If most human-inflicted suffering in this world is inflicted on non-human animals (most radically on animals on factory farms), and if non-human animals are just as capable of suffering as humans, then what's the point of treating animal rights as somehow unimportant compared to human rights?
Nowadays more and more people are calling attention to the necessity of
reducing the consumption of animal products. That's mainstream now. But
I've noticed that at the moment, it's almost always talked about as a matter of
fighting climate change: the reason why the meat industry is bad is that it's bad for the environment.
And of course, that is very true and important. But I think that everybody already knows and understands that there's more to it than
that.
I assume that the
intuitive obviousness of the "It's wrong to torture animals on factory
farms" perspective is the very reason why everybody's trying not to say
it out loud. People don't like to say things that will make everybody around them uncomfortable.
Of course, there are some people already breaking the rule. Yuval Noah Harari is probably the most famous thinker who's trying to bring this up. But overall, this continues to be a question that even the majority of philosophically and morally conscious people ignore. It's simply not something that we talk about. Yet.
To be honest, I get it. Existing in this world already feels overwhelming. Everybody's tired, the world is scary. Leaders and movements that question some of our best ideas – things like human rights and democracy – are gaining more power. It can feel like the moral progress that we've already made as a species is under threat.
And yet: as the dominant species on this planet, it's our duty to care about the well-being of all sentient beings that are affected by our actions.
The good news is that we already have the natural capacity for giving a shit.
The vast majority of the history of our species has taken place in hunter-gatherer societies. Hunter-gatherers had no notion of human superiority. In an animistic worldview, other animals were seen as soulful equals; it was vitally important to pay attention to the minds and desires of all life around you.
As a species, human beings continue to be geniuses of empathy. Our reactions to the suffering of non-human animals are still just as intuitive, and often just as intense, as our reactions when we see human suffering. The only difference is that our current ideas about non-human animals are very different from our current ideas about humans. Ideas are – and have always been – our way of turning off compassion. The same mechanisms that make "dehumanization" possible are also behind our ability to treat other animals as unfeeling biomass.
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| Every year, this is "life" for approximately 80 billion land animals, and approximately 51-160 billion farmed fish (who, by the way, despite people's tendency to always keep ignoring them, are probably just as capable of suffering as their terrestrial cousins, like mammals and birds.) |
About 12 thousand years ago, when the Agricultural Revolution and the domestication of animals started happening, humans were forced to gradually abandon their hunter-gatherer ways of seeing the universe. You see: it's psychologically difficult to simultaneously see an animal as your equal and as your property. People had to come up with a whole new worldview to feel more comfortable with what they were doing. And so they invented new religions that said that God only cares about Homo sapiens and has created all other creatures simply for human benefit.
And unbelievably, we still think that way. Even though there's no rational basis, and we're now living in an age where science is supposedly valued over religion. This division between human pain and animal pain is completely arbitrary.
I mean, why should we care about human rights? Why should we care about the well-being of people that we're never even going to personally meet?
Because humans are sentient beings.
We believe that basic human rights belong to all humans, regardless of their looks or their accomplishments or their mathematical abilities.
If I were involved in a horrific car accident and my intelligence level
were reduced to that of a 2-year-old child, nobody would think that it
would suddenly be OK to start beating me with sticks or keep me locked
in a small dark room. I would still be just as capable of experiencing
pain and horror as a Nobel laureate. That's the thing that matters.
What makes an individual worthy of ethical consideration is sentience:
the ability to hurt and ache and suffer when you hurt them.
The ultimate goal has to be a world where suffering is taken seriously regardless of what the suffering individual looks like, and where all sentient beings are legally protected from unnecessary violence. My hope – and this seems quite realistic to me – is that the introduction of cultured meat, cultured dairy, cultured eggs, and cultured seafood will make it psychologically easier for people to start expanding their thinking in this way.
We may be the most destructive species in the history of this planet, capable of the most extreme violence. But we're also the most creative species this pale blue dot has ever seen, and capable of the most radical compassion. My dream (and maybe even expectation) is that in my lifetime, I'll get to see that latter side start to win out.
Dear reader of this...
ReplyDeleteIf you happen to be looking for a way to do something meaningful with your life, I recommend taking a few moments to think about cellular agriculture.
Cellular agriculture means meat, seafood, eggs, and dairy grown from cells without the use of living animals.
If one cares about reducing unnecessary suffering in the world, and/or fighting climate change and deforestation, and/or preventing pandemics or antibiotic resistance, it's hard to think of another field with such enormous potential for making a difference.
Many big obstacles still need to be overcome, so a lot more energy, talent and money should be invested in researching and developing this field, and in getting people interested.
Anyone who manages to move this field forward – in ANY big or small way – is a huge hero in my eyes. At the moment, this is certainly one of the most important and impactful things a human being can do with their life. Currently, I contribute by writing about this, and by giving money to two nonprofits: NEW HARVEST and THE GOOD FOOD INSTITUTE.
Ezra Klein wrote an article where he explained the point of these organizations:
"The technical challenges here are real, and some believe them insurmountable. Even if they can be overcome, the political challenges are daunting, too. Meat producers are organizing around the world to try and stop these products from coming to market, and to wrap them in red tape and warning labels if they threaten profits.
But the benefits to directly growing meat, at scale, would be incalculable. ... This should be a moonshot we’re making as a society, but it’s being left, instead, to private capital, and so there’s too little basic science being done, and too many advances are patented and protected.
The Good Food Institute is the most important organization pushing this work. It’s second-to-none in the influence of its public policy efforts, its centrality to the ecosystem of companies and researchers, and its international footprint. It has also been effective at convincing traditional meat companies to explore alternative proteins, which could lead both to important products and turn political enemies into allies. ...
New Harvest is more directly focused on building the scientific community and funding the research to make cellular agriculture possible. It’s directly focused on the technical challenges of cultivated meat. If those aren’t solved, then all the lobbying efforts in the world won’t matter."
Klein's article is behind a paywall, but you can read it here, it's very good: https://web.archive.org/web/20211216101144/https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/16/opinion/factory-farming-animals.html
Here's a student guide by The Good Food Institute, explaining how one can enter the field of cellular agriculture:
https://gfi.org/resource/student-resource-guide/
And here's a subreddit where breakthroughs and challenges of lab-grown meat are discussed in a mostly quite enlightened way:
https://www.reddit.com/r/wheresthebeef/
By the way:
ReplyDeleteThe logic behind highlighting that this or that behaviour/way of seeing the world has been common among hunter-gatherer societies is _not_ to claim that hunter-gatherers somehow represent some perfect state of ideal morality - that because some ways of thinking are _older_, they're also inherently _better_.
Hunter-gatherers were and are people; capable of thinking and doing all kinds of bad things.
But, like many people, I often find myself thinking about hunter-gatherers for two reasons:
1) It's helpful to realize that our current ways of doing things and relating to the world around us are just options among others. There's nothing obvious about all this stuff that seems so normal to us - such as our current way of seeing non-human animals and the idea that their suffering is somehow less real than our suffering.
2) Since human beings have evolved in hunter-gatherer societies, looking at hunter-gatherer societies _may_ sometimes be helpful if we want to understand human beings. What kinds of psychological needs do we have? What makes life meaningful? Etc. Again, there's no reason why we couldn't find new answers to questions like these. It's just that history can sometimes be helpful when we try to imagine possible futures. (But if history starts to limit your imagination, you're doing it all wrong, man.)