Eating Meat and Marginal Cases

Fred's Basement

Scenario: Fred tortures puppies to extract cocoamone from their brains, which enhances his enjoyment of chocolate due to a head injury that damaged his godiva gland. He argues he's not a sadist but a chocolate lover seeking a solution to his deprivation.
Ethical Issue: The story raises the question of whether human gustatory pleasure justifies inflicting severe suffering on animals.
Cocoamone: Hormone responsible for the experience of chocolate.

Fred’s Behavior Compared with Our Behavior

Factory Farming: Billions of animals in the US endure intense suffering in factory farms for meat production, often involving mutilations.
Comparison: Asks if there's a morally significant difference between Fred torturing puppies and people consuming factory-raised meat.
Relevance: Is it relevant that Fred tortures the puppies and most people consume meat from animals tortured by others?
Ignorance: Many consumers are unaware of the treatment of animals.
The Argument of Causal Impotence:
- A consumer argues that their individual choice not to consume factory-raised meat won't change the industry's practices or prevent animal suffering.
- Response: Analogous example (Chocolate Mousse a` la Bama) where cocoamone is extracted from slaughtered puppies, but the industry is too large for individual actions to matter.
- Challenge: If it’s wrong to order the dessert, it should also be wrong to purchase factory-raised meat, given awareness of the suffering.
Causal Impotence: Deny it. Industry responds to collective behavior.
- Chickens: Most cruelly treated animals. In 1998, almost 8 billion chickens were slaughtered in the US.
- Example: Suppose that the industry is sensitive to a reduction in demand for chicken equivalent to 10,000 people becoming vegetarians.
- Risk vs. Harm: Even small risks of great harms are unacceptable.
- Commercial Aircraft Safety: Oxygen masks, the lifejackets, or the emergency exits on any given plane has smaller chances that one in ten thousand of saving any lives in a given week, but that doesn't mean that the safety measures should be waved.
Threshold: Reduce the time required before the next threshold is reached.
Influence: Many people who become vegetarians influence others to become vegetarian, who in turn influence others, and so on.
Doctrine of Double Effect: Suffereing of factory-raised animals is simply a by-product of the conditions dictated by economic considerations.
- The DDE requires not merely that a bad effect be foreseen and not intended, but also that there be an outweighing good effect.
- Whatever good could plausibly be claimed to come out of the system clearly doesn’t outweigh the bad.

Differential Moral Status

Argument: Fred's behavior is wrong because it involves puppies, who have a higher moral status than farm animals.
Rationality: Not a good differentiator due to the problem of marginal cases.

The Problem of Marginal Cases

Some humans lack the properties (rationality, moral sense) used to justify differential treatment.
If we can torture animals due to lacking certain properties, we should be able to torture humans that lack those as well.
Sympathy: Perhaps puppies count more because we care more about them.
Relativism: Such relativism is, to put it mildly, hard to swallow (ex: South Korea doesn't care about the treatment of cats and dogs).
Moral Sensibility: Only the feelings of those who have achieved exactly the right degree of moral sensibility.
Need an explanation of why this is the right degree of sensibility.

The Texan’s Challenge

Modus Ponens:
- (1) If it’s wrong to torture puppies for gustatory pleasure, it’s wrong to support factory farming.
- (2) It is wrong to torture puppies for gustatory pleasure.
- (3) Therefore it’s wrong to support factory farming.
Texan's Modus Tollens:
- (T1) If it’s wrong to torture puppies for gustatory pleasure, then it’s wrong to support factory farming.
- (T2) It’s not wrong to support factory farming.
- (T3) Therefore it’s not wrong to torture puppies for gustatory pleasure.
Sentimental Preference: Reluctance to mistreat puppies is a sentimental preference, not a moral mandate.
Moral Status: Humans have a moral status far above other animals.

Humans' versus Animals' Ethical Status—The Rationality Gambit

Claim: Humans have superior ethical status because it is morally right to give the interests of humans greater weight than those of animals in deciding how to behave.
Humans are rational, and animals are not.
Humans have rights, theirs is a moral status very different from that of cats or rats.
Moral Status: Opponents of abortion appeal to common features that fetuses have with adult humans.
Features such as self-consciousness or linguistic ability as necessary conditions of full moral status, and thus deny such status to fetuses.

The Challenge of Marginal Cases

Whatever kind and level of rationality is selected as justifying the attribution of superior moral status to humans will either be lacking in some humans or present in some animals.
Many humans are incapable of engaging in moral reflection.
Three philosophers (Cohen, White, and Schmidtz):
- Cohen: Persons who are unable, because of some disability, to perform the full moral functions natural to human beings are certainly not for that reason ejected from the moral community.
- White: It is a misfortune, not a tautology, that these persons cannot exercise or enjoy, claim, or waive, their rights or do their duty or fulfil their obligations.
- Schmidtz: The point is that we can, we do, and we should make decisions on the basis of our recognition that mice, chimpanzees, and humans are relevantly different types.
Suppose that ten famous people are on trial in the afterlife for crimes against humanity.
Ten famous People are on Trial in the Afterlife:
St. Peter: You are male. The other four men—Adolph Hitler, Joseph Stalin, George W. Bush, and Richard Nixon—are all guilty. Therefore the normal condition for a male defendant in this trial is guilt. The fact that you happen to be innocent is irrelevant.
Likewise, of the five female defendants in this trial, only one was guilty. Therefore the normal condition for female defendants in this trial is innocence. That is why Margaret Thatcher gets to go to heaven instead of you.
A second response to the argument from marginal cases is to concede that cognitively deficient humans really do have an inferior moral status to normal humans.
Warren suggests that ‘‘there are powerful practical and emotional reasons for protecting non-rational human beings, reasons which are absent in the case of most non-human animals.’’ and Steinbock in a similar vein with Utilitarian considerations aside, we feel a special obligation to care for the handicapped members of our own species, who cannot survive in this world without such care…In addition, when we consider the severely retarded, we think, ‘That could be me’.

Agent and Patient—the Speciesist’s Central Confusion

Those such as Carl Cohen, simply reiterate the differences between humans and animals that they claim to carry moral significance.
Others, such as Steinbock and Warren, attempt to go further.
She Warren, is certainly correct in claiming that a certain level and kind of rationality is morally relevant. If a being is incapable of moral reasoning, at even the most basic level, if it is incapable of being moved by moral reasons, claims, or arguments, then it cannot be a moral agent.
Humans are subject to moral obligations, because they are the kind of creatures who can be. What grounds moral agency is simply different from what grounds moral standing as a patient. It is no more unfair that humans and not animals are moral agents, than it is unfair that real animals and not stuffed toys are moral patients.
The Golden Rule is that we should ‘do unto others in order to get them to do unto us’.
There’s no point, according to this approach, in giving much, if any, consideration to the interests of animals, because they are simply incapable of giving like consideration to our interests.