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Usually Wash's avatar

Nice piece! My first instinct was to say something about Indian politics, how in India vegetarianism is right-coded and Kerala loves their meat. Anyway, I am a vegetarian but not a vegan.

But I do want to say that I do find the ethical case kind of bad, or at least the conventional utilitarian argument kind of lacking. I do assign much much more moral weight to human life than to all other life. If everyone going vegetarian made the GDP shrink 1%, and that slowed down for instance vaccine development which led to more deaths, it would be a bad thing. How many dollars would you pay to save a chicken? If you really think that donating to an effective animal charity is remotely reasonable vs donating to a charity like the AMF, applying simple utilitarian calculations could lead you to believe that humans don't have more inherent moral value than everything else on Earth combined, or at least to the conclusion that humans don't have more than 1000x as much moral value. I reject this conclusion, I think the actual number is either a very large finite number or just infinite. I also think the cow versus chicken debate is hard. Yes, you need to kill way fewer cows to get the same amount of meat. But definitely a cow is more sentient than a chicken. The cow is smarter and has more of a capacity to think and feel pain. It's a mammal. More closely related to a human. I would definitely save a cow over a chicken in a trolley problem. How much more? How many chickens is a cow? Difficult to know. You can get into even weirder conversations. How about wild animal suffering? Should we engineer versions of wild animals that don't feel pain and release them? You get into strange territory very fast.

I think that there are some better ethical cases against meat eating than a utilitarian calculation of animal suffering. One is honesty. You wouldn't kill the animal if you eat it yourself. Another is values. Be nice to animals, not to their sake but for our own. I mean, if we impose a society-wide moral taboo around making *animals* needlessly suffer, then probably it's hard to commit a genocide. Obvious counterpoint is that Hitler was vegetarian, but he was one person with some really strange and terrible ideas. Mainstreaming vegetarianism in society will probably have good effects on society. This is speculation, but I think it is part of the reason that India is relatively liberal, democratic, and pluralistic for its level of development.

In any case, factory farming will end when cultured meat becomes cheaper. After we phase out factory farming for purely economic and pragmatic arguments, post hoc we will say oh yeah factory farming was completely immoral. I think that's generally how these things these work. Really, slavery in the US was abolished because it stopped making economic sense. Cheap cotton from Egypt and India meant you needed huge tariffs on imported cotton for it to be competitive. The US started expanding Westward, expanding its manufacturing base which was concentrated North, and wanted cheap materials. But in hindsight, we talk all about the abolitionists and John Brown who was an actual terrorist. Brown is basically the equivalent of someone who would go to the place where Sparta where they throw the babies off and tries to shoot them. Not the way you make moral progress. Pragmatically and morally terrible. You know, as Harry Schwarz said, morality is cheap when someone else is paying.

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Sunil's avatar

A related observation / question - just out of curiosity.

Have inspection and regulatory agencies clearly laid down what free-range or cage free means? (A case in comparison are the discussions surrounding organic food labelling.) Is there a cage-free period specified for a day? Do free range farms have to be of a minimum area ? Are the animals branded, docked or sheared? How are free range veal calf slaughter be considered ethical or humane compared to factory farmed, when they are slaughtered young? I can go on.

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