My position on various animal ethics questions

 

 

This article is just a short summary of my stances on various animal issues.

 

Is it wrong to buy animal products?

Yes, though if it's needed for survival or otherwise basic medical reasons, I'm not willing to consider it to be as wrong at least, but then I'd also say the same for humans killing humans. Unpacking why it seems easier to defend harming a non-human for severe medical reasons or survival reasons, mostly boils down to practical social and emotional concerns, but intrinsically I don't see a good reason to let the species make any difference to the matter.

The reason it's wrong is that it either
A) directly increases demand for animal products, which increases the amount of unjust treatment of animals and the amount of suffering.

B) inspires an acceptance of animal products as a commodity when you otherwise could be part of decreasing the acceptance by boycotting their use. Sustaining the acceptance of animal products halts the vegan movement - which halts the reduction of unjust treatment and suffering of animals.

By decreasing demand and popularizing alternatives to animal products, we can both decrease the number of individuals born into a life of exploitation, and sooner reach the critical mass of vegans and reducetarians until a more top-down approach for restructuring the politics of agriculture (and other forms of animal exploitation) can become viable.

Is it wrong to painlessly kill an animal?

In practice yes, though philosophically the wrongness would depend on some factors that apply to both humans and animals:

Does potential future life have any intrinsic value? Does it have to be the life of that particular animal, and not a replacement? I'm unsure, but if it does then it's wrong to kill an animal who will have a future of value to them. Mercy-kills are probably good if the individual cannot recover and is clearly suffering and about to die as an immediate result and cannot express any sign of reconciling their pain with the value of living, whether it's a human or non-human.

Do they fear their moment of death/experience suffering as a result of the kill? Will someone mourn losing them? Will the killer be negatively influenced by the act or will it increase the likelihood that they'll go on to make a kill that doesn't meet these criteria? Does killing the individual put someone else in danger/harm's way?

I would always entertain it philosophically, but in practice my position is that even if it doesn't harm the individual who dies, it promotes speciesism and the legitimacy of killing animals in contexts where the above criteria clearly don't apply.

Update: Here's some thoughts I grapple with: https://runetass.blogspot.com/2021/07/thoughts-on-painless-killing.html

Are non-human animals worth the same as humans?

In principle yes, I don't consider species is morally relevant, and I consider intrinsic worth to come from the capacity for pleasure and suffering, regardless of species. Some animals like insects I probably don't consider of equal moral value, because I doubt they have the same capacities as most other animals, however none have a low enough moral value to justify exploitation or to not take them into consideration.

Should we care about the harm to animals that isn't caused by humans?

Yes, just as we should care about helping humans who we haven't harmed. Wild animals on average suffer horrifically compared to humans, and many of their lives are likely no better than a factory farm, and due to parasites and predation it could often be worse than most of the fates of farmed animals. I think people who react adversely to the idea of now all of a sudden acting like nature is this big moral problem to fix, are suffering from a bias in which the perpetrator takes too much space. It doesn't matter to the animal whether the cause of their suffering is a human, another animal, an accident or a natural disaster.

We should research ways to eventually solve the issue of overpopulation, starvation, disease and infections and predation, without causing more harm due to downstream effects on ecosystems.

We should also remove the idea of nature and biodiversity being intrinsically good, and always focus on individuals rather than species or populations.

Allowing evil to take place when it could be prevented, even when not directly causing it, seems morally wrong to me, and I'd also be surprised if non-utilitarians disagreed. If it's wrong to stand idly by and let someone be bullied, it's wrong to stand idly by and let someone succumb to the various causes of suffering in nature.

Is intervening in nature a form of human domination?

At least not more than encouraging contraception and donating to charity for less developed countries being a form of domination. You can advocate for reducing wild animal suffering and intervening in nature without bringing ideas of domination or colonization into it. It can also be viewed the opposite way, that extending our care to all sentient beings is the antithesis to human dominance and superiority.

Is it better for an animal to be born as a commodity than to never start existing?

There is an argument that says that by not bringing individuals into existence for animal products, there is in total less lives worth living being lived, and since some farmed animal lives are worth living, veganism would be worse than a more benign carnist way of living.

There are some possible answers to this:

A) It's always better to be unborn for an individual, because of David Benatar's arguments for anti-natalism. Since I'm still unsure about the accidental implication of pro-mortalism (it is better to die than to keep on living), I'm not sure that I could currently defend this point of view. Someone could perhaps say that this stance is very predictable and yet unreasonable, as evolution has made us quite geared towards survival at the cost of our own suffering. While that may be, and I may be in a cycle of discounting the suffering of my life and miscalculating how well my life will turn out, I simply don't have an ounce of a death-wish and this currently influences my views on the value of living, which I for myself judge to be good, or good enough. I couldn't confidently say that for any other individual, that they also must regard their life the same, and I have a depressingly high amount of friends who are, so to speak, more or less staying out of courtesy, and that also influences my views. Logically I find it somewhat hard to defend a pro-life view consistently with other views about the importance of avoiding harm, but I will no doubt reflect more upon it later.

Read my thoughts on anti-natalism (older article, some views may have changed)

B) Condoning exploiting and killing someone (and thereby sustaining the practice throughout society) is too negative for animals and humans on average to allow for individual cases of exploitation where animals do have a life worth living. Ending speciesism is probably of huge importance in order to address the ethics of farming animals across the board, but also to eventually address suffering in the wild.

C) Even if it is better, it's not a good outcome all things considered, nor the best one we can reasonably bring about. For instance, it may be better for a sweat shop worker to have income than to have no job and no money to take care of their basic needs, but it's still not by far the best we could do about their situation, and therefore given a better option it's still on the side of wrongness. Similarly, if an animal's life is worth living even when exploited, it's not by far as good as it could be without the exploitation.

Read my article on "They wouldn't have existed otherwise"

If an animal was raised in great conditions with a happy enjoyable life, wouldn't it be worse to kill them rather than a suffering factory farmed animal as you're robbing them of more pleasure?

When you look at an individual animal in isolation and deciding whether to kill them, then I would agree that it's worse to kill the happy one, provided that this animal would keep being happy and the suffering animal would keep suffering, because it's better to be happy than to be suffering.

However in the context of animal exploitation, once an animal is killed it's replaced by a new one, so it becomes a matter of what life the next animal will have, not how the life the animal had up until this point was. Presumably, if we have a farm where the animal we're focusing on did live in great conditions, then this farm is more likely to provide great conditions for the next animal too, more so than the farm that offered bad conditions for the animal. So while more of a future would be lost in the case of the happy animal, it seems at least better for that experience to end and eventually be replaced by another positive experience, than it is for a bad experience to end and  to be replaced with another bad experience.

Is the targeted exploitation of female and male animals sexism?

Probably not, rather it's speciesism. It's true that animals are exploited according to their reproductive system - only cows produce milk, hens lay eggs, males produce sperm, male chicks are macerated due to not contributing to egg production, nor sufficiently to meat production. However I think attributing this exploitation to sexism is a mistake. It's not the case that, in the eyes of the oppressors, either sex is morally superior to the other, nor that any discrimination happens simply because of the sex. If males could lay eggs or produce milk, they'd be exploited all the same. No victory of sexism will ever alone make it impermissible to exploit animals as long as speciesism is accepted, and that's not to say it's the bigger issue (which truthfully it happens to be) but that it isn't, to my understanding, an issue of sexism to begin with.

 

Is veganism a non-action?

Some say that veganism is more passive than what is often proposed, by saying that in practice it's a matter of not buying animal products, so essentially something that you don't do rather than something you do, similarly to how non-racism is a non-action - you don't partake in racist views and actions. I think that's not quite right, as in practice it involves taking many active measures to replace old habits, replace the source of certain nutrients and educating oneself, as well as doing the emotional labour of going against the stream. But I think after a while a vegan lifestyle becomes second nature and it starts feeling more like a non-action at least.

Does veganism introduce more wild animal suffering?

Not by virtue of the philosophy itself, however we must be careful during the abolition of animal farming to not unquestionably favour rewilding as an alternative.

Here's the argument that veganism in practice would increase suffering:

P1) If animal farms are abolished, less land is needed for growing food.

P2) If less land is needed for growing food, rewilding efforts will take the place of the excess farmland.

P3) Rewilding introduces more sentient life and supports ecosystems.

P4) In any given ecosystem (or at least the ones in question), more R-selected sentient species (lots of kids, low survival) will exist than K-selected species (few kids, higher survival), and more individuals than would otherwise exist on the farm, on the same area of land.

P5) Most R-selected individuals suffer and die a horrible death before reaching sexual maturity.

C) Abolishing animal farms leads to more animal suffering.

 

P2 could also be bolstered by saying that veganism intersects with efforts to reduce climate change, where large-scale rewilding is one of the efforts in favour. Rewilding can contribute to halting climate change, however if there are other ways to do that, we should consider advocating for using the land for other purposes than both animal farming and rewilding, if P4 and P5 are correct. I find it unlikely that the lives in question should be considered to be "more good than bad", though I would consider that possible for some lives of wild animals.

If it was true that veganism increases suffering when abolishing animal farms, we should nonetheless still look for long term solutions to reducing the amount of extreme suffering, and veganism is a part of that long term goal, in my opinion. We still need veganism to combat speciesism and encourage compassion for animals. Let's not only look at what contributions to suffering we make while on earth, but include the long term contributions, they matter just as much. Animal farming will eventually have to be abolished no matter what we replace the land with (I think), so if that turns out to come with an initial rise in the suffering curve, we should do it sooner rather than later nonetheless.

Is hunting or fishing wrong?

I'd say in the majority of the cases at least, yes. I would never do such a thing myself, however for the sake of being thorough, I'll entertain it through some different pathways:

A) Killing a deer so that they won't be eaten by a predator - on face value it can seem like a good deal for the hunter. They get to spare an animal from an even worse death, given that their shot is sufficient, they get to feed themselves and possibly prevent overpopulation of deer due to competition of resources, and they avoid any potential issues of the alternative food produced and distributed through the commercial supply chain.

However, killing someone to save them from a worse death down the line is probably not something we'd accept in the human context, even if we adjusted for cognitive ability. So my answer remains on those grounds that it promotes speciesism which overall is bad for the world of animals at large.

If it prevents someone from buying meat, then clearly hunting is the lesser harm just in terms of the suffering experienced - buying meat leads directly to the breeding of new animals into a life of exploitation, whereas hunting at best decreases the amount of individuals born into a life of suffering. It's unclear to me whether hunting prevents or increases the amount of population booms of deer, and thus unclear how it contributes to starvation.

Another consideration, posed by Brian Tomasik, is that depleted natural resources may be good because it prevents insect populations from booming in the grass, which decreases the amount of insects born to a life of extreme suffering and conflict.

In any case, justifying hunting because it's better than buying meat would pose a false dichotomy, and so it would need to be better than the best alternative option, including being vegan and helping the deer instead of ending them. However, that would still pose the question then if hunting is better than non-action, standing idly by as a vegan and not helping the deer situation, which I'm unsure about whether is the case, but I'm evaluating the harm of speciesism and the suffering (and possibly the deprivation) caused to the deer to carry the bulk of the weight in the analysis. I'm mostly just a big question mark on these things, but I would condemn it for now.

B) Killing a fish so they won't eat another fish - aside from the parallels with the deer issue, this gets especially complicated. If the majority of fishes eat other fishes, it's hard for me to understand whether you're preventing harm or causing it. Fishes have a lot of offspring, most of which will die before reaching sexual maturity, so maybe preventing the fish from having offspring goes on the positive side. Perhaps their life mostly consists of hunger and so won't have a big quality of life to protect, and perhaps being brutally killed by a fishing hook, heaved out of water and being stabbed to death is slightly more preferable than being eaten alive by a slightly bigger fish. But then the one who got killed can't go on and prevent other fishes from having offspring (by eating them). So I don't understand enough to know what's best for them, but I do condemn the attitude that currently legitimizes fishing. I think it's a speciesist act, and the reasons generally given for fishing are not ones that I can support. Farmed fishing seems like an immense source of suffering, and is not part of my answer.

A summary of my position on hunting and fishing is that I don't know what's best for the animals in question, but I think going along with the vegan movement for now is the fastest track to getting to a state where we can employ actual compassionate solutions to the suffering that exists in the wild, and avoid as much as possible justifying one atrocity by its ability to prevent a greater one, when the real answer should be that there's a third better option, in particular one that we might bring about faster if we go the vegan route now.

Should we kill predators?

I don't think so, but possibly lock them up. In all seriousness though, I think if we apply this situation to humans then we begin to see the problem - should we kill some creature (whatever it is) if it's aggressing on a population of humans that tends to deplete their resources and starve? What if the humans were of a lower intelligence, such as deer? What if the predator is another human who has gone mad beyond recovery and will only eat meat, and chooses humans as the target? I don't think killing is the best option we can come up with for both of these scenarios, if we put our best resources together, but I don't think standing idly by is the right thing either. Watching videos of predation on Youtube, not from romanticized nature documentaries, showed me the true horror of being the victim of a flock of predators. It's one of the saddest sights I've seen. I don't recommend it, but it may be a useful perspective. I'm agnostic about what the short term solution is, but I can't help but imagining eventually peacefully phasing out predation is the minimum acceptable outcome.

Read my article on the topic of killing predators

Does welfarism cause more suffering?

I don't really know. As far as I understand, the competing arguments are that welfare improvements aren't reducing suffering significantly in practice and it in turn makes people believe that eating animals can be justified and go on buying animal products while giving in to false advertising, and the other argument that welfarism does significantly improve animals' well-being, even if still bad, and that it gets people to care more about animals than otherwise, and so does produce more vegans, and that welfarism (systemic change) is needed as well as individual changes. I find it hard to pick only one for the time being, though the more plausible stance to me is that there is a way to advocate abolitionism and bringing about welfare improvements along the way.

One intuitive reason for 'welfarism' perhaps is that if I could press a button to stop a certain cruel practice, such as grinding male chicks, and instead bring about sexing during the hatching stage, then if I cease my finger from pressing that button on behalf of not wanting people to believe eggs are ethical, then this is equivalent to taking a situation in which eggs are sexed during hatching and pressing a button to instead grind them up alive so that I can use that as leverage against people to stop eating eggs. Clearly the second act is gruesome, but the difference I'm attempting to point out is one of doing vs allowing. What's the difference between resisting welfare proposals, for the sake of getting people to realize how fundamentally wrong we are, and actively bringing about a worse outcome for animals in order for people to realize it? I find this pretty compelling.

Does veganism increase suffering due to crop deaths?

No, I don't believe that. It's unclear to me how many crop deaths, and what kind of animals (insects, rodents and others) and what proportions we're talking about, but I think the numbers often presented are far higher than in reality, and done with inaccurate estimations. For example, rodents probably flee most of the time, and may contribute to less animals in the crop after harvest than before. It's also unclear to me whether crops increase rodent populations, and whether they die due to predation when they leave the crops, and other such things.

In any case, almost all cases of animal agriculture causes more crop deaths due to harvesting crops for animals, including grass for animals that are inside parts of the year. Vertical farming is a future solution that can mitigate these doubts at least, and until then it's possible that certain forms of animal agriculture causes less deaths (and possibly less suffering if we're talking about fringe cases), but perhaps the answer then is to rather advocate for plant food cases that are better than the best animal agriculture case. In any case my answer is gonna be very similar to most of the other answers. Long term the best solution should be vegan, and I think opting for that sooner rather than later is the way to go.

Does veganism include concern for humans?

I think of veganism usually as a movement for the non-human animals, so my first answer would be that it's not the point, really. There is oppression of humans and certainly many minorities that by many are seen as less-than, but everyone who is targeted by the vegan movement more or less already regards human life as unviolable and would agree that humans should be considered of equal moral value to one another, but wouldn't hold the same for non-humans and humans. So while the same arguments for veganism apply to humans, the movement is really about non-humans the way I see it. It addresses an anthropocentric view that harms non-human animals, and concern for humans isn't really part of the movement, but still logically applies to humans.

Perhaps some will say that veganism fights exploitation in general, and many humans are exploited, so it's to be considered non-vegan to buy products that support human exploitation. I could go either way on that, as humans are animals, I just think there is something special to be addressed about the way humans view non-humans that could justify an exclusive non-human focus. Regardless, something could be vegan in the sense that no exploitation of non-humans is involved, but still be a bad product to buy because it exploits humans. And perhaps one then could argue that refusing to call this product non-vegan because it's only exploiting humans and not other animals, could sustain the boundary between humans and animals in a way we as vegans don't want. However, practically as human exploitation happens in murky ways through the supply chain, we would in this case start to talk about likelihood and degrees of exploitation and perhaps degrees of veganness, rather than a full stop boycott of products that exploit non-humans. So it doesn't come without issues, which is why I'm leaning more towards saying that this is only about animals, but please be nice to humans all the same.

----- Update 23 November 2022:-----

Actually, I've changed my mind a bit here. I think the focus on non-humans specifically, and not all sentient beings, accidentally reinforces the anthropocentric view by creating a division between humans and other animals. It really is no different when it comes to the logic behind veganism. I think also the fact that veganism isn't as clear cut this way as an argument against actually is not that much of a con, as the alternative is that there is a very strict policy on what is regarded as vegan, when in reality the picture is a lot more fuzzy than how it's often presented. Acknowledging this can fight the negatives of vegan purism.

Are products that cause incidental harm to animals vegan, if practically possible to avoid?

I think they are still vegan products and wouldn't necessarily contradict anything on veganism specifically, but that doesn't mean you should buy them just because they're vegan. The stance I take is that veganism, in spirit, is a sort of equality movement, and I'd rather strive for consistency as far as veganism goes, and reducing suffering as far as utilitarianism goes. I prefer to keep veganism as a philosophy more similar to equality movements such as feminism, gay rights, trans rights, civil rights and so on. As such I think an answer to the question is that it is vegan, in the same way that if you go for a flight to another country and the emissions statistically will kill off humans, some of them gay, then it's both the case that you've increased suffering to gay people, perhaps needlessly, and that it doesn't contradict your position on being pro gay-rights. It's about equal consideration in that sense, as the real concern is that it harms sentient beings, regardless of their sexuality.

A retort could be that even vegan food systems harm animals disproportionally to humans, and that the analogy should then be that the pro gay-rights person takes a flight that disproportionally affects gay people for some predictable but accidental reason, and so cannot justify taking the flight while maintaining a pro gay-rights stance. I think it's possible that they cannot justify that flight, but I see no logical connection between the harm that comes from this flight and the harm that a pro gay-rights stance tries to address. The stance is "I should be able to love who I want and vice versa. Don't harm gay people by taking away that freedom", not "don't harm gay people specifically from a consequence of a flight". So while it is true that they should not be harmed, it's because they will suffer, not because they're gay, and similarly it's true that you should avoid products that incidentally harm animals, but the products aren't automatically non-vegan just because it's needless harm.

Is organic food evil?

I'm not sure. I suppose the argument is that it supports animal exploitation by making use of cow poo which would otherwise not give profits that can be used to sustain animal agriculture, and therefore conventionally grown vegetables would be better due to using less cow poo. I don't know enough about the pros and cons of organic vs conventional for the time being, but I'm not sure that it's a worthwhile point of focus at this time. However, I would be greatly in favour of using human poo instead of cow poo, and otherwise find ways to fertilize with plant matter in a way that keeps the soil fertile long term.

Any corrections, questions or objections can be sent to rune [at] deltaquack.com