I think the “animal response = toy robot” people would feel horrific if made to torture a pig, or even to see one tortured in front of them. In my view the problem is how isolated anyone is from ever having to see these things, not that we have some inbuilt intuition that animals don’t suffer.
I don't think this is a good argument because it's easy to get desensitized, working around animals. Certainly I don't think most farmers, hunters, and fishers are psychopaths.
I think that many people of the "what other people do with animals isn't your business" mentality are unaware of the actual horrors of factory farming. They just think of a bunch of animals cooped up in cages in close proximity to each other. They're not thinking of the actual acute suffering. It is much more plausible that animals can't "feel sad / unsatisfied with their life" than that they can't suffer acute physical pain.
See, for example, this reddit post, the first one I found from a google search I made after typing the above:
"They just exist in a cubicle surrounded by other animals, so how can they be sad about their life? They will never cry over the free life they couldn't live. They just live...to die...without thinking about anything."
Alternatively, maybe people, in the moment of seeing an animal in severe pain, have a negative emotional reaction, but when "thinking" (not necessarily carefully/rationally) about it in the abstract, they feel that animals can't actually suffer, because they don't have internal experiences in the way we do. There may be different "layers" of intuitions here. I think most people would probably also have a negative emotional reaction to a realistic animal-like robot (that they know is a robot) in extreme pain.
I think extreme suffering matters the most; it has become the core of my philosophy in the past few years. (See the philosophy chapters https://www.losingmyreligions.net/ for details)
Several points to maybe consider:
1. I'm closing in on 40 years as a vegetarian, and over three decades as an advocate. I've talked with more people than I can even guess at. I can honestly say I've never thought, "This person thinks animal suffering is pretend."
2. In your cladistic graph, it seems unreasonable to me to think that everything to the right of some point can experience human-level suffering, and everything to the left doesn't suffer. There has to be some gradation in the amount of suffering possible as the complexity of the nervous system increases. This isn't to denigrate the suffering of non-humans; we focus on chickens (One Step for Animals). But I wouldn't say the worst *possible* suffering of a chicken is equal to the worst *possible* suffering of a human.
3. Convincing people to change their habits is very hard, to the point where, to a first approximation, it is impossible. Worse, attempts are fraught with unintended consequences that actually leads to more suffering (https://www.onestepforanimals.org/about.html).
4. “It would be good to not have an unimaginably vast underclass of conscious beings like ourselves who we regularly subject to nightmarish suffering with basically no positive experiences to make up for it only because they have unsympathetic outer appearances and can’t reason and think well enough to convince us to stop.” I think this is a true statement, but in my experience, statements like this have, at best, zero impact on anyone who isn't already vegan. As I've gotten older, I realize we should focus not on being right, but first causing no harm. https://mattball.substack.com/p/being-smart-hurts
1. Interesting yeah, I've bumped into enough people who will say very directly that they basically don't think most animals (even dogs and cats!) have experiences that are anywhere near as bad to experience as normal human that I've started to assume it's more popular. Even if it's not a conscious belief, it seems like a strong subjective experience people have, where animal pain doesn't really add up to human pain in any meaningful way. Appreciate the pushback here.
2. Yeah I agree. I was trying to make this piece shorter (I have a tendency to get lost in parentheticals and footnotes in general) and cut a bunch of notes about how “obviously this will be some kind of spectrum” to avoid getting bogged down. I might need to edit those back in.
3. Yup I agree, I’ve really loved your recent writing on this. I’m pretty careful in other places to make the general point that requiring everyone to go vegan if they care about animal welfare is like requiring everyone sell their cars before saying anything public about climate change. Basically a massive disaster for the movement. I use “vegan” a lot here mostly because it was shorter than writing “Animal welfare advocate” every time but I should probably go back and clarify that.
4. Also not my experience! I’ve actually found big statements like this to get the issue across more clearly, because most people think animal welfare advocates are mainly just upset that animals are being killed at all. Would love to read more about alternative messaging ideas.
Really appreciated the thoughtful reply, keep up your great work on this! Everyone reading this should go follow Matt.
I always remember Cleveland Amory (not a vegetarian): "People have an infinite capacity to rationalize, especially when it comes to something they want to eat."
"I’m pretty careful in other places to make the general point that requiring everyone to go vegan if they care about animal welfare is like requiring everyone sell their cars before saying anything public about climate change."
I think this is an incredibly important point—one that both animal advocates and non-animal advocates often get wrong. An important datapoint for me is that in pre-civil war America, most abolitionists consumed slave products.
Good post. Echoing some other replies, I think almost all people know animals feel pain and suffer but just rationalise it away. Most people get extremely upset about their dogs, cats, alpacas etc being hurt and can express disinterest or delight in certain humans' suffering (foreigners, child rapists, terrorists etc), so I don't think it's an evopsych thing in perceiving human vs non-human. I think conformity, a high-preference for convenience, and supremacist ideology (in some cases) does most of the heavy lifting for why most people aren't animal welfarists or vegans.
I have a bit of a different take. I do believe most people strongly feel empathy for animals but what makes it difficult in the case of cows, pigs, chickens... Is exactly the fact that we are using them. It is easier to believe they can't suffer and if we don't believe that, the consequences for our behavior are just too big so we don't want to believe it. In other words, where you stand depends on where you sit. Beliefs here are largely based on behavior.
Thanks for this summary. Had a million similar conversations - it's pretty depressing.
i agree it's pretty hardwired. Also there is attention deficit. An average person gets bombarded by many different social justice issues that it is almost impossible to bring the topic in a way that would capture their attention for long enough do they can plan and take action despite the fact that it was never easier to be vegan than today.
"In the evolutionary environment, there would have been basically no reason to evolve an empathetic reaction to other animals."
There are lots of reasons. Mutualism in the natural world is extensive, given its broad utility for threat and resource management. One can regularly observe inter species assistance in the wild where the species interests are aligned and dont pose a threat.
On that basis, a resource/threat analysis better explains people's common views than abstract moral analyses. After all, humans have a well known propensity to inflict extreme suffering even on other humans that have been understood as a threat or a resource to be exploited.
I've posed the question to several pet owners of whether they would choose to save their pet from drowning or an unknown child. For those who choose their pet, without exception the explanation has been about their bond/trust with the pet and the potential threat/deception involved in trying to save an unknown child.
I think the philosophical views you are describing are often species-ist in nature. The suffering of a (unknown) pig is not effectively like the suffering of a human because it is physically and conceptually the suffering of a distinct species. A key clue to surfacing this underpinning framework is to quiz about the suffering of great apes. Increased resemblance to our species often comes with increased empathy for suffering.
With that analysis in mind, a more effective strategy for encouraging reduction of animal suffering would be to emphasise how it affects us from a resource and threat perspective.
> Pigs don’t behave as if they have dulled experiences. They behave as if they have very rich experiences of the world, and just lack the higher level reasoning abilities humans have.
Can you say more about what you mean here?
I initially assumed your argument was something like {pigs respond as strongly as humans to stimuli} => {update against the "pigs have dulled experiences" hypothesis}. But if that's the case, I think the update should really be against the "pigs have dulled experiences _and_ the strength of an animal's response to stimuli depends on the _absolute_ intensity of the corresponding subjective experience" hypothesis. Which is something I don't happen to find very plausible to begin with.
But maybe what you mean is something like the following:
1. Pigs are observed to have a broad range of behaviors. I.e., we observe behaviors ranging from b1 = "behaving as if extremely happy", b2 = "behaving as if quite happy", to bn = "behaving as if horribly suffering", with large n.
2. For sentient animals, going from bm to b{m+1} is associated with an increase in suffering / a decrease in happiness that's not infinitesimal.
3. 1+2 => assuming pigs are sentient, they have intense subjective experiences.
I totally agree it's no pretend. I totally agree human inflicted suffering (directly or indirectly) matters enormously and that we should take it very seriously. I'm a former vegan. That's said:
"For me, higher level thoughts don’t matter much when I’m experiencing pain. If anything, they help me manage and cope with pain and suffering. If someone turned off my capacity to think and reason, pain and suffering would be much more overwhelming for me, not less"
How do you know this? I don't see how introspection grants you any insight into this. I have no idea what pain would be like without higher level thoughts.
What about natural suffering? Mammals being hunted down etc. Is this a bad thing? Is natural suffering intrinsically bad? Would the world be a better place without it? Personally I don't think that would make any sense. Curious on your position!
I think the “animal response = toy robot” people would feel horrific if made to torture a pig, or even to see one tortured in front of them. In my view the problem is how isolated anyone is from ever having to see these things, not that we have some inbuilt intuition that animals don’t suffer.
I don't think this is a good argument because it's easy to get desensitized, working around animals. Certainly I don't think most farmers, hunters, and fishers are psychopaths.
I think that many people of the "what other people do with animals isn't your business" mentality are unaware of the actual horrors of factory farming. They just think of a bunch of animals cooped up in cages in close proximity to each other. They're not thinking of the actual acute suffering. It is much more plausible that animals can't "feel sad / unsatisfied with their life" than that they can't suffer acute physical pain.
See, for example, this reddit post, the first one I found from a google search I made after typing the above:
https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/comments/199a8zp/cmv_i_dont_see_how_factory_farms_are_that_bad/
"They just exist in a cubicle surrounded by other animals, so how can they be sad about their life? They will never cry over the free life they couldn't live. They just live...to die...without thinking about anything."
Alternatively, maybe people, in the moment of seeing an animal in severe pain, have a negative emotional reaction, but when "thinking" (not necessarily carefully/rationally) about it in the abstract, they feel that animals can't actually suffer, because they don't have internal experiences in the way we do. There may be different "layers" of intuitions here. I think most people would probably also have a negative emotional reaction to a realistic animal-like robot (that they know is a robot) in extreme pain.
Thanks for this.
I think extreme suffering matters the most; it has become the core of my philosophy in the past few years. (See the philosophy chapters https://www.losingmyreligions.net/ for details)
Several points to maybe consider:
1. I'm closing in on 40 years as a vegetarian, and over three decades as an advocate. I've talked with more people than I can even guess at. I can honestly say I've never thought, "This person thinks animal suffering is pretend."
2. In your cladistic graph, it seems unreasonable to me to think that everything to the right of some point can experience human-level suffering, and everything to the left doesn't suffer. There has to be some gradation in the amount of suffering possible as the complexity of the nervous system increases. This isn't to denigrate the suffering of non-humans; we focus on chickens (One Step for Animals). But I wouldn't say the worst *possible* suffering of a chicken is equal to the worst *possible* suffering of a human.
3. Convincing people to change their habits is very hard, to the point where, to a first approximation, it is impossible. Worse, attempts are fraught with unintended consequences that actually leads to more suffering (https://www.onestepforanimals.org/about.html).
4. “It would be good to not have an unimaginably vast underclass of conscious beings like ourselves who we regularly subject to nightmarish suffering with basically no positive experiences to make up for it only because they have unsympathetic outer appearances and can’t reason and think well enough to convince us to stop.” I think this is a true statement, but in my experience, statements like this have, at best, zero impact on anyone who isn't already vegan. As I've gotten older, I realize we should focus not on being right, but first causing no harm. https://mattball.substack.com/p/being-smart-hurts
Take care and be well.
1. Interesting yeah, I've bumped into enough people who will say very directly that they basically don't think most animals (even dogs and cats!) have experiences that are anywhere near as bad to experience as normal human that I've started to assume it's more popular. Even if it's not a conscious belief, it seems like a strong subjective experience people have, where animal pain doesn't really add up to human pain in any meaningful way. Appreciate the pushback here.
2. Yeah I agree. I was trying to make this piece shorter (I have a tendency to get lost in parentheticals and footnotes in general) and cut a bunch of notes about how “obviously this will be some kind of spectrum” to avoid getting bogged down. I might need to edit those back in.
3. Yup I agree, I’ve really loved your recent writing on this. I’m pretty careful in other places to make the general point that requiring everyone to go vegan if they care about animal welfare is like requiring everyone sell their cars before saying anything public about climate change. Basically a massive disaster for the movement. I use “vegan” a lot here mostly because it was shorter than writing “Animal welfare advocate” every time but I should probably go back and clarify that.
4. Also not my experience! I’ve actually found big statements like this to get the issue across more clearly, because most people think animal welfare advocates are mainly just upset that animals are being killed at all. Would love to read more about alternative messaging ideas.
Really appreciated the thoughtful reply, keep up your great work on this! Everyone reading this should go follow Matt.
All awesome.
I always remember Cleveland Amory (not a vegetarian): "People have an infinite capacity to rationalize, especially when it comes to something they want to eat."
Have a great one.
"I’m pretty careful in other places to make the general point that requiring everyone to go vegan if they care about animal welfare is like requiring everyone sell their cars before saying anything public about climate change."
I think this is an incredibly important point—one that both animal advocates and non-animal advocates often get wrong. An important datapoint for me is that in pre-civil war America, most abolitionists consumed slave products.
Good post. Echoing some other replies, I think almost all people know animals feel pain and suffer but just rationalise it away. Most people get extremely upset about their dogs, cats, alpacas etc being hurt and can express disinterest or delight in certain humans' suffering (foreigners, child rapists, terrorists etc), so I don't think it's an evopsych thing in perceiving human vs non-human. I think conformity, a high-preference for convenience, and supremacist ideology (in some cases) does most of the heavy lifting for why most people aren't animal welfarists or vegans.
Yes, but isn’t supremacist ideology a type of dehumanisation?
Thanks for this important article.
I have a bit of a different take. I do believe most people strongly feel empathy for animals but what makes it difficult in the case of cows, pigs, chickens... Is exactly the fact that we are using them. It is easier to believe they can't suffer and if we don't believe that, the consequences for our behavior are just too big so we don't want to believe it. In other words, where you stand depends on where you sit. Beliefs here are largely based on behavior.
Yup I buy this. Huge fan of your writing btw!
Thank you for writing this.
Thanks for this summary. Had a million similar conversations - it's pretty depressing.
i agree it's pretty hardwired. Also there is attention deficit. An average person gets bombarded by many different social justice issues that it is almost impossible to bring the topic in a way that would capture their attention for long enough do they can plan and take action despite the fact that it was never easier to be vegan than today.
"In the evolutionary environment, there would have been basically no reason to evolve an empathetic reaction to other animals."
There are lots of reasons. Mutualism in the natural world is extensive, given its broad utility for threat and resource management. One can regularly observe inter species assistance in the wild where the species interests are aligned and dont pose a threat.
On that basis, a resource/threat analysis better explains people's common views than abstract moral analyses. After all, humans have a well known propensity to inflict extreme suffering even on other humans that have been understood as a threat or a resource to be exploited.
I've posed the question to several pet owners of whether they would choose to save their pet from drowning or an unknown child. For those who choose their pet, without exception the explanation has been about their bond/trust with the pet and the potential threat/deception involved in trying to save an unknown child.
I think the philosophical views you are describing are often species-ist in nature. The suffering of a (unknown) pig is not effectively like the suffering of a human because it is physically and conceptually the suffering of a distinct species. A key clue to surfacing this underpinning framework is to quiz about the suffering of great apes. Increased resemblance to our species often comes with increased empathy for suffering.
With that analysis in mind, a more effective strategy for encouraging reduction of animal suffering would be to emphasise how it affects us from a resource and threat perspective.
> Pigs don’t behave as if they have dulled experiences. They behave as if they have very rich experiences of the world, and just lack the higher level reasoning abilities humans have.
Can you say more about what you mean here?
I initially assumed your argument was something like {pigs respond as strongly as humans to stimuli} => {update against the "pigs have dulled experiences" hypothesis}. But if that's the case, I think the update should really be against the "pigs have dulled experiences _and_ the strength of an animal's response to stimuli depends on the _absolute_ intensity of the corresponding subjective experience" hypothesis. Which is something I don't happen to find very plausible to begin with.
But maybe what you mean is something like the following:
1. Pigs are observed to have a broad range of behaviors. I.e., we observe behaviors ranging from b1 = "behaving as if extremely happy", b2 = "behaving as if quite happy", to bn = "behaving as if horribly suffering", with large n.
2. For sentient animals, going from bm to b{m+1} is associated with an increase in suffering / a decrease in happiness that's not infinitesimal.
3. 1+2 => assuming pigs are sentient, they have intense subjective experiences.
Stimulating post!
I totally agree it's no pretend. I totally agree human inflicted suffering (directly or indirectly) matters enormously and that we should take it very seriously. I'm a former vegan. That's said:
"For me, higher level thoughts don’t matter much when I’m experiencing pain. If anything, they help me manage and cope with pain and suffering. If someone turned off my capacity to think and reason, pain and suffering would be much more overwhelming for me, not less"
How do you know this? I don't see how introspection grants you any insight into this. I have no idea what pain would be like without higher level thoughts.
What about natural suffering? Mammals being hunted down etc. Is this a bad thing? Is natural suffering intrinsically bad? Would the world be a better place without it? Personally I don't think that would make any sense. Curious on your position!
The level of suffering in factory farms is far beyond anything that happens in the wild, and so much of the animal is wasted
I think I agree with that