Regarding to eat meat or not, we have been asking the wrong question.
An original moral experiment arguing against the consumption of farmed animals
Image from:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/ciwf/3218273112<
Most humans agree torturing an animal is morally wrong, that means, those (most
of them, at least) who are not vegetarians would agree non-human animals’
suffering matters, at least to a minuscule degree.
I want to try something with you to probe your moral sense.
Image from:
The Experiment
Consider this moral experiment. There’s a torturing machine in front of you. You
need to use the machine to** deliver an agonising electric shock to either a
rabbit or a human for 4 hours.**
Which would you choose? Chances are, you’ll choose to deliver the shock to the
rabbit. That’ll also be my choice too.
What about this then: You have the machine and a slightly uncomfortable chair,
this chair is no big deal, it’s just like chairs used by nasty malls to prevent
people staying in the mall for too long (like the one shown in the picture). You
must either make the human sit on the chair for 10 seconds or shock the rabbit
for 4 hours non-stop. What will be your choice?
I would choose to make the man sit on the chair. Without meticulous statistics,
I bet most people would do the same.
The only difference between the two scenarios is that, in the second scenario,
the human suffers less than the first one.
What does it imply for people changing their mind?
The non-vegetarians who changed their mind, or at least found the decision
process harder, endorse that there’s is a proportionality between the
moral-worth of humans and other animals, and such moral-worth is comparable.
Wow. That sounds like a bunch of jargons! Fret not though — let me explain this
bit by bit.
Let’s start with what do I mean by *“moral-worth is comparable”. *By saying
*“comparable”, *I mean the worth of humans and the worth of other animals are
on the same continuum. They can be directly compared, even with the assumption
that humans worth far higher than other animals.
The fact that the worth of animals and humans can be compared is precisely why
some people would choose to make the human sit on the chair over shocking the
rabbit. Making a person feel uncomfortable is a form of human suffering, but in
the face of casting a rabbit into excruciating pain, the former is better. In
other words:
An extreme form of non-human animals suffering is worse than trivial, mild
humans suffering.
This is what I mean by comparable: human pain and non-human animals pain are not
in different moral categories — it is not the case that trivial human suffering
would automatically carry more moral significance than the most horrendous form
of non-human animals suffering.
Second, proportionality.
With the second paradigm, if we gradually increase the level of suffering for
the human, for instances: to use a very uncomfortable chair, to do an
injection, to slap his face, to shock him for an hour, so-and-so forth.
Plausibly more people would side to shock the rabbit to save the human from
pain.
Different people may have different turning points; some are higher, some are
lower. It’s, though, very likely that you have one also, unless you agreed to
torture a rabbit to save a human from sitting on a chair that is probably just a
bit less comfy then the chair you’re sitting on.
This shows proportionality: when the suffering of the human to the rabbit
exceeds a fixed proportion held by us, we side to torture the rabbit. It bases
on our moral (maybe arbitrary) judgement of how much more humans worth than
other animals. We attempt to derive the optimal moral choice in every case.
Therefore, we can see that moral choices on non-human animals are based on:
- the proportion of how we perceive humans worth more than other animals
- our estimation of how much pain/pleasure the choice would cause the non-human animal and human in each case
Okay, So What?
Before deriving any conclusion from the experiment, one crucial limitation to
note is that pain/pleasure is not quantifiable. We can’t say that shocking a
rabbit at 4000V 0.05mA yields a moral score of -50 and doing the same to a human
would yield -300, and a human worths six times more. You can see this is
bullshit.
Does it mean we should cease comparing levels of pain/pleasure at all? We simply
can’t. We make comparisons and predictions on pain/pleasure levels long before
we even heard of the theory. Have you ever say “Thank you” to a waiter in
restaurant? We express our gratitude to others, not because to pose ourself as
educated, decent chaps, but with a wish to make others happy. You won’t know
whether this will generate +5 utility, but as humans, we know that he would be
happy. As highly socialised species, we generally have a good ability to grasp
whether others are happy, and how happy others are.
And, by switching choice from shocking the rabbit in the uncomfortable chair
paradigm, you already evaluated and compared utility — you decided sitting
on an uncomfortable chair is much less bad than being shocked, and that was the
reason you shifted your choice. In short, we have a good sense of how bad/good
an experience is.
I would argue for that, had we exerted our ability to evaluate goodness (for
humans) and badness (for other animals) on consuming farm animals, and applied
the same moral decisions on proportionality in experiment consistently in
life. Most of us would abandon eating farmed animals at least, if not go
straight to be vegans.
Images
from:
AND
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e0/Fuliji_roast_chicken_%2820150815131713%29.JPG
Say you roasted a (farmed) chicken on a warm Thanksgiving dinner. Basically what
you’re doing is this:
**You took a lifetime of inhumane confinement **(well, only humans deserve
humane treatment as the word implies?), where the chicken lived an A4-sized
battery which he could barely turn, with an overpowering smell of shit 24
hour-a-day. He had his mouth (peck) chopped off without anaesthetic when he was
a baby, and suffered a fearful and painful processing of slaughtering. All of
this is then translated to a rather brief positive sensation of the chicken
piece passing through your tongue, in which, may be you didn’t even notice how
good it tasted as you were too busy talking with your brother. My words are just
simply inadequate to illustrate how disheartening the living conditions of these
animals are: check this video out:
I can neither coin a sensible coefficient on how many times worse is the utility
aggregated over the lifetime of miserable chicken over the pleasure your family
derived from his body; nor can I tell you how many times a human worth more than
a chicken.
I just know we have been asking the wrong question — we ask: “Are humans more
important than other animals?”
If it’s a yes then we can eat them.
Actually, the real question to ask is: “Is few seconds of your fleshly enjoyment
more important than the lifetime suffering of an animal?”
If your answer is yes, then please eat as much as you like. This argument can
only appeal to the soft spot of consciousness — it can’t prove you wrong (but
other arguments can).
The decision is up to you. So, Is it a good moral tradeoff? I leave the
decision to you.
Yet, there is something to note. Do you still remember the moral experiment? If
you think eating farmed animals is okay, how are you different from people who
believe shocking the rabbit for four hours is better than letting the human sit
on the chair?
Or, the simplest of all, why don’t you buy some live rabbits and sit on
them? I am sure you would derive more comfort from their about-to-burst tummy
than any other chairs in the world.
What’s next?
I turned to be a pescetarian two years ago — that means I gave up on eating all
meats but seafood. No. No moral justification for that.
I believe eating fish is morally wrong. My pleasure doesn’t outweigh their pain.
After all, I am not a perfectly moral being. I chose it just because it’s lesser
of the evil — fish are not raised in such a miserable environment at least.
However, one thing that struck me hard is that at least we cared. If you
step back — why should we care at all? Can you prove to me, why we need to
be good, to other humans or animals? I can’t. But I just know we want to, and we
do.
To me, caring for others is one of the true miracles in the world.
And we act in response to our consciousness, bit by bit, bit by bit. We want
to be better and better — though we know we won’t be perfect.
That’s the reason I became a pescetarian.
I know, telling you to change your diet is a lot to ask. But if, and only if, my
argument touched your heart, why don’t you start by doing something small?
I suggest you three easy choices; I solemnly pledge you to do at least one of
them:
- Say no to Foie gras — it’s simply the worst kind of
shit - Eat one vegetarian meal in week — start from today
- Donate $10 to any non-human animals welfare
organisation (https://support.peta.org/page/1828/donate/1?locale=en-US) - More veg, less meat. It is good for you, the animals, and the earth.
Let’s work towards a better world together.
Some good articles to learn about non-human animal ethics
Equality for Animals? By Peter Singer
What is animal liberation? By PETA
Some further food for thoughts:
- Is it more moral to eat food that is tasty? As we derive more pleasure from the same (assumed) amount of suffering.
- Is it better to eat big non-human animals? Again it reduces the quantity of suffering.
- Why humans worth more innately?
- You made decisions in the moral experiment. Do your ACTUAL decisions reflect how is it OUGHT to be?
- Are the decisions grounded in just morality and rationality? What if I replace the rabbit with a mouse? Would you still make the same choice? (okay. I admit I used rabbit intentionally.)
At the moment, I could not provide adequate answers to these questions. When I do, you can be assured I will write an article about it.