Perhaps Rene Descartes was right when he made the compelling argument that animals don’t feel pain. After all, he was right about a lot of other stuff.

Descartes was a vegetarian for health reasons. He, did, however, skin dogs and rabbits alive for research purposes. He reasoned that if the animals felt pain then what was done to them would be so horrific that God would never allow it. Since God did, in fact, allow it, then it follows logically that dogs and rabbits don’t feel pain. There is no reason to think any other animals do, either. As Descartes went on to argue, animals don’t have souls, and without a soul, you can’t feel pain.

At this point you may be thinking, that only makes sense if there really is a God. How do we know God exists? Descartes proved that, too.

It should be noted that there are currents of religious thought which teach that the more intelligent animals do have souls. But even if this is true, just because an animal has a soul, that doesn’t mean it feels pain. It’s more likely that the complex neurochemical pathways which underlie pain perception that we share with nonhuman animals are a coincidence, and that they have an entirely different function in all nonhuman animals, not just the less intelligent ones that have no souls.

But even if animals do feel pain, does it matter? Let’s examine the issue from the perspectives of secular and religious morality.

Why Meat is Moral

Refraining from eating the flesh of animals would be unreasonable because it would be putting animals’ trivial interests in their own lives above our greater interest in eating them. After all, meat tastes really good. It’s such a treasured part of the diet that in some languages, the word for meal is “meat.”

There are some who would claim that if our actions cause the suffering of other sentient beings that is a strong reason not to do it. Libertarian philosopher Jan Narveson has powerfully refuted this claim and points out that the suffering caused to sentient nonhumans by humans is “counterbalanced by the fact that it is very much in our interests to do it.”

In a nutshell, “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.” He goes on to explain, “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.”

Even Peter Singer, father of the animal rights movement, acknowledges that animals have no interest in continuing to live. Of course, Singer is a whack job who gives most of his own money away to poor people he’s never met, and he thinks the kind of lives animals have is important. He argues that while animals have no interest in the quantity of their lives, they do have an interest in the quality of their own lives.

That may be true, just as humans have an interest in the quality of their own lives. But that doesn’t mean we should refrain from having children just because our children will suffer during their lifetimes. Life has intrinsic value. Even most humans who are deeply unhappy have the desire to go on living and do not wish they had never been born. Why should animals be any different?

If people stopped eating meat, then fewer animals would be born. As eminent economist Robin Hanson so eloquently stated in his Meat is Moral essay, by eating meat “you are not hurting animals; you are helping them.”

He points out that “we might well agree that wild pigs have lives more worth living, per day at least, just as humans may be happier in the wild instead of fighting traffic to work in a cubical all day. But even these human lives are worth living, and it is my judgment that most farm animal’s lives are worth living too. Most farm animals prefer living to dying; they do not want to commit suicide.”

Hanson explains that the more animals we eat, the more animals will be born to replace them. If we stop eating meat then those animals will never get to have a life at all. Since life on a factory farm is better than no life at all, meat is moral.

This doesn’t mean, of course, that we shouldn’t care at all about improving their lives. It is kind of us to do things that improve the lives of others, whether they be humans or animals, but it is not immoral not to. As Hanson put it, “It would be kind of you to pay a little more for your meat to improve the lives of the animals that become your meat. Just don’t confuse a lack of extra kindness with cruelty; people already do more good by buying ordinary meat than by buying veggies.”

Religious Morality

Perhaps you reject secular ethics. What, then, compels us to support the meat industry on religious grounds? All the holy books in the Western tradition advocate the eating of meat, and God explicitly gave humans dominion over animals. Furthermore, as mentioned earlier, Descartes proved that God exists and thereby established that animals don’t feel pain.

The authority of the holy books and the scientific proofs of Descartes will be sufficient for most people. But you may still have nagging doubts, or you may be one of a growing number of people who believes the Vedas offer a much better explanation of how the universe works. Quantum mechanics and superstring theorists are just now starting to discover all the things that were explained thousands of years ago in the Vedic scriptures.

People who follow the Vedas are vegetarians, but they eat a lot of dairy products, especially butter and ghee. One of the important tenets of their religion is nonviolence, so one day I asked them why they supported the dairy industry when the use of animals on dairy farms meets their definition of violence. They explained to me that if butter and ghee are properly blessed, they contain no karmic taint. The prohibition against violence is there only to help people avoid bad karma. But anything desired by Krishna and prepared with the proper rituals can have no negative karma no matter how it is procured.

“Why is that?” I asked. They just laughed at my naivete and told me that was how the universe is structured. Then they told me a charming story about Krishna as a child. Apparently he was very fond of butter and naughtly little Krishna used to sneak into the kitchen through a window to steal butter. One of his common nicknames is “the butter thief.” Apparently He is just as fond of it now.

What does this have to do with the morality of meat? No matter how many hormones you inject into cows and how sophisticated your milking machinery, the truth is that milk cannot be produced without producing lots and lots of calves. And farmers cannot just produce calves that go to waste. They must be able to cut them up and sell them. Farmers are not philanthropists, after all. They have to make a living. Lord Krishna wants butter, and without the meat industry, the dairy industry would dry up, Krishna would become unhappy, the universal dharmic order would be imbalanced and the whole structure of the universe would become deranged .

Now that we’ve established the moral necessity of supporting the meat industry, a few criticisms are in order.

A Few Words on the Inefficiencies of the Leather and Fur Industries

In order to maximize the contributions of the meat industry to human happiness, there are some inefficiencies in the leather and fur industries that should be addressed. Leather and fur are treated as commodities in their own right, and the flesh of the animals stripped of their skin and fur frequently goes to waste. To just throw the corpses into a pile and let them rot after we’ve stripped their skins is unethical. We should make full use of the animals in an attempt to create the maximum amount of human happiness we can from each animal.

Weak Arguments in Support of Eating Meat Should Be Abandoned

In order to be effective in our arguments, we must be careful to weed out any weak arguments, even if they are intuitively appealing. One such argument is that we need to eat meat in order to be healthy. It can be challenging to overcome such deeply ingrained thought patterns. But is has been acknowledged by the USDA and the ADA that a vegan diet can be healthy. We don’t want to use arguments that our opponents can effectively refute. If they defeat us on even a minor point such as this, it will give them some credibility, and they may use that to confuse the uninformed. Unsophisticated thinkers are easily swayed and may not realize that even though it’s healthy to be vegan, it is immoral.

The argument that I find most irksome is the one that it’s natural to eat meat. That just doesn’t hold any water. Murder and rape are also natural. Just because it’s natural does not mean that it is good or moral. After all, chimpanzees eat monkeys. Chimpanzees are our closest relatives, and we are theirs. But that doesn’t mean we should start eating our fellow primates. That would be ridiculous. It’s a health hazard to eat such closely related animals and it would also be in poor taste. Chimpanzees clearly have a lot to learn about common sense and morality.

We must bear in mind that we are superior as a species because of our ability to rise above our instincts and formulate morally coherent systems of thought. True compassion is knowing your place on the food chain.*

Every year, the number of animals bred for food in the U.S. increases by the hundreds of thousands. Let’s keep up the good work.

* @ngaulin on Twitter

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