“The Meat Eaters” Exposes More Problems in the Suffering Reduction Argument For Veganism

In “The Meat Eaters,” Jeff McMahan argues that if we care about animal suffering enough to stop being predators ourselves, we should try to remove predation from nature too:

Many thousands of animal species either have been or are being driven to extinction as a side effect of our activities. Knowing this, we have thus far been largely unwilling even to moderate our rapacity to mitigate these effects. If, however, we were to become more amenable to exercising restraint, it is conceivable that we could do so in a selective manner, favoring the survival of some species over others. The question might then arise whether to modify our activities in ways that would favor the survival of herbivorous rather than carnivorous species.

Anticipating that one of the objections to his plan will be “it’s wrong to kill off a species,” McMahan points out that we make species go extinct all the time as a side-effect of our existence. Since killing animals is inevitable, shouldn’t we try to aim for carnivores if we can?

But how could we ever control the species of animal that we accidentally or even intentionally kill as a byproduct of our activities? He isn’t talking about animals we hunt; he’s talking about animals we kill for agriculture and civilization. It makes no sense to say we could ever choose which animals get in the way of those things and thus must die. Would we move all the herbivores out of our fields and forests and put lions there instead, and then run over lions with our wheat threshers or shoot them for prowling our orchards?

It doesn’t matter. McMahan isn’t concerned with practicalities. He just wants to pose a philosophical question: is suffering reduction or the inherent value of a species more important? Should we protect the lion because there’s something worthwhile about lions existing? Or is this outweighed by the terror and pain that lions cause, which would mean we should get rid of lions to make the world a less brutal, painful place? McMahan believes that since species have come and gone throughout the world’s history, it doesn’t make sense to say that the exact species that are alive now are the right ones and should never change. Therefore, goodbye lions.

Some vegans say that to favor herbivorous animals over carnivorous animals like this is speciesist. That’s technically true, but it also implies that anti-speciesism is an inherent good regardless of the effects it has, and that maintaining it should be a top priority even when it impedes suffering reduction. Vegans who call McMahan out for speciesism are right, but they are selfishly valuing ideology over results. Being anti-speciesist is an important part of who these vegans are, so they will maintain that stance even if gazelles have to be torn to shreds for the rest of Earth’s existence because of it.

As for the argument that nature is fine as it is and we should just leave it alone, McMahan writes, “Nature is not a purposive agent, much less a wise one. There is no reason to suppose that a species has special sanctity simply because it arose in the natural process of evolution.” Those who are against toying with nature because nature is sacrosanct are committing the naturalistic fallacy, the same fallacy vegans like to call on meat eaters for saying that animals eat animals so humans can too. As Alex Melonas wrote in an earlier blog post that makes the same point as McMahan’s article:

There isn’t anything inherently “good” about “nature”; “nature” is merely, and I mean merely, the “is” in the is/ought fallacy. The existence of carnivores and omnivores and herbivores is the arbitrary result of ongoing genetic mutation in response to external stimuli. “Nature”, the product of this process, is a capricious, chance phenomenon. In other words, “nature” is devoid of all moral/ethical content, and any attempt to connect an ethical/moral claim to “nature” is bound to be an is/ought or naturalistic fallacy. The relevant ethical/moral concern, then, for me, is the harm and death that occurs in “nature”. Hypothetically, therefore, if genetic tinkering could result in the end of predation then that would be ethically/morally better, in the final analysis, than the alternative (e.g. allowing the lion to continue preying on a gazelle).

According to Melonas, the vegans on the message board where he originally made this argument were not happy. That’s not surprising. Vegans hate it when one of their own suggests doing away with the carnivores in order to reduce animal suffering. It comes up every once in a while when vegans talk amongst themselves, and the token anti-carnivore always gets shouted down. Before McMahan’s article ran, there was a thread on the Vegan Represent message board called “Should Carnivores Be Destroyed?” Here are a few points from the vegan who started it, “Abe12345”:

The problem is [carnivorous animals] cause much suffering. Their entire existence depends on it. Imagine the horror that must be felt by their prey, from the chase, all the way up to the kill. And the prey’s loved ones suffer too, all so some carnivore can sustain its life. It is very evil. The carnivore is the victim too, and should be eradicated humanely, no different than a psychopathic killer who had no choice about being born into a bad existence, probably to bad parents, and learning bad things, in a bad neighborhood, or perhaps being genetically susceptible to evil. … If vampires come to kill your neighbor, would you not have a moral right to help your neighbor if you could? Or should you let nature take its course, because the vampire is killing for food? … I don’t think the events of nature should be a detached biological observation for us. The animals feel pain and experience emotions similar to us. To me they are like people. If we see one nation attack another for their natural resources would we not get upset? Should we not interfere if feasible? [The lives of carnivores are] not as important as the amount of suffering they inflict.

He got a lot of responses, not a single one agreeing with him. Here’s a summary of the rebuttals:

Abe is a troll; he is being offensive; replace “carnivores” with “Jews” and he would be Anti-Semitic; he’s taking suffering reduction too far – it’s good enough to reduce suffering somewhat; let’s worry about human on animal suffering first; you would have to end all life if you want to eliminate suffering; this is tantamount to killing for ideology, which is even worse than killing for food; suffering is a part of nature and a part of life, so maybe it is a good thing; predators accelerate evolution by hunting the weakest animals, so without them we never would have come into existence; Herbivores kill insects, which means we need to kill herbivores as well; without predators there will be an overpopulation of prey that needs to be culled; since humans cause suffering too, shouldn’t we kill them all as well?; we cannot redesign the world to match our ethics; It is anthropocentric to judge animals for their behavior; intent is more important than suffering, and carnivores don’t have evil intent; a vegan utopia is impossible; who are we to say that prey animals have more of a right to life than predator animals?; Abe needs to come to terms with the reality we live in; Abe is ignoring the importance of the food chain; nature doesn’t care about suffering – only humans do.

Do you see why vegans hate the “let’s kill the carnivores” argument? It makes them say the sorts of things that normally only come from defensive omnivore mouths. It also makes it obvious that rights and suffering reduction – the two main arguments for veganism – often conflict.

It would be a violation of the rights of lions for humans to stop their existence. But it increases suffering to let them stick around. When faced with the contradiction between rights and suffering reduction in this instance, most vegans side with rights or cop to the naturalistic fallacy. But since they have no consistent reason for doing so, It’s easy for meat eaters to spot the arbitrariness of veganism. It’s better if this hypothetical never comes up in the first place.

Another interesting thing about this argument is that, as Melissa McEwen noted, it takes veganism to its logical conclusion. If vegans want to reduce suffering, why would they only care about suffering caused by humans? An animal doesn’t suffer less just because a fellow amoral non-human is killing it. In fact, a well-placed gunshot (or a bolt to the brain) probably causes less suffering than being eaten alive by a lion does.

Some vegans worry that “let’s get rid of the carnivores to reduce suffering” could somehow be used as an argument for human omnivorism, and indeed it could. If it turns out to be impossible to sustain human populations on humanely raised animals in the absence of factory farms, an alternative to livestock might be to systematically kill off all the predator animals, leaving the prey to ourselves. We would have a suffering-reduction excuse to eat these rampaging herbivores because they would now be at risk of overpopulation and painful starvation. If we dubbed ourselves the most noble predators and killed these prey animals as quickly and humanely as possible (doing a better job than lions and tigers, who don’t think about such things), there would be much less suffering in the world than before.

That is an extreme example, but if “let’s get rid of the carnivores to reduce suffering” allows us to kill animals in the name of suffering reduction, it can also justify non-vegan activities that are possible now, like hunting iguanas that are threatening the ecosystem.

The rejection of the anti-carnivore hypothetical shows how unprincipled most vegans are about suffering reduction. It’s a very specific suffering that they want to stop: human-induced suffering of animals for non-vegan pursuits. As long as it’s not for animal products that we eat, wear, or watch as entertainment (in other words, if it was caused for something that wouldn’t seem to require suffering, like a pair of vegan shoes), suffering is fine.

That’s because suffering in itself doesn’t matter to vegans. What they really want to reduce is their own guilt at being complicit in suffering.