The Logic of The Larder

[content note: cannibalism, torture and murder of babies, factory farming, horrifying thought experiments. These content warnings are not dire bullshit.]

I.

The argument that it is wrong to kill animals is perhaps made most eloquently in omnivore Neil Gaiman’s short story Babycakes (video of him reading it here):

A few years back all the animals went away.

We woke up one morning, and they just weren’t there anymore.  They didn’t even leave us a note, or say goodbye.  We never figured out quite where they’d gone.

We missed them.

Some of us thought that the world had ended, but it hadn’t.  There just weren’t any more animals.  No cats or rabbits, no dogs or whales, no fish in the seas, no birds in the skies.

We were all alone.

We didn’t know what to do.

We wandered around lost, for a time, and then someone pointed out that just because we didn’t have animals anymore, that was no reason to change our lives.  No reason to change our diets or to cease testing products that might cause us harm.

After all, there were still babies.

Babies can’t talk.  They can hardly move.  A baby is not a rational, thinking creature.

We made babies.

And we used them.

Some of them we ate.  Baby flesh is tender and succulent.

We flayed their skin and decorated ourselves in it.  Baby leather is soft and comfortable.

Some of them we tested.

We taped open their eyes, dripped detergents and shampoos in, a drop at a time.

We scarred them and scalded them.  We burnt them.  We clamped them and planted electrodes into their brains.  We grafted, and we froze, and we irradiated.

The babies breathed our smoke, and the babies’ veins flowed with our medicines and drugs, until they stopped breathing or until their blood ceased to flow.

It was hard, of course, but it was necessary.

No one could deny that.

With the animals gone, what else could we do?

Some people complained, of course.  But then, they always do.

And everything went back to normal.

Only…

Yesterday, all the babies were gone.

We don’t know where they went.  We didn’t even see them go.

We don’t know what we’re going to do without them.

But we’ll think of something.  Humans are smart.  It’s what makes us superior to the animals and the babies.

We’ll figure something out.

All of the arguments we use for why it’s all right to kill animals are morally horrifying if applied to babies. “Babies dying is part of the natural order. Lions eat babies all the time.” “Babies don’t even know what death is, so they can’t really be said to prefer not to die.” “I made sure this baby had a very happy life before I killed and ate her.” Like, what the fuck?

In the absence of a specific reason to treat pigs and babies differently, I shouldn’t kill pigs.

II.

I enjoyed the movie Carnage, which is a purported documentary from 2067, when the entire world is vegan, talking about how anyone could have been so cruel as to eat animals.¹ However, one detail made me cringe. After people became vegan, all the farmed animals went to sanctuaries, where they lived out happy lives and had equally happy children.

We can’t even do that for dogs and cats. Animal shelters regularly kill perfectly healthy animals because we as a society simply aren’t willing to pay enough to give all dogs and cats a minimally decent life.² Adding pigs, cows, and chickens would only worsen the homeless animal crisis.

Some pigs, cows, and chickens could survive in the wild. But feral animals are often pretty unpopular, partially because of human-wildlife conflict and partially because they can compete with native species and reduce biodiversity. I don’t especially love the possibility that what preserves farmed-animal species is that humans are bad at deliberately controlling wild-animal populations.

Realistically, what happens if the world gradually goes vegan is that there is a smaller and smaller market for animal products, so the populations of farmed animals crater. They may not even have a chance to feralize. There is a very high risk farmed animal species go extinct.

In theory, cows could be raised for milk without slaughtering them,³ and chickens for eggs. But I love pigs. They are beautiful, intelligent, creative, dignified animals. And if the world goes the way I want, there is a very good chance these animals I love will vanish from the world.

If the only other option were factory farming, it would obviously be worth it: in Compassion by the Pound, agricultural economists F. Bailey Norwood and Jayson Lusk point out that farmers believe pigs are stupid slabs of meat because all farmed pigs grow up in such impoverished environments that they have severe intellectual disabilities. But… what if there were a third option? Would it be okay to kill pigs—after they lived a rich, happy, fulfilled life—if that was the only way pigs would continue to exist at all?

This argument is called the logic of the larder, it’s over a hundred years old, and I still don’t think vegans have a great response to it.

III.

Occasionally, my friends debate whether it would be okay to create house elves from Harry Potter. If you could, would it be okay to create a species that is emotionally dependent on humans, that has a strong innate drive to serve, that loves humans no matter how cruel or neglectful we are to them? Would it be okay to design a species to be our servants, if we knew that they would be happy doing what we told them to? If we could make them so that they chose to obey, so that leaving them without a master is wronging them? Or does the happiness make the situation more horrifying—a sentient species whose development is cut off, whose horizons are eternally lowered?

…yeah, that’s just dogs.⁴

This is the argument of vegan philosopher Gary Francione, an argument that I don’t agree with but that still troubles me. It is wrong to treat a sentient being—a being that reasons, that has an inner life, that has its own purposes separate from yours—as property. It’s not somehow better because the sentient being is different from you. It’s not better if they’re of an different sex, or race, or class, or nationality, and it’s not better if they’re of a different species.

We made sentient species that can really only exist as property; to a very real extent, that’s what domestication is. Some species, like chickens, would have trouble surviving on their own; others, like dogs, love their servitude. That doesn’t change the moral situation. Don’t create house elves. If someone created house elves, sterilize the house elves, so the species peacefully and painlessly goes extinct.

IV.

Why is death bad?

On some theories, death isn’t necessarily bad, but killing is bad. For example, killing another being might be treating them as a means rather than an end, or doing something to them that you wouldn’t want done to you, or being disrespectful of their dignity as a reasoning autonomous being. On some theist views, killing is wrong because it’s God’s job to decide when people’s lives end. On these views, killing animals is wrong,⁵ even if animal death isn’t necessarily wrong.

In the Epicurean view, death is not in and of itself bad. If you die, you don’t exist, so things can’t be good or bad for you. Death is bad (if it is) because it is bad for the people who still exist: most centrally because they grieve, but also because they were financially or emotionally dependent on you, because they were were looking forward to you recording your next album, or because they are worried the knife-wielding serial killer will get them next. The Epicurean view suggests that there’s nothing wrong with killing farmed animals, as long as we make sure we kill the entire social group so they don’t miss each other. It also suggests we’re maybe a bit precious about babies.

Many people (especially preference utilitarians) argue that death is bad because most beings strongly prefer not to die. This suggests that killing animals is prima facie wrong because nearly all animals fight to survive.⁶ Since individual animals (as opposed to genes) don’t generally seem to care much about species survival, we should let farmed animal species go extinct.

Another theory is that, since you can only have experiences if you’re alive, death is bad if your life would have more positive than negative experiences in it. On the simplest version of the theory, killing happy farmed animals is wrong, because you would be preventing them from having various happy future experiences. However, hunting might be all right, depending on whether the hunted animal’s life looks to be good or bad going forward.

Unfortunately, this theory runs straight into population ethics, notoriously one of the most complicated areas of ethical philosophy. If we don’t create the farmed animals, they will have no experiences whatsoever, because they don’t exist. Is it better to not exist, or to have a happy life tragically cut short? This is not a dilemma I am going to resolve in a blog post.

The theory that I like best I read about in Martha Nussbaum’s Justice for Animals. Nussbaum argues that humans usually have life projects, construed in the broadest possible sense. We cultivate friendships, raise children, get bachelor’s degrees, finish the big accounting project at work, write novels, set new personal bests for the marathon, travel the world, binge Supernatural, and try to collect every stamp put out in 1972. Death is bad because it disrupts our life projects.

I think this mostly tracks our intuitions about what makes death bad.⁷ When someone dies young, we often express our grief by talking about their unfinished life projects: they never got to go to college, or get married, or fulfill their dream of being a musician. Conversely, we aren’t necessarily that sad when an elderly person dies: we might say “well, it was her time.” The reason is not that ninety is Objectively The Correct Number Of Years, but that a lot of elderly people are sort of marking time: their spouses are dead, they’ve retired, they’ve lost the ability to participate in their hobbies, they don’t have any ongoing projects, they’re just kind of waiting for death. When these deaths are sad, it’s because they (say) never got to meet their grandkids—a life project!

What about animals? Young animals, Nussbaum argues, always have the life project of growing up—which also resolves the baby situation. You shouldn’t murder humans, even if they are very boring, because individual humans are the expert on whether reading A Song Of Ice And Fire is a sufficiently important life project to justify their continued existence.⁸ And it is clearly wrong to kill chimpanzees: you can’t ever be certain enough that you’re not disrupting their multiyear project to gather power and get revenge on That Other Damn Chimpanzee They Hate.

But it doesn’t seem wrong to kill shrimp. Shrimp are plausibly sentient, yes, but it seems unlikely that they have any life projects per se. They just swim around eating food and trying not to get eaten themselves. It seems fine to raise shrimp for food, as long as we ensure they have happy shrimpy lives.

—I do notice that this argument does not lead to the continued existence to the intelligent, creative animal species, which is the thing I actually care about. Maybe we could catch pigs in between life projects somehow?

VI.

The logic of the larder can seem like a very theoretical argument. Humane farming is mostly a lie. Nearly all farmed animals’ lives are not worth living. I don’t eat eggs, even though I don’t have any moral compunctions about the concept of eating eggs. It’s easy to dismiss this as ivory-tower philosophy irrelevant to animal advocacy.

However, some farmed animals, like beef cows, do plausibly have lives worth living. Others, like shrimp, could have lives worth living if raised properly. It’s an important question whether it’s all right (or even morally praiseworthy) to eat them. Similar issues come up with hunting. It’s plausible that human hunting trades off against more painful deaths like starvation or disease, at least sometimes. Should we avoid hunting because it’s always wrong to kill?

I don’t know. It disturbs me. I eat hunted meat, sometimes; I don’t eat beef; I don’t have a consistent argument for why I do one and not the other. If I had the space, I’d get a pet pig.

Maybe someday we’ll be rich enough to keep all the species of animals we’ve domesticated in luxury, even if we have nothing to gain from them. I am repelled by all the options for what to do until then.

1. I was particularly touched by the group-therapy scenes where people process having eaten meat. I felt it was a sensitive handling of the meat paradox, especially for such a silly movie.

2. I know it’s PETA, but this is actually a good overview.

3. If we could figure out how to get them to give milk without having yearly pregnancies.

4. Tangent: this short story, which is positive on the existence of dogs, is excellent.

5. Well, okay, the theist argument depends on what God thinks of humans killing animals.

6. You could of course argue that farmed animals don’t really understand death, so they can’t prefer to be alive, but that raises some questions about babies.

7. I also find it amusing that your death is somewhat less bad if you happen to be a very boring person.

8. I think this argument does suggest that medical assistance in dying should be more widely available, including for people who don’t necessarily have particularly bad lives but are just done.