If someone had a child, castrated him without anesthesia as an infant, and then slit his throat when he reached 12 years old, I don’t think most people would wait for further details before judging that the adult is doing something wrong and they should not have children. And so things remain even if the rest of the boy’s life is fine, even if the approximately twelve years during which he’s not being mutilated or having his throat slit outweigh the bad.
But what if society was, for whatever purpose you’d like to imagine, full of children being mutilated and having their throats slit, in the billions, and whose lives were also just a never-ending nightmare, such children living in warehouses amongst feces and the corpses of their friends, suffering from untreated infections, and facing frequent physical abuse? Well, then, just mutilating a child in a few respects and slitting his throat when he’s 12 wouldn’t seem so bad. With the baseline being an eternal nightmare, you might see people who consider themselves sympathetic to children’s rights arguing that a few makeshift surgeries don’t outweigh getting to live an otherwise pleasant life, that twelve years is better than zero, that the boy wouldn’t exist if he weren’t going to have is throat slit, etc. And what if we suppose that this imagined world contains a lot of feral children frequently die of starvation or get eaten alive by predators? Well, then, people might argue that the boy who is merely mutilated and bled out has it way better most children do by default, and so it might even seem he is being done a favor.
So people would perceive things differently, despite the fact that nothing about the act changed beyond our initial suppositions. You shouldn’t mutilate and kill children; what is happening to other children in nature or by others’ hands does not make a difference, as long as it does not affect the circumstances around your particular choice.
And what should we expect of the future of this society, as long as the most righteous of its members all but regard mutilation and exsanguination as a gift? I can only speculate, and I would speculate that making the less-than-constant-nightmare-level conditions the norm would be a lost cause. Perhaps I’m too optimistic, but I don’t think ordinary people are compartmentalized enough to believe both “Children living constant nightmares is bad and stopping it is a huge deal” and “It’s fine to mutilate them and slit their throats if you otherwise keep things pleasant for them” without an intolerable amount of tension. Realistically, I think, you’d end up with people who nominally support better conditions for children but don’t do anything about it, so that the status quo is maintained indefinitely.1 No, I suspect there are only two possible futures: the one where the nightmare remains eternal, and the one where slitting someone’s throat is seen as beyond serious consideration.
So things are for us. If someone castrated their dog with a knife without any anesthetic to save money, or slit their throat when they turned six months old for whatever trivial reason, that would rightly be seen as unconscionable. Nobody would withhold their judgment until they find out whether the good in the dog’s life outweighed the bad or whether the dog would have existed had the owner not planned to do such things. If giving someone an on-balance pleasant life is such a good thing to do, then you can literally just do that without the mutilation and killing; voluntarily being unwilling to just do that does not permit you to inflict whatever abuse you please as long as it doesn’t make their life net-negative.
Yet, because factory farming is so bad, people who take themselves to care about animals’ welfare often judge it’s not such a bad thing to mutilate and kill pigs and chickens, as long as their life isn’t otherwise a constant nightmare. It is a fact that humans judgment is biased by framing, a fact that advertisers love. Whether we’re talking about the price of some widget or others’ welfare, we’re more inclined to positively favor some condition the worse the “default” happens to be. So when we consider how horrific factory farming is, and then consider the morality of just slitting a child animal’s throat, it would be a miracle if people’s judgments weren’t irrationally skewed in favor of the latter.
But what if the default were different? What if you lived in a society where no one ate flesh? Would you be the first to propose a brilliant scheme where we can bring all these additional pleasant albeit short lives into existence, such being financed by consumers who want to eat their corpses? I’d wager not, and indeed that even if this idea occurred to you, you’d dismiss it without a second thought. Even the most hardcore consequentialist, who agrees that in principle it’d be okay to bring someone into existence and then kill them if their life is net positive, would dismiss your proposal on the basis of “second-order effects.” It would not be difficult to predict that were such actions normalized, people would start to not care a whole lot about animals’ welfare, all while they want food for as cheap as possible, all while the killers are incentivized to cut as many corners as possible, before we just end up with billions living in hell. Now, maybe in this hypothetical you’d claim it’s uncertain whether people will become so callous as to finance hell-for-billions out of convenience; unfortunately, though, we non-hypothetical people have no uncertainty in this regard.
That is what the hardcore consequentialists would say. Everyone else would just say “No, it’s wrong to kill, even if the animal wouldn’t have existed otherwise. They exist now, and it’s wrong to kill them for the same reasons as usual.”
How bad are non-factory-farms, anyway? I cannot emphasize this enough: the victims are killed at a fraction of their natural age; they get loaded into trucks, driven to slaughterhouses, and have their throats slit or get gassed; “meat” is the corpse of someone who did not want to die, and you do not get to eat flesh without someone dying for it; this is already horrible enough that nothing more would need to be said in any remotely sane society.
But more can be said. You do not need to dig into vegan propaganda to see what happens on local or “family-owned” farms; the so-called farmers are happy to share their methods. Consider, for example, this video entitled “DIY Pig Castration - No Expensive Vet Bill.” The video was uploaded by a Sheraton Park Farms from North Carolina, whose website advertises that “All of our animals are raised on pasture where they are able to express their full personalities and live as they were intended to.” In this video at about the 6 minute mark, you can see a piglet being held down by a woman, and after cleaning the area, a man slices into his scrotum with a box cutter, at which point he immediately screams in pain. He then presses on the piglet’s genitals in order to push his testicles out of the wound, and the testicles are detached by simply pulling them away, all while the screaming continues.
For pig flesh to be “Certified Humane” or “Animal Welfare Approved,” it’s required that castration be done prior to 7 days old (unlike in the above video), but it is not required that any anesthetic be used (see here p. 19 and here 4.7.9; similar for cattle). See here for this mutilation being performed by people claiming to meet AWA standards. The procedure is described as follows: “I use a scalpel and I cut two incisions on the scrotum and I just pull and rip. I’ve never been a cutter, some people cut the vas deferens and stuff, but you have to cut it properly so that it doesn’t bleed too much, and I’ve found that [with] ripping there’s no bleeding, it’s beautiful.”
The “humane” standards seem to vary a bit when it comes to what mutilations are allowed; AWA prohibits cutting tails and horns off and cutting through teeth, while CH allows them. On the other hand, regarding identifying animals, the AWA says “Where identification is required it must not cause harm to the animal,” before including punching notches into their ears as one of the non-harmful methods (see 4.9.2). It is important that these things are being written by people who do not consider “humane slaughter” an oxymoron.
Speaking of which—the AWA label requires that animals be “stunned” prior to their killing so that they don’t have to consciously bleed out. Permitting forms of stunning/killing include being gassed, and being gassed with CO2 is merely recommended against. If you’re luckier, you get shot in the head, which will probably prevent you from experiencing bleeding out.
And all this, I remind you, is about getting killed, and getting killed is bad, and killing is something you shouldn’t do if you don’t need to. Usually, most people don’t deny this, even in the case of animals.2 If someone kills their dog, say because they just got bored of her, that would be generally and correctly regarded as a bad a thing to do to the dog. And it wouldn’t be regarded as just a little bit bad; it would be I-don’t-want-to-associate-with-that-person bad. And killing someone to eat their corpse, just because you don’t feel like eating something else? The only difference is that the latter is regarded as normal.
Though this is not to say activists wouldn’t be successful in replacing these conditions with still-hellish-but-less-so conditions, or that this wouldn’t be a great thing to achieve.
As for arguments, the most common kind of argument that dying isn’t bad for non-rational animals I see (other than hedonistic ones, which is a matter to be discussed in its own right) is that animals don’t want to not die, since they don’t have a concept of death, or a concept of themselves dying, etc. But this seems like an overly-stringent condition on what an animal can want. In the case of a rational being, it would indeed seem weird to say “Bob doesn’t want to die, though he also doesn’t know what death is.” To my ear, this seems weird because it seems implausible that Bob would be motivated to avoid death without understanding himself as trying to avoid death. If Bob regularly engages in death-avoiding behavior without knowing what death is, then we’d be more likely to say Bob is just following some urges whose nature he doesn’t know, and we wouldn’t attribute the death-avoidance to him. But things are only this way because Bob is a rational being, i.e. we expect him to possess some higher-order awareness of the reasons for which he acts. But there’s no similar grounds for attributing these standards to non-rational beings, who act on reasons without being aware of them as reasons. The mother lion wants to protect her young; does she have a concept of “protection”? I don’t know, but that seems neither here nor there; she instinctually acts with the goal of protecting her young, without necessarily being aware of herself as such.
No posts
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.