Gary Francione: I would suggest that our use of animals for the production of food involves torture.

Jan Narveson: I want to claim that the torture is justified. You want to claim it’s not.

The question is, is our interest in the taste of animal flesh such as to justify doing the things we do to them to get them into the frying pan? My answer is, yes.

Last month libertarian philosopher Jan Narveson debated vegan abolitionist Gary Francione about animal rights. Narveson’s view is that humans have no moral obligation to animals. He argues that it is morally acceptable for animals to suffer, even horribly, as long as it in is in our interests to use them. He also claims that torturing animals pointlessly or for entertainment is “weird” but of trivial significance morally.

For those who have been following the Twitter debates with @mattbramanti, his views seem to be quite similar to Narveson’s.

I thought there were two encouraging things that came out of this. One is that Francione said that there are still many people who honestly believe it is necessary for human health to eat meat. It makes me hopeful that, for some omnivores at least, changing their minds about that could lead to them considering a vegan lifestyle. The other thing Francione said was that the abolitionist position hasn’t “really hit the radar screen yet of a lot of people. But there is clearly a change occurring. It’s happening here in North America. It’s happening in Europe. The thinking about this issue is clearly in transition.”

Here are some some excerpts from the conversation. To listen to the full debate, click on the link above.

Jan Narveson: What morality is, is a uniform set of rules to be imposed by everybody on everybody. These amount to something like a social contract in the sense that we’ve got all these people that we’re relating to. Animals, on the other hand, are not part of this, because they can’t communicate with us. They’re not moral agents in the sense in which we are. And the question is, what is there about animals which makes us, who are moral agents, morally compelled to recognize rights on their part? And the trouble is that the answer to this seems to be: virtually nothing.

Interviewer: Are you saying that humans have morality and animals don’t?

JN: We’re talking about moral agency, not morality.

Gary Francione: But Jan, don’t we recognize that humans that don’t have moral agency are still members of the moral community? I think that is a generally accepted view.

JN: This is what I call the argument from marginal cases. Hardly anyone is like that. Children, of course, are, and they don’t have full rights. They grow up and they become people with full rights, and they’re very important to us, obviously, for that reason.

GF: Jan, do you accept that it’s morally wrong to inflict unecessary suffering or death on sentient nonhumans?

Do you think that there is no moral prohibition on that activity?

JN: That’s right.

Interviewer: Jan, if you believe that animals belong in a separate moral category from humans, what is to stop us from being very cruel to them?

JN: Well, what’s the point, in the first place? And in the second place, I agree with the general psychological perception that a habit of being cruel to animals could very well lead to a similar habit in regard to humans, and that’s serious. By the way, there is another general point to make here and that is, we’re talking indiscriminately about animals, but in fact, all the animals that you and I ever relate to, unless we’re hunters, are actually tame animals. They’re somebody’s property. And we do not have the right to inflict damage on other people’s property, pets nor domestic farm animals, etc. They all belong to somebody. They’re not ours. We can’t do whatever we want to with them. But that’s not because they have intrinsic rights. It’s only because their owners do.

Interviewer: But Gary, you don’t believe that animals are property.

GF: Of course they’re property. As an empirical matter, they’re property. I don’t believe they ought to be. When I use the expression “animal rights,” I mean one right: the right not be treated as property. But once we recognize that animals have the right not to be treated as property, once we recognize that their interest in not being treated as commodities, and at having their interests valued at zero depending on what our whim is or our desire is, we have to abolish institutionalized exploitation of animals.

JN: Notice that Gary doesn’t count the sentiment in favor of animals as a whim. I can easily imagine many people in many cultures regarding it as precisely that. Who are these crazy people who like animals?

GF: I think you’re misunderstanding my position if you think that I think we should use the law to impose this view on people. I think that would be crazy. It would never work. I think we need to think differently about the way we deal with animals, and I believe the revolution has to be one of the heart, and it has to be an ethical revolution.

If I like torturing animals, but I’m otherwise a nice guy… Your argument is that my torturing animals is only a problem if it’s going to lead me to be a nasty person otherwise. But as long as I’m not a nasty person otherwise — and there are plenty of people in this world who do all sorts of horrible things to animals, yet most people don’t regard them as horrible people. So in your view, the moral obligation is non-existent. As long as people are nice people otherwise to other humans, there is nothing wrong with people torturing animals if they get a charge out of that. If they like dog fighting, they like cock fighting, they like all sorts of things like that, then that’s fine. That’s fine for them to do. That’s your position, is it not?

JN: Well, when you say “fine,” you’re talking in a different kind of language…

GF: Is it morally acceptable? Is it morally acceptable for people to engage in dog fighting?

JF: In my view, there are two major general parts of morality. One part is the strict part having to do with rights, which is what I took you to be talking about originally, though I’m not so sure any more. And the other part has to do with how we ought to live and what kind of people we ought to be. On that front, I think torturing animals is pointless and weird, but the claim that it is morally wrong in anything like the first sense is, I think, not true.

It’s such a marginal case. Why are we even talking about it? Because the main use of animals, from our point of view, is first, for food and secondly, for medical research.

GF: I would suggest that our use of animals for the production of food involves torture.

JN: I want to claim that the torture is justified. You want to claim it’s not.

GF: We have no justification for eating nonhuman animals. It’s not necessary for us to eat them for health purposes. And animal based agriculture is an environmental disaster. So the question becomes: how do we justify killing 53 billion animals globally for food every year, not counting aquatic animals? How do we justify that if we take at all seriously the notion that we ought not to inflict unnecessary pain, suffering and death on animals? What possible justification could we have, and how is that any different from dog fighting? Some people like to sit around and watch dogs fight, and some people like to sit around a barbecue pit roasting animals that have been tortured every bit as much as the dogs used in dog fighting.

JN: You’re arguing from a marginal, weird case — the guy who tortures animals for its own sake — to the conclusion that people who eat hamburgers, like me, are malevolent torturers. I just don’t accept this.

Gary runs together two very different issues about this “unnecessary” business. We don’t need to justify our treatment of animals by claiming that they are in some serious sense necessary, like we would die if we didn’t eat animals. That’s not necessary at all. The fact is, if you like meat, then you’re justified in killing animals for the sake of eating meat.

GF: I think there’s a lot of confusion. I’ve spent a lot of time going around and lecturing to various groups, and it’s clear to me, that even though it’s 2009, a lot of people really believe that they need to eat animal products to lead an optimally healthy life. That is empirically not true. But a lot of people still believe it. And I think that has a role to play in it. But I also think we live in a society in which the casual infliction of death on animals is so widely accepted as sort of a default position. In a sense, it hasn’t really hit the radar screen yet of a lot of people. But there is clearly a change occurring. It’s happening here in North America. It’s happening in Europe. The thinking about this issue is clearly in transition.

Interviewer: Gary, what would it take for Jan to convince you that you are wrong?

GF: I don’t think he could. I’m familiar with Jan’s general political philosophy, and his libertarianism, and his notion of contractualism as a basis for morality. I reject that. I do not believe that that’s a good argument. This notion that human beings make a contract or that there’s anything like a social contract, I think that’s completely fiction. I think these are devices which philosophers use. There’s no social contract. I didn’t make a contract. You didn’t make a contract, there ain’t no social contract.

The notion that the members of the community are those who are capable of making moral contracts, or who are moral agents, is just a fundamental premise I don’t accept and I don’t think it can be justified and I don’t think is reflected in the conventional moral thinking of most people. So I don’t think he could convince me.

What I find curious about some of the comments he’s made, is when he said that torturing animals is morally permissible, but that it’s weird. So if I leave my house today and I’m on my way to the university and I encounter somebody who is about to blow-torch a dog because he enjoys torturing dogs, I can say to him what? “This is weird what you’re doing? It’s morally permissible, it’s quite all right for you to do it, but morally I can’t really tell you that you ought not to do it. All I can tell you is, ‘it’s weird.’”

Jan, I don’t understand what that means.

JN: You can tell anybody that he ought or ought not to do anything. People do it all the time. The question is, what kind of fundamental reason do we have for doing this?

In the case of torturing animals, other people see it and they’re shocked. They don’t like to see this kind of thing being done.

Interviewer: Jan, is it unpleasant to you? If you walked down the street, and you saw a man putting a blow torch to a dog, what would you do?

JN: I would ask him what on earth he was doing.

Interviewer: Would you stop him?

JN: Probably not.

Narveson goes on to insist that “Gary’s claim that they are being tortured is a wild exaggeration… de-horning a cow is not torture.”

Francione describes his visits to slaughterhouses and how he observed that 30-40% of the pigs were improperly stunned and were still conscious when they were cut up. “The things that I have seen give me nightmares.”

Narveson responded, “Well, they don’t give me nightmares, and I’m sure they don’t give the people who work in the slaughterhouses nightmares. Is this not, in some serious sense, a matter of taste?”

Narveson explained that he does not accept that “the claim that some sentient being suffers as a result of something that we do is a sufficient reason why we shouldn’t do it, or at least  is a very strong reason why we shouldn’t do it, one that would not be counterbalanced by the fact that it is otherwise very much in our interests to do it. The standard example is eating animals. The question is, is our interest in the taste of animal flesh such as to justify doing the things we do to them to get them into the frying pan? My answer is, yes.

“Because I don’t think animals count in the sense that humans do. I think it’s perfectly reasonable and justified to ‘enslave’ and, in Gary’s sense, ‘torture’ animals for these purposes.”

Francione responded, “This is what morality is about. There are things we wish to do, there are things that may make us happy, that are wrong.”

Gary L. Francione is a philosopher and law professor at Rutger’s University in New Jersey.

Jan Narveson is a philosophy professor at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada.

Listen to the full debate

We don’t usually think of what we eat as a matter of ethics. Stealing, lying, hurting people – these acts are obviously relevant to our moral character. So too, most people would say, is our involvement in community activities, our generosity to others in need, and especially our sex life. But eating – an activity that is even more essential than sex, and in which everyone participates – is generally seen quite differently.

The way food is sold an advertised today doesn’t help. Despite the recent upsurge of farmers’ markets, in the developed world almost all food is purchased from supermarkets. Shoppers are not presented with relevant information about the ethical choices that surround food. Instead, the world food industry spends more than $40 billion annually trying to make us eat their products – a figure greater than the domestic product of 70% of the world’s nations. That buys an avalanche of advertising that sweeps down on us from all sides but tells us only what the advertisers want us to know.

If slaughterhouses had glass walls, it’s often said,  we’d all be vegetarian. That’s probably not quite true – some people can get used to almost anything. But transparency is increasingly recognised as an important ethical principle and a safeguard against bad practice. Consumers should be able to get accurate and unbiased information about what they are buying and how it was produced.

There is a broad consensus within both religious and secular ethics that an ethical life respects virtues like fairness, justice, and benevolence. At the heart of these virtues lies a more basic principle: I cannot reasonably claim that my interests matter more than yours simply because my interests are mine. My interests may matter more to me, but I cannot claim they matter more in any objective sense. From the ethical point of view, everyone’s interests deserve equal consideration.

Obviously, animals can’t have equal rights to humans. Animals can’t have equal rights to an education, to vote, or to exercise free speech. The kind of parity that most animal advocates want to extend to animals is not equal rights, but equal consideration of comparable interests. If an animal feels pain, the pain matters as much as it does when a human feels pain. Granted, the mental capacities of different beings will affect how they experience pain, how they remember it, and whether they anticipate further pain – and these differences can be important. But the pain felt by a baby is a bad thing, even if the baby is no more self-aware than, say, a pig, and has no greater capacities for memory of anticipation. Pain can be a useful warning of danger, so it is sometimes valuable, all things considered. But taken in themselves, unless there is some compensating benefit, we should consider similar experiences of pain to be equally undesirable, whatever the species of the being who feels the pain.

We don’t need to eat meat to live. We only continue doing so because we are accustomed to eating these animals products and can’t imagine a meal without them, or because we like the way they taste. And these are not ethical justifications, given the harm these practices cause.

Mouth touching death.
Murder of the innocent.
Stale bodies devoid of breath
Unnecessarily heaven sent.

How can guilt not stop you?
When full knowledge you possess
Of the suffering that they go through
Full of blood, pain and distress.

Surely it tickles your taste bud.
But is it really sensible?
They pay it with their blood
And your reward is dispensable.

For the sake of a bit of meat
We deprive them of happiness
With disregard them we treat
And kill them all in masses.

And not single thought is spared
For those who gave their life away.
They died in pain and scared
Just so you live another day.

But they feel just like you do
Yet throats are sliced on your behalf.
Pre-packed they come to you
No flowers, grave or epitaph.

–Plutarch
(46-120 A.D.)
Greek historian, biographer, and essayist

‘Good evening’, it lowed and sat back heavily on its haunches,
‘I am the main Dish of the Day. May I interest you in the parts
of my body?’

It harrumphed and gurgled a bit, wriggled its hind quarters in
to a more comfortable position and gazed peacefully at them.

Its gaze was met by looks of startled bewilderment from
Arthur and Trillian, a resigned shrug from Ford Prefect and
naked hunger from Zaphod Beeblebrox.

‘Something off the shoulder perhaps?’ suggested the animal,
‘Braised in a white wine sauce?’

‘Er, your shoulder?’ said Arthur in a horrified whisper.

‘But naturally my shoulder, sir,’ mooed the animal contentedly,
‘nobody else’s is mine to offer.’

Zaphod leapt to his feet and started prodding and feeling
the animal’s shoulder appreciatively.

‘Or the rump is very good,’ murmured the animal. ‘I’ve been
exercising it and eating plenty of grain, so there’s a lot
of good meat there.’

It gave a mellow grunt, gurgled again and started to chew
the cud. It swallowed the cud again.

‘Or a casselore of me perhaps?’ it added.

‘You mean this animal actually wants us to eat it?’ whispered
Trillian to Ford.

‘Me?’ said Ford, with a glazed look in his eyes, ‘I don’t mean
anything.’

‘That’s absolutely horrible,’ exclaimed Arthur, ‘the most revolting
thing I’ve ever heard.’

‘What’s the problem Earthman?’ said Zaphod, now transfering his
attention to the animal’s enormous rump.

‘I just don’t want to eat an animal that’s standing there
inviting me to,’ said Arthur, ‘It’s heartless.’

‘Better than eating an animal that doesn’t want to be
eaten,’ said Zaphod.

‘That’s not the point,’ Arthur protested. Then he thought about it
for a moment. ‘Alright,’ he said, ‘maybe it is the point. I don’t
care, I’m not going to think about it now. I’ll just … er … I
think I’ll just have a green salad,’ he muttered.

‘May I urge you to consider my liver?’ asked the animal,
‘it must be very rich and tender by now, I’ve been force-feeding
myself for months.’

‘A green salad,’ said Arthur emphatically.

‘A green salad?’ said the animal, rolling his eyes disapprovingly
at Arthur.

‘Are you going to tell me,’ said Arthur, ‘that I shouldn’t have
green salad?’

‘Well,’ said the animal, ‘I know many vegetables that are
very clear on that point. Which is why it was eventually
decided to cut through the whole tangled problem and breed
an animal that actually wanted to be eaten and was capable of
saying so clearly and distinctly. And here I am.’

It managed a very slight bow.

‘Glass of water please,’ said Arthur.

‘Look,’ said Zaphod, ‘we want to eat, we don’t want to make
a meal of the issues. Four rare stakes please, and hurry.
We haven’t eaten in five hundred and sevebty-six thousand
million years.’

The animal staggered to its feet. It gave a mellow gurgle.
‘A very wise choice, sir, if I may say so. Very good,’ it
said, ‘I’ll just nip off and shoot myself.’

He turned and gave a friendly wink to Arthur.
‘Don’t worry, sir,’ he said, ‘I’ll be very humane.’