A few days ago on twitter, Peter Singer made the following comment
Re Michael Vick: if you eat factory farmed chicken, eggs, pork or veal, you’re in no position to be outraged by the Eagles signing him.
I think the spirit of this comment is largely correct, but some comments on twitter made me want to defend this claim in a little more detail than can be done in 140 characters (even by someone as eloquent and compelling as Singer). In fact, it seems that, if anything, we should be more outraged at those that support factory farming than at the Eagles for signing Vick. I’ll defend that below.
First, it is an empirical fact that both dog-fighting and factory farming subject non-human animals to incredible cruelty. I suspect people will grant this in the case of dog-fighting, but will, if my students are any indication, be reluctant to admit this about animals in factory farms. I’m not going to try to defend the empirical facts. Some quick research will support these facts.
Even granting the empirical facts, some people might object that while both institutions result in harm to non-human animals, dog-fighting is an institution that exists merely for pleasure, while factory farming is an institution that exists to generate food.
This objection might be compelling if factory farming were necessary for our continued and healthful survival. But, as it stands, both factory farming and dog-fighting are institutions that exist, mostly, merely for our pleasure. It is true that the kinds of pleasures generated are different. Factory farming generates pleasure for consumers in the form of the taste of food and in the money saved on cheap food that can be spent on other things; dog-fighting, I guess, generates pleasure for spectators from the thrill of the fight and from money made gambling on the dogs which, in some cases, yields money that can be spent on other things. But, despite the forms of pleasure being different, they are both institutions that exist mainly for our pleasure.
One response might be that factory farming, at least for some people, generates cheap food that is necessary for some people to live healthful lives. Due to structure of farm subsidies, meat in the U.S. is pretty cheap and some of the most impoverished make use of this in order to eat and conserve money for other important commodities.
This response works as far as it goes. Insofar as people need to cheap meat to live healthful lives, and insofar as this is only a possibility when meat is factory farmed, perhaps factory farming generates one good that may help to compensate for the harms caused to the non-human animals in the farms. But, this response doesn’t go very far. A bit of research will show that a vegetarian diet can be had cheaply as well and it will furnish the nutrients required to live a healthful life at about the same cost as a diet that contains factory farmed meat. Neither will it work to claim that eating meat is necessary for a healthful diet since a) meat can be had from sources that are not factory farms, and b) it is empirically false that you need meat to be healthful. It also won’t work to insist that, at least for the poor, getting all the nutrients necessary for a healthful diet is prohibitively expensive without factory farmed meat; the poorest of people are malnourished and this is partly because of the amount of factory farmed meat available (again, you are welcome to check the empirical facts).
If what I’ve said so far is true, then dog-fighting and factory farming are institutions that cause unnecessary harms. I’m just going to assert without argument that institutions which cause unnecessary harms like these are morally wrong (defending this claim probably requires a defense of a view of moral status on which animals have direct moral status. Such arguments abound and I think succeed. See DeGrazia for an introduction to these discussions).
So far what I’ve said doesn’t entail anything about which of these institutions is morally worse. People are certainly more likely to think that dog-fighting is worse than factory farming. I tend to think this results from a) our fondness of dogs and b) ignorance about factory farming. In any case, saying which is worse is actually pretty difficult. There are, I think, relevant facts about the kinds of attitudes embodied by those who engage in dog-fighting and those that engage factory-farming that might impact the moral wrongness of these institutions. Maybe the attitudes that dog-fighting participants (not the animals, the people) have are inherently more vicious than those of participants in factory farming. But, it is also relevant that the suffering in factory farms is of a greater magnitude than that suffered by dogs in dog-fighting institutions (I don’t have any hard data on this, largely because it is hard to determine the number of dogs killed in dog-fighting…they tend to keep that info quiet. But, the number of animals killed in factory farming is enormous. Conservative estimates put the number of pigs killed in the U.S. for food is around 128 million per year. That is from all farms, but the vast majority come from factory farms).
I don’t know of a simple way to take the facts about attitudes and magnitude of suffering into account, but it seems to me that even if the wrongs committed by the institution of factory farming are not as bad as the wrongs committed by the institution of dog-fighting (and I tend to think the opposite is the case), that the wrongs committed by the former are sufficiently bad, given that the harms are unnecessary and the magnitude of the suffering is huge, that we should strongly condemn the institution. This suggests to me that Singer is right to point out the inconsistency of being enraged by the Eagles support Vick while being complacent about factory farming practices.
In fact, I think we should be more outraged about factory farming than at the Eagles. It is true that as consumers of factory farmed meat, we only indirectly contribute to the institution, but this at best is also true of the Eagles. They aren’t engaged in dog-fighting, at best they are supporting someone who engages in dog-fighting. But, it isn’t even that; they are supporting someone who previously engaged in something morally atrocious. Meanwhile, many people are still participating in practices that contribute to factory farming. If anything, we should be more outraged by current participation than by past participation.
Anyway, that is my quick take and defense on Singer’s claim. An adequate defense would have to be much longer, so I’ll spare you.
2 Comments
Just thought I’d mention that this entire argument seems open to vegans’ standard argumentative move. Your language is in terms of meat, but dairy and egg production methods are at least equally as cruel as meat farming, and they are in some ways interrelated (e.g., veal calves are sometimes the byproducts of keeping dairy cows pregnant). Singer did mention eggs in his original tweet, and probably didn’t include dairy just because of space. Even lacto- and ovo-vegetarians might not have room to criticize Michael Vick.
I think that the argument probably does extend to other factory farmed food items, though this argument will be more sensitive to particular views about the harms committed. The power of the argument in the context of factory farmed meat is that the harms are morally comparable to those in dog-fighting independent of particular views of what those harms are (by any standard the harms are comparable).
However, I think the argument only works, or is only extremely persuasive, in the context of factory farmed animals. It is, I think harder to evaluate, for example, the moral wrongness of eating meat in small amounts from local small farms. Here evaluations will tend to be much more sensitive to particular normative views and will have to take into account, e.g., the harms caused by other dietary options that are less carbon friendly and thereby contribute to harms to non-humans in other ways. It will also be much more dependent on views about what constitutes the harm done to a given non-human on a farm (is death the principle harm, suffering, etc.). That is why I (and I think Singer) confined the claim to factory farming (and meat in particular).
Still, point taken.
Cheers,
John