This has been one of your weakest posts so far. This is not an attack. I'm not saying this as a criticism of your opinion as everyone is entitled to their own but this post is rooted in a ton of assumptions especially on the morality side. It read like a personal defence for a choice you have made and are now presenting it as universally truths.
I see a data presented about farms in the US but the world is much larger than developed countries. Even then, you are looking at meat, dairy purchased and cooked in its raw forms. As a basic example, you will be surprised at how many food items in your supermarket has milk solids. To assume they all source milk from ethical sources and still meet their bottomline is questionable. Let's assume this is true in the US and Europe but most of the urban world is still a price sensitive market and for an economically backward population, the only thing that matters is the price on the label. In some of these countries, the factory farming conditions are truly horrific. I won't go into much detail other than that.
You touched on how difficult it is to avoid animal products in other markets like pharmaceuticals. You are right. It is almost impossible to avoid it but again it is a function of availability and price. After meat is sold off, the rest of the carcass is used as much as possible. The sheer ubiquity of these raw materials is what drives secondary usage. If these were unavailable, won't there be alternatives found and used? Maybe, right? It is not a certainty but there are people willing to not see the needle move in their lifetimes but still have a moral stance. You talked about nutrition so I will give another example. I think it proven without a doubt that meat has more nutritional value and that it can’t exactly be replicated with plant foods. But there are people who avoid eating animal products and live well into their old age so it is not self-harm to avoid animal products. I am not saying they are healthy compared to meat eaters but that maximising personal nutrition/well-being is not a priority over a moral stance for them.
You also spoke about how ruthless nature is and that in comparison we give animals a great life and a great death. Firstly, you don't have to do much to be better than nature so it's a bad comparison. Secondly, the animals not knowing their own death and how it came is not a good defence for the act that is being committed. Especially when something like a cow never existed in nature. They have been domesticated to the point where they have lost all ability to self sustain. By human selection, we have taken away autonomy which nature at least provided. "We kill them but all creatures must die" unfortunately does not hold up as a great argument against humans. You can't enslave a human their entire lives and give a "good life" as a good defence for enslaving it or killing it (It was done in society and is now largely considered immoral).
Nature is immensely malleable as well. I hear people arguing that it is natural for humans to eat meat. That does not automatically make it the right thing to do. Dogs evolved from pure carnivores to omnivores. Humans evolved to process cooked food after fire was discovered. We evolved to better process grains after agriculture. "Which is more natural and hence more right?" is an incorrect premise. We have the gift of cognisance, we can decide what is right and wrong.
I do have a lot more to say but let me wrap this up. It is respectable to have a position that maximising human/personal nutrition, well-being and comforts is your priority. You are comfortable with a moral stand in which you avoid all harm until it does not adversely affect humans/self. That is entirely reasonable but it has to be explicitly stated and understood. It is not a debate that cruelty against animals purely to fulfil human needs is happening at an egregious scale.
Again, veganism is also a stance just like that. Why stop at animals? Plants have a life too, why are they secondary to human or animal life? A lot of vegans I've spoken to understand this fact but some still argue.
These moral positions are a line in the sand. You draw it where you are comfortable and try to adhere to it. The whole tone of the post was that one is more right than the other which I think is wrong (hard distinctions make bad philosophy) :))
In case anyone is wondering, I am not vegan myself. I say things on similar lines to vegans who come out and argue their position is the right one. All this is personal morality space, you ultimately do what you are comfortable with but everyone must understand that just because you think it is more correct, does not make it so.
+1 to your comment. I’m not strictly vegan, but generally live with vegan principles and eat like a vegan. The post here prioritizes human wellbeing over animals. Not wrong, but not necessarily right either. It’s like a post trying to justify or rationalize their stance.
Also, saying that veganism is a poor health choice - I disagree with. My diet is mostly vegan to vegetarian. My health is better than ever though it had little to do with my diet. The vegan diet just didn’t hurt it nor help it. I just don’t need it. I know I’m not the only one.
> that about 90% of US beef comes from farms that raise 100 or fewer cattle at a time
fyi, this is not accurate, you probably meant to say that 90% of US cattle farms raise 100 or fewer cattle at a time, they account for 46% of all beef cows.
idk the rest, i'm just very interested in the matthew effect (rich get richer) and how things cluster, so that sentence stuck out to me as fascinating if true. (unfortunately it wasn't)
Preface: I'm not a vegan, although perhaps I have some vague reductionist beliefs about trying to reduce my consumption of meat (I think I eat about 30% less meat than I used to). I agree with you that totalizing elimination of all meat products, regardless of mitigating circumstances, is probably not a consistent moral philosophy.
However, I don't really buy either of your main thrusts in this article.
On environmental grounds, it's almost like you're trying to reinvent a life cycle assessment from first principles. There's really no replacement for actually going and rigorously calculating the emissions profile / land use / water use / etc of given food products, and some of your arguments present a picture that perhaps the vast majority of academic research on this subject is mistaken. It is not. I don't really want to go point by point and refute each of your claims here but I will do so:
- Ruminant methane emissions: the fact that bisons used to constitute an equal amount of biomass to American cattle farming is irrelevant and you cannot simply discount methane emissions because of this... we're not comparing 1800-level bison farming to the present, we're comparing counterfactually reducing beef consumption vs not doing so. We can't bring bison back and the vast majority of cattle farming at present is not contributing positively to Western land use.
- The emissions from shipping food products across the world are *way less important* than the environmental effect of its actual production. If I can produce a food product 5% more efficiently in the Philippines and ship it to the US, it's "better" for the environment across basically any parameter you can dream up than growing it locally.
- You argue that other things are *worse* for the environment than meat consumption. Sure! If someone wants to reduce their carbon emissions, reducing air travel is more important than reducing meat consumption. But other things you mention, like reducing "non-essential food consumption" like wine or whiskey are orders of magnitude less efficacious. So you're kind of contradicting yourself here. Also, just because all farming practices are disruptive to the environment does not mean that we shouldn't try to minimize this disruption.
- Just because cattle farming is good in very particular regions (Iceland?) does not mean that the vast majority of cattle farming is beneficial for the ecosystem where it occurs. It is not.
- If your argument is that cattle farming *can be* done in a much less environmentally disruptive manner, then great: let's do it that way! But vegans are entirely reasonable for wanting to not consume meat products that by and large do *not* do it that way.
On animal welfare grounds:
- As others have pointed out, you're focusing nearly exclusively on cow consumption. There's a reason that animal welfare activists focus much more on chicken and pig farming in the US!
- You argue that cows are used to produce many other things, not just food. Go talk to vegans! Most vegans try very, very hard to avoid these other products as well!
- You bring up pets. If the primary mode of pet ownership were confining their cats and dogs to small, dark cages where they couldn't move, allowing them to develop sores and blisters covering their entire bodies, and subjecting them to various inhumane treatments, I'd guess that many vegans would abstain from that as well!
Ultimately, I think that a more narrow argument of this form would be really strong:
<<There are ways to farm animals that, from both environmental and animal welfare perspectives, are quite morally reasonable!>>
However, the massive majority of animal farming is just not being done this way! It is being done in ways that are quite bad for the environment (even if other things humanity does are worse) and are quite bad for the welfare of animals (even though certain smallhold farmers are not doing this). I think it's important to reckon with this.
Really? The arguments here are all over the place. He cites an article on "beef can help with climate change" from a charity which partners with animal ag organisations and has fossil fuel supermajors on its board. Also for some reason he focuses only on cows re. animal welfare - next to nothing about chickens, which make up 99% of farmed animals, or pigs, some of the smartest animals around, and how they're treated by modern industrial agriculture.
The environmental arguments are just whataboutism. Yes, there are going to be (very niche) cases where eating animals is less carbon-intensive than eating plants, or than drinking whiskey.
As usual with these arguments it's a motte and bailey - it's not an argument against veganism, it's an argument against almost all forms of meat eating except eating grass-fed bison (themselves a tiny proportion of all farmed animals), backed up with a bunch of specious statistics).
For the typical consumer in our modern food system, moving away from animal products reduces harm on the margin. There are some very niche edge cases where this isn't true and this whole post focuses on them, with a weird aside about how one guy's veganism was "self-erasure".
I was pretty disappointed to see this in my inbox today. I find your writing to be a harbor away from the culture war topics that plague the internet. I don't really see the point of writing about things that have been screamed about ad nauseam across the internet.
I think I understand. This post did originally have an apology disclaimer at the top because the topic is at once socially contentious as well as extremely passé - it's something that was debated endlessly online a decade ago (on Google Trends, it peaked in 2017), and hardly needs a new post. However, people keep asking me to flesh out a tweet-length explanation of my own beliefs, and so I wish I had something to point to, and thought it worth it enough to make for them.
I ended up deleting the apology disclaimer at the top before posting, because I find that nearly all of my posts naturally start with one for some reason or another, and it's an odd habit for one's own thinking.
Do your animal welfare intuitions change for factory farmed pork or chicken, where it is far more difficult to argue that their day to day experience is positive?
I think its significantly harder to see the average pork or chicken operation as good, though they have gotten a lot better (in America). I recommend buying pork from a farm you trust, like: https://acornblufffarms.com/
In general, finding eggs from good farms is easy, its just costly. That's a cost I can easily digest.
There is a second affordability problem subsequent to this, which relies more on the human health argument I've avoided
Simon, I think you get a lot right. But, I think your piece is misleading for focusing so much on cows for your intuition pumps, when there are ~100x as many chickens on factory farms in the US. These chickens are almost always in horrific conditions, living full of pain their entire lives. And then you only note this in a comment, and even then just 'average chicken operations is hard to see as good?'
If you were starting from the top, saying 'where is there animal suffering,' of course cows would only be a blip on that map, and so I don't think your piece does much to address the real harms happening.
I agree with you that it's possible to ethically raise cows and chickens and eat them for food. But chickens in the US are not raised like this, and I think it warrants more attention in your post if you want to be taken seriously by animal welfare folks.
If I started with chickens, I imagine people would complain “what about the more sentient animals, like cows?” I could have added another 5000 words, but I think I’ve already written too many. I wish I had a way to cut it down to 1000 without having to pre-empt so many “what about”s.
If anyone is saying “OK with all that regarding cows, but what about [any other animal]” then we are already outside of vegan territory, and into animal welfare instead. That’s perfectly fine with me, hence the opening quote: hard distinctions make bad philosophy. My primary problem with veganism is the failure of its low context inherent in its hard distinction.
I am, at the end of the day, an animal welfare folk. Hence owning my own chickens for six years.
Fair points, and I know you're an animal welfare folk and I believe you sincerely care about animals, and I endorse your chicken-owning. I think your comments here are really elucidating on your stance and would suggest you compile them into a followup piece.
My main critique of this essay is just that it's easy to read it and think you're ignoring the suffering of factory farms by focusing on the highest-welfare farmed animals.
I'm confused about the choice to focus on cows ("But since the cow is cited as the biggest environmental culprit, and is arguably more sentient than a chicken, let’s pull on that thread a little longer"). I understand the throughline from the environmentalism section, but people who pay close attention to farm animal welfare — I wouldn't count myself among them, yet — would readily offer that cows are not the strongest example of systemic, life-long abuse and suffering. Next up wouldn't be chickens either, I don't think. You should give this a read: https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/the-way-we-treat-pigs-is-a-sin I am not a vegan, and I was looking forward to reading a cogent counterargument to the incremental welfare + abolitionist content I've been tearing through recently, but this just felt like a strange and obvious miss.
The choice is deliberate. I need only agreement on one animal to turn it from veganism (a strict adherence to eating no meat) to animal welfare (which is not necessarily as absolute, which I also think very agreeable). “Hard distinctions make bad philosophy” is an allusion to this, though I don’t say it overtly, because I’m not trying to be particularly forceful here. More than I want to convince anyone, I want them less committed to absolutes.
If only I had sat with the post for another month, I probably could have made myself more clear. But at some point I have to stop staring at my drafts and finally send them. alas!
I appreciate many of your aesthetic and more intuitive insights, and I do not disagree with roughly half of what you say here, but you are not a very good or precise philosopher.
On this article in particular, it seems like Simon tried to add so many different ways to find nuance that he made it run on quite a bit. I actually don’t mind, and much of his other work more than redeems him.
The desire for self-erasure, hidden in moral language, affects people in ways bigger than veganism. Once you start seeing it, it becomes apparent in many aspects of our politics and our lives. I don't know if I've seen a good inquiry into where it comes from.
I really can't help but see this in every comment on this post that is pushing back against Simon's argument.
I'm not trying (though of course I probably still am falling victim to the tendency) to pathologize the reasoning of people I disagree with -- it just seems like the two sides of this issue cannot bridge this gap in foundational beliefs.
As a result, I keep finding myself getting annoyed and thinking "you guys just aren't getting it-- you are looking right past the core of the point," and I imagine they feel the same way about this essay.
As a woman who comes from a long line of cattle ranchers and currently lives on 550 acres of savannas & grassland in Texas, this deeply resonated with me. My love, respect and appreciation for the cows that shape this beautiful landscape is deep. They're tremendous teachers, and while they're here, they live peaceful lives. And even if I can't be totally certain of the cow's true experience, what I can be certain of is that they bring a tremendous amount of peace and gratitude to my life. I love them and eat beef daily and somehow don't find a contradiction in my behavior.
At the risk of being too long winded, I also want to share a personal anecdote. On an extraordinarily hot summer day (100+), I was noticing the herd sitting together under some trees, and a tremendous swell of grief coursed through my body. I began to weep, fell to my knees, and apologized to the cows for how cruel and thoughtless humans have been. They just benignly looked at me, and I received this response: They told me to get off my knees and to stop apologizing. I heard them communicate: "You humans need to get your shit together to take care of this place so that all creatures can better live. We forgive you. Stop apologizing and get to work in doing your job of using your bodies to support this home we share. We need you. Show up." And sometimes, it's as simple as noticing and appreciating beauty that is the showing up.
Very well researched and thought out. I appreciate all the work that went into to this. Your arguments / persuasion / facts as pertains to context are often overlooked yet crucial to decision making. As were your notes on the (relatively) cushy lives of modern cows. I, too, appreciate them for all they provide us with, including both the delights of seeing them grazing the land and the delicious steaks. Thanks so much for the thoughtful essay as always.
To extend your argument on the positive welfare of farmed cows, the universalization of the vegan position would risk the extinction of many of these species absent a deliberate contraction of human civilization. Which of course gets to the anti-humanist motivations underpinning many of their arguments. That being said I have recently given up pork and chicken (and reduced my egg consumption) for lack of access to farms where these animals have what I estimate to be positive-welfare lives.
I personally thought this post was excellent, and was surprised by the harshness of other commenters.
If vegans weren't so often obnoxiously self-righteous and saw veganism as a lifestyle choice rather than something that is intrinsically morally correct, I don't think pieces like this would even be necessary.
As Simon pointed out early in the piece, the process of developing moral judgements is largely unconcious and intutive, and argument which aim to defend a moral position tyically come after the fact. That is particularly true of veganism, whose adherents are prone to making all kinds of specious arguments to support the claim that veganism is ethically superior. And Simon does an excellent job of dismantling all of these arguments in this piece.
"I must reiterate that most people are rarely persuaded by arguments, really they have moral intuitions that are doing work in the background."
Thank you! Veganism aside, if moral arguments really worked for most people, we'd all be giving our disposable income to charity and live like minimalists. I think people also underestimate the human capacity to hold just not think about moral wrongs: some animals suffer so I can enjoy meat, but I spend very little time thinking about it.
Your arguments are strong against the extreme form of veganism but I think the milder claim that "you should probably eat less meat" remains very persuasive. All the ends you mentioned—environmental quality, wildness, animal welfare, and human wellbeing—would be served by the average American consuming less and ideally higher quality/more ethical meat. And that doesn't run up against your objections about misanthropy or unguided efficiency.
Directionally I agree, my own personal belief is that you should probably spend a good deal more on the quality of your meat. But my own personal argument also rests on nutrition as inescapably important as well, and I'm trying to avoid that here. As soon as you start rationing, you get into a separate argument that's essentially classism that I am subsequently trying to avoid here.
This has been one of your weakest posts so far. This is not an attack. I'm not saying this as a criticism of your opinion as everyone is entitled to their own but this post is rooted in a ton of assumptions especially on the morality side. It read like a personal defence for a choice you have made and are now presenting it as universally truths.
I see a data presented about farms in the US but the world is much larger than developed countries. Even then, you are looking at meat, dairy purchased and cooked in its raw forms. As a basic example, you will be surprised at how many food items in your supermarket has milk solids. To assume they all source milk from ethical sources and still meet their bottomline is questionable. Let's assume this is true in the US and Europe but most of the urban world is still a price sensitive market and for an economically backward population, the only thing that matters is the price on the label. In some of these countries, the factory farming conditions are truly horrific. I won't go into much detail other than that.
You touched on how difficult it is to avoid animal products in other markets like pharmaceuticals. You are right. It is almost impossible to avoid it but again it is a function of availability and price. After meat is sold off, the rest of the carcass is used as much as possible. The sheer ubiquity of these raw materials is what drives secondary usage. If these were unavailable, won't there be alternatives found and used? Maybe, right? It is not a certainty but there are people willing to not see the needle move in their lifetimes but still have a moral stance. You talked about nutrition so I will give another example. I think it proven without a doubt that meat has more nutritional value and that it can’t exactly be replicated with plant foods. But there are people who avoid eating animal products and live well into their old age so it is not self-harm to avoid animal products. I am not saying they are healthy compared to meat eaters but that maximising personal nutrition/well-being is not a priority over a moral stance for them.
You also spoke about how ruthless nature is and that in comparison we give animals a great life and a great death. Firstly, you don't have to do much to be better than nature so it's a bad comparison. Secondly, the animals not knowing their own death and how it came is not a good defence for the act that is being committed. Especially when something like a cow never existed in nature. They have been domesticated to the point where they have lost all ability to self sustain. By human selection, we have taken away autonomy which nature at least provided. "We kill them but all creatures must die" unfortunately does not hold up as a great argument against humans. You can't enslave a human their entire lives and give a "good life" as a good defence for enslaving it or killing it (It was done in society and is now largely considered immoral).
Nature is immensely malleable as well. I hear people arguing that it is natural for humans to eat meat. That does not automatically make it the right thing to do. Dogs evolved from pure carnivores to omnivores. Humans evolved to process cooked food after fire was discovered. We evolved to better process grains after agriculture. "Which is more natural and hence more right?" is an incorrect premise. We have the gift of cognisance, we can decide what is right and wrong.
I do have a lot more to say but let me wrap this up. It is respectable to have a position that maximising human/personal nutrition, well-being and comforts is your priority. You are comfortable with a moral stand in which you avoid all harm until it does not adversely affect humans/self. That is entirely reasonable but it has to be explicitly stated and understood. It is not a debate that cruelty against animals purely to fulfil human needs is happening at an egregious scale.
Again, veganism is also a stance just like that. Why stop at animals? Plants have a life too, why are they secondary to human or animal life? A lot of vegans I've spoken to understand this fact but some still argue.
These moral positions are a line in the sand. You draw it where you are comfortable and try to adhere to it. The whole tone of the post was that one is more right than the other which I think is wrong (hard distinctions make bad philosophy) :))
In case anyone is wondering, I am not vegan myself. I say things on similar lines to vegans who come out and argue their position is the right one. All this is personal morality space, you ultimately do what you are comfortable with but everyone must understand that just because you think it is more correct, does not make it so.
+1 to your comment. I’m not strictly vegan, but generally live with vegan principles and eat like a vegan. The post here prioritizes human wellbeing over animals. Not wrong, but not necessarily right either. It’s like a post trying to justify or rationalize their stance.
Also, saying that veganism is a poor health choice - I disagree with. My diet is mostly vegan to vegetarian. My health is better than ever though it had little to do with my diet. The vegan diet just didn’t hurt it nor help it. I just don’t need it. I know I’m not the only one.
+1
> that about 90% of US beef comes from farms that raise 100 or fewer cattle at a time
fyi, this is not accurate, you probably meant to say that 90% of US cattle farms raise 100 or fewer cattle at a time, they account for 46% of all beef cows.
idk the rest, i'm just very interested in the matthew effect (rich get richer) and how things cluster, so that sentence stuck out to me as fascinating if true. (unfortunately it wasn't)
source: https://www.aphis.usda.gov/sites/default/files/small_scale_beef.pdf page 3
Shoot thank you, I must have read beef operations as beef. I'll fix that.
Preface: I'm not a vegan, although perhaps I have some vague reductionist beliefs about trying to reduce my consumption of meat (I think I eat about 30% less meat than I used to). I agree with you that totalizing elimination of all meat products, regardless of mitigating circumstances, is probably not a consistent moral philosophy.
However, I don't really buy either of your main thrusts in this article.
On environmental grounds, it's almost like you're trying to reinvent a life cycle assessment from first principles. There's really no replacement for actually going and rigorously calculating the emissions profile / land use / water use / etc of given food products, and some of your arguments present a picture that perhaps the vast majority of academic research on this subject is mistaken. It is not. I don't really want to go point by point and refute each of your claims here but I will do so:
- Ruminant methane emissions: the fact that bisons used to constitute an equal amount of biomass to American cattle farming is irrelevant and you cannot simply discount methane emissions because of this... we're not comparing 1800-level bison farming to the present, we're comparing counterfactually reducing beef consumption vs not doing so. We can't bring bison back and the vast majority of cattle farming at present is not contributing positively to Western land use.
- The emissions from shipping food products across the world are *way less important* than the environmental effect of its actual production. If I can produce a food product 5% more efficiently in the Philippines and ship it to the US, it's "better" for the environment across basically any parameter you can dream up than growing it locally.
- You argue that other things are *worse* for the environment than meat consumption. Sure! If someone wants to reduce their carbon emissions, reducing air travel is more important than reducing meat consumption. But other things you mention, like reducing "non-essential food consumption" like wine or whiskey are orders of magnitude less efficacious. So you're kind of contradicting yourself here. Also, just because all farming practices are disruptive to the environment does not mean that we shouldn't try to minimize this disruption.
- Just because cattle farming is good in very particular regions (Iceland?) does not mean that the vast majority of cattle farming is beneficial for the ecosystem where it occurs. It is not.
- If your argument is that cattle farming *can be* done in a much less environmentally disruptive manner, then great: let's do it that way! But vegans are entirely reasonable for wanting to not consume meat products that by and large do *not* do it that way.
On animal welfare grounds:
- As others have pointed out, you're focusing nearly exclusively on cow consumption. There's a reason that animal welfare activists focus much more on chicken and pig farming in the US!
- You argue that cows are used to produce many other things, not just food. Go talk to vegans! Most vegans try very, very hard to avoid these other products as well!
- You bring up pets. If the primary mode of pet ownership were confining their cats and dogs to small, dark cages where they couldn't move, allowing them to develop sores and blisters covering their entire bodies, and subjecting them to various inhumane treatments, I'd guess that many vegans would abstain from that as well!
Ultimately, I think that a more narrow argument of this form would be really strong:
<<There are ways to farm animals that, from both environmental and animal welfare perspectives, are quite morally reasonable!>>
However, the massive majority of animal farming is just not being done this way! It is being done in ways that are quite bad for the environment (even if other things humanity does are worse) and are quite bad for the welfare of animals (even though certain smallhold farmers are not doing this). I think it's important to reckon with this.
Fun read. I think you’ve put forward the strongest forms of the arguments against veganism that I’m aware of. Thanks for writing
Really? The arguments here are all over the place. He cites an article on "beef can help with climate change" from a charity which partners with animal ag organisations and has fossil fuel supermajors on its board. Also for some reason he focuses only on cows re. animal welfare - next to nothing about chickens, which make up 99% of farmed animals, or pigs, some of the smartest animals around, and how they're treated by modern industrial agriculture.
The environmental arguments are just whataboutism. Yes, there are going to be (very niche) cases where eating animals is less carbon-intensive than eating plants, or than drinking whiskey.
As usual with these arguments it's a motte and bailey - it's not an argument against veganism, it's an argument against almost all forms of meat eating except eating grass-fed bison (themselves a tiny proportion of all farmed animals), backed up with a bunch of specious statistics).
For the typical consumer in our modern food system, moving away from animal products reduces harm on the margin. There are some very niche edge cases where this isn't true and this whole post focuses on them, with a weird aside about how one guy's veganism was "self-erasure".
Not good
That side of the argument has fairly slim pickings! He worked with what he had.
What side of the argument has slim pickings?
Simon’s side.
Gotcha
I was pretty disappointed to see this in my inbox today. I find your writing to be a harbor away from the culture war topics that plague the internet. I don't really see the point of writing about things that have been screamed about ad nauseam across the internet.
I think I understand. This post did originally have an apology disclaimer at the top because the topic is at once socially contentious as well as extremely passé - it's something that was debated endlessly online a decade ago (on Google Trends, it peaked in 2017), and hardly needs a new post. However, people keep asking me to flesh out a tweet-length explanation of my own beliefs, and so I wish I had something to point to, and thought it worth it enough to make for them.
I ended up deleting the apology disclaimer at the top before posting, because I find that nearly all of my posts naturally start with one for some reason or another, and it's an odd habit for one's own thinking.
Do your animal welfare intuitions change for factory farmed pork or chicken, where it is far more difficult to argue that their day to day experience is positive?
I think its significantly harder to see the average pork or chicken operation as good, though they have gotten a lot better (in America). I recommend buying pork from a farm you trust, like: https://acornblufffarms.com/
In general, finding eggs from good farms is easy, its just costly. That's a cost I can easily digest.
There is a second affordability problem subsequent to this, which relies more on the human health argument I've avoided
Simon, I think you get a lot right. But, I think your piece is misleading for focusing so much on cows for your intuition pumps, when there are ~100x as many chickens on factory farms in the US. These chickens are almost always in horrific conditions, living full of pain their entire lives. And then you only note this in a comment, and even then just 'average chicken operations is hard to see as good?'
If you were starting from the top, saying 'where is there animal suffering,' of course cows would only be a blip on that map, and so I don't think your piece does much to address the real harms happening.
I agree with you that it's possible to ethically raise cows and chickens and eat them for food. But chickens in the US are not raised like this, and I think it warrants more attention in your post if you want to be taken seriously by animal welfare folks.
If I started with chickens, I imagine people would complain “what about the more sentient animals, like cows?” I could have added another 5000 words, but I think I’ve already written too many. I wish I had a way to cut it down to 1000 without having to pre-empt so many “what about”s.
If anyone is saying “OK with all that regarding cows, but what about [any other animal]” then we are already outside of vegan territory, and into animal welfare instead. That’s perfectly fine with me, hence the opening quote: hard distinctions make bad philosophy. My primary problem with veganism is the failure of its low context inherent in its hard distinction.
I am, at the end of the day, an animal welfare folk. Hence owning my own chickens for six years.
Fair points, and I know you're an animal welfare folk and I believe you sincerely care about animals, and I endorse your chicken-owning. I think your comments here are really elucidating on your stance and would suggest you compile them into a followup piece.
My main critique of this essay is just that it's easy to read it and think you're ignoring the suffering of factory farms by focusing on the highest-welfare farmed animals.
I'm confused about the choice to focus on cows ("But since the cow is cited as the biggest environmental culprit, and is arguably more sentient than a chicken, let’s pull on that thread a little longer"). I understand the throughline from the environmentalism section, but people who pay close attention to farm animal welfare — I wouldn't count myself among them, yet — would readily offer that cows are not the strongest example of systemic, life-long abuse and suffering. Next up wouldn't be chickens either, I don't think. You should give this a read: https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/the-way-we-treat-pigs-is-a-sin I am not a vegan, and I was looking forward to reading a cogent counterargument to the incremental welfare + abolitionist content I've been tearing through recently, but this just felt like a strange and obvious miss.
The choice is deliberate. I need only agreement on one animal to turn it from veganism (a strict adherence to eating no meat) to animal welfare (which is not necessarily as absolute, which I also think very agreeable). “Hard distinctions make bad philosophy” is an allusion to this, though I don’t say it overtly, because I’m not trying to be particularly forceful here. More than I want to convince anyone, I want them less committed to absolutes.
Understood and appreciate the response.
If only I had sat with the post for another month, I probably could have made myself more clear. But at some point I have to stop staring at my drafts and finally send them. alas!
Couldn’t relate more!
I appreciate many of your aesthetic and more intuitive insights, and I do not disagree with roughly half of what you say here, but you are not a very good or precise philosopher.
On this article in particular, it seems like Simon tried to add so many different ways to find nuance that he made it run on quite a bit. I actually don’t mind, and much of his other work more than redeems him.
The desire for self-erasure, hidden in moral language, affects people in ways bigger than veganism. Once you start seeing it, it becomes apparent in many aspects of our politics and our lives. I don't know if I've seen a good inquiry into where it comes from.
I really can't help but see this in every comment on this post that is pushing back against Simon's argument.
I'm not trying (though of course I probably still am falling victim to the tendency) to pathologize the reasoning of people I disagree with -- it just seems like the two sides of this issue cannot bridge this gap in foundational beliefs.
As a result, I keep finding myself getting annoyed and thinking "you guys just aren't getting it-- you are looking right past the core of the point," and I imagine they feel the same way about this essay.
As a woman who comes from a long line of cattle ranchers and currently lives on 550 acres of savannas & grassland in Texas, this deeply resonated with me. My love, respect and appreciation for the cows that shape this beautiful landscape is deep. They're tremendous teachers, and while they're here, they live peaceful lives. And even if I can't be totally certain of the cow's true experience, what I can be certain of is that they bring a tremendous amount of peace and gratitude to my life. I love them and eat beef daily and somehow don't find a contradiction in my behavior.
At the risk of being too long winded, I also want to share a personal anecdote. On an extraordinarily hot summer day (100+), I was noticing the herd sitting together under some trees, and a tremendous swell of grief coursed through my body. I began to weep, fell to my knees, and apologized to the cows for how cruel and thoughtless humans have been. They just benignly looked at me, and I received this response: They told me to get off my knees and to stop apologizing. I heard them communicate: "You humans need to get your shit together to take care of this place so that all creatures can better live. We forgive you. Stop apologizing and get to work in doing your job of using your bodies to support this home we share. We need you. Show up." And sometimes, it's as simple as noticing and appreciating beauty that is the showing up.
Very well researched and thought out. I appreciate all the work that went into to this. Your arguments / persuasion / facts as pertains to context are often overlooked yet crucial to decision making. As were your notes on the (relatively) cushy lives of modern cows. I, too, appreciate them for all they provide us with, including both the delights of seeing them grazing the land and the delicious steaks. Thanks so much for the thoughtful essay as always.
To extend your argument on the positive welfare of farmed cows, the universalization of the vegan position would risk the extinction of many of these species absent a deliberate contraction of human civilization. Which of course gets to the anti-humanist motivations underpinning many of their arguments. That being said I have recently given up pork and chicken (and reduced my egg consumption) for lack of access to farms where these animals have what I estimate to be positive-welfare lives.
I personally thought this post was excellent, and was surprised by the harshness of other commenters.
If vegans weren't so often obnoxiously self-righteous and saw veganism as a lifestyle choice rather than something that is intrinsically morally correct, I don't think pieces like this would even be necessary.
As Simon pointed out early in the piece, the process of developing moral judgements is largely unconcious and intutive, and argument which aim to defend a moral position tyically come after the fact. That is particularly true of veganism, whose adherents are prone to making all kinds of specious arguments to support the claim that veganism is ethically superior. And Simon does an excellent job of dismantling all of these arguments in this piece.
Kudos!
"I must reiterate that most people are rarely persuaded by arguments, really they have moral intuitions that are doing work in the background."
Thank you! Veganism aside, if moral arguments really worked for most people, we'd all be giving our disposable income to charity and live like minimalists. I think people also underestimate the human capacity to hold just not think about moral wrongs: some animals suffer so I can enjoy meat, but I spend very little time thinking about it.
I intuitively disagree with everything here but I enjoy how you wrote it.
Your arguments are strong against the extreme form of veganism but I think the milder claim that "you should probably eat less meat" remains very persuasive. All the ends you mentioned—environmental quality, wildness, animal welfare, and human wellbeing—would be served by the average American consuming less and ideally higher quality/more ethical meat. And that doesn't run up against your objections about misanthropy or unguided efficiency.
Directionally I agree, my own personal belief is that you should probably spend a good deal more on the quality of your meat. But my own personal argument also rests on nutrition as inescapably important as well, and I'm trying to avoid that here. As soon as you start rationing, you get into a separate argument that's essentially classism that I am subsequently trying to avoid here.
Well, I would be interested in reading those other arguments if you ever decide to publish them.