There’s a scene in Éric Rohmer’s film The Green Ray in which the young heroine, Delphine, tries to explain to her dinner companions why she doesn’t eat meat. It’s because she prefers the lightness of lettuce, her body’s affinity with the airiness of plants, her fellow feeling with . . . well, it’s hard to say. Her hands flutter in the air like helpless stalks as the others smile with amusement and pity. The scene is familiar to me: I feel as if I re-enact it every time I request the vegetarian option at a professional event, only to face baffled questions to which I offer equally unpersuasive answers. My reasons, although deeply held, are not exactly rational.
The ethicist Peter Singer takes a different approach. When it comes to avoiding meat, he prides himself on absolute rationality. Since 1975, when Singer wrote Animal Liberation—the work that launched the animal rights movement—he has considered himself one of the few academics to speak cogently on animal cruelty. A “utilitarian” and “effective altruist,” Singer argues that the way we currently treat animals, especially those raised for consumption, is a “grave moral wrong.” He derives this belief from his practical moral code: “reduce pain and suffering, and increase pleasure and happiness, for all beings capable of having those experiences—in other words, for all sentient beings.” His latest book on the subject, Consider the Turkey, published just in time for Thanksgiving this year, repackages his old arguments in bite-sized form. The book comes in a neat, pocket-sized edition: perfect to pull out of your pocket and deploy against your ignorant in-laws and cousins over the holidays.
Singer devotes a good deal of space to recounting the horrors of factory farming. These are uncomfortable facts, grisly enough to give anyone second thoughts about the Thanksgiving (or Christmas) feast. Right now, the United States produces the most turkeys of any country in the world, five billion pounds annually. And Americans consume twice as much turkey each year as they did fifty years ago, fifteen pounds per person. To meet increased demand, the birds are crammed into facilities that often hold sixty thousand turkeys or more, and they are bred bigger every year. The most popular breed, the broad-breasted white, sixty years ago weighed on average about seventeen pounds. These days, it weighs about thirty pounds.
This unnatural life cycle means a lot of pain for the turkey. To reproduce, farmed turkeys have to be artificially inseminated because their body shape is too distorted for mating. The hens lay between eighty and one hundred eggs in a twenty-five-week cycle, by which time they’re “spent,” good for nothing but the chopping block. They spend their whole lives in a feeding facility—not quite a farm—with about two square feet of living room until they reach slaughter weight. Then their beaks are trimmed and their toes are partially amputated (which feels about like losing the tip of your nose or your big toe) to forestall cannibalism and other aggressions that occur in the tight living quarters. The birds often develop sores when their sagging chests rest for too long on the waste-soaked floor of a shed awaiting its annual cleaning, and are frequently starved when they reach market weight—better to keep the butchering nice and neat.
When that time comes, the birds are shipped to a slaughterhouse and dipped upside down in an electrocuted bath; the ones who raise their heads get their throats slit anyway. In some facilities, fifty thousand turkeys die this way each day. And when there’s bird flu, the government compensates Butterball or Jennie-O—the two largest turkey producers in the United States—to the tune of hundreds of millions for their losses after they kill off whole sheds at once by heating them to death like frogs in a huge ammonia-soaked pot.
Most people who have thought about animal cruelty for more than a minute are aware of these facts—and still go on eating turkey. Singer knows this. If the turkeys’ pain doesn’t convince you to swear off meat-eating, he argues, then their capacity for pleasure should: turkeys are capable of love. And anyone who does not recognize this, he adds, is a fool—unprogressive, maybe unevolved, irrationally led by the ways of the past. The list of fools is long, he sighs: all the great Greeks, Romans, Jews, and Christians of history—almost everyone up to Peter Singer—has been tragically blinkered on this subject. The Greeks, especially Aristotle, he writes in Animal Liberation Now, cared only about “rational” beings; the Hebrews believed God gave them “dominion” over animals, including the right to kill them; the Romans had the circus with all those lions tearing each other to pieces; and the Christians promulgated the then-radical but now hopelessly outdated view that “every human life—and only human life—was sacred.”
Christians get the worst of it. Singer argues that Scripture and Church leadership are precisely what have turned so many people into such thoroughgoing speciesists. The trouble started with Thomas Aquinas, who thought animals existed for the good of man, and has run all the way down through the centuries to Pope Francis himself, for whom Singer reserves only qualified praise. As for the other Francis, the preacher to fishes, in Singer’s opinion, the saint goes too far when he takes an “inward and outward delight in almost every creature,” including water, rocks, flowers, and trees. Singer rebukes him for the pebbles: “If we love rocks, trees, plants, larks, and oxen equally, we may lose sight of the essential differences between them—most important, the fact that some are capable of feeling pain and others are not.” This seems like an assessment insufficiently strained of its speciesism: it implies that of paramount importance to animals is what human beings think of them, how they decide to respond to their pain.
And the more one probes into Singer’s ideas, the more one suspects he might be something of a speciesist himself. His great utilitarian commandment—“maximize pleasure and minimize pain”—makes man the measure of all animal suffering. A Christian would acknowledge that in the Garden God gave man stewardship, or responsibility, over all creatures, but in Singer’s cosmos we’re past all that dominion and mastery talk. What is left to us is to study animals, learn to hear their pain, and keep up with the latest science so we can update our morals accordingly—drawing and redrawing moral boundaries based on our perceptions and preferences.
There’s a reason much of Singer’s career has been occupied by line-drawing. His utilitarian creed does not allow for anything more. The most famous example of this is his stance on human suffering in works from the 1970s such as Animal Liberation and Practical Ethics. In Singer’s world, infanticide is excusable in some cases—of course, highly regrettable—since by his lights, very young babies, especially those with disabilities, are unable to attain levels of rationality, self-consciousness, or autonomy even comparable to that of, say, an adult horse. Because of these limitations they are not full “persons”—and not owed the dignity due to persons, or even many of the higher animals. But when does a baby become self-aware, and how does one adjudicate between an intelligent horse and a too-defective infant? The answer for Singer depends on the research study, and one’s own personal code of ethics; the goalposts are always movable.
For animals, too, the goalposts are highly movable. While the safe line for eating animal products was in the mid-1970s “somewhere between a shrimp and an oyster,” that’s all changed now that scientists have found that many more sea creatures than we thought can feel pain. In fact, there is news about not only fish, who writhe in agony when killed en masse at fish farms, and maybe insects, but also plants, which do after all have ways of signaling distress. In fact, everything we eat may be able to “feel pain,” depending on how one defines it. This is why the altruism must become “effective”: if the option is to murder letuce or starve, then it is better to malevolently load up on salad because “if we must inflict pain or starve, we would then have to choose the lesser evil, and minimize the pain we inflict.”
This is a familiar quandary, best put to words by David Foster Wallace in his essay “Consider the Lobster,” to which Singer’s title alludes. During a visit to the Maine Lobster Festival, Wallace put the utilitarian moral boundary of pain to the test and found it unsatisfying: “I like to eat certain kinds of animals and want to be able to keep doing it,” he writes, but “I have not succeeded in working out any kind of personal ethical system in which the belief is truly defensible.”
This approach is more palatable, and perhaps persuasive, than Singer’s because it ends in uncertainty, a kind of inner moral queasiness that shows semi-utilitarian answers are the best he has, but they don’t settle his conscience. There is no sane way, he suggests, to act out a savior complex for a lowly crustacean at the center of a popular and highly lucrative food culture, no matter whether it screams as it dies. The best Wallace can do within a utilitarian framework is to worry about where to draw the line. This line of logic leads him to ask whether what we know about animals’ physical suffering puts every gourmet—every omnivore, even—in a morally indefensible position. It’s a problem that could easily be posed, Singer-style, to a family sitting down to carve a perfectly roasted broad-breasted white turkey.
“What I really am is confused,” Wallace concludes. Not so Singer. Fifty years of advocacy for animals have convinced him that he understands animals’ pain well enough to construct a new theodicy, along with a new set of commandments for his fellow human beings. It’s a strikingly simplistic project, where animals’ lives are reduced to pleasure and pain, with a simplistic prescription: dial down the torture; turn up the furry and feathery joy. And it reveals both the arrogance and sentimentality of Singer’s moral code: we know what’s good for the turkeys, and we can grant them perfect happiness.
“The whole subject of the brute creation is to me one of such painful mystery that I dare not approach it,” Thomas Arnold wrote when considering a similar question. This seems to me much more honest, a simple and humbling confession that the animal kingdom and its role in our fate is more complex than we know. By acknowledging their pain we haven’t understood the animals—why they are here and why they seem to suffer our uses and abuses so mutely. And by minimizing their suffering we have not atoned. Our situation is rather worse: we don’t even know whether we need to.
This is not a problem that can be solved at the dinner table, over tofu or turkey. But against the sheer scale of death in this world Singer should admit that he too is fluttering his hands.
This essay appears in Christmas 2024 issue of The Lamp.
