Contd.

Factory farming is disgustingly cruel, and ought to be abolished. I doubt whether the principle that rules it out is that it is wrong to cause unnecessary suffering. Factory farming does considerably increase productivity, and it may well be that many poorer people will be less well fed if it is banned. Hence I think that sometimes to inflict some suffering, necessary to promote human health, life and well-being, is immoral in spite of being necessary suffering. One has, I suppose to balance the suffering caused to animals against the benefit to humans, and neither animals nor humans will always win. But I should have thought it possible to eliminate factory farming though perhaps in stages for the benefit of human producers and consumers, though the welfare of the animals would demand its immediate abolition.  But imagine that the genes of an Aberdeen Angus could be blended with those of a lobster, so that when pieces of prime beef were cut off (naturally under an anaesthetic) the missing parts of the former exalted species were rapidly replaced, much as a lobster grows a new claw. Then you could eat beef without either killing anything or causing suffering, but I expect putting this idea into practice, even if it becomes possible, would be prohibitively expensive. But if such a way could be found, eating meat would be no more immoral than pulling rhubarb. Perhaps one day it will be possible for animals to be kept without brains in even more efficient factory farms than those we have at present. Perhaps even a few or one enormous and enormously insensitive cow might be enough to meet the needs of whole communities. One should not underrate the possibilities of future science. The idea is repulsive, but who are we to put our feelings before the welfare of the animals who would thereby behaved? And the animal so kept would only count for one on the hedonic calculus, which would make it easier to override her interests, if she had any.

I tremble to put forward an idea nowadays so heterodox, but if all living organisms form a chain of being, perhaps all of them, including vegetables, can feel `pain' in some very rudimentary degree. When plants turn to face the sun, perhaps they feel a pleasant sensation resembling warmth from doing so. Perhaps, for example, animal-eating vegetables like the Venus's fly-trap - not all vegetables are vegetarians  - can feel the pangs of unsatisfied hunger. But our obligation to be kind to vegetables cannot be very stringent, though it is certainly in our interest to treat most vegetables, especially edible ones, as kindly as possible. (I recently decided not to return some plants to a firm which had sent me the wrong ones because, though alive at the time, they would be dead or debilitated by the time they got back to their supplier, poor things.) But the rights of vegetables, too, must also frequently be denied on account of man's overwhelming desire for concrete.

The main reasons for having a rule forbidding killing people are utilitarian ones. The relations or friends or companions or compatriots of the deceased will retaliate, or they will take preventive action by pre-emptively killing a suspected killer, or a would-be murderer will muff it and his intended victims will try to kill him in retaliation. The result of allowing the killing of humans by other humans would be disastrous.  It is true that these utilitarianism reasons for not killing people are not psychologically effective, and it may be better that people be motivated by the irrational belief that human life's sacred, though (non-standard) utilitarianism is right, and human life is not sacred. But these utilitarian reasons for not killing do not apply to killing non-human animals, who do not have the power or will to retaliate, and animal life is less sacred than human life if it is sacred at all.  I doubt very much whether a duty not to kill and eat people (or any other animal) can be deduced from a duty not to harm them. For to harm someone is to cause him to be in a worse state than he was before he was harmed, and a dead person or animal has not been made to be in a worse state by being killed, but made to be in no state at all. He cannot, once he is killed, be caused to suffer, or to be deprived or unhappy, though the process of being killed might have been painful. And he certainly cannot, after he is dead, care about having being eaten.  The fact that what was formerly a man's proper name no longer has any application makes us unable to say that there is someone of whom one can truly say that he has been hurt, deprived of life, or wronged by being killed. For the same reason, we cannot owe the dead a funeral, or remembrance, or even oblige them by publishing (or eating) their remains - though we might have these duties to their relations or to their public or to posterity -in spite of the fact that posterity has done so little for us. Hence it is absurd to spend large amounts of time and money, and even to risk people's lives, to bring the bodies from remote or dangerous places to be properly buried. The people who prevent the bodies of their 'loved ones' -  I think those who use this expression mean relations - from being used by scientists to save the lives of others are sentimental, selfish, confused and bigoted.  The same argument applies to animals. We do not harm an animal if it is killed quite painlessly, and, though there are other reasons for not killing animals, avoiding harming them is the most important. The chaos that would result from allowing killing people does not come from allowing the killing of animals, for their friends and relations do not have the strength to retaliate.

It is a mistake to think that it is everybody's not eating meat that would cause animals not to suffer or be killed; so long as people continued to buy meat, if only for their animals, animals would still suffer, whether the people who bought it eat it or not. If we are wrong enough to buy it, whether we also eat it makes very little difference to the animals slaughtered. If, on the other hand, everybody were to eat (dead) meat, but no-one bought it, animal suffering would quickly almost die out. If you have a friend who is an animal rights person, do not tell him (other).  Hence, if I had a charismatic personality, and wished to put an end to meat producing, I would start a campaign to persuade people never to buy meat. They would be encouraged to eat it, provided they begged, borrowed or stole it, but did not pay for it. In fact, the more meat they stole the better. A kind of boycott in which everyone stole and eat meat, but no-one paid for it, would bring the meat producing industry to an end much more quickly and effectively than only a few eccentric people's just not eating meat. Even only a fairly small proportion of people eating meat they did not pay for might make meat producing uneconomic, though almost everybody would have to stop eating meat to produce the same effect. Trappers, hunters and crofters could go one eating meat, since they do not pay for it, but civilisation prevents there being many of these. (I am not optimistic about this helpful suggestion ever being acted on.)  Better consequences than those produced by advocating vegetarianism might be brought about by individual people's continuing to eat meat, but nevertheless campaigning to introduce legislation to outlaw boiling animals alive, or to introduce a government policy to devote more agricultural space to grain and less to meat, or to introduce legislation abolishing battery farming or painful ways of killing animals. One might be able to eat meat and have a clear conscience if one also campaigned for greater regulation of the meat producing industry. Most vegetarians I know just don't eat meat themselves, which is pretty useless, really. Given that all the above measures were implemented, and all the meat on the market were quite painlessly killed, then I think it would not be wrong to eat meat - immoderation, of course, if those who say it is bad for you are right. If all one does is to refrain from eating meat, one is perhaps satisfying one's conscience in a useless and rather lazy way.

Of course, one is speaking loosely when one says that animals can owe us anything. 'Owe' is a word that gets its meaning with reference to the application of rules governing the transference of property, and animals are not capable of understanding these rules. But they can and I think do stand in a relationship to humans which would, were there rules, justify one in saying that they owed us the lives of some of them because of what we have done for them, even if our intention was not that they should benefit from what we did. Of course this remark applies only to some animals, and applies less accurately than it did in the days before factory farming. One of the difficulties in evolving satisfactory treatment of our duties to animals is that it is impossible for them and us to be guided by a common set of rules. You could not play rule-governed games like Monopoly with animals, where one could incur debts or penalties or have duties or rights, say the right to buy property. (I think it follows from this that we can have none of Hume's artificial virtues to animals, but only his natural ones.) Some animals, for example cats, could not have any regard for rules because they are insufficiently gregarious to have that desire to conform that can makes rules possible. Dogs would not have this difficulty. Unlike cats, they can feel guilt, and some simple rules they do understand.  Let us suppose that chimpanzees can understand rules, as I suspect they can - they have rules concerning language and leadership, for example - and, since they appear to be able to communicate pretty well, we might be able to make an agreement with a colony of chimpanzees to the effect that we would keep them in very great comfort, and in return they would not objects our occasionally indulging in the gastronomic experience of eating one or two of them. They couldn't prevent our doing this, which means that they are not in a position to bargain, but perhaps they would feel or ought to feel or would feel if they were reasonable that they would have been getting a good deal from us, and feel that they ought to accept it.  It is possible that we might stand in the same relation to creatures from other planets that animals do to us. (We would have been in this relation to H.G.Wells's Martians, had these not been exterminated by our germs.) Had they not been exterminated, and had offered us material help in return for our not resisting their killing and drinking every month the blood of a certain proportion of us, we could well be getting a good bargain which we ought to honour. Their behaviour towards us might be regarded as less questionable than ours with respect to non-human animals, as we are able to live on substances other than meat, but Martians could not live without human-type blood. (I very much doubt, incidentally, whether we ought to apply the rule that each is to count for one to sentient beings such as Martians, even if they were much more intelligent and more virtuous in relation to other Martians than we are in relation to other Earthlings. Doing so might involve our allowing total self-destruction that such a being might better prosper.

It seems fairly obvious that we have evolved to have the sentiments, including moral ones, that we have towards men because we would not have survived without them. Disapproval of unkindness to children, for example reinforces mother-love, and both are certainly necessary to the survival of mankind, which is why we have come to love those we suppose to be our children.  To a much lesser extent our attitude to animals may have evolved for the same reason. In times when food was scarce men who suffered from and acted on a disapproval of killing and eating animals would not have survived. But some sympathy with animals also has survival value. We care better for animals that are useful to us if we are a little fond of them, and with the animals we train this is true to quite a marked extent. It is even to some extent of biological advantage to some animals to love and obey us. Indeed, with a minority of animals their being loving by us and so being loving us in return is now the only reason why they still survive. Nature is far from being always, or even mostly, red in tooth and claw.

I have a dream. It is that the rule 'to each according to his needs, from each according to his ability', should apply to all animals.  And if it is true of non-human animals as well as of human ones that if he (or she) will not work, neither should he live, domestic animals, who are no longer able to care for themselves, should at reasonable intervals quite painlessly be killed and eaten, or perhaps distributed as largesse to the poor and needy. Meat from them might even be sold in shops There is no moral reason why exacting these contributions should be organised only by humans, but humans are as yet the only animal that possesses the power and ability necessary to supervise and enforce them.  Despite the above remark, which is a slight exaggeration, I have the greatest regard for animals. I think they are as capable off love and pain as are humans. This does not exclude pains such as those involved in fear of what may come or sadness at what has been lost. And the more one knows of animals, the more one realises how like humans they are, even animals who are very unlike human animals in appearance. All the scientific investigation in recent years has indicated that they are much more capable of thought and language than earlier men supposed. They should always be treated with the greatest kindness and consideration. This kindness, however, does not extend to not eating them, provided it can be done without undue pain to the animals eaten.

 

Jonathan Harrison March 2007