AFF's Doublethink

Beth — November 16, 2009 at 1:09 pm

Interesting sidenote: This isn’t the only time that Ellen DeGeneres, who has sort of become PETA’s vegan posterchild in recent months, has stuck up for poor people who eat meat. In this month’s edition of the publication that is the industry standard in newsgathering — O, Oprah’s magazine — Oprah asks Ellen about going vegan. Ellen says she’s glad she did it and how much weight she’s lost and the health benefits blah blah blah… but then discusses how she tries not to be in people’s faces about it. She explains it is easy for her to be vegan, because she not only is rich, she has a chef, who can make vegan food taste good.

It is sort of a refreshing bit of honesty.

David Adesnik — November 16, 2009 at 1:21 pm

There’s a long-standing tension between better-off activists concerned about environmental issues and the broader population that would have to pay the cost of the environmentalists’ proposed reforms.

I’m no expert on the issue, but it seems there are prominent environmentalists who get this point and are focused on ways to help the environment while also saving money.

I’m curious if any of the anti-factory farm activists have moved in this direction yet. I’m guessing there are a slew of low cost measures to reduce cruelty without raising prices.

But ultimately, if you want free-range chickens, you’ll have to pay for it.

Sonny Bunch — November 16, 2009 at 1:28 pm

I cannot tell you how much it annoys me when activists like Laurie David and Al Gore talk about how flying should only be affordable for the uber-wealthy — which is what they really mean when they talk about carbon taxes and the rest.

Beth — November 16, 2009 at 3:00 pm

Adding onto an earlier point, hunger is now at a 14-year high. While I certainly don’t like to see the problems that come from factory farming, and especially dislike seeing the abuse toward the animals, we have to consider that adding restrictions onto these farms will, in fact, make hunger an even bigger problem. David is right… we have to look at solutions to the cruelty problem that don’t hurt the farmers’ bottom lines.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/17/us/17hunger.html?hp

Freddie — November 16, 2009 at 3:39 pm

I agree with you to an extent, but then this is an almost textbook example of making the perfect the enemy of the good. Surely the goal should be to reduce the harmful effects of factory farming AND work on making basic necessities like food more available for poor families. Since you brought it up, an old lefty like me has lots of ideas for how– but you aren’t going to like them…..

Brian — November 17, 2009 at 2:25 am

Certainly it’s true that free-range meat is more expensive than factory-farm meat, but vegetarian fare is cheaper than either and can easily be no less nutritious or varied.

I suspect the celebrities, like Ellen, who are the most visible advocates create a somewhat distorted perception by unintentionally associating vegetarianism with affluence. But for me and the many other vegans and vegetarians I know who live near or below the poverty line, there’s little conflict between our ethics and our budgets.

Frank Blank — November 17, 2009 at 10:04 am

“Marx was wrong. Capitalism does not elevate the poor as laborers then sputter out allowing for them to seize all means of production and abolish government.
Instead commerce keeps the poor on a steady rise, enhancing and streamlining the costs of what and how they are able to consume. As the poor grow in health, strength, and numbers, the rich become panicked, offended, and revolt by finding excuses and ways to control this malignant tumor of humanity. The ugliness they rebel against must be put in utilitarian and spiritual terms in order to gain widespread acceptance among the upper and middle classes.”
- Claus Dronken
I don’t see how you can expect those who capitalize on this movement to ride coach and buses everywhere with the root of the problem, and still be respected by their target audience.
Foer simply takes the most customary rhetorical route that we’ve all grown used to hearing when the rich crusaders of taste are confronted with the obvious victims of their preferred policies – expand the perspective of the issue to something cosmic, simultaneously shrinking the present suffering of any individual human being to an invisible and necessary short-term cost, well worth the eventual outcome, to a much larger, “deeper,” and profound concern for humanity and the symbiotic balance of our precious blue bubble of life (much like the ambulance’s exhaust appears to most normal (poor) people).

He’s not lying. This is as honest as these people get – they don’t necessarily despise the poor, or at least no particular poor people per se; only the effects of the poor’s size, habits, and ignorance (his mega-store “footprint”); they don’t really think of any actual poor person having to sacrifice anything in particular for the sake of the righteous rich man’s revealed interpretative truth and ideals (though, if pressed would say these fat philistines have a lot they could and should give up), or feel bad for any individuals they’ll never have to meet or know.
These rich people don’t really have to think of money, so don’t really reflect on the fact that the money that their money people invest for them, or that they spend flying around on their private planes to hotels and homes contributes to an economy that provides hundreds of better solutions to environmental and population problems in the long-term than any committee of however many educated rich people over the same period.
But simply using his own money, like some common consumer, to improve the lives of actual living people he shares the world with is too inconceivably anonymous and slow a solution for the rich crusader. He needs crisis, urgency, panic to give meaning to his life.

These effete, leisured products of capitalism are free of such narrow-minded pedestrian concerns because, they think, they are favored and holy enough to seek and conceive the bigger picture. Being rich, they are somewhat more free of everyday need and have risen above these everyday material trifles like the “daily cost of living.” They see this cost, truly felt only by the most destitute, as belonging to themselves, as the spokesmen for humanity; rather than to the impoverished families who suffer or dies when that price of life is unpaid. The cost belongs to all of us, the free-range vegangelist says – to the planet, to the future, so the burden falls on them, the rich, clear-sighted sage, to go on the poor man’s t.v., to preach and feel good about relieving himself of his duty.

Environmentalists against nuclear energy and “overpopulation”, animal right cults, and food-ethic nags are just some of the latest volunteers in this general war against mass democracy and the “wastefulness” of the increasing ease, freedom, and dominance of the poor and their needs.

Frank Blank — November 17, 2009 at 10:10 am

Brian, if your diet is cheaper than that of someone getting by on McDoubles, Chalupas, hot dogs, bologna, or spam then you are not getting enough protein.

Sonny Bunch — November 17, 2009 at 10:12 am

The point isn’t that veganism/vegetarianism is too expensive, the point is that meat would be much, much more expensive if we radically altered how we raise cattle/chicken/pigs and moved to family farms/grassfed animals. There’s little conflict between the ethics and the budgets of the vast majority of meat-eaters too, but all that would change if we started monkeying with the food-delivery system.

Brian — November 17, 2009 at 11:10 pm

Frank, the 16oz bag of lentils I just picked up for a dollar and some change has the total protein content of three McDonald’s Quarter Pounders with Cheese. I easily get all the protein I need on far less than what McDonald’s would cost me.

And Sonny, yeah, I understand your point, and it’s definitely given me something to consider. My comment was aimed more at Beth’s who implied it was easy for Ellen to be vegan because of her wealth.

C.J. Trillian — November 18, 2009 at 10:15 am

Sonny, certainly it’s the case that meat will become far more expensive if we tinker with the food delivery system. But your post fails to consider that prices will change for all sorts of other things, too. The cost of meat will go up in large part because the number of cows will massively decrease. But remember that all of those extra cows had to eat, too. And meat-eating is a really inefficient use of resources; one cow consumes way more calories than it delivers as food.

So what all of this means is that, yes, switching away from factory farming animals will make meat a lot more expensive. But it will also make Brian’s lentils even cheaper, since the space we used to use feeding cows or chickens or pigs can now be devoted to growing food for humans.

Basically, your post assumes that the cost of items in one segment of the market will increase radically while all the rest will remain constant. But there is very little reason to think that would be true. Which is all basically a different way of saying that there are plenty of substitute goods for meat. So it’s not as if raising the price of meat entails a return to the bad old days of malnutrition for the poor.

Sonny Bunch — November 18, 2009 at 10:24 am

No, that’s not at all what it assumes. It assumes exactly what I wrote: People like eating meat because it’s both tasty and a good source of the materials we need to keep our bodies running. I promise you, the average meat-eater could care less if lentils became cheaper because lentils are not nearly as tasty as a delicious chicken breast or a hearty steak.

What you’re arguing is this: You don’t care that poor people won’t be able to afford the food they want to eat and currently have access to (i.e., meat) because they will have access to cheaper food they don’t want to eat (i.e., lentils) but that’s okay because you think it is better for them/better for the environment/better for the animals.

C.J. Trillian — November 18, 2009 at 1:22 pm

It seems to me that there are (at least) two different points that are getting conflated here.

1. Would the elimination of factory farming deprive the poor of access to protein?

2. Would the elimination of factory farming deprive the poor of the access to cheap meat that they currently have.

The answer to (1) is clearly no. The answer to (2) is clearly yes. Your post is about (1). Your reply to my comment says that you’re really interested in (2). That’s fair enough, though I submit that your post doesn’t say what you’ve said in your comment.

Still, if we take (2) to be what’s really at issue, then I guess my response is, so what? The mere fact that X represents the current status quo hardly entails that anyone is entitled to X.

I mean, there are all sorts of structural changes that one could impose that would have the effect of altering the status quo. Congestion pricing, for example, would increase the costs of driving on I-95 during rush hour. Plenty of poor people who currently drive on I-95 during rush hour might find themselves unable to do so. But that’s hardly a sufficient reason for refusing to implement congestion pricing. Instead we say that poor people will simply choose from an array of substitute goods (carpooling, taking the bus, working nonstandard hours, etc.) Yes, some people lose out on something they currently enjoy. But we’re all better off as a result.

What people prefer is (at least in part) driven by the institutions that are already in place. When an institution is set up to make one particular good really cheap, then of course that’s the one that lots of people pick. Change the institutional structure, and people will choose from alternate goods.

Unless you insist that all policy changes be Pareto superior to the status quo, the mere fact that some will no longer have options that they currently have is hardly a knock-down objection to a policy change.

If your position is something like “I like to eat meat and I oppose anything that makes it harder for people who have my preferences to live their lives as they wish,” then that’s fine. But it’s a bit disingenuous to then pretend as if your real objection is that your opponents will leave poor people malnourished.

Sonny Bunch — November 18, 2009 at 1:41 pm

C.J.: At least you’re willing to admit you don’t particularly care about the government taking steps to actively make the lives of poor people less pleasant. I can respect that.

C.J. Trillian — November 18, 2009 at 2:20 pm

That characterization is fairly question-begging, no? It assumes that eating meat is more pleasant than not eating meat. You might well hold that view, but it’s one that would need at least some support.

I mean, there’s at least a reasonable case to be made that the morality of factory farming is more-or-less on par with the morality of, oh say dogfighting. (http://distributedrepublic.net/archives/2007/08/21/we-are-all-or-mostly-mike-vick) So I would characterize my position more as that I don’t particularly care about the government taking steps to make it harder to torture animals.

I do wonder — and I’m not trying to be snarky here, I’m just genuinely curious — whether you’d say the same sorts of things about allowing the state to restrict marriage or abortion.* Both of those things arguably make the lives of (at least some) poor people less pleasant. But afaik no one actually supports such policies because they actively want to make the lives of poor people less pleasant. They support such policies because they think that the activities in question are morally problematic.

It’s fine if you don’t think that animals have moral standing. Some people think that fetuses have no moral standing. I object when those who hold such a view accuse their opponents of hating women/poor women. It seems equally unfair for you to assign such motives to me.

*I’m not at all trying to argue for a moral equivalence here. The point is a logical one, not a moral one.

Sonny Bunch — November 18, 2009 at 2:31 pm

For the record, I didn’t say you hated poor people, just that you want to make their lives less pleasant. It’s not just the meat-eating comments* but also your comments on commuting. Forcing people to carpool/use mass transit/work nonstandard hours are all things that make people’s lives less pleasant. You’re arguing that there’s a greater good there, and fine, but it is what it is.

And I often make the argument that restricting access to abortion is bad because it will make people’s lives less pleasant. I’m pro-choice largely because I don’t think it makes a ton of sense for unmarried teens/20-somethings to have kids: They’re ruining their lives, and the lives of their kids.

*And yes, eating meat is objectively more pleasurable than eating lentils. (I’m only being mildly snarky here. I bet that if you approached 1,000 random people on the street, 920 of them will say they preferred a chicken breast to a bowl of beans.)

C.J. Trillian — November 18, 2009 at 3:22 pm

I appreciate the thoughtful reply. Just a few quick (and mostly unconnected) thoughts.

I’m fairly new here, but I’m interested to know where you’d put yourself on the ideological spectrum. I ask b/c, I’m having some trouble figuring out how a principle like “it’s wrong to make people’s lives less pleasant” matches up with what I understand to be libertarianism or conservatism.

I worry, for example, that such a principle makes it hard to do things like make changes to Medicare or welfare or Social Security. After all, those programs all make some people’s lives more pleasant. Restricting access or cutting benefits thus would seem to run afoul of your principle. But I wouldn’t have thought that something like means-testing SS would be especially controversial here.

The same is kind of true for congestion pricing of traffic, which I take to be pretty uncontroversial, at least in the libertarian circles with which I’m more familiar. Isn’t that a pretty straightforward case of internalizing a cost that’s currently externalized? I mean, traffic congestion is about as clear an example of an externalized cost as there is, no?

I also find myself unpersuaded by your notion of objectively pleasurable. Opinion polls are pretty good at revealing preferences, but that’s no guarantee of getting at actual pleasure. A quibble, I’ll grant you. But an important one, I think.

But even if I grant your claim (and I think that you might actually have the number of chicken-lovers too low), I’m not sure that’s relevant. The moral question is less about whether chicken is more pleasurable than eating lentils. It’s whether the pleasure you get from eating the chicken outweighs the chicken’s suffering. And then I’d ask you to consider whether you’d want to have the same position wrt someone who says that they really, really enjoy watching dogs try to kill each other.

Sonny Bunch — November 18, 2009 at 4:03 pm

I would say I’m something like a libertarian on domestic issues and a neoconsesrvative on foreign affairs.

I think I’d argue that fighting against the government actively making policies that limits people’s freedoms — in this case, the freedom to eat what they want at the lowest prices the market can offer — is a very libertarian point of view. From a libertarian perspective, there’s a big difference between the government saying a.) “I’m going to tax you heavily in order to redistribute your wealth to another person who isn’t working/can’t afford health care” and b.) “I’m going to implement policies that will restrict the way in which the market works, making it far more inefficient to feed the population.”

Now, there’s the argument to be made that the market isn’t really at work right now because corn is so heavily subsidized and corn-feeding livestock contributes to its cheapness. I’m open to that argument to an extent — I think government ethanol subsidies are a joke, for example. That being said, I think the fact that we’ve been able to adapt corn for so many uses is something of a miracle of modern science. I’m pro subsidizing something that can be grown easily and over large spaces that serves, literally, hundreds of thousands of functions.

As far as the suffering of chickens goes…look, you’re breeding them for food either way, right? I don’t see how it’s a morally defensible position to say “It’s fine to kill them, just not this way.” If the suffering of animals is wrong, then it’s wrong regardless of how little or how much they suffer, right?

C.J. Trillian — November 18, 2009 at 5:01 pm

Well, suffering is bad certainly. But wouldn’t it follow that more suffering is worse than less suffering? I don’t see why it should be particularly inconsistent to claim that factory farming of animals is worse than non-factory farming of animals.

The position I’m articulating is a consequentialist one. Suffering is a prima facie wrong, but that doesn’t entail that all suffering is therefore morally wrong. I don’t have any objection at all to people whose choices genuinely are eat meat or starve. That sucks for the animal, but it would suck a lot worse for the person who starves to death.

But in the case of factory farming, there’s the fact that you are causing lots of added suffering for animals in exchange for the utility jump you get in moving from a bowl of beans to a chicken breast. I find it fairly implausible that the average person really does get that much of a utility gain from the chicken (just as I find it implausible that Mike Vick got enough pleasure from watching dogs kill each other to justify the suffering the dogs went through.)

That said, I don’t think it’s totally implausible that you might enjoy chicken enough to justify killing and eating a chicken that got to live out a normal chicken life. (For me, it doesn’t, so I don’t eat chickens at all. But your mileage may vary.)

To put the point another way, I don’t think that animals have some inalienable right to life. There’s nothing inherently wrong with killing an animal. There is something wrong with causing an animal to suffer for my enjoyment. Whether that enjoyment comes from actually watching the animal suffer or whether it comes from not having to spend much money to eat it strikes me as morally irrelevant.

Ted — November 19, 2009 at 11:33 am

I think factory farming is directly to blame for many of the health issues we are facing today. Its the whole mindset of making food as cheaply as possible regardless of the risk. Shop local=healthy life and community!

Edward Cortelle — December 14, 2009 at 8:02 pm

If you don’t support my cause – banning breeding animals for food and fur and torture in laboratory experiments,
and investing the millions of dollars necessary into research to grow meat without breeding an entire animal (check out New Harvest) – then I should not be forced to support your cause, such as all this super-politically correct “support the troops” garbage.

The relative lifestyle “comfort” of activists is absolutely irrelevant to the issue of the anti-libertarian murder and torture of BILLIONS of innocet animals each year.

These meat-eaters and others who refuse to change their lifestyles and consumption habits and purchasing habits are the biggest hypocrites on earth when they simultaneously preach libertarian values of self-reliance. It is not these animals’ responsibility to clothe and feed you or test your medicines on them. Nobody who is a meat-eater can claim to be vegetarian.

I also do not see anything inherently wrong with one human being kiling or imprisoning another human being when the latter is not minimizing the number of animals they kill or the amount of pain that they do to animals. You cannot preach these “law of the jungle” ethics and then whine and complain if people use them against you.

I don’t make this politically correct BS distinction between “civilian” vs “military”, because I do not have to. I have the free speech right to advocate War for Animal Rights.

I also could not care less about some trivial BS health problem to meat-eaters that is CAUSED by factory farming. I cheer and applaud when they drop dead from disease.

Edward Cortelle — December 14, 2009 at 8:04 pm

I don’t give an F to human meat-eaters if banning factory farming will make their meat more expensive. Good. They whine and complain about their “rights” and petty loss of “freedom”. They have absolutely NO concept of what the loss of freedom means, like the animals confined in factory farms do. Stay inside a phone booth for your entire life. See how you like it.

I have more concern for Roman Polanski’s freedom than I do for these anti-animal activists.

Edward Cortelle — December 14, 2009 at 8:10 pm

The vast majority of people in the United States (and I am sure throughout the world, but for now I will focus unfairly on the USA) LOVE being poor. If they actually CARED about NOT being poor, then they would not deliberately vote for Demopublicrats over and over and over and over again, in spite of knowing the consequences, in spite of what activists and Greens and Libertarians and Socialists and Independents have warned them about.

Governments would and should invest billions of dollars in going after the PETA X-Meat Prize.

Some people think that tastiness to them is more important to them than the freedom from confinement and terror to animals is to the animals.

Well, I and other people believe that locking those people up is trivial to them compared to the freedom of animals.

My principles are perfectly consistent with American values. There is no contradiction.