by Stuart Rachels poses this question in the final section of a recent paper on vegetarianism (in T. L. Beauchamp & R. G. Frey (eds.), The Oxford handbook of animal ethics, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012, pp. 877–905). Some quotes:
The paper deserves to be read in full. Rachels is a utilitarian, and his way of approaching the morality of meat-eating should resonate with many readers of this forum.
When people in our culture think of a moral horror, they think of the Holocaust—the campaign of genocide in which Hitler and his Nazi thugs starved, beat, and ultimately murdered 5.7 million Jews.185 They do not think of industrial farming. But which has caused more suffering: the Holocaust or industrial farming? In asking this question, I use the word “suffering” in its proper sense: suffering is extreme pain, or agony. To compare industrial farming to the Holocaust, let’s consider the number of victims involved in each.
Today around ten billion animals per year are killed in American slaughterhouses, and the vast majority of these animals suffered greatly. Let’s assume, very conservatively, that during the last twenty years, around five billion animals per year have suffered in American factory farms, which amounts to 100 billion suffering animals. And let’s assume that the Holocaust caused suffering to 20 million human beings. This means that, for every single human being who suffered in the Holocaust, five thousand animals have suffered in American factory farms during the last twenty years.
Many people hope that animal pain isn’t really so bad. [...] According to this argument, animals don’t really suffer, because their pain isn’t amplified by such emotions as regret, self-pity, shame, humiliation, and dread.
This argument, however, is unsound. Imagine that a human being has twisted her ankle and is now on the ground, writhing in agony. She’s trapped in a world of pain, waiting for it to end. But she doesn’t blame herself for the pain, nor does she fear for her future. Her pain is not “amplified by distinctly human emotions such as regret, self-pity, shame, humiliation, and dread.” Her pain just hurts like hell. This example proves that pain can be very, very bad even if it’s not “amplified by distinctly human emotions.” If castrating a pig without anesthesia causes the pig that type of pain, then that’s enough for my arguments.
But suppose I’m wrong. Suppose that, for whatever reason, human pain is ten times worse than animal pain. On that assumption, factory farming over the last twenty years has still caused pain morally equivalent to five hundred Holocausts. Or suppose there’s only a 10% chance that the arguments in this paper are correct. On that assumption, factory farming, again, has had the expected utility of five hundred Holocausts. And if there’s only a 10% chance that animal pain is 10% as bad as human pain, then factory farming has had the expected utility of fifty Holocausts (or really more, since I’m ignoring a lot of the suffering caused by industrial farming). The philosophical arguments for vegetarianism are easy. The difficult thing is getting people to stop eating meat.
The paper deserves to be read in full. Rachels is a utilitarian, and his way of approaching the morality of meat-eating should resonate with many readers of this forum.
