[content warning: discussion of murdering babies, use of disabled people in philosophy thought experiments]
The Logic of the Larder
One important issue for effective animal altruists is the logic of the larder. The argument goes like this: if farmed animal lives are worth living, then it is good to eat meat, because if you eat lots of meat then more farmed animals will exist and live happy lives. Advocates for the welfare of farmed animals should encourage people to eat more meat to cause more happy animals to come into being.
In most cases, farmed animal lives are unpleasant enough that the logic of the larder doesn’t apply. Their lives are not worth living, so it’s good not to eat animal products. However, in some cases– such as cows raised for beef, or Certified Humane chickens– some reasonable and thoughtful people argue that the farmed animals’ lives are worth living. In those cases, the logic of the larder suggests, effective animal advocates should eat more meat.
The Baby Farm
Imagine that, among very wealthy people, there is a new fad for eating babies. Out baby farmer is an ethical person and he wants to make sure that his babies are farmed as ethically as possible. The babies are produced through artificial wombs; there are no adults who are particularly invested in the babies’ continued life. The babies are slaughtered at one month, well before they have long-term plans and preferences that are thwarted by death. In their one month of life, the babies have the happiest possible baby life: they are picked up immediately whenever they cry, they get lots of delicious milk, they’re held and rocked and sung to, their medical concerns are treated quickly, and they don’t ever have to sit in a poopy diaper. In every way, they live as happy and flourishing a life as a two-week-old baby can. Is the baby farm unethical?
If you’re like me, the answer is a quick “yes.”
My intuition suggests three things. First, it is a harm– at least to some beings– to kill them. That is, I do not adopt the Epicurean position that the only harm of death comes from the grief other people feel, your unfulfilled plans, etc., none of which apply to the one-year-old babies in the baby farm. You might say that some beings have “a right to life.”
Second, my intuition is not a speciesist intuition. My intuition suggests we should also not farm Vulcan babies, orc babies, house elf babies, Twi’lek babies, or chimpanzee babies. Therefore, my intuition is not grounded in the fact that babies are members of the human species per se.
Third, the “right to life” does not depend on certain sophisticated cognitive capacities unique (or allegedly unique) to the human species, such as autonomy, practical reason, a capacity to form relationships with other beings, awareness of oneself as a subject of mental states, desires and plans for the future, the capacity to bargain, an understanding of one’s duties and responsibilities, etc. One-month-olds are pretty stupid and do not have any of these capacities.
I am horrified by the idea of a baby farm. I am not horrified by the idea of a beef cow farm. Perhaps I am being inconsistent and speciesist; whatever it is about babies that makes it wrong to murder them is perhaps also true of cows, except that I grew up in a society that undervalues beef cow lives, so I undervalue them as well. Conversely, perhaps my judgment of the baby farm is influenced by morally irrelevant factors, like it being very disgusting, and perhaps it is ethical to raise babies for meat.
Incompletely Realized Sophisticated Cognitive Capacities
I believe the solution here is that the right to life comes from certain incompletely realized sophisticated cognitive capacities. What does this mean?
Adult humans without certain disabilities have various sophisticated cognitive capacities, which I listed off a few paragraphs ago. It is not necessary right now to determine which ones give you a right to life. To have concrete examples, I’m going to talk about practical reason (the ability to understand the good for yourself, set goals and create plans, and reflect on your goals and plans) and affiliation (social interaction, putting yourself in other people’s shoes, and love and care for others). But this is purely for illustration and the argument works the same whatever capacities you use.
I will use the terminology “threshold capacity for practical reason and affiliation” as a shorthand for “sufficient capacity for practical reason and affiliation that we believe that you have a ‘right to life.'” It does not matter, for the sake of this argument, what threshold you adopt, assuming that you agree that nearly all adult humans are above the threshold. I believe that most people agree.
It is reasonable to believe that neither babies nor cows have a threshold capacity for affiliation and practical reason. A cow may very well have more capacity for practical reason than a newborn baby. But that doesn’t mean that their position with regards to capacities are the same. A cow has all of the capacities it is ever going to have; it has fully developed cow capacities. A baby has incompletely developed adult human capacities. When a newborn baby cries until it is picked up, or recognizes the face of its parents, that is the beginning of a human ability for affiliation. When a newborn baby waves its arms in front of its eyes, is delighted by the movement, and repeats it, that is the beginning of a human ability for practical reason. We consider not just what the baby is able to do but what its abilities are incomplete fragments of.
As an analogy, consider the difference between a blind person and a blind cave tetra. A blind cave tetra does not have eyes; it does not have any capacity to see in any form. Blind people, on the other hand, have an incomplete form of the capacity to see, in the sense we’re using it here. This has real, concrete effects. A blind person generally has eyes, eyelashes, eyebrows, a visual cortex, and so on. Most legally blind people have at least some vision, such as the ability to perceive light. Some blind people can respond to stimuli they don’t consciously see. Blind people repurpose the visual cortex of the brain to handle language. A blind person and a blind cave tetra may have an equal ability to see, but their situations are concretely different, because a blind cave tetra is not the sort of being that sees at all, while a blind person can has much of the equipment generally associated with seeing.
Running through a list of hard problems, I believe this rule gives satisfactory results. (Again, I use “practical reason” and “affiliation” merely as examples.)
Vulcans, house elves, Twi’leks, and orcs? All capable of affiliation and practical reason, and therefore have a right to life.
Sufficiently advanced artificial intelligences? Capable of affiliation and practical reason, have a right to life.
Fetuses? It is difficult to decide when a fetus begins to have the capacity for affiliation and practical reason, even in an incomplete form. There is little opportunity to plan one’s life in the womb, and it can be difficult to distinguish reflex behavior from complex planning. Nevertheless, it is important to be very very conservative about committing murder; if your plan involves even a one percent chance of killing a person, you shouldn’t do it unless you have a very very good reason. For this reason, society should improve access to highly reliable contraceptives and provide poor and single parents the support they need to avoid abortion. Abortion regulations should be considered thoughtfully, balancing the bodily autonomy of pregnant people with the potential right to life of the fetus. Abortion regulations that lead to later abortions (for example, waiting periods) should be avoided, because they increase the chance that the abortion is murder.
People with impairments in their capacities for practical reason and affiliation? This is a complicated issue and there are several possible considerations. In many cases, impaired people can exercise a threshold capacity for practical reason and affiliation if provided with appropriate support. For example, the vast majority of autistic people are capable of understanding other people with appropriate supports, such as clearly written explanations of things that neurotypicals understand instinctively. Similarly, intellectually disabled people can almost always set life goals, but may need supported decision making. In rare cases, a human may unambiguously not have any capacity for practical reason or affiliation, even in an incomplete form, as in babies with anencephaly; in this case, the human would have no right to life.
Some disabled people will have partial or incomplete capacities. This case is similar to the case of the blind person: while the blind person cannot see, and certain disabled people cannot affiliate at the threshold level, in either case the disabled person has these capacities in an incomplete form. Finally, it is very very common among the severely disabled that we can’t know whether a person has the threshold capacity. Consider a person with total locked-in syndrome: they may be able to reason or affiliate, but if they cannot communicate, how can we know? It can be very difficult to assess the true abilities of nonspeaking disabled people or disabled people with severe motor control issues. For this reason, it is important to be conservative and extend the right to life very widely.
Animals? The threshold capacity is, by stipulation, placed at a point where nearly all adult humans pass it. How many animal species have a right to life will depend on what the threshold capacity should be, which is a subject that is too large to discuss in this blog post.
It seems unlikely that there are no species in which certain gifted members have threshold-passing capacities (or an incomplete form of the same) and others do not. In theory, if we had perfect knowledge, the right to life would be correlated with species but not determined by it, as in general beings have the capacities of other members of their species. In practice, except in extremely unusual cases such as anencephaly, a conservative approach suggests that we should extend the right to life to all members of a species of which at least one member has demonstrated threshold-passing capacities.
For my part, the baby farm doesn’t seem obviously unethical? Like, it would be bad if the alternative to killing the babies were continuing to give them happy lives for the remainder of their un-interfered-with lifespans, but given the incentives at play, the choice isn’t between the farm raising a long-lived happy baby or a killed-at-a-month-of-age happy baby; it’s between the farm raising no baby at all or a killed-at-a-month-of-age happy baby. And, while a month of happy life is obviously worse than many years of happy life, it seems equally obviously better to me than no life at all, much as my own probably-not-much-longer-than-a-hundred-years happy life is obviously better than no life at all. So, if anything, I’d say that the farm is actively doing a moral good by bringing about month-long happy lives which wouldn’t otherwise have gotten to occur.
LikeLike
Some thought experiments with this concept:
Suppose there are two alien species, As and Bs. Both species are near-identical mentally in the first year of their life, and are well below threshold-passing capacity. Individuals of species A mature after one year to eventually have subjective experience and capacities similar to that of an adult human. Individuals of species B remain at a similar level throughout their life, analogous to cows. As I understand the argument here, a one-year-old A has a right to life, while a one-year-old B does not, even though they exhibit identical mental function.
Suppose that instead As and Bs are in fact two variants of the same species, and whether an individual becomes an A after age 1 or not is a consequence of exposure to a certain hormone in the first year of life. Does a member of this species which has not yet been exposed to the hormone have a right to life until 1 year, at which point it loses the right once it is no longer possible to become threshold-crossing? Does the fact that it ever had this capacity mean that all Bs still have a right to life?
What if the intervention to provide greater capacity is more invasive? How do we draw the line between “exposure to a hormone” and “intelligence enhancement so radical that it could grant a cow sapience”? (It’s admittedly unclear how the latter would work, but it seems at least plausible that such a thing could happen.)
I don’t have a lot of intuition here myself, as I’m in the “baby farms are probably ethical up to issues of norm erosion” camp. But I’m in that camp at least partly because I feel like there aren’t very principled ways to draw right-to-life lines that include babies, so I’m curious how this sort of rule behaves in weird cases.
LikeLiked by 1 person
More thought experiments on the theme:
What if we have 100 individuals of the sapience-granted-by-hormone species, but the only possible hormone source is 10 doses? How does that affect things, both before and after we distribute the doses?
What if sapience-granting is immoral (there’s a species where you have to kill someone and feed their soul to a baby for it to develop)?
Suppose we give a cow some magic sapience juice, but wears off in an hour. Does that diminish its moral worth while it is sapient?
LikeLiked by 1 person
Well, using the Scarrans as an example, you keep them from destroying the universe.
LikeLike
It seems more plausible to me that the baby farm isn’t a rights violation than that animals have a right to life.
A right is a legitimate claim against others, and depends on agents having a reason to accept it. So it can’t be grounded in the moral patient’s properties alone (whether that’s mental capacity or anything else), but also requires some relation to the rights-respecting agent. So if there were a very powerful and self-sufficient alien who enjoyed torturing and/or hunting humans, they’d have no reason to be agree to be bound by humans having rights, so we wouldn’t have rights with respect to the alien. For a similar reason, animals (and babies) don’t have rights against us.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Counterpoint: I value babies not-being-killed and would retaliate against the babyfarmers the same way I would if they were attempting to kill me. I am approximately certain that I am not the only person who holds this position. Therefore, even granting your framing of rights for the sake of argument, the agent does have a reason to respect the rights of babies.
(Or, in fewer words: I refuse to sign any social contract to which babies are not treated as signatories.)
LikeLike
Having an other-regarding preference towards babies isn’t enough to grant rights to them. Compare to someone who really likes rocks and finds crushing them to be really objectionable – rocks still wouldn’t have rights.
LikeLike
@blacktrance
But most people regard a lack of anti-rock-crushing preference as normal whereas a lack of anti-baby-killing preference is widely considered at least abnormal and often reprehensible.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Given the variance in what’s been regarded as normal and abnormal, that’s not much of a guide. And at most, it’s a guide to what people regard as wrong, not to what’s actually wrong.
LikeLike
If you’re disregarding what people regard as wrong as evidence, what is your basis for concluding that things are actually wrong?
LikeLike
That question is only a few grades less general than “Why do you believe everything you believe?”, so a proper answer is beyond the scope of a blog comment. But as far as rights are concerned, I’m a contractarian. Contractarianism’s derivation of rights is independent of commonsense beliefs about right and wrong, so where they disagree, that doesn’t count against it, and where they agree, it’s mostly a happy coincidence.
LikeLike
“and depends on agents having a reason to accept it”: I’m offering these agents a reason to accept it. Why must the reason solely stem from the capabilities of the persons in question?
LikeLike
If they agreed, they’d be giving in to extortion. If they’re trading the freedom to kill for a freedom to not be killed themselves, that’s reciprocal, but demanding people to bind themselves with your other-regarding preferences goes beyond that.
LikeLike
> If you’re like me, the answer is a quick “yes.”
Huh, I was definitely expecting this sentence to end in “no”, which seems like the obviously right answer to me. The world would be brighter with more happy babies in it even if those babies were not going to mature into people.
LikeLike
See I just see your blind cave tetra example and I’m just like, I bet most of the structure for seeing is still there and it’d only take a few genetic tweaks (or bodily alterations) to reactivate it! Systems once evolved don’t tend to vanish entirely AFAIAA, and even then not in the genes; and this allows one to reactivate them, with the rest of the body already prepared to integrate the result, rather than having to reconstruct them from scratch and, worse, manually integrate it with the rest of the body. So, while I’m not at all confident that “incompletely realized capacities” is a meaningful category, if we accept the category I’m not sure I’d say that the blind tetra’s sight isn’t one…
LikeLike
Well, this is literally the intuition that the word “speciesist” was coined to describe.
LikeLike
If they’re horrified by the idea of a baby Twi’lek farm, or Vulcans eating babies, then it’s not really speciesism.
LikeLike
Even if Twi’lek or Vulcans are not technically human, they’re extremely similar to humans in terms of both appearance and behavior, enough that a speciesist pro-human intuition would automatically extend to them as well. Most alien species are created to be very human-like for this reason: because of speciesism, it’s easier for most people to empathize with what is basically a pointy-eared, logical human than it is to empathize with a squid-like alien that communicates entirely through ink-splatters, even if the squid is equally intelligent. (Heck, Vulcans can interbreed with humans so under some definitions they’d be part of the same species anyway.)
Also they’re fictional so I don’t know how relevant it is to use them as examples. How people relate to fictional entities is different in many ways from how they relate to real-life entities.
LikeLiked by 1 person
@Hyzenthlay
I suspect Ozy would have similar intuitions about ugly, nonhumanoid aliens like the Pierson’s Puppeteer, the Mesklinites, or the Tandu. And they did mention chimpanzees, which are totally real and are at least as inhuman-looking as orcs.
I suspect Ozy’s intuition is something like “It is wrong to kill something that has traits that will eventually grow into the traits that compose and intelligent creature if you do the bare minimum to keep it alive and healthy.”
LikeLike
Under the “me = my memory” theory of identity, baby farms are probably ethical because prior to a certain age not only episodic, but any memories are completely lost, and there’s no continuation of self between them and even toddlers, leave alone adults. So for ethical purposes, they’re all gonna die soon anyway, which substantially reduces the badness of killing. A more guaranteed way to make it ethical would be to keep them on drugs that prevent the formation of long-term memories, and the rest depends on how similar or dissimilar memory suppression vs no memory suppression is. Note that this is different from the epicurean approach because “the capacity to form the continuation of consciousness” is a far lower bar to pass than “having hopes and dreams”, and in all likelihood, adult cows are more capable of the former than newborns are.
LikeLike
I’m not convinced this isn’t a general anti-abortion argument. As I understand it, you’re drawing a distinction between babies and fetuses (before some point at least) because the former have incomplete capacity whereas the latter have none at all. But sleeping adults also have no capacity.
LikeLike
This reminded me of Tooley’s famous kittens paper, which is of course one of the things mentioned in the bibliography of the SEP article Ozy links to. There seem to be good reasons to count those whose capacity has been temporarily interrupted as still having the relevant rights, and equally good reasons not to count those with some potential to develop such a capacity in the remote future; the cases are not parallel. Tooley’s paper is here: https://eclass.uoa.gr/modules/document/file.php/PPP504/Michael%20Tooley,%20Abortion%20and%20infanticide.pdf
LikeLike
Yes, Ozy’s argument is very similar to Tooley’s “conservative’s defence” on page 55:
“The conservative’s defense will rest upon the following two claims: first, that there is a property, even if one is unable to specify what it is, that (i) is possessed by adult humans, and (ii) endows any organism possessing it with a serious right to life. Second, that if there are properties which satisfy (i) and (ii) above, at least one of those properties will be such that any organism potentially possessing that property has a serious right to life even now, simply by virtue of that potentiality, where an organism possesses a property potentially if it will come to have that property in the normal course of its development.”
I don’t find his attack on it very convincing though:
“In short, anyone who wants to defend the potentiality principle must either argue against the moral symmetry principle or hold that in a world in which kittens could be transformed into “rational animals” it would be seriously wrong to kill newborn kittens.”
I think the latter claim is very reasonable, and I expect a lot of people would agree.
Going back to your original point: I don’t think Tooley does provide good reasons to ascribe sleeping people rights. He basically admits this: “Situations such as these strongly suggest that even if an individual doesn’t want something, it is still possible to violate his right to it. Some modification of the earlier account of the concept of a right thus seems in order. … Precisely how the revised analysis should be formulated is unclear.”. In the next paragraph, he seems to be implying a distinction where sleeping people have “conceptual capability” and fetuses and infants don’t. But as I see it, this distinction needs to be justified by an actual “revised analysis”, not just the suggestion that one exists.
LikeLike
I am confused as to why any analysis is necessary beyond ethical intuitions. If you are relying on your ethical intuitions for your ethics, what more is needed? Intuitions are not facts. They are not rational beliefs. They are just feelings. If your ethics are based on your feelings, then why not just conclude that what is right is just what feels good?
In other words, if your ethical intuitions say that baby farms are wrong, doesn’t that just tautologically mean that in your ethical system, baby farms are wrong? How does one falsify an intuition?
LikeLiked by 1 person
“They are not rational beliefs.”
Precisely, which is why the answer to “if your ethical intuitions say that baby farms are wrong, doesn’t that just tautologically mean that in your ethical system, baby farms are wrong?” is no. Looking at the checker shadow illusion (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Checker_shadow_illusion) causes an intuition that squares A and B are a different colour, but (at least after reflection) that will not be your belief. Intuitions inform moral beliefs but (in most meta-ethical systems) they aren’t equivalent.
LikeLike
See 1.2 and 1.3 here: https://web.archive.org/web/20161115073538/http://raikoth.net/consequentialism.html
LikeLike
I always think a threshold is suspicious and needs solid justification when compared to a gradient. This situation screams gradient to me. Some animals may not have ‘practical reason’ typically, aside from certain outstanding individuals – I would take that as solid evidence that most of the species members are close to having practical reason.
This makes it natural to say that cows lives don’t matter exactly as much as human lives, but nonetheless do matter.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Pingback: Rational Feed – deluks917
There are differences in the cognitive capacities of humans and animals, sure, but it’s not clear to me why that matters in determining whether they have some right to life.
It seems like a more plausible explanation — with fewer hoops to jump through — is that an ethical farm of beef cattle is also immoral. And I think the intuition that that’s not morally wrong may simply be cultural — because my intuition is that euthanizing large numbers of cattle that are not suffering is morally wrong as well, and that includes beef farms with minimal animal abuse.
LikeLike
Also, as far as moral intuitions go, a useful exercise would be to substitute “beef cattle” with “dogs.” I suspect most people’s moral intuitions would change with that substitution.
LikeLike
Maybe I’m a horrible person and/or something is wrong with me, but I don’t see the baby farm as all that bad? Babies aren’t people. They’re potential people, sure, but if no one is attached to them (I would include any caretakers in this) then… I don’t care? The main problem with it is efficiency. We don’t farm predators because raising them takes more meat than you generally get out of them. I guess if it’s a rich-people fad that doesn’t matter as much, but humans are still expensive to manufacture, especially compared to cows, which can figure out how to feed themselves by the time they’re a few hours old and can live entirely on grass.
LikeLike
No way you came up with those distinctions first and then happily found out they came out to condemn all the things that would get you in trouble for agreeing we can kill babies or the disabled but not fetuses. Seems to me like you decided where you wanted to draw a line and looked for even a weak excuse to draw it there.
I don’t find that an epistemically useful approach but I realize some do (and I don’t mean to sound harsh here just on mobile).
I’m down with biting the bullet on baby farm.
LikeLike
Why do you think biting the bullet on the baby farm is a better option than accepting the possibility that cattle have a right to life?
LikeLike
Pingback: Egoism in Disguise | Living Within Reason
Just for the record, I’m okay with the baby farm. I wouldn’t donate to it, but I wouldn’t work to prevent it either.
2004-me would be shocked by this and think something has gone wrong. But 2019-me is convinced they simply thought it through more. It’s probably not a coincidence that 2004-me was a vegetarian and 2019-me isn’t.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Reblogged this on Autism Candles.
LikeLike