So I'm going to start with a slide that may disturb some of you. These are dogs who have been captured and rounded up and are going to be killed for their meat. It's part of the dog trade which exists in some countries in the world. Now, you probably think that this is a horrible image, that this is something that should not happen. What I want to persuade you of is that while of course, I agree with that, it's part of something that is far, far larger. And that is impossible to justify as a whole. And that while I doubt that anyone in this audience will be participating in the dog meat trade, I'm sure that most of the audience are likely to be participating in what I'm going to talk about.
In 1970, I was a graduate student at the University of Oxford, studying philosophy, specializing in ethics, interested in the big ethical questions of the day, things like the war in Vietnam, abortion, civil rights. But if you'd said to me, “And what about the ethics of how we treat animals?” I would have been taken aback. I would have said, "Well, what's the problem here? Of course I'm against cruelty, like any decent person would be, but there are laws against cruelty, so I just don't really see this as an issue."
And then one day, after a class on a completely different topic, I happened to strike up a conversation with a Canadian graduate student called Richard Keshen. He invited me back to his college for lunch to continue the conversation. And when we were offered the hot meal of the day, which was spaghetti with a sauce on top, he asked if the sauce had meat in it. And when he was told that it did, he took the salad plate instead. I took the spaghetti, we sat down and ate. But at some point then after we'd finished our previous conversation, I said to him, "So what's your problem with meat?" You have to understand that it actually was very rare for anyone to meet a vegetarian in 1970.
So Richard said something very simple, an explanation of why he wasn't eating meat. He said, "I don't think we're justified in treating animals the way in which they're treated in order to be turned into a food for us." And I said, "What exactly do you mean by that? Aren't they sort of just grazing in the fields and basically having a good life until, of course, you know, they get trucked the slaughterhouse and then they get killed? That's bad, but their life doesn't seem so bad to me." But he said, "No, that's not the case. Increasingly, many animals are being reared inside, in factory farms, and their lives are miserable because the only thing that matters is producing their meat, milk or eggs at the cheapest possible price."
So I decided I need to know more about this. And I did, and I found that what he was saying was correct. And then that started me thinking about, well, but surely there must be something that justifies us in using animals in this way. Because, you know, it was hard to imagine that I had, for all of my life up to that point, been doing something that was wrong. So as a philosophy student, I went back to the philosophers of the past.
I started with ancient Greeks, but what I found wasn't convincing. So with Aristotle, for example, he said that the less rational are made for the more rational they serve that purpose. And so plants serve animals and animals serve humans. And the less rational humans, the so-called barbarians, serve the Greeks as slaves because Greeks, Aristotle thought, were more rational. Well, apart from the obvious objection to slavery, I was skeptical that the universe had this kind of grand purpose, grand scheme of creation that Aristotle was describing. It certainly wasn't the way Darwin had taught us to look at the world.
So I then went on to look at some later philosophers. I looked at Thomas Aquinas, who was hugely influential in the 13th century on the Catholic Church, and he drew from Aristotle, but he also drew from the verse of Genesis, where God says that he's giving us dominion over the animals. And essentially, he ended up saying that, because of this grant of dominion, we have no duties to animals. The only reason why we should not be cruel to animals, according to Aquinas, is that if we are, we may develop a disposition that makes us cruel to humans, and that would be bad. But the animals in themselves counted for zero, in accordance with Aquinas.
You would think you couldn't get much worse than that. But Descartes, in a way, in the 17th century, was worse because he said that animals are not capable of feeling anything. They're just automata. They're just like very complicated clocks which have a mechanism that makes a noise. Except that God created the animals and the mechanism is more complex.
If we skip on to the 18th century, we find that Kant also said we have no duties to animals and that the only reason to be kind to them is to practice kindness towards humans. For him, though, the reason was that animals are not rational beings and therefore cannot be self-aware or make autonomous choices about what to do.
But I think the answer to this was given by Bentham towards the end of the 18th century when Bentham asked the question, "Can they reason? Or can they talk? That's not the question. The question is, can they suffer?" And I think Bentham was right. If a being can suffer, then that suffering matters, whether they're capable of reasoning or talking or not.
And Bentham, in fact, really showed a lot of foresight when he looked at what the French revolutionaries had done in freeing slaves in the French colonies and said, "One day we'll discover that just as the color of a man's skin is no reason for abandoning him to the caprice of a tormentor, so whether a being has fur or a tail is similarly no reason for denying them rights." And that seems to me to have been a very prescient remark. And indeed, I think we have to agree with this view that pain is pain no matter what the species of the being who is suffering that pain.
But when I thought about these philosophers, other than Bentham in particular, and the attitudes that were present in the society in which I was living, it reminded me of some other ways of thinking that we now reject. For example, the racism of the Europeans who thought that they were entitled to enslave Africans, transport them across to the new world and use them as tools for their purposes. And of course, they did that on the basis of an ideology that either insisted on differences between humans and Africans, which didn't exist, but also on a religious belief and interpretation of some aspects of the Bible that they thought justified them in slavery. And then we can also look at the ideology developed by men in order to justify their oppression of women and their denial of women of basic rights, including the right to vote, and in many cases to own property or essentially to be equals in a moral community.
And we can reject these ideas as racism and sexism and see them as ideologies. But I think that we need to think that as a species, we have a similar kind of ideological stance to non-human animals. And adopting a phrase that I saw from another Oxford person called Richard Ryder, we can refer to this as speciesism.
So speciesism, the major form of it, says that humans are the ones who are morally important. We have a moral status, we have human rights, we have intrinsic dignity, we are all equal. But animals are not our equals, do not have dignity or rights that we do. And the main form of this kind of speciesism, of course, is that it puts us at the center of the moral universe, us humans. And if you're not a member of our species, you don't really count. So the boundary of moral concern runs identical to the boundary of our species. We can call that anthropocentric speciesism.
There's another kind of speciesism. And I want to come back to that slide that I showed you right at the start, of the dogs. If you think that this is wrong, but if you don’t think that something very similar is wrong -- These are pigs who are being transported to slaughter. And if you think that it's terrible to eat dogs, you would never eat dog meat, but you do eat meat from pigs, then I think you're a speciesist in the sense of you have a favorite species, probably because you have lived with a dog and perhaps you don't appreciate the intelligence of pigs. It wasn't for no reason at all that George Orwell made the pigs the leaders of the farm in his novel "Animal Farm." They are highly intelligent animals, and I really don't think that there are any reasons why we should regard it as OK to eat pigs, but not OK to eat dogs.
So what position should we adopt with regard to animals? The principle that I advocate is one of equal consideration of interests, or to be more specific, equal consideration of similar interests. So when beings are capable of feeling pain, then that pain should be given equal weight to how bad it is that a being is in pain, whether that being is a human or a non-human animal capable of feeling pain. The only thing that matters is how serious is the pain that the animal is feeling. But the crucial thing is that suffering is suffering. Pain is pain. And that's irrespective of the being whose pain it is. We're not justified in distinguishing, discriminating against those who may differ from us in some respects, but are capable of feeling pain as we do.
Now let's look at how important this is as an issue. I said at the start, this is a huge issue. And it's a huge issue because of the fact that we raise animals for food on a vast scale. And that, as I learned more than 50 years ago, but as is even more the case today, those animals are increasingly kept indoors in conditions that are not at all suitable to their interests and needs, that do not give them a good life, but give them what is essentially a miserable life.
So let's start with chickens. The largest number of the land-based animals, at least that we raise for food, are chickens, something like 70 billion chickens are raised for food each year. And this is a standard way in which virtually all of them are raised: indoors, extremely crowded as you see here, in a big shed.
And as Professor John Webster, who's an eminent veterinarian who studied farmed animals, says, this is the single most severe and systematic cruelty that we inflict on non-human animals because there are so many of them. I think, in my view, the only rival for that would be raising fish in aquaculture or fish farms, because there, the numbers are even larger. Something like 120 billion fish are raised for food each year.
So this is a chicken. This is actually a further explanation of what I said about why chickens are suffering, not just from crowding, but because they're bred to grow so fast that they put on weight very quickly before their immature leg bones are really able to support the way in which they have to stand. So that’s why Professor Webster said that it’s so painful, we’re inflicting so much cruelty on them, because they are in pain. He compared this to someone with arthritis having to stand all day despite the arthritis in their legs.
So in the slide you just saw, you saw a chicken who was not standing but was lying on the litter on the floor of the shed. That chicken was there because the chicken's legs had collapsed under them and the chicken would have been unable to walk around and would have been unable to reach food or water. So the fate of that chicken was a slow and miserable death of dehydration or starvation in these huge chicken factories.
These are the chickens, hens, who lay eggs. They are kept in small wire cages, unlike the chickens raised for meat. There is no room in that standard battery cage for the hens to even stretch their wings fully, to walk around. And there's no possibility of the weaker, less aggressive birds getting away from the more aggressive ones which may peck them. And to prevent that, the birds routinely have the pointy end of their beak cut off without anesthetic, with a hot blade.
So these conditions have been outlawed in the entire European Union, in the United Kingdom and in some other countries. But sadly, in the majority of the United States, they are still entirely legal and they are practiced.
So finally, let's talk about pigs. You already saw the pigs being trucked to slaughter. But the worst aspect of pig production is the treatment of their mothers. That is, the breeding sows whose role is simply to keep churning out piglets, more and more piglets throughout their lives until the rate at which they produce litters of piglets drops off and then they'll be sent to slaughter.
These are animals who naturally would live in a forest, would be spending their day roaming around, rooting for food, socializing with others in a small social group, or in the case of sows, looking after their piglets after they're born. The sows would want to build a nest of leaves and twigs before they give birth.
None of that is, of course, possible in a factory farm. They spend all their lives standing in this narrow stall, unable to turn around. They get fed. They can stand up and lie down. And when they do give birth, they're still on concrete, still tightly confined, and then their piglets are taken away from them at an early age so they can be made pregnant again. That's just another aspect of this gigantic factory-farm system which is inflicting a vast amount of suffering on, as I say, a total of about 200 billion vertebrate animals each year.
So it's important to realize that none of this is necessary to feed the world. In fact, it's a reverse of that. It's taking a lot of grain or soy, which we have to grow. We are clearing forests in order to grow more of that food. Clearing the Amazon, for example, to grow soy. And over three quarters of the world's soy crop is fed to animals, and in the process, the majority of the nutritional value of that soy is wasted. We could cause less damage to the environment, preserve more forests, more biodiversity, and avoid the local environmental pollution factory farms cause to water and air, while feeding the planet much better and reducing our impact on climate change.
So my first ask of you all is to not support factory farming, to not commit your dollars to buying the products of factory farms.
Now, you might say, "What about going further? Should we stop eating animals at all?" This was taken at an organic farm not far from Princeton University, where I teach. And these calves are with their mothers. They are having an ideal life for their species at this point, though, of course, the calves are then going to be taken from their mothers, transported to slaughter and killed. Is that acceptable?
Well, it's not the way I want to live. I want to make a cleaner break with animal suffering and with the exploitation of animals. And to be honest, I don't want to have to look around very carefully to find sources of animal products like that that really I could be confident are treating their animals well, because a lot of products that appear to be humane are not all that good.
But if you feel you really need animal products, OK, that's the way to go. And I want to welcome conscientious omnivores as allies in the fight against factory farming, which, as I say, is, for me, the prime thing to stop. The vast evil and unnecessary evil and polluting evil of factory farming.
So that’s what I’d like you to join me in doing. But I think it's also important to be active citizens, not only to change your own diet and your habit, but to contact your political representatives, to join organizations that are working against factory farming and to support that cause in whatever way you can.
Thank you very much for listening and I look forward to your questions and discussion.
Chris Anderson: Peter, thank you so much. So provocative. Just looking at the shocking images that you show, I wonder whether a big part of the problem is just a form of almost sort of, collective denialism. How is it possible that a society as knowledgeable as ours can somehow engage in this collective denialism on the scale of what is actually happening?
Peter Singer: It is a kind of denialism. You're right about that, and people have said to me, you know, when I talk about the arguments that I began with, they say, "Well, I do find that persuasive. But, you know, I don't want to look at those images. They're going to spoil my dinner." And obviously, they're saying, "Even if the arguments are persuasive, I'm not really going to change what I'm going to have for dinner." And I think that's evidence of the deep conservatism that people have about what they eat. That it's something they're very reluctant to change. It's part of our culture, it's part of some of our traditions. And if you do change and if your family and friends are still eating meat, you're going to be in the awkward position of at least implicitly suggesting that what they're doing is wrong when you order something differently. So I think it makes people a little bit uncomfortable.
I'm hopeful, though, that the recent rise in plant-based foods is going to make it easier to make that change, you know? If we can just increase the critical mass of normality a little bit further, I think it will be easier for people to stop the denialism and make the change.
CA: Suppose someone agrees with you that suffering wherever it is, is bad, kind of, equally bad, but is skeptical that actually animals do suffer as much. But can a chicken really suffer as much? There's this sort of feeling of, oh, that's a bird brain ... What is the evidence that a chicken actually can suffer deeply?
PS: This is one of the aspects in which there's actually been a lot more work over the 50 years since I'd started thinking about animals. And there have been studies that show that -- you mentioned this term bird brain -- that actually bird brains can be highly intelligent. There's the famous marshmallow experiments that have been done with human children where they learn that there's a marshmallow put in front of them on a plate, but if they don't eat this marshmallow for a certain number of minutes, they'll get a second marshmallow as well. And in fact, it turns out the chickens can also learn to wait and some chickens will wait for the additional food treat and not eat the one that's in front of them.
CA: And that's good evidence for sort of the intelligence of chickens. But I mean, just a level of suffering. We know kind of what the pain process is in a human brain. Is that same essential neural process there in chickens and does that give plausibility to the idea that therefore they’re probably suffering in the same way, or capable of it?
PS: Yes, it does. It's a central nervous system going to a brain with nerves that function in roughly the same way. Obviously, a common evolutionary origin that all vertebrates have. And I personally have no doubt that chickens suffer from physical pain and there's lots of reactions and behavior showing that they do.
Maybe I'll mention, as you've asked that question, there's been some debate in the past about fish because their brains are somewhat differently organized. But again, in more recent years, there's been a lot of research done on fish. There's a book by Victoria Braithwaite, a major fish researcher of pain, and this work by Lynne Sneddon that shows, I think, very clearly, that fish feel pain. Their behavior shows, when they have painful stimuli, the changes and interestingly, when we give them pain relief of the kind that we would take, you know, painkillers, their behavior moves back to normal as it does with us.
CA: But isn't it true to say that, at least with some aqua farming, aquaculture, that fish aren't raised in quite as sort of, antithetical conditions to how, you know, they can swim freely as opposed to being crammed in a cage, for example. Does that count to some extent as sort of, you know, the same sort of ethic as the sort of conscious omnivore that you were talking about or not really?
PS: No, I don't ... No, I really don't think any form of aquaculture is comparable with being a conscientious omnivore. They're very crowded. They swim in circles, I think, because they have instincts to swim further distances, certainly, obviously salmon swim across the oceans. And, you know, we know less about fish stress, but it seems pretty clear that they're stressed. Often they develop, because of the crowding, they have sea lice infestation. For fish who are raised in nets in the sea, it’s a major problem and clearly causes them suffering.
And of course, there's no humane slaughter at all. I mean, at least for animals in factory farms, they get trucked to slaughter, and the slaughter houses are terrible places. But the actual moment where they're killed, they're supposed to be stunned. The stunning doesn't always work, particularly for chickens. But they're supposed to be stunned. But with fish, there are no regulations requiring them to be stunned before they're being killed. So the methods of slaughter are very painful.
CA: Wow. Well, I can feel a lot of people, members, saying, "Oh, no, that was the one source of protein I was hopeful I could keep."
PS: There's plenty of others.
CA: Frank would like to know, "If we were successful in resisting factory farming, how could employees of factory farms sustain their livelihoods?"
PS: Well, for one thing, factory farms have cheap products, partly because they have extremely poorly-paid labor and not a huge quantity of it. They often employ undocumented immigrants who they can exploit more ruthlessly and pay less to. It's very unpleasant work because being inside these factory farms is very unpleasant. I've been into a chicken farm, for example, and the first thing you notice is your eyes start to sting and your throat hurts because there's so much ammonia in the air from the droppings of the birds. Birds have to live with that all the time. But the workers just go in there as briefly as they can. So, yes, obviously, those jobs would disappear, but ... As I say, they're pretty undesirable jobs. There's a huge churn. Basically, they're employing new people all the time because the old ones leave. So the workers who can't stand it for very long typically are getting other jobs anyway. And hopefully they're getting better jobs. And hopefully we would have an expanding plant-based food industry and there would be more jobs in those industries.
CA: So, Peter, I want to shift topic for a minute. You've entered controversial waters many times in your life as a utilitarian philosopher, and especially over the issue of disability and how to think about that in our culture. We have a member, Christian Bayerlein, who actually was a speaker at the last conference where he flew a drone around the audience using muscles. He has this question to you, "Peter, as a German native with a physical disability, I've had the privilege to inspire many through my works as a disability rights advocate. From a society that couldn't see my potential at birth, I'm driven by the principle enshrined in our basic law. Human dignity is inviolable. I firmly believe in universal kindness that should extend to all beings, including humans, irrespective of our abilities. So reflecting on our shared history, especially the dark times of involuntary euthanasia in my home country, I'm interested in your evolving thoughts on disability rights." Peter, perhaps you could just give a background to this controversy and what your evolving thoughts are on this issue.
PS: Yes, thank you. I have long been an advocate, as somebody studying and then a professor of bioethics, I've been an advocate of choice in dying. I welcome the fact that in many countries now and in some states of the United States, people are able to ask a physician for assistance in dying, when they, let's say, are terminally ill or incurably ill and don't want to live further. And their quality of life has fallen to a level that they consider unacceptable. A physician can either give them a lethal injection in some countries or in others can prescribe a drug that they can take to end their life. And I welcome that. I think that, again, eliminates completely pointless suffering and gives people more autonomy and choice about how they die.
But there are also circumstances where an infant may be born with a very severe disability, which means that their lives are going to be ones with a lot of suffering and perhaps without redeeming features because they're not going to live very long anyway. They may only be going to live months or a year or two, but with a disability that perhaps causes them pain or suffering or at least doesn't allow them to have enjoyable lives.
And in those circumstances, doctors will often ask parents if they wish to have the child resuscitated if the child needs assistance in breathing. Like, if the child is on a respirator. And the parents then have a choice of saying no, you know, "Now that we understand the future for our child, we think it's better that the child should die now rather than live to the end of their life, whenever that might be." And that seems to be widely accepted. It's certainly practiced in neonatal intensive care units all over the world. That is, of course, a decision to say it's better that a human being should die than live because of the nature of that being's severe disability.
And if that's the decision, which I think is a defensible decision, then I think if the baby doesn't need any life support, like, doesn't need a respirator to breathe, but otherwise has just the same very unfortunate prognosis, the parents should also be able to make that choice. They should say to the doctor, "We think that it's better that our child should not live. Can you make sure that our child dies without suffering?" They might want to hold the child while that happens. That certainly happens when respirators are withdrawn.
So I think that can be a good ending. It does suggest that some lives, people with disabilities, are so bad that it's better that they die. Some people have accused me of ableism for believing that, but I think it's just very hard to deny that when we look at some of the worst of these situations.
CA: But isn't part of the issue here that it's so hard as an outsider to know? Like, isn't there a risk that we're influenced by our sort of, physical, just instincts of, you know, you see someone who looks not like we expect them to look and you sort of gasp and think, "Oh, that's going to be awful. And I can't imagine raising that child." And yet, roll the clock forward 20 years and you discover that actually that child has an amazing life. It was interesting talking to Christian at TED, I mean, he spoke about the deep life satisfaction he has had. And there are many, many, you know, "disabled people" who feel the same way.
It's a sort of such a fine line between the sort of, the reasonableness of your opinion, which I think a lot of people would respond to, and just feeling like you're being somehow callous about the incredible potential of these babies.
PS: I don't agree that I'm being callous. I think, in fact, it's callous to refuse to make a decision in a case where the evidence suggests and the medical advice is and you can certainly go beyond the medical advice and talk to parents of children who've had this condition that your child now has. I welcome, I think it's wise to get the broadest range of opinion and information that you can, including from the disability community. But I think to just say, "Well, we can't make a decision" or even just to say as is part of that basic law in the German constitution, you know, human dignity is inviolable and to end a human life -- this is not in that clause, but people might extrapolate -- to end a human life is a violation of human dignity, I think that's callous. I think it's saying, you know, to say you've got to go on living no matter what the prospects are, is to turn yourself away from the great likelihood that there'll be far more suffering.
CA: OK, so we're going to move on from this for now. But if someone wants to dig in deeper, there's an amazing piece in "The New York Times" from 2003 that was a conversation or multiple conversations between Peter and a disability rights activist and just, the level of nuance with which that was conducted, to me, it's an extraordinary example of how, I don't know, how we could do a better job of bridging between difficult, controversial views, as opposed to the instinct of just slamming to judgment.
Peter, I think I'd like just to almost give you a chance just to wrap things up there. Like, is this a battle that we can win in the sort of, next 30 or 40 years? Do you think that humanity's capable of doing this?
PS: I think we can. Would be wonderful if I was still around to see it, I probably won't be, but I think we're making progress. But I think we can, I think we have been, over the centuries, if you look back, evolving morally in terms of pushing out the boundaries of the moral circle from the tribe to the nation to the race and now to all humans and starting to cross that boundary to all sentient beings. So, yes, I end up being an optimist on this, that we can build a critical mass and eventually eating meat, or certainly at least eating factory-farmed meat, will become something that is as socially unacceptable as, let's say, smoking indoors at a dinner party. Or, you know, there have been many other important moral changes that we've made, obviously we've changed attitudes to gays, for example. That's a big moral revolution, not complete, but getting there. And I think we can complete those past ones and develop the moral revolution in extending our concern to all creatures capable of suffering.
CA: Perfectly said. I love this notion of us persuading each other to kind of raise our game. Peter Singer, thank you for your life's work. It's been an extraordinary journey. You've really done an amazing job of using the power of reason to change people's minds. And I think you'll go down in history for it.
Thank you all, take care.
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