When animals are reduced to widgets to maximize quarterly profits, it’s inevitable that there will be mistreatment. A farm in San Diego reportedly disposed of 30,000 live, squirming hens (who apparently were no longer producing sufficient eggs) by feeding them into a wood chipper. It was cost-effective.
For the last half-dozen years, I’ve avoided meat, in part because of Singer’s writing, in part because of my experience raising livestock and poultry on our family farm, and in part nudged by my daughter. But I puzzle over the complexities.
I don’t eat factory-farmed food, but is it OK to eat farm animals that have been humanely raised? (I could be open to that; after all, I do eat animals like elk that have been hunted, partly because natural predators are rare.) I stopped eating octopus after reading a book about their intelligence and empathy, but what about shrimp? (For now, I do eat shrimp and other shellfish.) To me, the central issue is as the philosopher Jeremy Bentham expressed it in the 18th century: “The question is not, can they reason, nor can they talk, but can they suffer?” And the answers for, say, oysters, aren’t always obvious.
We haven’t figured out our moral obligations to fellow humans, so perhaps it’s understandable that we haven’t worked out our obligations to shellfish. But the way people struggle with these questions strikes me as a measure of moral progress — and of the power of ideas.
“The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood,” wrote John Maynard Keynes. “Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.”
And so it is that a philosopher’s book originally published almost half a century ago prodded our consciences and changed what will be on summer barbecue grills around the world. That is the moral force of an idea whose time has arrived.