate, where the burden of proof can be unfairly shifted from the perspective of the audience by asking the pointed questions the argument is designed to ask.

The argument itself comes in two parts, and this is a guide to responding to and dismantling the argument in debate if you ever come across it.  A more complete break down of all of the problems with the argument is available here:

https://philosophicalvegan.com/wiki/index.php/NameTheTrait

#NameTheTrait is presented as follows:

Argument for animal moral value:

P1 - Humans are of moral value

P2 - There is no trait absent in animals which if absent in humans would cause us to deem ourselves valueless.

C - Therefore without establishing the absence of such a trait in animals, we contradict ourselves by deeming animals valueless

Argument for veganism from animal moral value:

P1 - Animals are of moral value.

P2 - There is no trait absent in animals which if absent in humans would cause us to consider anything short of non-exploitation to be an adequate expression of respect for human moral value.

C - Therefore without establishing the absence of such a trait in animals, we contradict ourselves by considering anything short of non-exploitation (veganism) to be an adequate expression of respect for animal moral value.

You may notice some superficial similarity to Peter Singer's “argument from marginal cases,” but it doesn't run very deep. (This is discussed a little more on the wiki.) As outlined in the Philosophical Vegan Wiki, both parts of #NameTheTrait are riddled with logical problems, and neither conclusion follows from its premises.

However, if you come across this argument, trying to explain how it fails logically in any detail (like the missing "identity of indiscernibles" premise) is probably not useful to correct your opponent (who won't listen) or for any audience (who may not understand).

A better approach in debate is probably to "steel-man" the argument, and treat it in the way the presenter thinks it works.  Go ahead and assume all of those sneaky hidden premises, and use the most generous possible interpretation of every term.

Even go so far to assume the first conclusion is correct, because you probably already agree it is: Most animals are not valueless.  But be sure to be clear: Most animals have some moral value.  Not equal moral value to most humans.

Even the creator of the argument (Isaac Brown) and Vegan Gains agree with this, and they regularly share images like this:

If you're arguing with them or anybody who learned it from them, there probably won't be any disagreement on that point.

From there, the second half of the argument "Argument for veganism from animal moral value" falls apart because P2 is misleading to the point of being a non sequitur:

P2 - There is no trait absent in animals which if absent in humans would cause us to consider anything short of non-exploitation to be an adequate expression of respect for human moral value.

P2 implicitly sets up an all or nothing false dichotomy of completely having or completely lacking the trait, but not all traits are like that: most come in degrees. And that includes traits that could give moral value (like intelligence, sentience, consciousness, language ability), and if those traits come in degrees, so can the moral value that they give: a notion supported by images like that above. Varying degrees of moral value could have different implications for treatment.

The traits bestowing moral value are thus not absent completely, but come in varying degrees (which does not contradict the conclusion of the first half of the argument, or the premise in the second).

If we map no moral value at all to 100% exploitation acceptable and no consideration for interests, and human moral value to 0% exploitation acceptable and full consideration for interests, animals would fall on a spectrum between the two points.

This spectrum makes room for animal welfare: when you accept some exploitation of an animal, but also limit that exploitation in some ways to avoid certain levels of extreme violations of interests.

Nothing in this argument demands "non-exploitation" (called veganism in the argument).

There are a couple ways (branching into different options) your opponent may try to answer this, so I'll go from easiest to most complex:

1. Your opponent may deny that a spectrum of moral value equals a spectrum of exploitation.

Such a denial will likely be based on claims that, "You wouldn't accept being exploited if you had less moral value" (drawing from the assumptions in the hidden premises).

However, as it stands (and without stating those hidden premises), P2 in the second half of the argument "Argument for veganism from animal moral value" is obviously and intentionally in the same broken form as P2 in the first half of the argument "Argument for animal moral value":

P2 - There is no trait absent in animals which if absent in humans would cause us to deem ourselves valueless.

vs.

P2 - There is no trait absent in animals which if absent in humans would cause us to consider anything short of non-exploitation to be an adequate expression of respect for human moral value. If one implies absolutes, then so does the other.

If a gradation of moral value (from zero to human) must be interpreted in the second P2 as requiring absolutes of exploitation vs. non-exploitation from any non-zero value at all, then the same gradation of other traits (moral-value-giving traits) does the same in the first half of the argument with respect to moral value, meaning all animals that have such a trait in any degree have the same moral value. 

To put it another way:

IF a fruit fly, with its low moral value, would also not deserve "anything short of non-exploitation" as an adequate expression of respect for fruit fly moral value, then a fruit fly with under 200k neurons and its barely non-zero intelligence would–IF intelligence is the trait giving moral value–have the same moral value as an Einstein.

This is obviously absurd, and it results in a dogmatic view of value like this diagram the #NameTheTrait advocates often show as an example of what they disagree with... 

If your opponent wants to follow this line of reasoning, that is contradicting the agreement on the first conclusion, as well as the teachings of the #NameTheTrait guru.

If your opponent tries to claim that P2 in the second part of the argument is special and creates a valid dichotomy (so any moral value at all forbids any exploitation at all) where P2 in the first part creates a spectrum (such that smaller amounts of moral giving traits can grant lesser amounts of moral value), this should be easy enough to reveal as an absurdity for any audience present even without a deep understanding of the logical fallacies involved in the argument.

This is the easy win.

2. Your opponent can claim that it's not the permissibly of exploitation that varies on a spectrum, but the wrongness of the exploitation.  So exploiting humans in the same way is more wrong than exploiting animals, proportionally along the spectrum of value.

This is simply not how the argument is formulated:

"deem ourselves valueless" in the first half of the argument corresponds to: "consider anything short of non-exploitation to be an adequate expression of respect for human moral value."

As the first half deals with amount of moral value, the second half deals with what level of exploitation is acceptable.  It says nothing of degrees of wrongness, and to do so would explicitly make some meta-ethical commitments the argument is meant to avoid.

According to the belief in a moral spectrum by the formulator, we should deem ourselves to have less value (just not none) if a moral giving trait is present to a lesser extent, and likewise we would consider something short of non-exploitation (just not 100% exploitation) to be an adequate expression of respect for a lower level of animal moral value (a level under human moral value).

Even in the conclusion there are no claims of moral wrongness, only "contradiction".  While a double standard in itself isn't a logical contradiction, which is why these contradiction claims are incoherent, the point of the argument is to leverage subjective beliefs about value and demonstrate "inconsistent" application based on those beliefs to humans/the self vs. "animals".

Advocating improved welfare for farmed animals is consistent with this unless the #NameTheTrait advocate is willing to bite the bullet and overtly promote a particular meta-ethical system.

But let's assume your opponent does just that, and bites the meta-ethical bullet.  He or she throws out or radically alters the #NameTheTrait argument, and pushes forward with the idea that it's the wrongness that varies on a spectrum and not the acceptable level of exploitation -- what do you do?

If the argument were that the wrongness varied by the harm, you'd probably be stuck.  I agree with that, and in a good argument it leads to nuanced discussion about consumerism and agricultural impact.  Usually plants win... sometimes they don't.  And veganism is probably a pretty decent heuristic (at least to start with).  Radical reducetarianism and other forms of minimalism are good ones too.  The formulators and promoters of the argument don't want to go there, though.  They want to show how veganism is THE moral baseline, and this doesn't do that.  Such an argument doesn't substantiate just going vegan on its own because there's no hard line when it comes to harm delineating veganism in itself from other low impact lifestyles, and we might be compelled to do more than just be complacent vegans (we might even need to be critical of our palm oil butter and our bleeding edge gaming rigs with multiple screens, for example).

If you get into that discussion, you're far enough away from #NameTheTrait that it's beyond the scope of this guide, and by that point you're probably dealing with much more reasonable arguments.

But if the argument is that wrongness stems from exploitation?  That one is easy, because this brings us to a way in which P2 is false: We don't consider non-exploitation to be the baseline for respecting human moral value, whether we are considering the broad or narrow sense of "exploitation".  Unless we're radical Marxists, we admit MANY pragmatic exceptions to human exploitation.  Even in our own lives, most of us tolerate having our own labor "exploited" for a wage, which earns the companies we work for a profit.  To the extent that we are worried about exploitation at all, what we're worried about is harmful exploitation (exploitation in the more narrow sense), but only when that harm exceeds pragmatic benefit.  Non-exploitation is impossible in the modern world, and we exploit humans and animals constantly.  That's probably OK as long as it's more beneficial than harmful overall.

Arguments revolving around minimizing of the broader sense of exploitation don't stop at veganism, and they extend politically into quite radical socialist and social justice theories: radical social justice is the only thing that comes close to providing a consistent basis for the last thread of their argument... which is pretty ironic, since both Isaac Brown and Vegan Gains are vehement "Anti-SJWs".

If you are ready to ignore actual harm and go down the rabbit hole of deontological social justice politics, you might have a lot to discuss, but that's not something most people are on board with. If you can show that's the only direction these arguments lead, most people will realize this has nothing to do with any notion of morality as they see it, and they'll lose interest in #NameTheTrait or whatever vestiges of it remained to be argued.  From my perspective, I don't think it does veganism a service to tie it to such a controversial political ideology.

And that's it.

Of course that's not the only way to dismantle #NameTheTrait, but it is probably the easiest given the pretty common agreement that animals have at least some moral value.  Attacking the first part of the argument "Argument for animal moral value" on logical grounds is pretty simple (it is a non sequitur, see the philosophical vegan wiki for more detailed explanation of its problems), but arguing that the premise of animal moral value in the second part is wrong is much more difficult and not something I can help with (you'd probably need to look into social contract or deontological bases for moral value).

Hopefully this guide has been helpful.  The sooner logically incoherent arguments like #NameTheTrait can be put to rest, the sooner we can have productive dialogue on ethics and the future of human food and resource use.

All I ask is that you don't take the trainwreck of failed logic that is #NameTheTrait to be indicative of the best arguments veganism has to offer; it's the absolute worst, it's just promoted as the best by some well meaning but very confused vegans who haven't learned to be skeptical of things that are too good to be true yet.

– By Philosophical Vegan

Anyone with questions, disagreements or arguments about #namethetrait should join the discussion at the Philosophical Vegan forum.

[letthemeatmeat]

Essay on Peter Singer’s Flawed Metaethics

I wrote an essay about Peter Singer's old metaethics, and how his previous thinking about the way that we determine right and wrong reveals a problem for his animal equality argument (as well as for his effective altruism argument). You can download the essay here. 

[letthemeatmeat]

An Alternative Theory for My “Vegan Brain Fog”

When I used to follow vegan blogs more closely, I would sometimes notice when a normally prolific blogger suddenly wouldn’t post for a long time. Of course the most likely explanation was that life got in the way, but there was another possibility that would occur to me – maybe they stopped blogging because they finally hit the inevitable vegan breaking point and went back to eating animal products. So then sometimes when I would stop blogging for a while, I would wonder if there were any vegans theorizing that I stopped blogging because I realized how wrong it is to eat animals and went back to veganism.

That’s not why I’ve mostly stopped blogging here. Mainly I just had a lot less time and also thought I should at least try to get paid for my writing, and maybe write about a wider variety of things. However, if someone did think to theorize that maybe something had changed in my attitude about some aspects of veganism, they wouldn’t be entirely off base. I’ve been meaning to post about that for a while, and finally over the summer I decided I kind of had the time to stop putting it off. I put it off some more anyway. And then a racist, misogynistic, xenophobic, ablest, Islamophobic narcissistic rapist was elected the next president of the United States, and it felt like it was time to get this over with and move onto other things. 

Previously, when people would ask me why I quit veganism, I would always say that it was for health reasons. If they wanted me to elaborate, I would talk about being brain fogged and depressed at the end of my nine years of an animal-product-free diet. My mind felt like mush a lot of the time, and I was all but indifferent about living. But now, if someone were to ask me why I quit veganism back then, I would have to be a little more precise. I would say something more like, “I was feeling brain fogged and horribly depressed, and I became convinced that veganism was the cause of that.” 

I would put it this way because I no longer am so convinced that veganism had much to do with it. This is not to say I think veganism is the best possible diet for me, or even that it is just as good as all other options I have – just that the main symptoms I was reacting to when I thought I needed to eat animal products again probably had little or nothing to do with veganism.

In a blog post called “The History of My Diet,” I meticulously described all the significant moves in my eating habits up until I quit veganism, and a couple of years beyond. I wrote that post because I’d gone back to eating animal products for health reasons, and I guess I still felt a little weird and insecure about it, and thought it was important to list everything I had ever eaten in my entire life as a sort of explanation. Silly as it may have been, the post came in handy later on when I started to question the veganism/brain fog connection.

Where “The History of My Diet” starts to get interesting for me now is, “Fall of 2006 - Summer of 2007,” which starts a little over a year before the November 2007 climax when I quit veganism. Here are the significant bits:

I become a member of the Park Slope Food Co-op, which has good produce and vegan products for cheap. I drink a lot of kombucha now that it’s reasonably priced. This is when I become aware of having chronic brain fog. I’m always tired and sluggish, my thinking isn’t as sharp as it used to be, and I’m generally depressed. To fight this, I overcome my fear of caffeine and get into coffee, which my roommate assures me is healthy as long as it’s black. It helps. I try not to drink it too much, but whenever I don’t, brain fog.

Nothing too interesting happens in Summer 2007, so let’s skip to “Fall of 2007 - Winter of 2007.” Again, the most significant parts:

My roommate…raised vegetarian and now an ex-vegan, has been following the “evolutionary fitness” model (a version of the Paleolithic diet). He looks healthier than I’ve ever seen him, which is hard for me to ignore while I’m feeling worse than ever. He’s been talking up meat and bashing starch for a while now, and his arguments coupled with how awful I feel start to make sense.

At this point in the story, I become worried that veganism is to blame for my poor health. I try to make a more paleo style veganism work, but it doesn’t, and eventually I succumb to animal products and feel better.

I see now that I got a significant detail wrong in “The History of My Diet.” The start of my coffee drinking should have been later, under “Fall of 2007 - Winter of 2007,” around the time my roommate and best friend was getting into “evolutionary fitness.” I know this because his coffee peer pressure was inspired by the dietary regime of Art De Vany, the fitness guru who was one of the earlier paleo diet advocates, and it wasn’t until the summer or fall of 2007 that De Vany started dominating our discussions. The coffee being healthy “as long as it’s black” was a reference to De Vany’s belief that humans were not designed to drink milky coffee.

For those of you not old enough to remember the paleo diet, one of its distinctive claims was that the majority of human evolution took place in environments that are totally at odds with most aspects of modern living, and we could be a lot healthier if we adjusted our diets and behavior to better match the expectations encoded in our DNA. In De Vany’s interpretation, obeying our genes’ commands meant avoiding grains, legumes and restricting dairy, and eating a diet of mostly vegetables and animal products. It also meant frequent bursts of intensive exercise, and coffee – one of the neolithic exceptions that De Vany saw as a welcome development. Light beer was another of these welcome developments, which I assume is because De Vany really liked light beer.

As a vegan for ethical reasons with macrobiotic leanings, there wasn’t much for me in all this, though I appreciated the anti-dairy angle. Still, my friend’s enthusiasm inspired me to test out its few vegan elements that I wasn’t already doing – namely drinking black coffee and sprinting in the park. (In retrospect, that sprinting might not have been vegan, since I was almost certainly stomping insects. I guess the coffee wouldn’t have been vegan either, for similar reasons.) 

At the same time, my friend was telling me some of De Vany’s more specific nutritional arguments, most of which clashed with veganism. In paleo discourse, veganism is often framed as one of the most egregious violations of our inherited nutritional requirements, so it’s a frequent punching bag for paleo defenders, including De Vany. A 2010 blog comment from De Vany to a vegan interested in evolutionary fitness sums up De Vany’s stance: “You could live AS a vegan, but you can never BE one. It is not in your genes or your metabolism to be other than a omnivorous carnivore because meat is where the dense nutrients and energy were trapped on the savanna. … You are walking a tightrope.”

I’m not sure why I would have misplaced the start of my coffee drinking in my otherwise fairly meticulous timeline, but to make sure I wasn’t misremembering now, I searched my gmail archives for “coffee,” looking for the earliest reference I could find to me drinking it. That turned out to be October 29, 2007, a little less than a month before I quit veganism: “I’m drinking coffee now,” I wrote my girlfriend at the time, “so I will certainly be up way later.”

The other thing I turned up in my coffee Gmail search was something I wrote a few days after quitting veganism. Someone who had always known me as a vegan had emailed to wish me a “Happy Tofurky Day” in late November 2007. I wrote back to her that as of a few days ago I no longer celebrated Tofurky Day, and explained why: “I'd started to be really bothered by how sleepy and non-energetic I've been. Any day where I wasn't sleepy was unusual. I got into coffee and white tea, which would help every day that I drank them, but I didn't like the idea of having to rely on them, and be living in a fog any day I wasn't drinking them. That made me a sitting duck for a diet that [my roommate] has been trying for a while which has seemed to make him much more energetic. He reads this blog about ‘evolutionary diet and nutrition,’ which advocates a diet consisting of no grains or beans, but rather vegetables, fruits, meat, eggs and nuts (to the extent that he can eat nuts, since he's allergic to everything but almonds). He is always talking about it, and I didn't give it much thought, but eventually his arguments started to make sense.”

Any guesses what my alternative theory is?

A couple of years ago, when I moved into a housing co-op in Austin, one of the housemates asked if I wanted to buy into his “kombucha club.” If I helped pay for the ingredients and his time, I could drink home brewed kombucha. I love kombucha, but I turned him down. Kombucha has caffeine! I knew that once I started drinking it, I would need a steady amount every day to avoid withdrawal. There wouldn’t be enough kombucha for that, so I’d have needed to start drinking straight up tea again to make up the difference, and to drink just the right amount of tea to perfectly match the amount of caffeine I’d started getting from the kombucha. Even then I would be likely to have some grogginess and headaches. It didn’t seem worth the hassle.

I somehow got inspired to give caffeine another chance this year, and I bought a large box of decaffeinated white tea, thinking that a decaffeinated version of the supposedly least caffeinated tea (whether it actually is the least caffeinated tea is controversial and apparently depends) wouldn’t cause me any problems. My plan was to use one packet of this tea a week, on Tuesdays. I’d returned to school and had one three-hour metaethics class in the early afternoon on Tuesdays. I thought the small amount of caffeine in one or two steepings of a single bag of decaffeinated white tea would be just enough to make me slightly more alert, without making me feel worse the next day or day after. Nothing about this plan worked. The tea never made me feel better, but it did later make me feel worse. I gave up after three weeks.

One thing I didn’t know about myself when I started drinking kombucha and then coffee and white tea in that last year of being vegan is that I am ridiculously sensitive to caffeine. I had mostly tried to avoid caffeine since giving up soda as a teenager and I didn’t know about the variety of reactions to it, like that some people can drink it as a pleasant hobby and others become instant addicts. My roommate was in the former camp – he could drink coffee all day one day and none the next without it destroying him – and I assumed I could drink caffeine haphazardly too. The other thing I didn’t know is that caffeine withdrawal symptoms could be something other than piercing headaches – like, say, depression, existential dread and a near inability to think.

(I was reminded of these symptoms last year when my girlfriend at the time decided to give up coffee, thinking it would be better for her throat. By the next day or day after she went cold turkey, she couldn’t get out of bed because she was so overwhelmed with feelings that everything was horrible and hopeless and nothing mattered. I was eventually able to convince her this was caffeine withdrawal and not her new reality. She broke her coffee fast and instantly felt better.) 

So, at the same time I was feeling awful because I didn’t realize I needed to drink a consistent amount of caffeine a day or none at all, my ex-vegan best friend was telling me the way humans evolved ruled out veganism as a potentially healthy diet. In what now seems to me a tellingly peculiar coincidence, it’s around this time that veganism began blatantly failing me. As I was hearing about the dietary tightrope I was walking by disobeying genetic fate, I happened to be feeling more miserable than ever. I was feeling so bad at that point that the “arguments started to make sense.”

That’s when internet searching led me to a blog called Beyond Vegetarianism, which featured stories of people who had given up veganism for health reasons, and painted evolution-guided eating in a favorable light. The site tipped me off to a vegan physician who was studying the phenomenon of “failure to thrive” on a vegan diet. “I’m one of these vegans who is failing to thrive,” I thought. Then I read the chapter of The Omnivore’s Dilemma in which Michael Pollan tries vegetarianism, can’t hack it, goes back to eating meat, and says that that’s okay. “I’m in an omnivore’s dilemma,” I realized. And so I made my attempted escape from this dilemma by resigning myself to my omnivorous fate and quitting veganism. Not too long afterward, a former vegan named Lierre Keith published a book called The Vegetarian Myth with her own story of vegan misery, which made me even more confident that veganism had been the problem. That’s when I started writing this blog. 

At some point after that I learned the origin tale of Jack Norris RD, which I took as still more confirmation: he is a vegan activist who became a dietitian after encountering a lot of ex-vegans through his activism. Some of these ex-vegans had started eating animal products again for health reasons.

With health undermining so many attempts at giving up animal products, it was easy to see myself as just another one of those those cases.

Now it’s not so easy. 

In “The History of My Diet,” I illustrated the addition of coffee into my diet with a photo of a cup of coffee, and the name I gave that file was “Brain Fog Deterrent.” Um… deterrent? I confused the culprit for the cure. When I wrote "The History of My Diet,” I thought I had been drinking coffee to escape the vegan brain fog that had suddenly hit me after years of veganism – nature’s punishment for my arrogant rebellion against evolutionarily preordained omnivorous fate. But much more likely to me now is that I was drinking coffee to escape the caffeine withdrawal that I was suffering from my inconsistent kombucha, white tea and coffee habits.

This may sound bizarre to people who have no problems with caffeine, but a prolonged caffeine withdrawal that you have no idea is caffeine withdrawal (and which you keep extending because you do not know this) can make you not want to live.

“I drink a lot of kombucha now that it’s reasonably priced. This is when I become aware of having chronic brain fog.” The connection seems obvious to me right now, but when I first started drinking caffeine, the only withdrawal symptom I knew about was headaches. And It’s possible that in Fall of 2006 - Summer of 2007, I didn’t think of kombucha as a caffeinated drink at all. Apparently, GT’s Kombucha, the brand I was drinking most, used to advertise itself as caffeine free because they thought fermentation destroyed all the caffeine. Now they say there’s less caffeine in kombucha than in the original tea before fermentation, but even that’s disputed.

At some point after I quit veganism, I did recognize that inconstant caffeine consumption would turn my brain into mush on withdrawal days. I quit caffeine for a while around the time I quit veganism – or at least, that’s what I gather from that email I found – but at some point after that I got back into coffee and drank it consistently for a while. When I was doing this, I would wake up very early every morning with a headache, which I would then cure with coffee. I eventually decided that as much as I loved caffeine while I was drinking it, it wasn’t worth the pain when I wasn’t. I went through an intentional, self-aware caffeine withdrawal that was around two weeks of agony – and the symptoms weren’t just headaches. But I somehow managed not to connect this with the reason I left veganism. I put “vegan brain fog misery” and “caffeine withdrawal misery” in separate boxes, and it was only more recently when I felt the brain fog again without knowing how to categorize it that I realized both felt the same. 

The short version of that story is I was inexplicably brain fogged for a day and a half – I could barely stay awake or think at all, and was suddenly depressed – and as I was trying to figure out what was going on, I thought, “This feels like vegan brain fog or caffeine withdrawal.” I wasn’t vegan, so it couldn’t be that. Then I realized I’d had caffeine a couple of days earlier. The mystery solved, I was left feeling unsettled that I couldn’t distinguish between vegan brain fog and caffeine withdrawal when I didn’t know the cause. And then I remembered that veganism failed me around the same time I was drinking a lot of caffeinated stuff in random doses and learning about evolution’s exclusively non-vegan plans for me.

So that’s the new theory. There is at least one loose end in it. Why did I feel better once I started eating animal products if it wasn’t veganism that was making me feel bad? Did I time my last cup of coffee or tea just right so that my caffeine withdrawal lifted as I was biting into the fish? That would be difficult to believe, but I wasn’t lying when I said I felt better soon after eating animal products. Other ex-vegans have this sensation of feeling great after eating meat for the first time in a while. Some vegans chalk this up to the placebo effect, but I’ve always been skeptical of that explanation, and still am.

One reason is that I’ve experienced that feeling great surge multiple times since I first gave up veganism, and whenever I do, it always seems to correlate with breaking a mostly vegan or vegetarian diet for some kind of animal flesh. The most recent repeat of this was in the summer of this year. I hadn’t (and still haven’t) been a lot of eating animal products since late February, but a few months ago I was offered a supposedly freegan hunk of rare steak. I noticed the same sort of tingly rush as I was eating it that I felt when I was first quitting veganism, even though I wasn’t expecting anything like that.

This time, though, I felt like the importance of this sensation might be overstated. The sensation was relatively fleeting, and it’s not that I felt kind of tired and weak, and then I ate this steak and felt normal. Rather, I felt good and normal, and then as I was eating the steak (and a little while afterward) I felt great – and then pretty soon I felt normal again. And I know I can’t replicate that feeling every time I’m eating meat when I’m eating it regularly. I do, however, sometimes notice that I feel generally better while eating animal products than when I’m not. This summer I was being a bivalvegan, and it was obvious that I felt better while eating a plate of mussels than while eating a Daiya fake cheese covered gluten-free pizza. (Which may not be the most fair comparison.)

I don’t really know what to make of the meat rush sensation, but I do think it’s real. If you’ve been feeling mediocre or worse, and then suddenly you feel great right after eating meat, you might start discovering problems with veganism too.

As for the timing of my caffeine withdrawal/vegan brain fog possibly lifting around the time I first took a bite into animal products – it seems incredibly unlikely that the timing could have been so precise. But judging by my Tofurkey Day response, it does seem like I basically traded caffeine for animal products around that time, so maybe it did roughly go something like that.

If the new theory about my brain fog is right, it doesn’t mean there are no health benefits to eating some animal products, or that other people are wrong to leave veganism for their health, but it does mean that my quitting veganism was based primarily on a mistake. The mistake that changed my life, and likely the lives of some others too, was thinking the brain fog came before the caffeine rather than after.

Let them drink herbal tea.

[letthemeatmeat]

What makes a better world: lab-grown meat or humane farming? – Rhys Southan | Aeon Essays

Which world would be better: one in which all meat is grown in a lab or one which still contains humanely farmed animals?

This is an article I wrote comparing the ethics of cultured meat and low-suffering animal farming. My main goal in writing this was to look at the harm of death and how we might think about it in the context of raising animals for food. Cultured meat (aka brainless, non-sentient flesh produced in factories) provided a nice foil for animal farming here, since there is no harm of death when something is never alive. But because the harm of death is comparative rather than absolute – death’s harm is that it is a deprivation of additional life; it isn’t something intrinsically bad in itself – inevitable death, even premature death, may not be a good reason to avoid creating good lives. 

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The Cecil Trap

In general, it seems to me that utilitarian arguments for veganism work better than rights-based arguments for veganism, since it is probably impossible to even conceive of giving all sentient non-human animals rights in any kind of consistent way. That isn’t a problem for utilitarian arguments for veganism, since utilitarians aren’t committed to rights or even to consistency. In utilitarianism, whatever maximizes the good and minimizes the bad is what we should do; rights and/or consistency may or may not be instrumentally useful to achieving those goals. 

But recently I’ve seen a couple of prominent pro-vegan utilitarian writers step into a sort of interesting trap that rights-based vegans easily avoid. It could be called The Cecil Trap – named after the murdered lion who has inspired some utilitarians to make arguments that cause problems for the notion that suffering is suffering no matter who experiences it or who causes it, and that reducing suffering and increasing pleasure is all that matters. 

Dylan Matthews at Vox.com wrote an essay called “Eating chicken is morally worse than killing Cecil the lion,” which argued that humans who eat chicken cause more suffering than the dentist who killed Cecil the lion, and so it is hypocritical for chicken eaters to criticize Cecil’s killer. I wrote a post in response to suggest that this type of argument was pro-human bigotry. Why criticize meat eaters for hypocrisy for being upset about Cecil’s death and suffering if you don’t criticize meat eaters for hypocrisy whenever they are upset about a human’s death and suffering? 

The implied answer to this puzzle is that Matthews is bigoted against non-human animals in favor of humans. I didn’t quote Matthews in the piece, but here is the line in his article where he really tips his hand:

[Cecil’s killer, Palmer] also likely prevented some animal suffering: Lions are carnivores, and Palmer increased the life expectancy of Cecil's prey by ending his life. He didn't increase it by much, given how old Cecil was and how little gazelle killing he had left in him, but it's still a factor.

Presumably, then, Matthews is now committed to making a statement like this every time a meat eating human dies or is killed: “The victim was a meat eater, and his killer reduced the suffering of his future prey by ending his life. This is a factor we have to consider in judging whether his murder is unfortunate.” *

Today, Amanda MacAskill and William MacAskill posted an article that expanded on the logic of that line of Matthews’ I just quoted. Their article was given the headline, “To truly end animal suffering, the most ethical choice is to kill wild predators (especially Cecil the lion).” They wrote:

As long-term vegetarians who abstain from meat for ethical reasons, we are both supporters of animal activists who seek to improve the lives of animals. So you might expect us to agree with activists like Ingrid Newkirk that the killing of Cecil is a terrible thing. But we don’t. In fact, we think it may be the case that animal rights activists should support the killing of predatory animals like Cecil. ...

By killing predators, we can save the lives of the many prey animals like wildebeests, zebras, and buffalos in the local area that would otherwise be killed in order to keep the animals at the top of the food chain alive. And there’s no reason for considering the lives of predators like lions to be more important than the lives of their prey. ...

[I]t seems hard to see why animal welfare advocates would be in such uproar over the killing of Cecil. Walter Palmer killed one animal, but in doing so he saved dozens of others.

The obvious question that leaps out at me, and which MacAskill and MacAskill don’t quite address, is whether this argument applies to humans. Matthews argued in his piece that factory farming humans cause more suffering to animals than Cecil’s hunter did, and this would seem to imply that Cecil himself caused less suffering to the animals he killed than do factory farms (since Cecil died more slowly and painfully than most of his victims likely did, and this was still less suffering than a factory farmed chicken experiences). Whether or not MacAskill and MacAskill agree with Matthews on this point, their argument would prima facie have us defend the murderers of meat eating humans, since murderers kill one (human) animal, but in doing so, save dozens of other animals. 

Is the logic that MacAskill and MacAskill appeal to not a a justification of killing humans who are responsible for massive amounts of animal suffering? And if not, does this suggest that increasing pleasure and reducing suffering may not be all there is to care about? 

MacAskill and MacAskill do address a possible application of their argument to humans. They make an analogy to a serial killer, and say that it would be better to kill this serial killer to protect his next victims than to do nothing at all to stop him. But if we try to erase species distinctions and care only about suffering and pleasure, all meat eating humans are serial killers. Is it a good thing to kill meat eating humans, then, to protect the animals who would have been their next victims? This seems like an obvious application of of the arguments that MacAskill and MacAskill offer for killing Cecil, and it would appear to be potentially compatible with the assumption that as utilitarians, they are concerned with reducing suffering and increasing pleasure above all, and so might think that rights are only sometimes but not always necessary to respect. 

Perhaps MacAskill and MacAskill did a utilitarian calculation and found that killing humans to reduce the suffering of the animals they eat ends up backfiring as a suffering reduction measure, since it would cause so much suffering to humans, and it would hurt animals as well, by discrediting suffering-reduction schemes that involve killing non-human predators in the wild. Or maybe they have another reason for believing that their arguments do not apply to human predators of animals. Perhaps there are reasons for considering the lives of predators like humans to be more important than the lives of their non-human prey?

If so, why not mention that in the article? As it is, MacAskill and MacAskill have made an argument that would seem to justify the murder of meat eating humans, and they haven’t done anything to assure us that isn’t a possible takeaway. 

* Well, only if he wants to be consistent, which he doesn’t have to be! 

[letthemeatmeat]

Animal Farming is Not “Necessary”... But What Is?

Vegans sometimes refer to the consumption of animal products as unnecessary, or as causing unnecessary harm. In part one of our online debate at Reasonable Vegan, the philosopher Robert Johnson wrote that, “Veganism itself is, in essence, the result of a line drawing process, where we should draw a rough line on moral principles like suffering. Between the unnecessary (thus immoral) and the necessary (thus excusable).”

Reasonable Vegan posted the final part of the debate today. In her postscript analysis of the debate, Reasonable Vegan co-creator Rebecca Fox wrote, “the word ‘necessary’… [is] a word we vegans throw about too casually and yet it underpins a huge portion of vegan philosophy.”

Not all vegans would agree that the distinction between “necessary” and “unnecessary” significantly underpins vegan philosophy, but there are enough vegans who do treat the non-necessity of animal farming as an essential factor in its alleged unjustifiability that I think it’s worth trying to pin down what that is supposed to mean.

Vegans often critique animal exploitation as unnecessary without positing a special definition of “necessary.” To understand this kind of claim, we might assume the standard definition of necessary, which is something like, “required to be done.” This is my first instinct, but this would make the vegan argument incoherent, since by this definition nothing outside of the inevitable and unavoidable (such as laws of nature) can really be called necessary in themselves. If we’re to take some version of “required to be done” as the definition of necessary, then it’s no surprise that animal farming is unnecessary. But this non-necessity would be true of all the harms that vegans cause too. 

We might instead apply a looser, more vague, common sense meaning to necessary. This might be a little sloppy for ethical debates (or even Game of Thrones reviews), but not hopelessly so. When someone says, “Was that really necessary?”, they don’t mean, “Was that the result of natural law?” They mean something more like, “You probably could have avoided doing that hurtful thing without horribly undermining yourself.” And in fact, this basically does capture what many vegans are getting at when they call animal exploitation unnecessary. Vegans see animal farming as horribly harmful (and there’s no doubt that factory farming is), and many of them believe that giving up animal products is not that huge a sacrifice. Thus, we should give up animal products. 

As an informal cost-benefit analysis that factors non-humans into its calculations, this interpretation of necessity has something going for it. But I don’t see this working as an argument for giving animals rights based on their interests. It places too much importance on how animal farming affects humans, and implies that if animal farming abolition would horribly undermine ourselves, then it is okay to farm animals. Some utilitarian vegans might be happy with that. However, it clashes with any rights-based vegan scheme that says we must be impartial about species membership, and that we need to treat the interests of animals as equal to our own. 

Unless I’m missing something, it looks like non-utilitarian vegans can’t mean “necessary” in this loose common sense way. Until they are more specific with what they mean by necessary, it seems fair to assume that when these vegans talk about necessity or the lack thereof, they mean something close to “required to be done.” 

As I wrote in the Reasonable Vegan debate, if something is necessary in this sense, it is either inevitable or it is necessary for something – such as attaining a desired outcome. Talking about actions as “necessary” or “unnecessary” without defining the “for what” implies that some actions or goals are necessary in themselves, while others are unnecessary in themselves. But how can any actions or goals be necessary in themselves? Certain actions might be necessary to achieve specific goals (it may be necessary to kill an animal if the goal is to eat that animal), but the actual achieving of a goal is never necessary, no matter what the goal is. This is true even of survival. Eating when we’re otherwise about to starve is necessary for extending our lifespans, but extending our lifespans is not necessary, since failing to do so is an option.

This is why objecting to animal farming on the grounds of its non-necessity often turns out to be specious. Of course animal farming is unnecessary – it is possible for us not to do it. But if we applied this straightforward necessity standard to every activity that causes harm, it seems to force a human extinctionist conclusion, since non-existence is the only way for humans to avoid causing unnecessary harm. However, since most vegans are not members of the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, this can’t be what they wish for us to take from the necessity argument. 

When I asked Robert Johnson to say more about what he meant by necessity, he said (in part), “Where one should draw the line of ‘necessity’ is up for debate, but there’s not much rational support for the idea that it’s necessary to kill others if you like the taste of them.” 

This response reminds me of an essay I saw by a duo of vegan philosophers that was published last week, called “Veganism Without Animal Rights.” In it, Anna Charlton and Gary Francione denounce animal farming as unnecessary, but they don’t say anything about what actually is necessary – except that eating animal products can’t possibly qualify. They wrote:

Most people believe that animals have some moral value but that it is not objectionable per se to use and kill animals for human purposes as long as we do not impose unnecessary suffering on them. And necessity must exclude suffering imposed for the reason of pleasure, amusement, or convenience. If imposing pain for pleasure, amusement, or convenience may be considered as necessary, then there is nothing that can be considered as unnecessary. If pleasure, amusement, or convenience can be considered as “necessary,” then the conventional wisdom about animals is that we can use animals as long as we don’t impose unnecessary unnecessary [sic] suffering, or gratuitous suffering. So in [the case of a hypothetical person named Fred who gets pleasure from torturing animals], conventional wisdom would say that Fred should not impose more harm than is necessary for him to derive the pleasure and amusement he seeks. But no one would anyone regard that as a plausible understanding of “necessity.”

Charlton and Francione think they’ve ensnared meat eaters with our own logic – most meat eaters probably wouldn’t claim to be in favor of unnecessary harm, yet animal farming results in unnecessary harm – but Charlton and Francione seem oblivious to the opposite problem. If imposing pain for pleasure, amusement, or convenience may not be considered necessary, and if all unnecessary harm is forbidden, how do you justify all the harm that a hypothetical vegan society would be responsible for? 

Of course vegans making the necessary/unnecessary distinction will need to say that vegan harms are “necessary.” But it’s not at all clear that they can plausibly do that. Even the desire for something as seemingly vital as continued human existence might ultimately collapse into pleasure and enjoyment, unless the necessity vegans can explain why perpetuating the human species is fundamentally essential – and not just something we want to do because we gain enjoyment from existing and from contemplating humanity’s future.  

Ethics-motivated vegans are in the business of adding restrictions onto human behavior, but most of them don’t want to restrict absolutely all human behavior that has a harmful impact on animals. Trouble is, it's difficult to justify even the vegan-approved actions that harm animals without ultimately appealing to selfishness and partiality in favor of humans. And since selfishness and human-centric partiality is a large part of what many vegans criticize about meat eaters, vegans typically don't want to look overly guilty of these same sins. Denouncing the unnecessary without defining the necessary can be a way for vegans to advocate the restrictions they want without committing themselves to the restrictions they don’t, all while avoiding the appearance of pro-human partiality – since their human-centric partiality is hidden behind that smokescreen of the never-quite-explained “necessary”.

But is “necessary” really necessary in vegan advocacy – or could vegans get rid of this non-necessity talk without losing the core of their argument? 

That depends on the rest of their philosophy; it looks to me like the necessary/unnecessary distinctions is difficult for non-utilitarian vegans to give up. This could be because the messiness of giving rights to wild animals is such a headache for rights-based veganism that they need to do a sleight of hand here. Though they would probably never admit this, non-utilitarian vegans typically argue for rights when it comes to farmed animals, and then they argue for a kind of human-centric utilitarianism when it comes to wild or feral animals. 

Why the discrepancy? Partially it could be because the harms to wild animals are less visible, or less viscerally repulsive than animal slaughter, and so vegans tend to care about these harms less. In addition, it’s pretty simple to see how rights for farmed animals would work (in the most basic version, you just stop breeding farmed animals until they go extinct, and then the problem is solved since we can’t violate the rights of non-existent animals!) – but it’s not at all simple to conceive of giving rights to wild animals in a consistent way.  

Giving rights to wild animals would mean giving them rights to their habitats, for instance, but merely abstaining from animal exploitation does not accomplish this, and it’s hard to imagine anything less radical than the end of human civilization or even humanity itself that would. Just look at what happens when we give rights to a single species of wild animal. Because of these sorts of conflicts with wild animals, pure and consistent deontological veganism may not actually exist outside of the human extinction movement. Instead, the animal rights vegans typically have to advocate deontology for farmed animals, and human-favoring utilitarianism for wild animals – but since they don’t want to confess to this heretical ideological impurity, they obscure their wild animal utilitarianism with obfuscating talk about harms being either necessary or unnecessary.* 

(This isn’t a problem for consistently utilitarian vegans, since they don’t have to think of wild animals as having rights of any kind. They can even say that life in the wild is mostly miserable, and that humans experience more pleasures than non-human animals do, and so the expansion of human civilization is a good way to improve overall utility by reducing the number of wild animals who come into existence.)

Non-utilitarian vegans who are attempting to extend a system of rights to animals based on their interests may not be able to tell us what they mean by necessity because that would reveal that their use of “unnecessary” to condemn non-vegan harms and their implied use of “necessary” to defend vegan harms is either covering up covert utilitarianism, or it’s papering over unjustifiable (by their own standards) rights violations against wild animals. 

Leaving the meaning of “necessary” mysterious allows such vegans to equivocate between two unstated definitions of necessity: one that automatically condemns almost all meat eating (for instance, that “necessary” means required in itself, or required for immediate survival) and a separate more lax one for vegan behaviors that harm wild animals (for instance, that “necessary” means something like “popularly desired and relatively uncontroversial outcome,” which leaves human civilization in place no matter how much it harms wild animals). The reason for this equivocation is that the definitions of necessity that easily condemn meat eating are likely to also condemn vegan harms – which non-extinctionist vegans aren’t in a good position to condemn.

* The authors of Zoopolis are aware of this problem, and they suggest a non-utilitarian solution to conflicts between humans and wild animals, but I don’t think it is able to abandon pro-human partiality. 

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One of the principles of ‘reasonableness’ (and indeed good critical enquiry of any kind) is a willingness to accept and consider sensible and …

Reasonable Vegan organized a written debate between me and the vegan philosopher Robert Johnson. So far they have posted the first half of the debate. (The link is in the headline.) After Part Two runs, I’ll make one or two posts on this blog to elaborate on points from the debate. 

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Consistent Veganism Would Give All Animals Endangered Species-like Protections

Vegans sometimes forget that staying consistent with their own premises would require respecting the interests of wild animals – and not just these animals’ interest not to be hunted. A veganism that purported to give rights to animals based on their interests would have to give habitat rights to all non-human sentient creatures who need space to mate and roam in order to thrive. If taken seriously, enforcing these kinds of protections for wild animals would drastically (if not fully) curtail and reverse human development.  

This Pacific Standard article by Gabriel Kahn provides a hint of what rights for wild animals would entail. It describes a case in which a potential wind farm has had to significantly reduce the number of its planned turbines to avoid harming sage grouses, which are on the verge of being labeled an endangered species:

Some of the ranch’s…sage grouse liked to mill about on a hillside where the ranch’s strongest winds blew.

Ryan Jacobson, the company’s chief wind engineer, was crushed. He had planned 327 turbines in that spot. So he set about drawing up a new plan with half as many turbines. “I’m still in mourning,” he says. The more bird data that came in, the more complicated the situation became. Jacobson would submit a new map for the turbines, only to be told by the sage grouse teams that he had to make another adjustment. With each change, the wind farm became a little less powerful. When Jacobson submitted his seventh major redesign, the Bureau of Land Management gave the green light. They had spent four years counting sage grouse…

The project’s generous…accommodations for sage grouse and eagles have partially closed off some of the country’s best wind resources…

You might imagine that since factory farming is such an environmental disaster, veganism as a practice is always best for the environment, but here is a case in which doing the vegan thing (though these are all presumably non-vegans who only act like vegans when it comes to sage grouses) is not the most environmentally wise move. 

On the other hand, this article also says that if the sage grouse were to officially land on the endangered species list, it would lead to a shutdown of much of Wyoming’s coal mining industry – so it looks as if concern for this particular animal could have mixed results for greenhouse gas reduction.

What’s also interesting about this story to me is that it shows how much humans have to undermine themselves to respect the interests of even a single species of wild animal. If non-utilitarian vegans were to be consistent about their desire to give rights to all sentient beings based on their interests, a vegan society would have to extend the protections that sage grouses get in this story to all animals who would benefit from them. A truly vegan society would have to treat most sentient non-humans as we now treat select endangered species. 

In this particular case, that kind of consistent protection would probably mean no wind farm at all. Though it’s the sage grouse that seems to have so far had the biggest impact on plans for this wind farm, the article also mentions that bald eagles and golden eagles are a (potentially fatal) concern as well:  

In 1940, when America’s iconic bald eagles were on the brink of extinction, Congress passed the Bald Eagle Protection Act. In 1962 it expanded the act to include golden eagles as well. Killing either species, even accidentally, is a felony.

Those 60-meter-long turbine rotors, moving at up to 200 miles per hour at their tips, are giant guillotines. The Eagle Protection Act can turn a wind farm into a criminal enterprise. (In the past two years, Duke Energy and PacifiCorp, both of which operate wind farms in Wyoming, have pled guilty to killing eagles and paid millions of dollars in fines.)

The only way Anschutz’s company was going to be able to operate without fear of prosecution was to apply for something called an eagle take permit, a classification the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service created in 2009. If a project can demonstrate that it has done everything possible to mitigate the loss of eagles, a certain number can perish. So far, Fish and Wildlife has issued a total of one long-term eagle take permit—to a wind farm in California.

In one document, the Bureau of Land Management estimated that Miller’s wind turbines might kill as many as 64 eagles. Miller was seething. “No way in hell we were going to kill that many eagles!” he says. “We don’t have that many in the first place. What am I going to do? Import eagles just so I can kill them?” …

Wherever [biologists found an eagle nest on the land], even an inactive one, the [wind farm] engineers would have to carve out new buffer zones and re-arrange the turbine layout once again. …

Clint Riley, an assistant regional director at Fish and Wildlife, says that the reason it is taking the [the Bureau of Land Management] years to sign off on the eagle take permit is simply that “the project is much, much larger than anything that’s been contemplated anywhere else.” He thinks that if all goes well, his agency could grant the permit by the end of the year.

The wind farm developers will get a permit to build their turbines if they can demonstrate that they have “done everything possible to mitigate the loss of eagles,” but of course they won’t really have demonstrated that unless they decide not to be a wind farm. Of course, the government is not taking eagle lives as seriously as that, because that would be too prohibitive and they ultimately care more about humans than they care about eagles. Anyway, it may be that wind farms are less detrimental to birds than fossil fuels are  – but from a consistent vegan perspective, this just means fossil fuels have to go too.

Vegans sometimes try to justify human development in light of this by pointing out the risks that developers are willing to take with human lives. Developers build roads even though we know that some number of humans will accidentally die on these roads, and this supposedly allows vegans to be okay with roads even though we know that some number of non-human animals are going to die on these roads too. I don’t think this analogy works, because it ignores that humans are both benefitted and harmed by roads – and build roads anyway because they think they are a net gain for humans – while most of the sentient non-human animals affected by roads are only harmed by them. 

The risk of death while driving is a risk many humans are willing to take so that humans and the resources they want can move around more quickly. Humans build road for themselves because most of them believe that despite their risks and the damage they do to natural beauty, they make humans better off.

Most non-human animals have no reason to see human development this way. A society that actually gave protections to animals based on their interests would have trouble justifying the construction of even a single road or turbine.

[letthemeatmeat]

Seafood Buyer's Guide for Those Who Accept the Deprivation Account of the Harm of Death

Last year, Vice Munchies posted an article I wrote called "The Ethics of Eating Fish That'll Die Pretty Soon Anyway." The article was inspired by the “Seafood Buyer’s Guide,” which warns consumers away from eating fish species that are overfished and on the verge of extinction. The point of my article was that if you think death is a harm because it forecloses future experiences, it will usually be more ethical to eat animals with naturally short lifespans than with naturally lengthy ones; if a fish only lives for a couple of months anyway, there's not much potential future experience there to destroy.

For space considerations, they had to cut the full guide I put together that organized sea creatures into categories describing how ethical they were to eat based on their lifespans. But there are no space considerations on Let Them Eat Meat, so for anyone who is seriously interested in eating fish based on their natural lifespans, I'm posting the guide here. 

BEST CHOICES

(0-13 year lifespan)

Albacore Tuna (12 yrs)

Atlantic Salmon (13 yrs)

Anchovy (4 yrs)

Argentine Shortfin Squid (1 yr)

Bar-Cheeked Coral Trout (12 yrs)

Bay Scallops (2 yrs)

Bettas (2-5 yrs)

Bigeye Scad (2 yrs)

Bigeye Tuna (12 yrs)

Black Carp (13 yrs)

Blackfin Tuna (5+ yrs)

Blowfish (6 yrs)

Blue Crab (3 yrs)

Bluefish (9 yrs)

Broad Barred Spanish Mackerel (12 yrs)

Butter Sole (11 yrs)

Calico Rockfish (11 yrs)

Cannonball Jellyfish (6 months)

Capelin (5 yrs)

Chinook Salmon (3 - 9 yrs)

Chum Salmon (7 yrs)

Cod (13 yrs)

Coho Salmon (5 yrs)

Crucian Carp (10 yrs)

Dab (12 yrs)

Dungeness Crab (10 yrs)

Gulf Corvina (9 yrs)

Herring (12 yrs)

Humboldt Squid (2 yrs)

Hybrid striped Bass (6 yrs)

Indian Squid (1 yr)

Japanese Flying Squid (1 yr)

Kelp Greenling (12 yrs)

Killifish (2-3 yrs)

Krill (1 - 6 yrs)

Longfin Squid (8 months)

Mackerel Scad (4-5 yrs)

Mahi-Mahi (5 yrs)

Masu Salmon (3 yrs)

Mitre Squid (1 yr)

Mollies (5 yrs)

Monkfish (11 yrs)

Mosquitofish (3 yrs)

Mud Crab (5 yrs)

Mullet (8 yrs)

Octopus (1 - 5 yrs)

Pacific Cod (13 yrs)

Pacific Sanddab (13 yrs)

Pangasius (10+ yrs)

Pink Salmon (3 yrs)

Pink Scallops (6 yrs)

Platys (5 yrs)

Pompano (7 yrs)

Prawn (5 yrs)

Rainbow Trout (11 yrs)

Ram Cichlid (3 yrs)

Sanddabs (13 yrs)

Sand Sole (10 yrs)

Shad (11 yrs)

Shortbill Spearfish (5 yrs)

Silk Snapper (6 yrs)

Seven-Figure Pygmy Goby (59 days)

Shrimp (1 - 3 yrs)

Skipjack Tuna (12 yrs)

Smelt (1 yr)

Sockeye Salmon (8 yrs)

Speckled Sanddab (5 yrs)

Spiny Scallops (6 yrs)

Spot Croaker (6 yrs)

Squirrelfish (4 yrs)

Stone Crab (8 yrs)

Striped Marlin (10 yrs)

Summer Flounder (10 yrs)

Swordtails (5 yrs)

Tailor (9 yrs)

Wahoo (6 yrs)

White Seabass (12+ yrs)

Windowpane Flounder (7 yrs)

Yellowfin Tuna (8 yrs)

Yellowfin Whiting (12 yrs)

Yellow Perch (10 yrs)

  GOOD ALTERNATIVES

(14-29 year lifespan) 

Alfonsino (23 yrs)

Arrowtooth Flounder (20 yrs)

Atlantic Sea Scallop (20 yrs)

Barramundi (25 yrs)

Bass (16 yrs)

Bighead Carp (20 yrs)

Black and Yellow Rockfish (21 yrs)

Blue Marlin (18 - 27 yrs)

Blue Rockfish (24 yrs)

Cabezon (20 yrs)

Catfish (15 - 25 yrs)

Chilipepper Rockfish  (16+ yrs)

Cobia (15 yrs)

Cow Rockfish (25+ yrs)

Crawfish (8 - 20 yrs)

Danube Salmon (15 yrs)

Eastern Australian Salmon (26 yrs)

English Sole (22 yrs)

Estuary Cod (22 yrs)

Figure-8 Puffer (15 yrs)

Flathead Sole (21 yrs)

Flounder (14 yrs)

Giant Trevally (24 yrs)

Grass Carp (21 yrs)

Grass Rockfish (20 yrs)

Gray Snapper (24 yrs)

Greater Amberjack (17 yrs)

Greenstriped Rockfish (25 yrs)

Grenadier (25 yrs)

Haddock (20 yrs)

Hake (14 yrs)

Hoki (25 yrs)

Icefish (15 yrs)

Iridescent Shark (20 yrs)

Kelp Rockfish (15 yrs)

Largemouth Bass (16 yrs)

Mackerel (25 yrs)

Milkfish (15 yrs)

Mulloway (30 yrs)

Mussels (24 yrs)

Narrow Barred Spanish Mackerel (22 yrs)

Olive Rockfish (25 yrs)

Opah or Moonfish (20 yrs)

Oysters (20 yrs)

Pacific Bluefin Tuna (26 yrs)

Pacific Hake (23 yrs)

Plaice (20 - 25 yrs)

Pollock (17 yrs)

Red King Crab (20 yrs)

Red Porgy (18 yrs)

Rex Sole (24 yrs)

Rock Sole (22 yrs)

Lingcod (20 yrs)

Round Whitefish (14 yrs)

Sardines (25 yrs)

Scup (20 yrs)

Seabream (15 yrs)

Sea Mullet (16 yrs)

Shortbelly Rockfish (22 yrs)

Shovelnose Sturgeon (15 yrs)

Snow Crab (14 yrs)

Spangled Emperor (27 yrs)

Spotted Seatrout (18 yrs)

Squarespot Rockfish (19+ yrs)

Starry Flounder (24 yrs)

Starry Rockfish (28 yrs)

Stripey Seaperch (20 yrs)

Sweetlip Emperor (22 yrs)

Swordfish (15 yrs)

Tilapia (20 yrs)

Totoaba (25 yrs)

Vermillion Rockfish (22 yrs)

Walleye (29 yrs)

Walleye Pollack (17 yrs)

Weakfish (17 yrs)

Weathervane Scallops (28 yrs)

Winter Flounder (15 yrs)

Witch Flounder (25 yrs)

Yellowfin Bream (24+ yrs)

Yellowtail Flounder  (17 yrs)

Yellowfin Sole (25 years)

  AVOID

(30-∞ lifespan)

Abalone  (30 yrs)

Angler Fish (Unknown)

Antarctic Sponge (1,550 yrs)

Arctic Char (25 - 30 yrs)

Atlantic Tarpon (55 yrs)

Australian Lungfish (75+ yrs)

Black Drum (30+ yrs)

Black Rockfish (36 yrs)

Bocaccio Rockfish (36 yrs)

Bowhead Whale (211 yrs)

Canary Rockfish (75 yrs)

Cean Quahog Clam (507 yrs)

Chilean Sea Bass (50 yrs)

Common Carp (38 yrs)

Copper Rockfish (55 yrs)

Common Thresher Shark (50 yrs)

Darkblotched Rockfish (66 yrs)

Dover Sole (55 yrs)

Eels (150 yrs)

Flatworms (Almost immortal)

Freshwater Pearl Mussel (250 yrs)

Geoduck (168 yrs)

Giant Sea Bass (75+ yrs)

Gopher Rockfish (30 yrs)

Greenland Sharks (200 yrs)

Green Sturgeon (60 yrs)

Grouper (30+ yrs)

Halibut (50 yrs)

Harlequin Rockfish (43 yrs)

Hydra (Possibly immortal)

Koi Fish (250 yrs)

Lake Whitefish (50 yrs)

Lobster (60+ yrs)

Longspine Thorynhead (40 yrs)

Mangrove Jack (52 yrs)

Manta Ray (100 yrs)

New Zealand Tai Snapper (40 yrs)

Orange Roughy (149 yrs)

Orca (90 yrs)

Petrale Sole (32 yrs)

Pacific Ocean Perch (90 yrs)

Pink Snapper (45 yrs)

Pomfret (Unknown)

Queen Conch (30 yrs)

Quillback (32+ yrs)

Red Drum (60 yrs)

Red Emperor (34 yrs)

Red Sea Urchin (200 yrs)

Red Snapper (57 yrs)

Redstripe Rockfish (41 yrs)

Rougheye Rockfish (205 yrs)

Sablefish (94 yrs)

Scarlet Seaperch (32 yrs)

Sea Turtles (80 yrs)

Sharpchin Rockfish (45 yrs)

Shortfin Mako Shark (29 - 32 yrs)

Shortraker Rockfish (120 yrs)

Shortspine Thorynhead (100 yrs)

Silvergray (80 yrs)

Skate (50 yrs)

Speckled Rockfish (37 yrs)

Spiny Dogfish (100 yrs)

Splitnose Rockfish (84 yrs)

Striped Bass (30 yrs)

Tilefish (50 yrs)

Tube Worms (250 yrs)

Turritopsis dohrnii jellyfish (Forever)

White Sturgeon (100 yrs)

Widow Rockfish (59 yrs)

Wreckfish (70 yrs)

Yellowedge Grouper (80 yrs)

Yelloweye Rockfish (114 yrs)

Yellowmouth Rockfish (34 years)

Yellowtail Amberjack (30 + yrs)

Yellowtail Rockfish (64 yrs)

PS: Meat eaters who believe that death is harmful by cutting off future experiences could also use a guide to the lifespans of land mammals, birds and insects. I have not put a full list together, but I can say that rabbits, hamsters, guinea pigs, bat-eared foxes, opossums, royal antelopes, hedgehogs, robins, mayflies and dragonflies are suitable short-lived options in those categories. 

[letthemeatmeat]

Decoding, “Oh, I Could Never Give Up Cheese!”

At a wedding a few weeks ago, I was meeting some guy who I’ll never see again and it came up that I’ve written stuff about veganism. Upon hearing the word “vegan,” he started to respond, “Oh, I could n...” and he didn’t need to finish because I knew he was about to say, “Oh, I could never give up cheese.” Why is this such a predictable non-vegan cliché?

One popular theory is that cheese is addictive. Veganism advocate Dr. Neal Barnard has made this claim, and Bite Size Vegan explored this question in a video called, “Is Cheese Addictive?” Diana Fleischman's post “Is Cheese Really Addictive?” comes to a different conclusion than Barnard does, and Skeptical Vegan’s post “Cheese Addiction?” is characteristically skeptical.

The supposed addictiveness of cheese immediately strikes me as suspect because there don’t seem to be any standard withdrawal symptoms associated with quitting it. Isn’t there more to addiction than liking something too much to want to give it up? Caffeine doesn’t appear to be addictive for everyone, but for those who do become dependent on tea or coffee, they feel fatigue and headaches when they go off it. Withdrawal from alcohol can lead to delirium tremens. What does cheese withdrawal look like? Well, since the supposed addictiveness of cheese has to do with it acting as an opiate, we might expect cheese withdrawal to look like opiate withdrawal, with symptoms like: Agitation, anxiety, muscle aches, increased tearing, insomnia, runny nose, sweating, yawning, abdominal cramping, diarrhea, dilated pupils, goose bumps, nausea and vomiting.

Is this what happens when cheese eaters suddenly go without cheese for a while? I’m sure there are some anecdotal reports of this kind of thing, but I would expect to hear more of them, especially since cheese is so popular.

Or maybe withdrawal is not a necessary aspect of overcoming addiction, and addiction just means a heavy reliance on something, or cravings. In that case, cheese could be addictive in the same way that tahini was addictive for me when I used it just about every day I cooked for myself. It seems to me that this is just cheese or tahini acting as a culinary crutch – something you can throw on food to instantly make it taste better and be more filling – but if we use “addictive” loosely, then sure, this could be an addiction.

I think one of the reasons that “cheese is addictive” has become such a popular belief amongst vegans is that it helps explain the bizarre fact that some people can encounter the vegan message and still not go vegan. To these vegans, “Oh, I could never give up cheese!” sounds something like, “Nothing could ever make me give up cheese,” because they’re hearing it from their own perspective that sees veganism as really meaningful, or an ethical obligation, or as offering an obvious and huge benefit to animals. What could be more compelling than veganism? Quite possibly nothing! So if someone knows about veganism and sticks with cheese instead, they must be hooked senseless. 

“Oh, I could never give up cheese!” shouldn’t be taken literally, because most people who say it could give up cheese if they found out they were allergic, or their taste buds changed and they started to find it disgusting, they stopped being able to afford it, or they lived in a time or place where there was no access to dairy. What they’re really saying is this: “Oh, I could never give up something that I really enjoy for an abstract ideal that I have no emotional or intellectual connection to,” with cheese acting as the most obvious mascot for desirable foods that veganism demands that we give up. In other words, it’s not that the pull of cheese is overwhelmingly strong, it’s that for these non-vegans, the pull of veganism is pitifully weak. Veganism seems less meaningful to them than cheese is delicious.

It’s difficult for many vegans to see it this way because for them the pull of veganism is so strong. If they are vegan for ethical reasons, they might see veganism as an obligation of some sort, as a way to give their lives more meaning, or as an ethical obligation. Some vegans even think that veganism is “not a sacrifice” because they get so much out of it personally. That’s why it can be hard for some vegans to understand people who hear about veganism and immediately intuit that they would not find veganism meaningful, and thus that it would mean giving up a lot for no tangible benefits that they could ever see. 

For them, veganism asks too much and offers too little. This is of course an egoistic way of thinking about it, but it can also have to do with the perception that one person going vegan makes no noticeable difference. Someone can want factory farming to end without wanting to be vegan if it won’t do much to accomplish that. Being vegan can drastically change someone’s life, sometimes (though not always) for the worse, and the benefits that it offers to non-existent animals by preventing them from being born can seem abstract. Believing that veganism is a moral duty or adds a sense of purpose to your life is a way to get around the perception that it doesn’t accomplish much, but that doesn’t happen for everybody. Many of the “Oh, I could never give up cheese!” people are accurately sensing that they fall into this camp that wouldn’t feel psychological benefits from going vegan. Without that tug of duty, anything they like about eating animal products easily overwhelms whatever appeal vegan ideas might otherwise have for them. 

This also helps to explain other non-vegan “arguments” like “plants are alive” “canine teeth make me a meat eater” “I’m on the top of the food chain” and “we’re omnivores”. These arguments have nothing to do with the actual reasons that non-vegans eat non-vegan things, but this is often how non-vegans explain themselves when they talk to vegans. Many non-vegans take the mere mention of “vegan” as fighting words, because whether vegans intend it or not, their talking about veganism often sounds to non-vegans like, “I’m living this way for reasons that imply that you ought to too,” and this seems to demand a response. “Plants are alive” and “canine teeth make me a meat eater” really just mean, “This strikes me as an argumentative sort of conversation, because you obviously want me to change how I live, so I’ll respond in an argumentative way. Unfortunately, I haven’t thought about this issue very much, so I have no real points to make.” 

That’s why the new vegan site Your Vegan Fallacy Is and the new Vegan Street Blog post “Vegan Snark Attack” are missing the point. 

That animals are capable of suffering and animal farming typically causes animals immense amounts of suffering is pretty much the only good argument that vegans have. When that one fails, which it apparently has once meat eaters respond with “what about plants?” or “I have canine teeth,” the argument is probably lost. Concerning her desire to correct bad faith arguments against veganism, Marla Rose writes on Vegan Street Blog, “I have to also remind myself that most of the time when [non-vegans] bring up these ludicrous arguments [such as “what about plants?”], they really think they’ve got something impressive to work with, which is why it’s up to us to (patiently, calmly, effectively) prove otherwise.” This strikes me as a mistake. I don’t think that the “what about plants?” non-vegans really do think “they’ve got something impressive to work with.” Defeating those weak arguments will accomplish nothing, because those arguments are not the real point. 

Vegans can make all the arguments they want, but the problem remains that many people perceive veganism as asking too much and offering too little. Refuting non-vegan fallacies does nothing to fix that. 

[letthemeatmeat]

Meat Eating is Not Inherently Paradoxical

Animal rights activists sometimes wonder why meat eaters are okay with eating farmed animals like cows, pigs, and chickens, but are not okay with eating human babies who are seemingly less rational and less capable than pigs are. Pro-human species prejudice is the usual suspect, but that can’t be the full story because animal activists have also noticed that humans often eat meat while caring for and protecting non-human animals in the form of pets, or wild animal species that they favor. This is often referred to as a paradox, but it's not. There's no contradiction here.

The reason most of us don’t eat babies even though they are irrational is obvious to the point of being a near tautology: most humans value babies for reasons other than the consumption of their flesh, and these reasons are strong enough to easily outweigh any temptation there might be on some people’s part to eat babies or condone the eating of babies. There are selfish reasons for having children, but these reasons are different than the selfish reasons we breed animals such as cows and pigs – and that's why the outcomes are so different. It’s not that parents are selfless and animal farmers/consumers are selfish: it’s that the self-interested aspect of parenting takes a very different form than the self-interested aspect of animal farming because the most effective way to get value out of offspring is so unlike the most effective way to get value from cows. Parenting is what might be called a “caring compatible selfishness,” because the children who offer parents the most are usually the children who are the best cared for. The problem that vegans have with animal farming is not that it is self-interested, but that the nature of what we value in certain animals makes animal farming a form of self-interest that is not so easily caring compatible.

In the article, “Parenthood and Caring Compatible Selfishness” at Ethos Review, I described why I thought parenthood was caring-compatible despite its often being motivated by self interest. Children typically offer parents abstract benefits such as:

[P]roof of adulthood, life enrichment, curiosity satisfaction, a shot at feeling less erased by death, societal or romantic partner approval, further evidence of genetic strengths, vicarious living, perpetuating a family business or legacy, improving the odds of being loved and cared for in later years, and being a means to spread genes and memes.

Some of these, like taking over a family business, obviously do involve direct labor, while in other cases mere existence is all it takes for children to provide the symbolic value parents are after. But even children whose parents have no business to speak of aren’t necessarily free from laboring for their parents. To serve as a lasting source of meaning, children often need to satisfy parental expectations about what they will be like, what values they will hold, what they will accomplish, and what sort of life they will live.

Most parents psychologically benefit when their children flourish, and most people want to flourish, so this arrangement works out when parents and children have overlapping ideas of the good life—and when the children manage to achieve them. As long this all lines up, parenthood functions as a sort of caring-compatible selfishness. This is the kind of everyone-wins self-interest that achieves its self-oriented benefits through the virtues of care: love, trust, compassion, respect, responsibility, responsiveness, empathy, affection, sacrifice, tenderness, attentiveness, generosity, gratitude, and nurturance.

If this is right, it should make it clear why people who are opposed to eating babies are not opposed to eating animals who are seemingly more intelligent than babies: most of the important reasons that parents value their offspring do not apply to farm animals. Children offer meaning through their achievements and whatever else allows parents to feel proud of their children and enjoy spending time with them. Farm animals, in contrast, offer food. Though pigs are intelligent, they cannot carry our genes or values into the future. Of course we do not kill everyone who does not carry our genes or values into the future (though some humans are murdered for having values too different from someone else’s), but part of that is a function of co-existing in a mutually beneficial society. Pigs fail there too. The reason dogs and cats survive without serving as vessels of our genes and values is no paradox either: they provide pleasure through companionship that is valuable enough to outweigh what they would offer as food, especially when there are other animals who are not valued for their companionship.

So it’s not that we’re prejudiced in favor of humans, exactly, as meat eaters who love their pets more than they love other humans shows. It’s just that what babies and pets offer us happens to coincide with the need to nurture them and to try to help them have the best lives possible, whereas what farm animals offer us happens to coincide with our needing to kill them at a young age.

In rare cases, the death of a child can be more meaningful to a parent than the child growing up and thriving, and when that's true, it wouldn’t wouldn’t be surprising for parents to wish for their child’s death. The story earlier this year about a teenager in Pakistan named Aitzaz who sacrificed his life to prevent a suicide bombing provides an example in which a child's death can provide the parents (or at least the father in this case) with meaning. From The Independent:

“Aitzaz has made us proud by valiantly intercepting the bomber and saving the lives of hundreds of his fellow students,” 55-year-old Mujahid Ali Bangash [father of Aitzaz], told the AFP news agency. “I am happy that my son has become a martyr by sacrificing his life for a noble cause.”…

“Many people are coming to see me but if they try to express sympathy, I tell them to congratulate me instead on becoming the father of a martyr,” he said. “I will be even more than happy if my second son also sacrifices his life for the country.”

Parenting is not always caring-compatible in a direct way, then. And abortion provides an example in which the potential benefits of having and caring for a child are outweighed by other self-interested concerns, such as wanting to avoid the pain and other challenges of pregnancy, or wanting to maintain the freedom of childlessness (amongst many other possible reasons). Opponents of abortion, like opponents of animal farming, reject abortion because they see it as a form of selfishness that is not caring compatible. The basic pro-choice response to this is that freedom of abortion is an acceptable aspect of self-care. Self-care is the gist of the argument for meat eating as well. Whether it is an acceptable form of self-care is of course what everyone is debating. 

By the way, this post is not intended to be an ethical defense of meat eating. My only point here is that while there are ethical problems to deal with when it comes to eating meat, there is no "paradox."

[letthemeatmeat]

Jack Norris RD on the Humane Research Council's Vegetarian/Vegan Recidivism Survey

The vegan dietitian Jack Norris just posted his take on the Humane Research Council's survey of how many vegans and vegetarians go back to eating meat, and why: 

“Former vegetarians/vegans were asked if they began to experience any of the following when they were eating a vegetarian/vegan diet: depression/anxiety, digestive problems, food allergies, low cholesterol, an eating disorder, thyroid problems, protein deficiency, B12 deficiency, calcium deficiency, iron deficiency, iodine deficiency, vitamin A deficiency, vitamin D deficiency, zinc deficiency. The findings show that 71% of former vegetarians/vegans experienced none of the above. It is quite noteworthy that such a small proportion of individuals experienced ill health.”

HRC sounds pleased that only 29% experienced ill health – but that’s almost one-third of people who tried the diet. I was actually hoping to find out that, say, only 1% of former vegetarians experienced poor health because it would allow me to retire from my nutrition work that, while being a labor of love, is indeed a labor, and takes away from my other efforts. At almost 1 out of 3 people, I’m not so sure it’s time to cross the finish line and declare victory.

“All of the conditions [listed above] were experienced by some participants, though only rarely. In each case, less than 10% of lapsed vegetarians/vegans experienced one of these issues, except iron deficiency (experienced by 11%).”

Fatigue is the most common complaint I hear. I have not found any one explanation for most cases of fatigue though vitamin D deficiency and iron deficiency in female endurance runners are common. ...

“Respondents who indicated they began to experience at least one of the conditions were asked if it improved after they started eating meat. 82% of these respondents indicated that some or all of the conditions improved when they reintroduced meat. The most typical timeframes for improvement were: within 2–6 days (20%), within 1–3 weeks (33%), and within 1–3 months (22%).”

Interesting. For some people who come to me with severe problems that we cannot seem to solve, I have often wondered if I should suggest they try going back to eating animal products, reset their health (if it does in fact reset), and then try becoming vegetarian/vegan again more slowly.

[letthemeatmeat]

Human Extinction: It Follows From What Most People Already Believe

In his recent post, "Veganism: It Follows From What Most People Already Believe," veganism advocate Gary Francione writes:

If you believe–as most people believe–that: (1) animals matter morally; (2) because animals matter morally, we cannot justify imposing “unnecessary” suffering on them; and (3) pleasure, amusement, or convenience cannot suffice as “necessity,” then you are already committed to stop eating, wearing, or using animals in any situation in which there is not compulsion or real necessity, such as being on the desert island or the lifeboat with no access to plant foods.

Francione makes this point again and again, seemingly without realizing that the implications go far beyond giving up all animal products.

A totally vegan human civilization would theoretically be free of non-human animal exploitation, but it would still cause pain and misfortune to wild and liminal non-human animals through competition for space and resources, and other harmful effects of human activities. If pleasure, amusement and convenience are not excuses for imposing suffering on animals, then vegans should stop eating vegan foods that are not needed for health or survival, like vegan cupcakes or any calories above the absolute minimum required to survive.

Vegans who take their own existences to be "necessary" would probably need to mostly subsist on freegan foods or a soylent type concoction that is formulated to cause as little suffering to animals as possible--and that's only looking at the implications for food. Anything vegans did that wasn't necessary for survival would raise the question, "is this somehow causing suffering to non-human animals?" If the answer is "yes," as it most certainly will be, the pleasurable, convenient, or amusing activity becomes forbidden even if no intentional animal exploitation is involved. 

But that's if we're being charitable to Francione's logic. The other problem with his simple formula demanding that everyone go vegan is that continued human existence does not seem to be strictly "necessary," so anything humans do for any purpose that causes non-human animal suffering is causing unnecessary animal suffering. It's not veganism that flows from Francione's premises but immediate human extinction. 

Francione could try to show that human existence were necessary somehow, but I've never seen him do that. He throws around "necessary" and "unnecessary" without ever defining them beyond insisting that animal products are unnecessary because pleasure, amusement and convenience are all unnecessary. I agree that pleasure, amusement, convenience and animal products are unnecessary, but only because Francione isn't defining the "for what" part of "necessary," and without a "for what," everything is unnecessary.

But even if mere human survival were the "for what" of Francione's "necessary," he still runs into problems because this demands more sacrifice than simply ending animal exploitation, and because it's still unclear why human health or human existence should be necessary.

If there is no grand purpose to human existence (and I've love to see Francione propose one), pleasure and amusement are among the major reasons that we strive to keep the human species going. And if pleasure and amusement are no excuse for harming non-human animals, Francione's premises don't allow us to justify continued human existence. 

[letthemeatmeat]

And "Justify It" Part 3

TheMicroFilmPrinciple's comment inspired me to clarify my own thoughts on the problems with veganism, so I thought I'd post that as well. My response to "Another take on 'Justify It'":

I enjoyed this comment a lot and agreed with most of it. I only have a couple of minor disagreements. One is that I think that the premise of some amount of human selfishness being required to justify meat eating still stands. And you even allude to why it does: because there is technically the option for humans to all immediately stop eating and die, which would be far more selfless and better for non-human animals than our continuing here in almost any conceivable human society I can imagine.

I don't know of any vegans who are demanding immediate human extinction, because even the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement wants to allow living humans to live out the rest of their lives, which I would say means allotting humans some amount of selfishness. But immediate extinction is still technically an option, which means that rejecting this option (as all or nearly all vegans and meat eaters want to do) is accepting some amount of selfishness for humans. Another more selfless alternative to ultra harm reduction meat eating would be some sort of human society that manages to improve life for animals so much that the animals are better off with humans than without. This is probably impossible, but it's something that David Pearce dreams about at The Abolitionist Project. This would be another option that, if it's possible (which it probably isn't), would be less selfish than even the least selfish form of meat eating.

I basically agree what you said about intent. Vegans don't actually have good intent based on their own standards, as I talk about toward the end of this post. When it comes to habitat destruction, for instance, vegans think they should get to pretend that destroying habitat with wild animals in it is ethically the same as destroying habitat with no animals in it, just because theoretically the habitat could have had no animals in it. This is a version of The Doctrine of Double Effect. I think there's a lot of problems with using The Doctrine of Double Effect here, because for one, how do we get to say that feeding ourselves constitutes a "good end" that justifies the inevitable harming of some animals when animals are better off without us anyway and so in some sense the best end (if we're taking non-human animal perspectives) would be our not eating? Humans non-intentionally killing animals to eat constitutes two bad ends from animals' POV, not one good end that justifies the bad unwanted consequences (as The Doctrine of Double Effect requires).

There's also obvious problems with the typical example that Gary Francione uses. He says that when we build a road, we know humans are going to die driving on that road, yet we build it anyway. We're willing to accept some deaths of humans when we build this road. So if we destroy habitat knowing that animals are unfortunately going to die, that's the same thing, right? No, because driving on a road is a calculated risk for humans that they take because there is some benefit for them to drive on this road and get somewhere fast. But roads provide no benefit and only harm for wild animals, so it's a faulty comparison. A better comparison would be to environmental racism, or driving indigenous humans out of their homes to make room for Europeans, which most people would say counts as a rights violation. "Intent," as vegans typically use it, does not work the way they want it to work.

However, separate from the vegan/non-vegan issue, I don't totally agree that we can simply dismiss caring about intent rather than consequences as obviously stupid. Personally I am a lot more consequentialist leaning, but I'm not sure we can call deontology irrelevant and leave it at that. Even so, that doesn't matter in this context because veganism doesn't satisfy the deontological requirements for giving animals rights, since it allows habitat right violations, for one.

I liked your pointing out that vegans aren't actually harm/ghg/rights-violation/etc. minimizers. This is something that frequently annoys me about vegan environmentalist rhetoric especially. "You can't be an environmentalist if you eat meat" makes no sense because it seems to be implying that an environmentalist is someone who only does the ecologically optimal thing -- which no environmentalists do. Plus, even if someone is eating some factory farmed meat, they could balance that out by eating not very much of it and reducing their environmental impact in ways that not all vegans are doing, and thereby reach the same GHG footprint. And anyway, as you point out, various forms of meat eating are better than a purely vegan system as far as the environment is concerned. If we want to reduce methane from animals, then hunt methane emitting animals, for instance. And certainly don't let animals live out their methane-emitting lives on sanctuaries.

But again, we have to allow for some environmental non-optimality if we're going to be okay with meat eating, because not eating anything and dying is still technically an option. And that would be better for the environment than just about any version of us staying here. 

[letthemeatmeat]

Another Take on "Justify It"

My last post, Justify It, was a response to vegans demanding that meat eaters justify not being vegan. I liked the detailed comment by TheMicroFilmPrinciple on that post, so here it is:

As someone with a background in looking at mathematical models, the vegan mentality that people must somehow "justify it" strikes me as completely nonsensical (as well as arrogant, hypocritical, smug, and rude).

Some points on reality generally overlooked by such a request: (1) One first needs some structure to the problem. "Justify it" is vague, pointless language. Come up with a metric with a clear definition of what terms we are supposed to "justify" action under, such as choosing what "kills the fewest vertebrates" or "causes the least suffering among life forms that appear to suffer [by some definition]" or "preserves as much habitat as possible" or "preserves biodiversity" or on and on and on. Pick the metric with clear definitions, and we can look at the results.

(2) Once (1) is decided upon, just about every sensible structure to the problem leaves all vegan systems as sub-optimal solutions. Pretty much no matter the vegan food system chosen, there always exists a non-vegan system that has superior results by the chosen metric (greenhouse gases, land use, killing the fewest animals, etc.). This reality is not hard to see once one actually models a food system, such as Vaclav Smil illustrates in Should We Eat Meat? or the "default livestock" discussed by Simon Fairlie in Meat: A Benign Extravagance. The conclusion is obvious to anyone who has looked at system-level modeling, and it is the standard conclusion of all mainstream research that an optimal system will include livestock (not to mention hunting and fishing, which score even better). The only question is at what level and with what methods (lots of disagreement on that). When any vegan system is sub-optimal, why would one need to "justify" not being vegan?

The only exception to the clear superiority of an optimally designed non-vegan system I can think of is one that bases its morality on "intent" instead of actualized consequences, which seems about the stupidest concept one could propose. Why would animals, who have no concept of our intents, care about whether we "intended" their suffering or not? Are we so self-centered that what goes on in our minds is the deciding factor, overriding what actually will happen to animals, when supposedly "considering others"? And, even if we concede such an "intent" concept, we also would have to have a bizarrely distorted concept of "intent," because a vegan system would take actions that blatantly will kill, maim, and cause suffering (to a greater extent than an optimally chosen non-vegan system), actions that could not be excused as "accidental" any more than someone who plows through a crowd of people with a car, but claims it wasn't "intended" harm because, while the plowing through the crowd was completely a conscious choice with known results, the "intent" was to park in a space on the other side of the crowd, not killing all those people who just happened to be killed in an entirely foreseeable manner. If I were a victim of such a driver, I would consider that equivalent to murdering me, whether that was his stated intent or not (and I'd rather be shot than crushed). The inevitable and foreseeable consequence of action is similar when we destroy habitat.

(3) Besides the fact that any vegan system is sub-optimal to an optimally chosen non-vegan system, we also have the problem that absolutely no one truly optimizes by these sorts of metrics (suffering, GHGs, habitat preservation, etc.) in their personal decision making. I often see vegans mention "minimizing suffering" (or whatever we are maximizing/minimizing), but then when they describe what they mean it becomes clear that they don't know what "minimize" means. As soon as one makes a choice that in any way isn't the absolute minimum, we are no longer minimizing. If one is going to be so rude as to ask other to justify their actions, then you had better make sure to have a list of justifications for each and every choice that prevented optimization. A little humility is warranted, and this touches upon the idea that it's alright to act selfishly on some level, because we all do to at least some extent.

(4) In light of points (2) and (3), I don't actually think one needs to get acknowledgement about humans being able to act selfishly as part of the premise, as you suggest your opening premise would be. I agree that of course humans should be able to act selfishly, so I'm not arguing that it's not true. For example, any food system that leaves humans starving would be one I find unacceptable, even at the cost of the environment and non-human animals, and I find it implausible and cruel to ask someone to be genuinely unhealthy for the sake of animals or even other humans, especially when the gains for others would be small and hypothetical (sidenote: sugar crops usually have better caloric yields, so one should load up if trying to minimize land use or GHGs). However, asking for the right to act at least a little selfishly is not a necessary condition, because under any metric our hypothetical vegan proposes, other than an arbitrary and nonsensical "my intentions" concept, there will be a non-vegan choice that will be superior. Well-managed hunting beats any vegan way of feeding oneself. Fishing is vital to our food system. Waste-fed pigs or crop-residue fed cattle will score better than planting additional crops if we forgo the resources of food waste and crop residues. Even if the long-term goal was human extinction, the food system on the way there would be better including a well-chosen set of animal foods with plant foods (unless we were choosing no food whatsoever, starting immediately, in which case the question is "How do you justify eating?" and the choice would clearly be immediate mass suicide).

(5) Usually, when confronted with research justifying point (2), a vegan will suggest that because of the industrial system we have today, some optimal animal products are irrelevant, so we should be vegan in order to reduce demand. That's not entirely illogical, but it's still not really correct. Such a concept would only apply if all possible efficiencies of livestock, hunting, and fishing--the ones where they are improvements over vegan consumption--were already being used up, so that any reduction in overall demand implies a reduction in inefficient production. However, we don't come close to using all of the waste food that could be fed to pigs, so a former vegan that creates a market for a waste fed pig is making a strict improvement over the vegan alternative. One could say the same thing about hunting an abundant wild species (deer are not close to being overhunted in the USA, for instance). If we are talking about people justifying sub-optimal choices, then the vegan who refuses to hunt the abundant deer outside of town should be on the list. So, if choosing optimal consumption, the answer is not vegan on an individual or system level.

(6) Some vegans are good enough to realize my following point, but far to many are not, so I will add it anyway. Livestock are absolutely essential in the developing world. They expand the food supply and enhance food security for people who are vulnerable. Any debate on diet should come with the caveat of "in the developed world," with clear exception made for the multitudes that would starve without livestock or major changes to the system as it exists today. That's pertinent to one of the above "justify" requests, because the 56 billion is one of the estimates for world land animals killed, and I find it rather morally repugnant to question the peasant farmer's use of chickens when living in a western lifestyle.

[letthemeatmeat]

"Justify It"

A couple of weeks ago, a relatively new vegan emailed me to ask:

Is there a rational excuse to eat meat for pleasure? Because that is the only reason that you can find today to actually eat meat. We don't need it to survive anymore, so all 56 billion land animals killed every year are being killed for palate pleasure. Since I became vegan nine months ago I've been trying to find a rational justification to eat meat in today's society, but I never found it. I want to know if you did.

Yesterday James McWilliams made a similar request of meat eaters in general in his recent post "Local Nonsense":

What needs to be acknowledged in this moral delusion is this: it does not matter where your animal’s ethically unjustified death happened. Your ethically unjustified animal death remains ethically unjustified if it happened half a world away or in your own backyard. It’s still unjustified. An animal does not care where it’s slaughtered. It cares about not being slaughtered.

So, to demand what I’ve been demanding of meat eaters for almost a decade: justify it.

All right, all right, I'll justify it! Or rather, I'll sketch out what the justification would look like, and elaborate on it later. 

The basic justification for meat eating would have to open with this premise: It's okay for humans to be selfish in regards to our interactions with non-human animals.

I imagine there are a few vegans reading this who are tempted to jump in now and say, "Aha, that's where we disagree!" But they can't do that! Almost all vegans have to agree with meat eaters on this basic premise, though there are a few exceptions.

The vegans who favor immediate human extinction don't have to agree with meat eaters here, for obvious reasons. Neither do utilitarian transhumanist vegans who believe humanity could reduce suffering and increase pleasure overall by using technology to engineer suffering out of the world – thus allowing humans to earn their keep by being an actively positive presence that is better for animals than if we weren't here at all. Maybe the vegans who want the end of human civilization are kind of off the hook as well, although it's hard for me to imagine primitivist vegan humans coexisting with wild animals in a purely mutually beneficial sort of way. Animals are probably better off without even post-civilization humans, since these humans would still be taking up space and competing for vegan resources. 

So, all the vegans who don't want human extinction, who aren't demanding that humans engineer suffering out the world, or who aren't suggesting a human return to pre-agricultural ways that is mutually beneficial for humans and animals, are willing to accept the harms that non-human animals experience because of vegan human civilization selfishly persisting to the detriment of animals. Even when vegans try to be less selfish than standard veganism requires by imposing more limitations on a hypothetical vegan human society beyond giving up animal products, as the authors of Zoopolis do, they still end up allowing some human selfishness that benefits us at the expense of other animals. 

So we could just as easily turn the question around on James McWilliams or the person who emailed me. Justify it, guys: why are humans allowed to selfishly persist on this planet when most animals would be better off if we weren't here? 

The debate between meat eaters and most vegans, then, is not about whether humans are allowed to behave selfishly in ways that harm non-human animals. The debate is over what degree of human selfishness is acceptable, what forms we want to allow this selfishness to take, and how harmful certain forms of animal exploitation really are.

Most vegans want to draw the line at blatant kinds of animal exploitation, at hunting, medical testing, animal entertainment, and animal agriculture, and argue that these are the distinct and unacceptable forms of human selfishness. The trick for vegans becomes showing how these are distinguished from all the vegan ways that humans harm animals, like through habitat displacement and side effects from pollution, global warming, vegan agriculture, pesticides, roads, wind turbines, and so on. Typically they try to do that by arguing that non-vegan actions are unique in the amount of suffering that they cause or unique in the way that they violate animal autonomy or rights. 

I can think of four possible general responses for the meat eater who cares about ethics to make: that it's okay for us to be even more selfish than vegans want us to be; that vegans are right about the amount of selfishness we should aspire to but wrong that giving up animal exploitation is compatible with a reasonable level of wellbeing for all humans; that animal exploitation and hunting are not necessarily distinct in the form and degree of human selfishness that they represent; or a combination of the three. 

The Stone recently published an essay I wrote that is an attempt to argue the "animal exploitation does not have to be uniquely selfish" point. They titled it, "The Enigma of Animal Suffering," and the main idea was that if we could design a form of animal farming that didn't cause animals much suffering, we could exploit non-human animals without their realizing it. And if we did that while accepting the Epicurean idea that those who die are no worse off than those who are never born, animal farming could apparently be as harmless as the ways that vegans kill animals. From my perspective, it's hard to see what makes this kind of animal exploitation uniquely selfish in contrast to the ways that vegans hurt animals. Of course this kind of high-welfare animal agriculture would still be selfishly motivated, but again, most vegans can't exactly critique it on that basis. Vegans could disagree with Epicurus about the harmlessness of death for the one who dies, but then there's the problem that a vegan human civilization selfishly does things that end up killing animals too.

Vegans could say that intentionally killing animals is much worse than killing them as a likely or inevitable side effect of vegan behaviors, and that could persuade some people. But I have to question the "good intent" of selfish vegan human behaviors that we know will harm or kill animals for the sole benefit of humans (sometimes intentionally and directly so, like with pesticides), especially since there's no apparent purpose to humans being here other than that we like existing and most of us are disturbed at the prospect of humanity going extinct.

As I said, I will elaborate on this more later, but in short, here's how I would justify low-suffering animal farming: almost all vegans and meat eaters agree that humans can selfishly put our interests before those of other animals, vegans underestimate the sacrifice that veganism would be for many people, and animal farming doesn't have to be the distinctively harmful and offensive form of human selfishness that it mostly is today. 

[letthemeatmeat]

Will future people look back on us with scorn for eating meat? Click on the headline to see my take on this at Ethos Review.