Pets deserve more than livestock

Contra Bentham's Bulldog on dogs vs. chickens

This AI pig’s nipples make me kind of uncomfortable

This essay is a response to an article by recent podcast guest Bentham’s Bulldog, entitled Noem and Factory Farming.

In this piece Bentham’s Bulldog (henceforth BB), who is a vegan and stalwart advocate of animal rights, argues that it’s hypocritical to oppose killing an aggressive farm dog while regularly consuming the flesh of animals raised in factory farms:

Most people think one shouldn’t kill a dog unless the situation is really desperate…Yet most of these people eat meat, and kill hundreds of animals a year for the sake of taste pleasure. You can condemn Noem or you can defend the eating of animals, but you cannot do both.

The pigs that adorn the plates of the typical meat-eater are, in fact, smarter than dogs. The chickens, cows, and turkeys that one stuffs their face with can suffer. And unlike Noem’s dog, the animals on factory farm endure grueling conditions. They have no semblance of a life beneath the cruel walls of the factory farm.

He describes the hellish conditions of these farms in visceral detail:

Chickens that lay eggs spend their entire lives in tiny cages unable to turn around, with the feces of their fellows piling up around them, burning their legs and feed. They stand on sharp wire meshing all the time, leading to ubiquitous agony and foot injuries. Their beaks are sliced off with a knife.

The chickens reared for meat spend their entire lives in sheds with cruel, artificial lighting that leads to chronic sleep deprivation. They’re surrounded with shit and ammonia—two incredibly foul-smelling substances. They have no ability to play or do anything that might bring them joy, and face similar mutilation.

…the basic point is clear: we inflict unimaginable, unspeakable cruelty on around 90 billion animals every year. The animals we factory farm endure conditions that we would not hesitate to call torture if inflicted on either human or dog. And yet despite that, despite paying for animals to rot in filth and feces-ridden cages, we have the audacity to act like we care about animals.

BB then concludes his piece by demanding that readers who consider themselves animal lovers morally reckon with the horrors of industrial meat production:

There is a contradiction at the heart of the way we treat animals…. when one realizes that every time one eats an animal, they are inflicting incalculable cruelty upon animals, their love of animals is in sharp conflict with their love of meat. This produces desperate contortions and rationalizations—one cannot consistently defend eating meat in normal conditions while also holding that cruelty to animals is wrong.

There are various topics where the middle-ground position is completely untenable… One must either consistently hold that animals don’t matter at all, that it would be fine to burn live cats for fuel, or hold that they do matter and that our current practices of eating meat from tortured animals is deeply wrong… If one really thinks we shouldn’t kill animals absent a very good reason, then they must support a complete overhaul of the great juggernauts of doom known as factory farms, that dispense blood, destruction, and flesh.

This is a powerful argument we should grapple with seriously. But I suspect most meat-eaters will either concede the point while refusing to change their behavior, or will just reject it out of chuddish bigotry while sending BB blurry jpegs of hamburgers.

I’m instead going to advance a good faith argument against BB’s thesis, because I believe he’s wrong in an interesting and important way.

I also think I have some unique insights into the topic, because fifteen years ago I was saying all the same things as him.

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I’ve always liked animals a lot more than people. So much so that in my youth I was a vegan for about a year, and then a vegetarian for about five or six years after that.

I embraced this lifestyle for basically the same reasons as BB. I simply took the suffering of animals seriously, and after looking at the statistics on factory farms and truly internalizing the enormous scale of suffering that occurs on a daily basis, it seemed to me that animal rights was the single most pressing issue of our age.

For most of my teenage years I was incredibly sanctimonious about this sentiment, because I viewed the consumption of animal flesh as trivially indistinct from murder. For several years in a row I proudly ruined my family’s Thanksgiving celebrations and got into screaming matches with older relatives. And I genuinely despised meat eaters—much more so than I ever resented other races when I was a white nationalist.

Eventually I toned it down, but I always retained a pretty violent disdain for people who don’t consider animals morally important. In freshman year of high school I regularly get into physical altercations with normie chud kids who mocked my animal rights activism. This is a big reason why I decided to drop out and homeschool myself.

Even as I gradually slid to the right during my college years, animal rights remained a huge wedge issue for me. It made conservative politics completely unpalatable even as I increasingly detested the anti-white and anti-male attitudes of modern academia.

Things changed around nineteen or twenty when I started getting into right libertarianism, which at the time was heavily associated with the Paleo lifestyle. This was a more masculine and vitalist framework than vegetarianism, but it left a lot of space for caring about animal welfare, since many Paleos (especially among libertarians, who tend to be spergy moral contrarians) emphatically reject factory farming for free range / pastured / hunted meat.

So for the next few years I started eating meat again, but only the fairly expensive ethically raised shit from Whole Foods. Then around ~22 I gradually started consuming cowschwitz flesh again, for the first time in about a decade.

This final evolution was driven entirely by moral laziness. From 21-23 I basically saw the pigs and chickens on factory farms as morally identical to my own cats and dog, who I very genuinely loved like children. But only consuming ethically sourced meat was simply becoming too inconvenient, too expensive, and too socially isolating, and I simply enjoyed the taste (and relative protein density) of meat too much to give it up.

I was willing to make my peace with what I considered to be a monstrously evil regime, simply because seriously confronting it had become a giant pain in the ass. It’s easy to take an uncompromising and radical stand when you’re a weird autistic teenager with no friends and basically nothing to lose, but as your social circle expands and you make your way in the world, that starts to become a lot harder.

Is holding true to your principles and standing up to a regime you can’t fix worth becoming “that guy” by turning down a hot dog at a company outing? Is it worth alienating your girlfriend’s family by refusing to bond with her dad over the grill?

These are very real questions I had to grapple with as a young man, and on each occasion it seemed obvious to soften my beliefs and take the diplomatic route.

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One reason for this is that adopting a hard line on factory farms also forces you to reckon with the countless other exploitative regimes undergirding western man’s constant influx of dopamine cummies.

We all know our phones and shoes and dragon dildos are made by orphans in contemptible Thai sweatshops who are only there because it's better than subsistence farming or prostituting themselves to seedy Australian expats. We all know half the girls on Pornhub are being sex trafficked or controlled with drugs. We all know that rock on our honey’s engagement ring was extracted at gunpoint by a six year-old in Sierra Leone who’s probably since become a child soldier in some warlord’s posse.

But no one gives a fuck.

Obviously most educated people have one or two pet issues where they try to abstain from unethically sourced whatever, but rejecting EVERYTHING produced in an evil way just makes you a tiresome weirdo most people will avoid. And I’d argue that it’s simply impossible to do this under modern capitalism, or really any economic system that relies on massive economies of scale. And that’s because out of sight is out of mind.

The human brain is still basically neolithic, and can only conceive of a small village worth of people as actually being distinct persons. Anyone and anything outside of this sphere is purely an abstraction until either A) they become personally salient to you; or B) you choose to adopt a religious / ideological structure that attaches you to them via some imagined arbitrary ingroup (think “Americans”, “Christendom”, “the sisterhood”, “the White Race”, or “conscious beings capable of suffering”).

Pretty much everyone is aware of mass exploitation, but life is simply too exhausting and complex for anyone to seriously mobilize in opposition until said exploitation hurts a member of their ideological ingroup or starts impacting them personally. Consider how Antebellum Yankees basically ignored slavery when it massively enriched the Boston textile mills, and then suddenly turned against it once they had to compete with southern planters for the best land in Kansas and Missouri. Or consider how lots of dudebros who probably roofied girls at frat parties will have a daughter and suddenly start to adopt all kinds of feminist sensibilities about consent.

Understand this isn’t some cynical take that people are bad or evil. In my experience most people are very concerned about doing right by their friends, family, coworkers, and anyone part of their ideological ingroup.

But giving a shit beyond this is absolutely exhausting and most people don’t really have the resources or energy to do so.

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Before we delve further into this issue, I should clarify some broad philosophical differences between Bentham’s Bulldog and myself.

When it comes to meta-ethics, BB is a moral realist, which means he thinks some moral claims are objectively true. I am what I would call a moral intersubjectivist, which means I think moral claims are true to the extent we implicitly agree they’re true.

As I understand him (he can of course correct me if I’m wrong), BB believes in moral realism because of an intuition (or intellectual appearance) that certain moral claims are true independent of anyone’s opinion. I am unsatisfied with this explanation because it gives no account of the origin of moral truths and is unfalsifiable.

Moral realism only makes sense to me when derived from the scripture of an organized religion like Christianity that specifies a clear metaphysical origin for moral truths. BB is a theist, but he doesn’t specify God as the source of his objective moral principles. In his podcast episode with me he says they don’t have a source.

But if something doesn’t have a source, and you believe it exists primarily because of an intuition, it sounds to me like you’re kinda just making it up.

And that’s basically my take on morality—it’s made up. But I’m an intersubjectivist and not a moral nihilist (let alone something really autistic like a non-cognitivist) because I don’t see moral claims as merely frivolous opinions or expressions of sentiment. To me a statement like “torturing babies is wrong” is analogous to modus ponens or the transitive property. Just as those are necessary axioms for thought, “don’t torture babies” is an essential rule for an orderly and peaceful civilization.

Moral principles are not “real,” because they don’t exist in the physical universe, but they sort of “exist by definition,” just like intersubjectively defined concepts / forms like “chair” and “mountain” and “big tiddy goth gf,” which we arbitrarily impose upon patterned amalgamations of quarks in the physical universe.

In other words, moral claims are true to the extent society intersubjectively agrees they are true. And by that token, some things like “torturing babies is wrong” will basically always be true, and on these topics moral realism and intersubjectivism look functionally identical. On the Torturing Babies Question, BB and I shall be eternally aligned, and this generally applies to most of the obvious big ticket items like murder, rape, and ethnic cleansing.

But a substantive disagreement emerges when we discuss common moral dilemmas, which are practically inevitable given the enormous differences observed in the public’s moral foundations. The research of Jonathan Haidt and others clearly shows that liberals, conservatives, and libertarians all have substantially different fundamental moral values. And among intelligent people, this is virtually always the primary cause of downstream policy disagreements on issues like abortion.

Take the statement “abortion is wrong”. A moral nihilist will say it’s false because all moral claims are retarded woo. A moral realist will have some purportedly objective criterion whereby this statement can be assessed. A moral relativist will say the statement is true or false depending on some greater social context.

An intersubjectivist will say it’s true to the extent there’s social alignment in that direction, but will understand intrasocietal moral controversy as more a question of brute power in which different factions with intractably opposed moral intuitions driven by largely genetic temperamental differences will try to bigotedly impose their will on each other, but may occasionally reach some compromise for practical grillpill purposes.

This framework provides a robust basis for building coalitions with people who don’t share your own moral intuitions because it accepts that moral disagreements stem from mostly temperamental factors beyond one’s control. This facilitates a more practical realpolitik attitude towards organizing society than BB’s moral realism.

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One major tension in BB’s worldview is that he justifies a lot of his beliefs on the basis of intuition—things seem to be such and such way—while also adopting a lot of moral views that normies would find weird or odious.

I personally don’t like arguing with people based on my own intuitions, unless said intuitions are so aggressively conventional and universal in their appeal that rejecting them would make my interlocutor seem like a retarded psycho. But even then most people won’t bite the bullet and do this, so intuitive arguments are generally not effective in debates. It’s almost always far better to argue with people from their own moral / ideological premises, or by making a callous appeal to their self interest.

And to be fair, BB has an exceptional talent for rhetoric, and is good at reaching people where they are. But some of his positions are weird and hard to defend.

This is because he subscribes to an ethical view called Act Utilitarianism, which says an action is morally correct if it produces the greatest utility (think the presence of happiness and absence of pain) for the greatest number of conscious beings. This sort of thinking is of course associated with the Effective Altruist (EA) movement, which famously tries to get people to be more impactful with their charitable giving by donating to causes with a greater utilitarian ROI, such as investing in malaria nets for impoverished and highly exposed African populations.

Utilitarianism rubs a lot of people the wrong way, and one reason for this is that it gives virtually no weight to proximity or moral particularism based around a tribal ingroup preference. Its most famous advocate is Peter Singer, who famously argued that affluent westerners should donate far more of their income to charity, including to initiatives aimed at alleviating third world poverty:

“It makes no moral difference whether the person I can help is a neighbor's child ten yards from me or a Bengali whose name I shall never know, ten thousand miles away.”

This attitude will immediately strike most people as absurd, and I share that view.

Almost everyone on the planet has an overpowering and deeply primordial intuition that we all share a sacred duty to take care of “our own” over “outsiders”. This is a deeply prosocial impulse, because it’s impossible to pool resources and coordinate actions at scale without forming exclusive institutions along some friend-enemy distinction. This tribal distinction is also how we adjudicate social tensions and conflicts over shared resources between different factions and interest groups.

Humanity will—very thankfully—never become an undifferentiated mass of fungible moral agents subject to a genuinely universal ethical system, because nobody feels any real loyalty to the species as a whole (other than 40k LARPers on reddit). And it’s very doubtful anyone will until intelligent extraterrestrial life is discovered.

Most people are instead loyal to an ingroup comprising several concentric circles of intimacy, with the nuclear family as the central institution, and then a Dunbar’s Number-sized “village” of friends / extended family as the wider core, and finally a broader and more abstract “ideological ingroup” based on national / racial / religious affiliation as the outermost Matryoshka Doll.

It basically works like this:

The tribal instinct is generally stronger in conservatives than in liberals, stronger in nonwhites than in whites, and stronger in trans-Hajnal whites than cis-Hajnal whites.

It is dismissed as churlish in elite circles, but these elites typically have the same basic impulse—they just see other cosmopolitan / globalist internationalists as their “ideological ingroup” instead of their countrymen / coethnics / coreligionists.

I suspect that Utilitarians who genuinely believe things like Singer’s quote about the Bengali kid typically come from highly cosmopolitan demographic cohorts that are mostly disconnected from the concerns and interests of the greater public. These cohorts have outsized power, and can certainly overrule prole tribalism most the time. But that’s precisely how you get dangerous retards like Trump coming into power.

Instead of trying to force a cosmopolitan ethic on the proles, it would be better if these elites simply encouraged more agentic proles to take care of their neighbors.

When you tell the chuds in Wyoming to donate to Africa, they’re just going to laugh at you. Tell them to help their local tweakers and they’ll probably give it some thought.

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One reason almost nobody is a doctrinaire utilitarian is that everyone can easily think of a million thought experiments where maximizing general utility might cause you to break morally particularist loyalties in some obviously unacceptable way.

For instance, say The Joker kidnaps your kid. and also two rando stranger kids, and then forces you to choose to between your kid dying and the other two.

Obviously over 90% of people would say that someone should choose to protect their own child because they have some special moral obligation there. The idea is there’s something primordial and existentially significant about being a parent that means you always have a pressing obligation to protect your kid. But you’d probably have smaller majorities agreeing to the same idea in regards to friendship and nationality.

I don’t see how you can make purist utilitarianism practically workable in this situation. To me a moral philosophy is untenable if you can’t devise an incentive structure around it that doesn’t horribly contravene everyone’s basic intuitions, a lot of which stem from our incredibly tribal neolithic lizard brain.

If you don’t account for ingroup preference your morality is just LARPing and is completely unworkable in the real world.

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And now, at long last, we’ll return to animals.

My basic contention in opposition to BB’s thesis is that mankind actually has a special moral relationship with certain animals—most notably dogs and cats, and to a lesser extent horses. This relationship entails a more substantial obligation to these creatures that doesn’t exist for livestock animals like cows, pigs, and chickens.

It’s important to recognize how deep our connection is with the animals we love most. We domesticated dogs 30,000 years ago, back in the ooga booga paleolithic era, to help chase down game and serve as crucial nighttime guardians. Then as humanity began to put down roots in the early neolithic, our feline friends domesticated us, clearing our granaries of vermin and keeping us free of disease. Then a few thousand years later we domesticated horses, first using them to carry us by chariot and then gradually breeding them over many generations to accommodate us on their backs. It goes without saying this increase in mobility was an enormous force multiplier.

Dogs, cats, and horses were always treated with a lot more respect than other animals because they were useful for what they could do rather than what they could provide.

And that’s a big reason there’s such a huge stigma around eating them. It’s not just because we love them—it’s because they were historically seen as useful tools. Eating a horse would be like dismantling your Subaru for scrap metal. It seems really retarded and barbaric—a horrible waste of a useful asset.

The sentimental attitude we display towards our pets today is mostly a postwar thing, and in premodern times was mostly confined to very wealthy people. But it’s worth noting that as life has grown more comfortable and more urban over the past few centuries, we’ve been breeding our domestic pet animals (dogs in particular) to be a lot softer and cuddlier than they used to be. I think this, too, is a good argument for giving them some special moral status.

Modern dogs and cats are basically hyper-neotenous cuddle machines that we’ve selectively bred to be eternal toddlers. Their entire purpose in life is to provide us love and companionship. A lot of them never know anything else. This doesn’t necessarily apply to a farm dog like Noem’s Cricket, but I’d wager he still came from much softer stock than a farm dog from several centuries ago.

Finally, dogs are simply more proximate than chickens are for most people. They are “part of the family” and thus part of the ingroup. It makes sense to care more about your cute doge than an obese beakless retarded zombie chicken in a factory farm, for the same reason it makes sense to value your own children more than someone else’s. People talk about how disgusting Noem is while scarfing down Torture Hell Meat for the same reason a guy will be horrified when his own sister is sexually exploited but will spend an evening on Motherless without feeling a lick of shame.

Proximity matters. Different things are different.

And universalist utilitarianism is weird, unintuitive, and alien to 90% of people.

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Please understand none of this is to defend factory farms in the slightest. I would be fine with immediately criminalizing the industrial extraction of animal flesh, because I think ending that level of mass suffering would be entirely worth making it unaffordable for poor people to eat meat.

It would be very annoying to pay $30 for a free range burger until lab grown meat becomes ubiquitous, but I like animals enough to support this if it ever becomes politically tenable. But I very much doubt that will happen.

People simply value their dopamine cummies far far more than animals not being tortured, girls not being sex trafficked, and children not being exploited in Asian sweatshops or African diamond mines.

You might not like this—I don’t either—but if you want to achieve any incremental improvement you must operate within the world that is, not the world that ought to be. And that means creating a virtuous incentive structure that simply assumes selfishness and tribalism as banal facts of life and lets us move forward from there.

That’s the only way to liberate Cowschwitz.