Meat Offsets are Underrated
A carnal indulgence
If you think that animals have any moral weight, it becomes very difficult to justify factory farming. And if you can’t justify factory farming, it becomes difficult to eat meat. Or, rather, it should. But people still do eat meat. Including me.
There are many reasons to go vegetarian. Eating less meat offers some health benefits, though I suspect the optimal human diet (from a purely nutritional perspective) does include a little of the stuff. There’s the horrible conditions in factory farms, and a desire not to support those. There’s climate change - meat is just a really inefficient way to get calories in terms of carbon. And there is a constellation of other more abstract reasons, like a broad commitment to nonviolence or just plain compassion.
The main reason to eat meat is that you want to. But boy, is it possible to want to. I crave meat basically all of the time; one of my favorite meals is just a Styrofoam container of chicken teriyaki from the mall. Further, the desire for meat (or any kind of food) is one of the few pure reward signals built into the human brain. As the world’s millions of perennial dieters know, it can be a difficult signal to override!
To cater (heh) to people like me, there are ideas like reducetarianism, cajoling carnivores to indulge a bit less. And of course to a vegan, vegetarianism is itself a compromise, a way to satisfy urges (and get B12) without harming animals so much. But personal consumption - or lack thereof - is not the only lever.
The Indulgence
Suppose a guilty burger-eater wins the lottery. Suddenly, he has a million dollars burning a hole in his pocket. He pays off his house, funds his kids’ college accounts, and sets up his retirement. But, feeling a twinge of sadness over his celebration steak, he has a clever idea. What if he took the $100,000 that he had left over, and donated it to a vegetarian charity? Surely for that kind of money, some bleeding hearts could convince two other people to forgo meat. Or even ten people! Now our burger-eater can eat all the steak he desires, secure that when it comes to animals, he’s in the black. Sure, he personally eats several thousand factory farmed chickens, cows, and fish, but he indirectly saves many more. In particular, a world where he was never born is worse for animals, in aggregate, than the world where he enjoys a nightly filet mignon.
Is there something wrong with our guilty millionaire’s plan? Maybe! There are certainly arguments against it. I’ll present five.
Argument from Non-Fungibility
It’s obvious that a firefighter who saves two children from a burning building is not thereby granted moral license to kill a random person on the street. If we consider animals moral patients, then helping one animal doesn’t cancel out hurting another. If you wanted to make up for your crimes against the pigs you subsidized torturing, you’d have to do something for those specific pigs. Except you already also subsidized their slaughter. Oops.
Argument from Hypocrisy
At least some animal welfare charities do dietary advocacy: they try to convince people to eat less meat. Paying to convince other people to do something, so you don’t have to do that exact thing, is hypocritical. Most people have strong instincts against that sort of thing - it’d be a scandal if a politician telling their constituents to ration water had a gigantic fountain installed on their lawn. Also, there’s a pyramid scheme dynamic. If everyone runs around paying for “go vegan” leaflets, sighs with relief, and hits the McDonald’s drive thru, the mission is very much not accomplished.
Argument from Inequality
Simply having more money shouldn’t get a person out of fundamental moral quandaries. The lottery winner - or the heiress - can donate enough money to save ten times the animals they’ll ever consume, and still have enough to grill burgers on their personal yacht. There’s a sense that taking a moral stand should entail real stakes, and that those stakes shouldn’t vary that much between people; if a struggling single mom has to grapple with what meat consumption means to her, a magnate shouldn’t be able to cut a check and snarf down caviar.
Argument from The System being Bad
If you stop eating meat, you’re opting out of the carnist system. Maybe you can’t personally take down Tyson Foods, but you’re no longer feeding the beast. But donating to some nonprofit? Really? Good luck finding one that’s not just some vanity project, or cooking the books, or at minimum dramatically overstating their impact to score money from suckers like you. The solution is simple! Eat beans!
Argument from Allegiance
Being vegetarian, or ideally vegan, is a bright line in the sand. It entails some sacrifice, sure, but it shows you’re serious about animal welfare. If enough people become vegetarian, it can start a cascade of norm changes: think about how weird it would be if someone just lit up a cigarette without asking at a restaurant today, compared to thirty years ago. Weird complicated finicky shell games don’t change culture. Setting an example does. So keep it simple, and stop eating meat.
I don’t think any of these arguments are terrible. In fact, I think each has some force, depending on what a given meat-eater cares about. But I do give $100 each month to Compassion in World Farming. Let me explain why.
The Case
First, I’ll make a positive case for my donation behavior. Then, briefly, I’ll respond to the arguments I’ve laid out for the prosecution.
I don’t have a problem with animal husbandry per se. When I see happy-looking cows grazing by the interstate, I think it’s good that they’re alive and I accept that someday, they’ll be killed for meat. If I could wave a magic wand and make it so that they’d never been born, I wouldn’t, because it seems like their lives are worth living.
If I stopped eating meat, all else equal, I’d very slightly decrease the number of animals raised for food in the world. But the reason that’s a good thing isn’t that raising animals for food is fundamentally evil - I don’t believe it is! Rather, it’s good to reduce the number of food animals because most food animals have horrible lives.
Compassion in World Farming doesn’t try to abolish animal farming. Rather, they try to make it more humane. To pass laws guaranteeing more rights for farmed animals, and to get major corporations to promise - as enforceably as possible - to meet welfare standards for them.
So, by donating $100 a month (I am not a lottery winner or heiress), I feel like I am ever-so-slightly raising the waterline for animal treatment. And, in fact, the way animals are treated is the thing I care about, rather than how many of them there are. If every chicken, cow, and salmon on a farm had a nice life and then suddenly, painlessly died, then sure. Bring on the meats!
Am I, by eating meat meanwhile, complicit in a system I disagree with? Yes. But I feel like actively trying to help improve that system, even if it’s just with some money every month, is the right choice for me.
And now, the arguments:
Non-Fungibility: The entire system of modern agribusiness is so complicated and abstract that it feels like “make things better” is a better lodestar than “don’t retroactively harm any specific animal”. I admit this is sort of weak, but the whole thing is weird since my main crime against these animals is… causing them to be born? But it’s not their being born I hate, it’s how bad their lives are. And I can fight to improve that!
Hypocrisy: I think if you care about animal welfare, you’re only hypocritical if you’re specifically funding vegetarian outreach. But I’d be perfectly happy to live in a world where everyone pays extra money for ethical meat, and eats it. No hypocrisy here!
Inequality: It’s tough to be poor. I’m not interested in judging people who can barely make rent for not donating, but I’m middle class and can spare $100 each month, so I do.
The System: Sure, it’s hard to find good charities. But, you know, skill issue. I think I’ve found a pretty good one. And that charity is actively trying to improve the system, with some good wins so far.
Allegiance: If veganism seemed like it was on the cusp of a grand cultural victory, I’d be inclined to defend its borders. But it isn’t: only about 5% of Americans are vegetarian, much less vegan. You need more than that to shift norms, so I’d rather try to help shift farming norms instead.
The Call
I’m not sure if I have any fellow guilty meat-eaters who read my blog - most of you I know about are either happy meat-eaters or already vegetarian. But if you do eat meat, feel bad about it, and have disposable income, join me! I’m not sure it’s an ethical slam dunk, but it’s a whole lot better than nothing.
If you are interested, again, my charity of choice is Compassion in World Farming, but for those doing their own research, Animal Charity Evaluators is a good place to start, or you could check out recent grants from the Animal Welfare Fund.