I had a really good dialogue about this a while ago. Here’s a transcription, if you’re interested in a detailed answer to this:
Factory farming is terrible. I completely respect anyone who is vegan because they oppose the abuse or exploitation of animals.
The issue with stuff like this is that it indicates some equivalency of human women and animals. I remember when PETA did a “holocaust on your plate” campaign which was fairly critisized for indicating that the murder of millions of men, women, and children was the same as eating meat.
I don’t think the meat industry is ok and I agree that what it now considered normal in that industry is morally wrong. I also think it’s a separate issue from human social trends. Minorities being compared to animals is never a good thing.
Two points on that.
There were multiple holocaust survivors that went vegan, citing the similarities between the their experiences and that of animal agriculture;
This is because what the holocaust was, in essence, was treating people like animals. Jewish people were loaded onto cattle cars on trains, sent to what were effectively slaughterhouses, and gassed in chambers - where I live (UK) almost all pigs are killed in gas chambers.
You can make the argument that animals deserve no moral consideration if you want, but a lot of the worst things that humans have ever done to other humans is what humans do to animals all the time.
It isn’t the act of eating meat that is compared by animals rights groups to the holocaust, its all the stuff that came before it. Because it was essentially the same process.
I actually stated multiple times that I do believe animals deserve moral consideration. Once again, I think the norms of the meat industry are clearly immoral. Where we disagree I think is that I believe human considerations are fundamentally different from considerations of other animals, and putting people on the same level as animals in argumentation is more harmful than productive for a variety of factors.
I’m not saying that humans should have the same considerations as non-human animals, I’m saying that the holocaus analogy isn’t innacurate, as the same acts were/are committed. Do you disagree?
As far as the animals are concerned, what they go through is the holocaust (obviously they aren’t sapient, but you get my point).
Before saying anything else, I want to be clear that I would like to see a future free of animal meat from the practice of slaughter. I strongly disagree that these two things are comparable in any way other than they both involve the act of killing at high rates.
I’m not going to argue that our ancestral nature is morally correct, because in many ways we understand that many our instinctive impulses and wants are morally wrong. This being the case, the most available source of sufficient protein necessary to power our brains and bodies has come from meat, and this has been the case until very recently with advancement in our understanding of nutrition. Humans and our ancestors have killed other animals to eat them since before we even assumed our present taxonomy. There is an almost universal instinctual and cultural reason that people kill animals to eat them. I think we agree that it would be best to progress past this draconian practice, but there is no malice or de-humanizing campaign of extermination here whatsoever.
Compare this to the Holocaust. There is no way whatsoever that it could ever possibly be justified in any way. It was the result of reactionary politics coming into power and leading an entire society through the use of propaganda and terror to despise a group of sapient people for reasons that were entirely and demonstrably untrue. Sapience is a major factor. Although livestock can definitely understand when they’re being abused, they can’t comprehend the scope of what is happening beyond their immediate experience. The people in the camps lived every day with a full understanding that they were being tortured and murdered en masse as a political scapegoat at best and pure sadism at worst. They suffered their abuse and suffered the understanding of why it was happening and how little they could do about it. They weren’t being harvested, they were being murdered in a premeditated fashion in massive numbers exclusively for reasons of prejudice and intentional malice. The motives and suffering caused from this evil I think are significantly greater.
Complicating it further, there is a social imperative to de-humanize a person before they can be abused, exploited, or murdered. There is a common understanding that some creatures exist to be beasts of burden, some are dangerous predators to repelled, and some are invasive pests to be exterminated. There are life-forms such as actual cockroaches in which this understanding is completely justified. De-humanizing is taking a person who has agency and cognition and framing them as if they are an unthinking creature to be managed in some way for the “good” of the perpetrator.
Like I said above, the only similarity between these two evils is superficial. I believe they are fundamentally different.
Thanks for the input. I’ve actually had debates like this before, too.
But fundamentally I still disagree with you and I don’t see the similarities as superficial. People have been treated by the Nazis like animals in this industrial killing process. And they’ve actually been “harvested”. Not sure in how much detail I should go, but at least in some extermination camps the Nazis collected various human Organs, like their hair, their skin, their nails and also all the possessions they’ve had.
Regarding your argument of animals as protein and generally placing them as an inferior other that has been historically treated as such, you seem to tap into some fallacies. It is never good to base an argument solely on traditional practices. Because then what else has been practiced for thousands of years? Abuse, wars, enslavement and a lot of other very horrendous stuff. Also, isn’t this the whole point of discussing how animals should be treated in the first place? That it is ethically wrong. And you seemingly draw a mental line that you don’t want to cross, so you refer to traditional practices. But this is exactly how many people justify sexism, racism to themselves. Women shouldn’t vote because they’re brain isn’t capable of it, or biological races exist and thus some people are inferior are similar to animals can’t comprehend what’s going on and it is therefore ethically acceptable to treat them badly.
I was confused at first, why you kept referring to how bad you think of killing animals. But apparently that’s were you’ve decided to draw the line for yourself. That what we do to animals is killing them and nothing else. I would argue, that the killing is actually a result of structural devaluation of animals that encompasses so much more than just the killing part. And now I could go into critique of capitalism and intersectionality. How people that are made to be powerless cogs in this system seek to have at least some power over others. And how this then breeds all kinds of discriminations, abuse, etc. Also against animals. Or how our understanding of the world is very much informed by false dualities that place woman against man, savage people against the civilized white man, inferior animal against superior human, nature vs culture. (Or have a look at Edward Said’s Orientalism, making a similar analysis for oriental against civilized west.) In short, all of this is about power. I would argue that exploitation of animals surely stems from a need for resources but that in our current world it is very much about power as well.
I also disagree that animals aren’t sapient. Like, how would you define sapience in the first place? Continued studies over the last decades have shown that animals are pretty much capable of everything we thought would be limited to humans. And we constantly keep searching for the next distinction how animals are fundamentally different from humans, and we keep failing! So no, I don’t see a fundamental difference in animals vs humans. Again, this is a false duality. We are animals!
This seems like a pretty reasonable dialogue that covers a number of salient points. That said, it’s not at all obvious to me that other animals aren’t sapient. That seems, to me, to be something we tell ourselves to justify cruelty toward them and to reduce the significance of their suffering. I don’t see anything particularly special about human beings that indicates to me that we have a monopoly on the sort of self-awareness that we possess.
As non humans ourselves and having observed many other non humans for years we agree that other species are also sapient, though the need for such terms is as you say more than likely just a way of justifying cruelty, and putting humans on top (which says a lot about them) and they should probably stop caring so much and just treat all species kindly and without malice, cruelty or yes slavery because they currently do awful things to them: creatures like rats, pigs etc in places like laboratories and farms etc.
I had a really good dialogue about this a while ago. Here’s a transcription, if you’re interested in a detailed answer to this:
Thanks for the input. I’ve actually had debates like this before, too.
But fundamentally I still disagree with you and I don’t see the similarities as superficial. People have been treated by the Nazis like animals in this industrial killing process. And they’ve actually been “harvested”. Not sure in how much detail I should go, but at least in some extermination camps the Nazis collected various human Organs, like their hair, their skin, their nails and also all the possessions they’ve had.
Regarding your argument of animals as protein and generally placing them as an inferior other that has been historically treated as such, you seem to tap into some fallacies. It is never good to base an argument solely on traditional practices. Because then what else has been practiced for thousands of years? Abuse, wars, enslavement and a lot of other very horrendous stuff. Also, isn’t this the whole point of discussing how animals should be treated in the first place? That it is ethically wrong. And you seemingly draw a mental line that you don’t want to cross, so you refer to traditional practices. But this is exactly how many people justify sexism, racism to themselves. Women shouldn’t vote because they’re brain isn’t capable of it, or biological races exist and thus some people are inferior are similar to animals can’t comprehend what’s going on and it is therefore ethically acceptable to treat them badly.
I was confused at first, why you kept referring to how bad you think of killing animals. But apparently that’s were you’ve decided to draw the line for yourself. That what we do to animals is killing them and nothing else. I would argue, that the killing is actually a result of structural devaluation of animals that encompasses so much more than just the killing part. And now I could go into critique of capitalism and intersectionality. How people that are made to be powerless cogs in this system seek to have at least some power over others. And how this then breeds all kinds of discriminations, abuse, etc. Also against animals. Or how our understanding of the world is very much informed by false dualities that place woman against man, savage people against the civilized white man, inferior animal against superior human, nature vs culture. (Or have a look at Edward Said’s Orientalism, making a similar analysis for oriental against civilized west.) In short, all of this is about power. I would argue that exploitation of animals surely stems from a need for resources but that in our current world it is very much about power as well.
I also disagree that animals aren’t sapient. Like, how would you define sapience in the first place? Continued studies over the last decades have shown that animals are pretty much capable of everything we thought would be limited to humans. And we constantly keep searching for the next distinction how animals are fundamentally different from humans, and we keep failing! So no, I don’t see a fundamental difference in animals vs humans. Again, this is a false duality. We are animals!
This seems like a pretty reasonable dialogue that covers a number of salient points. That said, it’s not at all obvious to me that other animals aren’t sapient. That seems, to me, to be something we tell ourselves to justify cruelty toward them and to reduce the significance of their suffering. I don’t see anything particularly special about human beings that indicates to me that we have a monopoly on the sort of self-awareness that we possess.
As non humans ourselves and having observed many other non humans for years we agree that other species are also sapient, though the need for such terms is as you say more than likely just a way of justifying cruelty, and putting humans on top (which says a lot about them) and they should probably stop caring so much and just treat all species kindly and without malice, cruelty or yes slavery because they currently do awful things to them: creatures like rats, pigs etc in places like laboratories and farms etc.