I previously argued that, at least for a moderate vegan, the using of animals as mere means characterizes almost all real-world agriculture. It is this attitude that leads to the deplorable conditions and treatment of animals in agriculture. If we treated animals as individuals it would be far harder for us to ignore the horrors of animal agriculture. Home egg production where the chickens are treated like pets will be OK for the moderate vegan, but animal agriculture will not.
But isn’t this being naive about the realities of life for all animals including ourselves? It would seem to condemn the actions of subsistence farmers who are merely trying to provide calories to their families. Such farmers certainly use their farm animals as mere means, but it would be odd to fault them for this. Similarly the hunting or fishing of animals certainly uses them as a mere means for sustenance. This gets to another critique by vegans about modern rich world agriculture (and “Whole Foods Omnivores”), that it is unnecessary.
The argument against the omnivore from a lack of necessity goes something like this. All kinds of horrible actions and institutions might be excusable if they were necessary for survival. For instance, many actions in war might be deemed morally permissible (though perhaps not good) in cases when they are necessary for the defense of a nation, or when waging a just war. These needn’t even be controversial cases; though some may debate whether the user of nuclear weapons or carpet bombing is ever permissible, it seems obvious that bombing poison gas production facilities with precision strikes would be permissible during a defensive war. That’s the case even if that bombing kills a number of civilians. Morality in the real world sometimes allows for violence, deprivation, and killing because the world can be a cruel and inhospitable place.
The situation of humans prior to the abundance of the green revolution might be seen as equally dire, as might that of modern hunter-gatherers or those who survive plane crashes in the Yukon Territory.1 The vegan (even the “radical vegan” I introduced earlier) can accept this without giving up any ground to the Omnivore about the moral obligations towards animals of modern humans in rich societies. The modern omnivore has a real choice not to kill. And in fact, they would be losing only pleasure, not health or well-being in not killing.2.
This will be the core argument I will explore over the next few posts. It will show that the Omnivore, and even the Whole Foods Omnivore who buys “humane” meat, cannot deny certain horrors and harms imposed on animals raised and slaughtered in modern meat and dairy production. Furthermore, those Omnivores cannot deny that the suffering of animals matters at least to some degree, as their treatment of non-human pet species shows. They are then forced into a balancing procedure that I do not think they can win. They will have to assert that their enjoyment of meat outweighs the suffering of literally thousands of animals in a lifetime to satisfy their appetite.
It will be a notably weak claim that need not say anything about the wrongness of killing animals, if it is done relatively painlessly. Of course, that might be wrong, but it is for a future discussion. Importantly, almost no actual instances animal agriculture raise animals to have long pleasant lives, and so the wrongness of killing is largely irrelevant for the debate about animal agriculture.
The strongest argument for the Omnivore, I think, will arise from an argument about the horrors of nature. Nature may be so horrible that animals cannot expect a life without torture, suffering, and early death. If that is true, then those animal agriculture is not very nice it isn’t notable either. The Whole Foods Omnivore might even add that the animals they eat do live “nice” lives. Humans’ expectations about what a living thing can expect out of life are clouded by the wonders and pleasantness of modern society, and we do not owe it to animals to provide them that. We do not owe it to animals to make them our pets. This is a deep argument that the vegan should take seriously, but I think will ultimately fail.