Philosophical Argument Isn't Enough In Animal Ethics
And it's not that weird that people eat pigs and love their dogs
Genre— Animal ethics, meta-philosophy, the kind of speculative work which needs experimental backing to have much of a claim to truth (but I hope is interesting to read).
How EA?— I keep all the EA stuff in section IV.
TL;DR
I argue, (more-or-less) with Cora Diamond, that Singer’s arguments for vegetarianism miss the mark for most readers because they don’t engage with the real relationships people have with meat-eating.
In the final section, I extend the conclusion to the broader claim that “philosophical argumentation fails to latch on to the ways that most people think (and hence fails to persuade)” and briefly sketch the application to the problem of building solidarity and whether longtermism or existential risk framings of EA are better.
I- It’s so weird that people eat pigs, but love their dogs!
As a vegan, I’ve said this, or something along these lines, many times. It is often just a way of performing incredulity, a way of asking people to think again, to see if, on a second attempt, they might prefer to construct the world differently than it is.
Used this way, it can be useful. But I would expect it to only help convince people who already have some reason to consider a change. There is actually a very easy answer to this question… no, it isn’t weird at all.
Many, many people live lives that contain both eating pigs and loving dogs. They don’t experience this as a constant dissonance, and if they are absolutely forced to, they won’t have much trouble giving some acceptable non-reason for the distinction, and moving on. Their action isn’t directly hypocritical, because their relationship with pigs and dogs are very differently embedded in their lives.
This is (partly) what Cora Diamond, a scholar of Wittgenstein, argues in her essay: Eating Meat and Eating People. Her article is both a critical piece on the pro-vegetarian arguments of Peter Singer, and an appeal to promote vegetarianism in a different way. I think the essay argues for a valuable point— that overtly philosophical approaches to moral persuasion don’t speak to most people.
For a summary of Diamond’s paper, check out my tweet thread:
II- Diamond’s critique of Singer
“The mistake is to think that the callousness [of human treatment of animals] cannot be condemned without reasons which are reasons for anyone, no matter how devoid of all human imagination or sympathy.”- Eating Meat and Eating People, pg.16
Singer argues that the ability to suffer or have certain cognitive capacities qualifies you as an interest-holder, i.e, a being with interests such as an interest in not suffering. Infringing on someone’s interests is what makes an act wrong, and because the animals which many humans eat qualify as having these interests, eating them is wrong.
Diamond counters that Singer shows a purposeful ignorance of real human custom. The reason we don’t eat our dead isn’t because it would ‘infringe on their interests’, and the reason people eat animals isn’t that they have ‘failed to realise they are interest-holders like us’. We don’t eat our dead because it would be disrespectful, because it is taboo, because it reminds us viscerally of our own frailty, because the bodies have spiritual significance to us. We eat animals because they are for sale in the supermarket, because we were taught to, because we don’t have a relationship with the animals, because they taste good and we don’t think about it.
Singer wouldn’t take this as much of a critique (and you might not either). He doesn’t see his task as a philosopher to be ‘describing human customs’. Instead, he thinks that people share certain moral reasons, and with the right argument, he can show them that their own commitments entail the conclusion he wants to promote. Specifically, he wants to show them that the way that they care about other people should be extended to animals.
However, I think that Diamond’s observation is good grounds for a critique. Through her examples, she is pointing out that there is much more complexity in the relation between us and a dead human than the consideration of whether they are an interest-holder or not. If our moral decisions were really driven by Singer’s logic, then there is no obvious reason that we shouldn’t eat our dead. The real reasons that we do feel against doing so aren’t represented by his argument.
In the more relevant context, a person who treats their dog with kindness but eats factory-farmed bacon isn’t contradicting themselves if the reason they treat their dog kindly isn’t because it is an interest-holder. An argument like Singer’s, which runs from a starting point of rationalised moral reasons, fails to meet this person where they are.
III- An appeal to promote veganism differently
But— Singer’s arguments are actually very popular. They are often cited by people as the reason they became vegetarian. Why am I making a theoretical critique when they seem to work well in practice?
Well… I would suspect that the majority of people who are convinced of vegetarianism by Singer’s work are not responding to his argument, but instead to a certain image that appeals to them. Singer might be doing by accident what we could do better on purpose.
His books and articles are full of emotional examples of tortured animals. Perhaps Singer’s readers like to think of themselves as kind, and after being caused to picture enough animal cruelty, they feel that to continue to feel kind, they have to sever their connection with it. Perhaps they see that the fight for animal rights can give them a feeling of being right while so many others are wrong (especially when the right argument is so simple and intuitive! How could everyone else be so stupid?). Whatever it is, their pre-existing commitments, plus Singer’s vignettes, get them to his conclusion, but it wouldn’t be fair to say that they get there through his argument. The more explicitly rational sections often leave people cold. It is the pictures, and the cruelty or suffering that they evoke, which remain in the memory.
Diamond explores some alternative routes to persuasion in the third section of her paper. In general, they are ways of trying to encourage certain forms of fellow-feeling between humans and animals which are necessary for us to extend pity to them, or to think of them as independent beings not to be interfered with. Diamond uses poems to emphasise these points— this section was especially fun to read. But I don’t think her positive account is as strong as her critique.
The key point that I got from that section of her essay is that if philosophical arguments aren’t always sufficient to change an individual’s morality, then we need to try a range of different approaches. We need to model compassion to the people around us, we need to establish new norms through our actions and through laws, we need to re-conceptualise the role of animals in our lives. The practice of referring to pets as “companion animals”, detailed explorations of the lives of animals in tv shows like ‘my octopus teacher’ which help us to see their otherness and their individuality, and yes, videos of animals suffering on factory farms— all these things might help us build this better world.
IV- This might matter beyond veganism
This post treats Singer’s overly philosophical argument failing to persuade as a case study. But I think that the conclusion— that philosophical argumentation fails to latch on to the ways that most people think (and hence fails to persuade), can be generalised. I have two more applications in mind: building solidarity, and longtermism vs existential risk framings of Effective Altruist causes.
Building solidarity:
In ‘cruelty and solidarity’, an essay in his popular collection ‘Contingency, Irony and Solidarity’ Richard Rorty makes a similar point which I think applies to another aspect of Singer’s work. He points out that solidarity, understood as subjectively feeling-with someone, and more practically, as being motivated to practice mutual aid, doesn’t usually come from philosophical arguments alone.
Singer, in Famine, Affluence, and Morality, tries to call his audience to treat distant people in need in the way they would a child who is drowning in a pond in front of them. The paper caused a stir, and continues to be taught in intro to ethics courses, mostly because people didn’t follow his argument to its conclusion but couldn’t figure out why. The reason, from Rorty’s perspective, would be that solidarity is something that must be built. All the efforts and obligations and fellow-feeling that the state of solidarity contains are not already present in the realisation that the person you face is a fellow interest-holder. The reality is much more complex, and the movement to build that fellow-feeling must be one of sustained effort.
I personally think that it is very commendable when people act in exception to this, and take an argument like Singer’s at face value. But if we want to grow solidarity, we need to be cognisant that this isn’t the norm.
Longtermism vs Existential Risk framings of Effective Altruist causes:
Maybe my view will change after the reception of What We Owe The Future is more apparent, but it seems to me that more abstract, philosophical framings of longtermism do far worse at convincing people of the importance of EA causes than specific existential risks.
I’m slightly less of a pure speculator on this; I’ve done interviews with a range of EAs to figure out what compels them and the people they speak to, and read the results of a survey that tested different messaging framings.
Abstract philosophical framings generally come out as the least compelling. For students, specific, tailored examples of ways that the listener could help the world, or in general audience contexts, focusing on the children and grandchildren who are at risk from our inaction, seem to be more compelling.
My (weakly held) opinion is that The Precipice is a better flagship book for EA than WWOTF. WWOTF is all about philosophical arguments which, although combined with good examples, strike many non-philosophers as platitudinal. Think of all the effort spent on convincing philosophers that future people matter— when you encounter this argument as your first brush with EA, it is likely you would just leave thinking it trivially true. However, when you find out that there is a 3% risk of a pandemic causing human extinction this century, you listen.
If you want to comment on this article, feel free to do so below OR put some comments on this google doc version of the essay. All feedback is welcome.