The X-Schema X1) Emm is (or has) X
9. Beyond Factory Farming
from CAFOs. (See section 7 for a reminder about why Fred has no choice but to cage and mutilate the puppies.)
How about meat from humanely raised animals? Here, again, we can look to Fred for guidance.
PAINLESS DEATH
Fred’s brain stops producing cocoamone, and the only way to obtain useable cocoamone is to distill it from the brains of puppies. So he buys twenty puppies, lets them run around free in his apartment, takes them for walks, buys them toys, and treats them well. Then, once they’re a year old, he sneaks up on them one by one, swiftly decapitates them, grinds up their brains, and distills a month’s supply of cocoamone.
Is Fred doing something immoral? I would say so, though I’ll admit that what he does in PAINLESS DEATH isn’t nearly as bad as what he does in the original COCOAMONE FARM case. If you agree that it’s wrong for Fred to slaughter puppies for their cocoamone even if he otherwise treats them well, then you should agree that it’s wrong for you to buy meat even from humanely-raised farm animals.
How about eggs and dairy from humanely raised animals?
For instance, suppose that someone keeps chickens and cows as pets, treats them well, never slaughters them, and sells their milk and (unfertilized) eggs. Would it be wrong to buy and consume their milk and eggs? To find the answer, let’s consider what would be the analogous case for Fred:
HAPPY PUPPY SWEAT
Fred’s brain stops producing cocoamone, and the only way to obtain useable cocoamone is to distill it from the sweat of puppies. So he buys twenty puppies, lets them run around free in his apartment, takes them for walks, buys them toys, and treats them well. He collects their sweat—without killing them or harming them in any way—and distills a month’s supply of cocoamone.
This case seems to combine all the best features of the previous two cases with none of their problematic features. Certainly Fred
isn’t doing anything immoral. So, by parity of reason, there’s nothing immoral about buying eggs and dairy from humanely raised animals on a no-kill farm.
Finally, what about lab-grown meat? We currently have the technology to “grow” beef in a laboratory—just the meat, with no animal attached—without any living animals being harmed in the process. Someday soon, you may be able to buy this lab-grown meat in stores and restaurants. Would that be immoral? Once again, we can answer the question by imagining Fred getting his cocoamone in an analogous way:
COCOAMONE LAB
Fred’s brain stops producing cocoamone. So he buys a hundred small clusters of brain cells that were painlessly extracted from living puppies without harming those puppies in any way. He keeps the cells alive in a chemical solution, and collects the cocoamone that they produce.
When we drastically change the details of the case in this way, it no longer seems like Fred is doing anything immoral. No animals have to die or suffer in order for him to get his cocoamone. Since there is no morally relevant difference between what Fred does in COCOAMONE LAB and buying lab-grown meat, and since Fred isn’t doing anything immoral in COCOAMONE LAB, there’s nothing immoral about buying and eating lab-grown meat.
What we’ve just seen is that the arguments of this chapter don’t support the extreme view that it’s never permissible to buy or consume meat or other animal products. But even though I haven’t shown that eating meat is always immoral, I have shown that it’s immoral to buy any of the meat (and most of the eggs and dairy) that’s presently for sale in stores and restaurants.
Suppose you are convinced that you ought to stop buying and eating meat. But you can’t bring yourself to cut out meat completely, perhaps because you love Taco Bell too much or because grandma will be crushed if you refuse to eat her Christmas roast. What’s a wannabe vegetarian to do? What I would say is that morality comes in degrees. It’s wrong to eat meat, but it’s far worse to eat meat at every meal than to eat meat just on holidays and a Taco Bell Double Decker Taco now and
again. So, my advice is to make a good faith effort to decrease your meat consumption, to once a day or once a week. In other words, you can become a “reducetarian.” Then, when you’re ready, you can transition to a 100% (or 99%) vegetarian diet.
Reflection Questions
1. Can the arguments from precedent or naturalness be defended against my objections? Or can you think of a superior line of argument in defense of eating meat?
2. Can you think of a plausible way of arguing against premise FP2, that what Fred does is immoral? Make sure that your argument in defense of slaughtering puppies won’t double as a defense of slaughtering human infants.
3. Can you defend one of the putative morally relevant differences discussed in sections 7 and 8 against my objections? Or can you think of a morally relevant difference that was not discussed?
4. If not for the meat industry, the billions of animals raised and slaughtered annually for food would never have existed.
Could this fact be used as the basis for an argument in defense of eating meat? Why or why not?
5. What should someone who accepts the Argument from Fred’s Puppies think about freeganism, the practice of eating only meat that someone else has purchased or thrown in the dumpster and that would otherwise go to waste?
Sources
The discussion of the Arguments from Precedent, Naturalness, and Necessity draws heavily from Dan Lowe’s “Common Arguments for the Moral Acceptability of Eating Meat.” The Argument from Fred’s Puppies and subsequent discussion is drawn from Alastair Norcross’s “Puppies, Pigs, and People.” The argument from killing mice in section 8 is drawn from Mike Archer’s “Ordering the Vegetarian Meal? There’s More Animal Blood on Your Hands,” and the response to that argument is
drawn from the All Animals Australia blog’s “Debunking
‘Ordering the Vegetarian Meal?’” The statistics in section 8 about the proportion of crops grown to feed animals are drawn from Brad Plumer’s “How Much of the World’s Cropland is Actually Used to Grow Food?” Here are some additional resources:
• Elizabeth Anderson: Animal Rights and the Values of Nonhuman Life
• Animal Kill Clock (animalclock.org/)
• Andrew Chignell, Terence Cuneo, and Matthew C. Halteman:
Philosophy Comes to Dinner
• Cora Diamond: Eating Meat and Eating People
• Tyler Doggett: Killing Animals for Food (wi-phi.com)
• Mylan Engel Jr.: Fishy Reasoning and the Ethics of Eating
• Lori Gruen: Ethics and Animals: An Introduction
• Elizabeth Harman: The Moral Significance of Animal Pain and Animal Death
• Michael Huemer: Dialogues on Ethical Vegetarianism
• Anja Jauernig: Speaking Up for Animals
• Christine Korsgaard: A Kantian Case for Animal Rights
• Loren Lomasky: Is it Wrong to Eat Animals?
• Jeff McMahan: The Meat Eaters
• Peter Singer: All Animals are Equal
• David Foster Wallace: Consider the Lobster