A Limited Defense of Factory Farming: The Ethics and Politics of Consuming Intensively Raised Animals.

• Author: Ashbach, Jonathan

Forty-seven years ago, in 1975, Peter Singer published Animal Liberation, the book largely responsible for initiating the animal rights movement. On a theoretical level, Singer argued that the interests of sentient animals deserve consideration equal to that due humans. "If a being suffers there can be no moral justification for refusing to take that suffering into consideration[;] ... the principle of equality requires that its suffering be counted equally with the like suffering ... of any other being" (2009, 8). (1) Privileging human interests is speciesism--an unjustifiable "bias in favor of the interests of members of one's own species" (6). On an empirical level, Singer's argument, to the (significant) extent that it dealt with factory farming, (2) consisted largely of detailing the practices of factory farms to convince readers that animals raised for food are typically treated in a manner that inflicts great misery on them and is therefore morally unacceptable. "The aim," Singer wrote, "is to demonstrate that under these methods animals lead miserable lives from birth to slaughter" (97). His conclusion (159-60) was that in most circumstances today vegetarianism is morally requisite. (3)

Timothy Hsiao has recently stirred controversy with a series of articles defending meat eating in general and factory farming in particular (Hsiao 2015a, 2015b, 2017). His stance is noteworthy because although there is a significant literature on the relative ethical merits of vegetarianism and omnivorism, (4) and although scholarly condemnations of factory farming are not uncommon, (5) the literature in defense of factory farming (at least from the perspective of the ethics of its impact on animal well-being) is comprised almost exhaustively by Hsiao's own articles.6

Unfortunately, Hsiao's defense of factory farms is unconvincing. The fundamental problems with his argument are twofold. First, that argument is predicated on a eudaemonistic account of morality that many readers will find deeply problematic rather than persuasive due to its irreducibly self-centered nature. (7) Indeed, Hsiao indicates lack of familiarity with more common and persuasive (and less egoistic) accounts of morality, writing that "[i]t is hard to see what else morality could be if not a code of conduct that exists for the sake of guiding purposeful action in pursuit of one's flourishing" (2015a, 1129). The second root problem begins when Hsiao makes a fairly convincing defense of the position that (of the species we know) only human beings are rational actors and therefore moral agents. The difficulty is that he then makes an unjustified leap to the position that only humans can be moral patients, as if it were impossible for a being to be morally wronged unless it is also capable of morally wronging others. (8) Such a position runs counter not just to what might be dismissively dubbed the ideology of animal rights apologists but also to widespread and deep-rooted moral intuitions. (9) As a consequence, a number of articles have responded to Hsiao, all of them negatively, (10) and so the treatment of animals in factory farming as practiced in the United States today is left with virtually no direct ethical defense in the academic literature.

Against this background, I seek to do five things. First, I sketch a plausible philosophical position from which one might approach the question of factory farming. Because all moral judgment takes place from a particular metaphysical standpoint, this section plays a major part in my project by indicating a reasonable philosophical starting place from which one might approve of factory farming. It traces the outlines of an intuitivist, utilitarian, and ratiocentric (IUR) perspective that seems appropriate to this issue. Second, working from this starting point, I suggest a principled approach to evaluating the permissibility of factory farming. Since factory farming is not a distinct target per se but is instead simply a collection of practices sometimes used by farmers raising livestock, I begin by asking what the absolute minimum standards appropriate to the raising of animals for consumption in general could be (against a baseline of vegetarianism), and I suggest that raising animals for consumption (and therefore factory farming among other methods) is acceptable if it results in a net gain in utility to humans that more than offsets any net disutility to the animals involved, perhaps discounting animal utility vis-a-vis human utility. This section of the paper thus describes the theoretical position on factory farming that I believe follows from the IUR perspective. Third, I seek to remedy the gap in the literature by offering a moderate prima facie empirical defense of factory farming based on the criterion enunciated in the previous section. Finally, the paper's fourth section does two things. It extends the discussion to regulation and consumer activism, first arguing theoretically that reforms to current factory-farming methods that are more likely to increase (again, perhaps discounted) animal welfare more than they decrease human welfare are worth pursuing. It then suggests empirically the desirability of increased intervention. That is, it offers some initial evidence that animal welfare could be significantly increased at little human cost. My hope is that this article will provide a reasonable middle ground between what appear to me to be twin evils: immoral nonconsideration of animal interests on one hand and immoral overconsideration of those interests to the detriment of human interests on the other.

The limited scope of my argument (in two senses) should be noted. First, factory farming has been criticized from a number of angles, including its effects on the environment and justice (Rossi and Garner 2014; Martin 2016), in addition to the ethics of its impact on animals. One of the most serious concerns is that routine overuse of antibiotics in factory farms is contributing to the rise of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, with potentially widespread negative effects on world public health (Anomaly 2015, 2020). I address only the ethics of factory farming's direct impact on animal well-being. My conclusions are therefore meant to be modified by other lines of argument, not taken as definitive. Second, I do not seek to exhaustively defend the IUR perspective from which this article argues or the empirical conclusions to which it comes. Such a task would be far too involved for any single article. I instead offer a brief initial defense of the position, point readers to literature where each aspect of it is investigated in greater depth, and note a few suggestive empirical findings. My goal is not to prove that my position is the one and certain truth but to suggest a plausible approach that I think offers a reasonable (limited) defense of factory farming and a fruitful framework for further debate.

By animal welfare, I mean an animal's net subjective experience--the overall balance of its positive and negative affective states. This is controversial in theory but need not be, I think, in practice. There is debate as to what precisely constitutes animal welfare, and mainstream positions focus not only on mental states but also on animals' health and ability to engage in behaviors normal to their species. (11) In practice, however, disease and repression will affect an animal's affective states, and thus other perspectives overlap substantially, if not perfectly, with the definition assumed here.

Philosophical Orientation: The IUR Approach

In this section, I sketch a plausible philosophical perspective from which one might approach the question of the permissibility of factory farming. This perspective is intuitivist, utilitarian, and ratiocentric (IUR).

First, the IUR perspective is intuitivist. By intuitivism, I mean not the intuitionist understanding that certain propositional moral truths are self-evident but an approach to moral questions that profoundly respects the complexity of the moral realm and the fact that moral intuition is our primary source of information about it. The intuitivist will hew very close to moral intuitions and be skeptical of attempts to "rationalize" ("oversimplify"?) moral perception by concluding that a moral principle is established and should be applied regardless of counterintuitive results. The approach I describe will instead be deeply attentive to the intuitive moral relevance of particular circumstances, relationships, or categories, whether the resulting distinctions seem "rationally" relevant or not--whatever that means. (12) It must be noted, however, that intuitivism does not mean simply doing whatever one unreflectively feels to be right. Right use of moral intuition can be trained and educated; empirical information is relevant to our perception of moral rights and wrongs; and deliverances of moral intuition that are broad (across space) and deep (across time) and that present themselves as more fundamental or certain trump those that are idiosyncratic, peculiar to a given culture, or weak. (13) Respect for the moral categories our intuitions discern will be vital at a number of points in the following pages.

Hsiao objects to an emphasis on moral intuition, but his position is arguably incoherent. Noting that many theorists who conclude that animals possess moral status appeal to intuition, Hsiao objects that "many theories that claim intuitive support are mutually exclusive. What we want from a theory of moral status is a robust conceptual framework for understanding moral status, not just a list of properties that are justified by a mere appeal to intuition" (2015b, 282). No doubt many theories that appeal to intuition do contradict one another--as do many theories that appeal to reason. But this is no more reason to reject intuition than to reject rationality. The solution instead is again reflection on intuitions that are broad...