In a popular post I wrote back in February contrasting individual preference and political ethics, I argued that we should all be comfortable being a little hypocritical sometimes. Having a preference for sparkling wines, for example, doesn't automatically make one a bad socialist; having inegalitarian sexual preferences doesn't render those behaviours acceptable outside the bedroom; and benefitting from privilege doesn't make one unqualified to structurally critique it. In following-up that post, I'm going to look at another YouTube discussion by streamer Destiny, this time on the ethics of veganism. I enjoy Destiny's way of dissecting topics, which is leaps and bounds more sophisticated than that of other talking heads. In short, I agree with him that given the minimal recognition of all human beings as a party to the social contract, the consideration of other entities as ethical subjects is a mere aesthetic preference from which no universal principles can be drawn.
For the record, I am not a vegetarian nor do I think veganism is a a superior ethical position that meat-eaters are simply being hypocritical about. I took a (mandatory) course in 'vegetarian politics' as an undergrad, which did instill in me a certain distaste for meat. But I still consume it, and don't see a problem in everyone else doing the same. Nor is my view on this informed by consequentialist concerns: I get that Western diets can have adverse health consequences and that industrial agricultural has deleterious effects on the natural environment. Switching to veganism may have positive individual and societal outcomes, and I am all for stronger regulation of the agricultural sector, but I don't believe that universal ethical "oughts" can be derived from this sort of utilitarian calculus (which in any event always admits of exceptions). Instead, this particular blog is aimed squarely at "ethical vegans", who hold that it is wrong in se to exploit animals in ways we don't exploit humans.
It's art all the way down
As a moral skeptic, I generally take the position that ethical rules are social facts, not scientific ones. A behaviour or belief can only be considered right or wrong by its congruence with the norms, rules and institutions that constitute a community of interacting individuals. Social contract liberalism is a universalist ideology that holds that the relevant community is all human individuals, although the 'thickness' of its ethical rules may vary depending on nation-state membership. One of liberalism's key philosophical difficulties, and its central contestation with ethical veganism, is why it reifies humanity as the criterion of social membership, or in other words, how we decide who is and isn't entitled to recognition as "human". The more liberalism moves away from its Christian 'natural law' roots (i.e. ' individuals endowed by their Creator'), the more open to re-interpretation this principle becomes.
Chapter 16 of my book, "Politics for the New Dark Age" is all about the distinction between ethics and aesthetics. Aesthetics is about creating identity through the satisfaction of preferences; political philosophy is the normative ethics of collective decision-making. So long as two individuals identify as members of a shared community, they can (in principle) debate the right and wrong of a behaviour using a shared framework. And yet, as the invocation of a shared identity suggests, there are always aesthetic choices at the core: what is my identity, what is my community, and what are its ethical rules? That doesn't mean we can't argue about those choices, but such debates boil down to art criticism: we can discuss the artistic merits of "Boss Baby", for example, without any paticular view being morally wrong.
So here's my central argument: right and wrong are ethically meaningful social statements within a the social context defined by universal liberalism. However beyond the minimal liberal requirement that we recognise of all humans as persons, the selection of decision-rules about the ethical treatment of non-human objects is an aesthetic preference from which no universal moral facts follow. Thus, while vegans, or Hindus, may elect to see cattle as moral subjects, they cannot ethically obligate other individuals and cultures to do likewise. Personally, I'm wholly comfortable with speciesism ("humanism") as a general rule, using the legal and biological category of 'human' as the threshold for moral consideration. It's a solid baseline that prevents abuse in most edge cases, meets the requirements of liberalism and satisfies our day-to-day pragmatic needs for ethical calculation.
Can we derive a "non-speciesist" rule for ethical consideration? Probably . . . .
Destiny defines his decision rule as "social contract reciprocity": the idea that to be part of a society, and therefore subject to ethical consideration, a category of thing has to be capable, under ideal developmental conditions, of recognising and being recognised as performing the behaviours necessary to establish social trust. Destiny may underplay it, but this is very solid philosophical ground to stand on. In evolutionary game theory, there are multiple ways of overcoming social dilemmas and generating reciprocity, including kinship, reputation and identity/categorical markers. The first two generate what philosophers call special moral obligations (for example, to family and to contract partners), whereas the third is important to Rawlsian liberals, constructivists and cultural evolutionary scholars alike.
In this framework, we exercise indirect or altruistic reciprocity (trust without expectation of direct reward) towards those who perform the behaviours we have been socialised to expect a member of the community in good standing to perform, and who in turn recognise and respond positively to our own performance of those behaviours - even though we are unrelated to them and don't know them personally. This is called 'prosociality'. The mutual construction of society on the basis of altruistic reciprocity helps explain why sociopaths are such as widespread figures of cultural anxiety, and also why systems of punishment are so heavily weighted towards ostracism, banishment and imprisonment of non-conformists. Mutual recognition as beings worthy of ethical consideration also serves as a universal "Turing Test": we cannot ever directly observe the moral consciousness of another, only react to behaviourial signals which increase or decrease our belief that it exists.
Some hypotheticals: Violence against animals, Neanderthals and AI
Let's use violence as a case study. If we follow Jonathan Haidt and assume that moral reasoning is modular and domain-specific, we can start with the hypothesis that aversion to violence and harm ("suffering") is perhaps the most widely shared human ethical trigger. If non-human entities are not protected from arbitrary and selfish violence, then they also aren't entitled to any other form of ethical consideration. For the record, this is where ethical vegans go wrong: as virtue ethicists, their insistence that suffering is always incorrect is hopelessly naive and drives them into a rabbit hole of deciding what entities do or do not feel suffering. Consequentialists tell us that harm is sometimes productive and therefore ethical; social contract deontologists say that harm can be ethical if it's controlled by rules - the most important contemporary rule is the prohibition on directly harming another party to the social contract. The question we must ask is: is it ethically wrong to harm an entity that belongs to a category of thing that is prima facie incapable of moral reciprocation?
First the goods news: as social animals, humans seem psychologically pre-disposed to making favourable intuitive inferences about the agency of others: we readily anthropomorphise other entities, and ancient peoples inferred agency to the land and the weather and tried to make moral bargains with the gods and goddesses thereof. So the burden of proof is in favour of inclusion: other entities face a low bar to establish that they are moral subjects.
Now for the bad: almost all animals fail to reach this threshold. Animal behaviour is instinctive: a prey animal is incapable of recognising that a strange human is not a threat, and a hungry predator will always see a human as a potential food source. While we can override the instincts of individual animals through direct incentives (i.e. regular food provision) this is direct, rather than indirect or categorical, reciprocity. Selfish restraint ("this human feeds me") is not general moral consideration. Now, there may be exceptions amongst higher order social animals: our closest ape relatives, elephants and domesticated dogs (whose social reasoning we have irrevocably altered through domestication) for exampel. These animals appear to be capable of recognising humans as being subjects of ethical consideration unprompted, even though under usual conditions they are primarily kin-centric. But any more generous aesthetic rule is also likely to be prima facie culturally and environmentally contingent: a costly preference for expanded ethical inclusion akin to having the resources to prefer fine wines.
A more interesting hypothetical arises in the case of our Neanderthal and Denisovan cousins, who were not homo sapiens strictu sensu but closely related enough genetically that we could still interbreed. Robin Dunbar and others have argued that the capacity for symbolic communication is what makes human organisation at scale possible. It remains an open scientific question whether Neanderthals and Denisovans also possessed this capability, and to what degree. The evidence for Neanderthal symbolic culture is anecdotal, but personally fairly convincing. It's appears likely to me that the common ancestor of humans, Neanderthals and Denisovans (Homo Heidelbergensis) therefore possessed this ability and would hypothetically qualify for personhood, albeit perhaps subject to the same paternalistic limitations we might apply for the mentally handicapped in our own society.
Now, what about a different kind of entity: AI? I would propose that any artificial intelligence that showed itself capable of moral reasoning and of recognising the moral worth of humans would be recognised as sentient member of the social contract and protected from arbitrary harm. An anti-social or purely utilitarian AI, however, that failed to offer mutual recognition to humans as subjects of ethical consideration - no matter how vast its potential intelligence - would not qualify for social contract reciprocity and could be destroyed with no ethical consequences. I have no real interest in the ethics of AI research, but draw some comfort from the fact that an any AI trained using social games would likely develop the concept of social contract reciprocity on its own through an exploration of the mathematics of altruism.
Being comfortable with our preferences
Returning to the topic at hand. I will conclude by saying that what we consume (and how we produce what we consume) is first and foremost an aesthetic choice, not an ethical one. The ("non-speciesist") liberal decision rule that requires social contract reciprocity as a condition for the possession of rights and protection from harm is robust ("it's good art"). Nevertheless, other aesthetic choice are also valid, even if they're not rigourously philosophically grounded. To have concerns about the way commercially farmed animals are treated is legitimate, as is the insistence that food be properly monitored and labelled to make that choice meaningful (so too with halal, GMO or organic food labelling regulations). But the exercise of these preferences is merely about establishing markers for individual identity, and don't entail any ethical calculations from which universal moral 'oughts' can be derived.
Does that mean we should be singularly unconcerned about those who are cruel to animals? No, of course not. The type of art a person enjoys can be a signal about the type of person they are, and their proclivity for anti-social behaviour. A society that mistreats its own people is likely to be a threat to other societies. A child that tortures animals may be a threat to others later in life. And how commercial agriculture treats animals and make them suffer unnecessarily says alot about the broader social values of capitalism. But the signal alone is not the ethical transgression: the wrong of commercial agriculture lies in its willingness to mistreat and exploit (human) farm workers. Incidentally, social contract reciprocity is an excellent argument for why corporations are not entitled to fundamental rights: they are incapable of acting morally and recognising (human) workers as ethical subjects.
Beyond violence, the question of who is and who is not a member of a social contract entitled to legal and ethical consideration is in practice the core vulnerability in the exercise of all the moral senses. While everyone obviously abhors harming women, minorities or the disabled, some people are far too tolerant of excluding marginalised groups from proper consideration when it comes to questions of fairness and equality. This exclusion and selectivity about moral personhood is ubiquitous, and is one of the ways intolerance and oppression are naturalised and legitimised. If we want to expand the scope of ethical consideration, let's prioritise fulfilling our obligations to the members of society that we already recognise - rather than expanding society itself to fit the aesthetic sensibilities of vegans.