Why "Happy Meat" Is Always Wrong

by Magnus Vinding

This essay attacks the "happy meat" position head-on. It argues that this position is morally indefensible and that it not only causes immense amounts of animal suffering, but also, somewhat ironically, serves as the very foundation of our abuse of animals today - of our treating animals anything but well - and that this is all it ever will and can. This reveals the moral urgency of stopping the spread of this position and of rejecting it completely. "Magnus Vinding argues powerfully against eating "happy meat."" - Peter Singer, author of 'Animal Liberation'. "Like child abuse, animal abuse can be practised with more or less cruelty. Magnus Vinding argues persuasively that we shouldn't be doing it all. In his latest work, Vinding explores the insidious concept of "happy meat" - a tribute to the human capacity for self-deception. Harming other sentient beings should not be a life-style choice in any civilised society." - David Pearce, founder of BLTC Research and co-founder of Humanity+, author of 'The Hedonistic Imperative'.

Genres: Philosophy

46 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 2014

About the author

Magnus Vinding is the author of Speciesism: Why It Is Wrong and the Implications of Rejecting It (2015), Reflections on Intelligence (2016), You Are Them (2017), Effective Altruism: How Can We Best Help Others? (2018), Suffering-Focused Ethics: Defense and Implications (2020), Reasoned Politics (2022), Essays on Suffering-Focused Ethics (2022), and Essays on UFOs and Related Conjectures (2024).

His next book will be Compassionate Purpose: Personal Inspiration for a Better World.

Reviews

[Seth · Rating 2 out of 5]

Where I agree with Vinding: In practice, there's much more humanewashing than actual happy meat, and if you feel that the idea of 'happy meat' justifies your own meat consumption, it's a safe bet that you're a hypocrite. I feel like it's important to make that clear first, before I tear this essay apart, as I am about to do.

In part 1 of 2, Vinding makes theoretical arguments against the permissibility of happy meat. Here he relies on appeals to intuition and pre-theoretic morality - trying to stay on safe ground, I suppose, though considering what a self-contradictory morass pre-theoretic morality is, that doesn't work too well - freely making claims about what is beyond doubt and what we all agree on, which I am inclined to doubt and disagree with. His arguments are summarized nicely in this quote:

How have we convinced ourselves that – when it comes to the beings we exploit; and very conveniently just them – avoiding pain is more important than avoiding an early death?

Certainly, people are commonly hypocritical, or at least speciesist, in this regard, but I'd turn it around: the more valid and interesting direction to go from here is pointing out how our psychological biases commonly lead us to get our priorities ass-backwards when it comes to ourselves and each other.

On to section 2:

It can be objected, however, that our basic ethical principles are sometimes misguided, and that it is not always sufficient to refer to commonly accepted ethical principles in order to establish the immorality of a certain practice... The goal of this second part is to address the skeptical consequentialist of any utilitarian flavor, and to show that the “happy meat” position indeed is morally wrong – that it is not just by referring to, and consistently applying, the basic ethical principles and intuitions we all hold that we come to the conclusion that the “happy meat” position is unethical, but also when we look more directly at the consequences this position has for sentient beings and their well-being.

Well, at least he acknowledges how weak section 1 was. I'm going to address his individual points in section 2 in the order in which he makes them.

What the consequentialist aims to bring about is not merely something better than nothing, but instead the best of all possibilities – the greatest well-being; not just to bring about lives merely worth living... If we think deeper about the “happy meat” position, it becomes clear that better options are available – that spending our time and resources on bringing non-human beings into existence in order for them to be killed and eaten is nowhere close to the best thing we can do with our limited resources. We can be more ambitious, and aim toward higher moral peaks. So we should.

Yes, that's what the consequentialist aims for, but concluding that therefore, anything short of that is impermissible is straw consequentialism. Further, total utilitarianism in particular (which I don't endorse, but it's worth addressing) is happy to bite the quantity over quality bullet. Vinding doesn't have more nuance to add here.

An observation worth making from the outset is that the vast majority of people agree with the “happy meat” position – agree that we can only justify eating non-human beings if we treat them well – and few people ever justify eating flesh with anything but the “happy meat” position.

Wow, what? Big if true! I roll to disbelieve! Citation needed! Unfortunately, no citation is given, and a look through Vinding's bibliography does not make it obvious where this claim came from. I've seen polls showing that, e.g., a majority of people in the US favor legislation intended to protect farmed animal welfare, but Vinding's making a much, much stronger claim here. As for the bit about few people using any other justification, if that's true, I must have a powerful selection effect bringing me into contact with those few. Again, citation needed!

Vinding spends several paragraphs talking about the emotional disconnect between people and their non-human victims (oddly, never mentioning the CAFO workers who are in direct contact with them), and then says this:

A lack of empathy alone does not, however, explain how this unbelievable trick is performed – how we say we only accept flesh from “happy” beings, yet buy flesh that came from beings who lived terrible lives... Here is how the trick is done in practice: If our consumption of non-human beings is ever questioned, we resort to the “happy meat” position that states that eating flesh can in principle be justified, and this somehow manages to let us off the hook in our own minds, to not think further about it, and to go on as we have always done – buying and eating flesh from beings of all kinds who lived horrible lives. All that seems to remain in our minds is: “No, it can be justified!”, and the details are forgotten.

Excuse me, waiter, I ordered a bailey. This is a motte. Vinding started out making the sweeping claim that happy meat is necessarily wrong, has now retreated to the weaker point that actually, people are hypocrites, and is trying to pass this off as the same thing. No, "People endorse claim X but do thing Y that's inconsistent with X" is not an argument against the validity of X. He tries to bridge the massive gap here by arguing that the idea of happy meat is somehow foundational to the system of exploitation that actually exists, and also could not do anything but lead to such a system. This is another extremely strong claim. If well-supported, it would lead to the conclusion that endorsing the idea of happy meat is bad by the standards of the idea of happy meat itself, which is still different from and weaker than the original thesis that happy meat is always wrong, but close enough in practice, I guess. I don't think Vinding succeeds, though. He has an anecdote to illustrate his points, about a carnist he once argued with, who justified his position with happy meat:

What happened next, I could not have written better myself were I to write a scene portraying the inconsistent “happy meat” eater, because just after we had this short conversation, this man who just could not understand the immoral people who buy flesh from anything but “organically raised beings”, went to the local cafeteria and took food from the buffet, and not surprisingly, he had taken flesh from the buffet, flesh from a tuna that he had absolutely no idea where came from, and also various dairy products that likely were not organic either. Was the tuna raised “organically”? Did the tuna live a good life, and was this being, or beings, whose flesh was now on his plate killed painlessly? The answer is surely that this being was not killed painlessly, but in a slow and horrifying way – most likely pulled from the deep with a hook in her or his mouth in order to come up and suffer from suffocation in the air and finally have her or his life ended through decapitation.

I agree this is illustrative, but I don't think it illustrates what Vinding wants it to illustrate. It's evident that it wasn't actually that important to this man that his food lived well and that he didn't give it much thought; it was just a convenient excuse that he could throw out when challenged. And it's hard to see how a moral position that people don't care or think much about could possibly be foundational to anything.

It should be clear at this point why the “happy meat” position should be rejected completely on utilitarian grounds too – why it should indeed be rejected on utilitarian grounds especially... For not only does the “happy meat” position support our abuse of non-human beings; it is the very foundation of it in practice. This is ironic, of course, yet not hard to see if we allow ourselves to imagine what would happen if we did not have the “happy meat” position to rely upon to provide an invalid, yet clearly efficient justification for buying flesh, eggs, and milk from beings who have lived horrible lives. Without the distracting “happy meat” position on the table, but only the reality about the unspeakable amounts of suffering we impose on the non-human beings we exploit and eat, it becomes clear to everyone that we have no good reason at all to bring them into existence and kill them.

No, that's not at all clear to me. I think Vinding is right to point out how important to the system of exploitation the disconnect between people and their victims is, but wrong to think that the happy meat argument in particular enables that disconnect. It doesn't need any particular argument to enable it. It is self-enabling. It ensures that most people don't have to think about how their food is made, and that's enough. Without the happy meat rationalization, people would just throw out some other speciesist argument when challenged.

The only way out of this vicious circle is to reject the “happy meat” position completely in the first place – to not buy into this purportedly compassionate position that is really psychopathic at its core; that is, devoid of any kind of empathy and emotional connection with the beings whom we claim to care for.

Naturally, I disagree with this, having disagreed with just about everything that led up to it. If people who use this rationalization don't actually care that much about it, why put so much emphasis on theoretic arguments against it, especially when it doesn't matter that much in practice? To the extent that people do care about it - which is certainly nonzero - surely it's easier and more effective to show them what actually goes on in CAFOs and point out how the commoditization of animals strongly incentivizes their mistreatment, making happy meat an ideal that's not just difficult to realize but practically impossible to scale for mass consumption in a capitalist society. I have some experience doing this pre-COVID with Anonymous for the Voiceless and similar orgs, holding screens showing footage from CAFOs and speaking with those who stop to watch about the realities of factory farming. Most people just walk right past - suggesting that people don't care about animal welfare as much as Vinding claims - but we did get a few every time. Certainly the footage is more of an attention grabber than theoretical arguments. Also, recent studies on college students have shown that teaching animal ethics can reduce meat consumption, but it's only effective if the theory is accompanied by factual information on what life is like for farmed animals.

One final complaint from me: Vinding being concerned about WAS, I was hoping he'd argue against a steelmanned happy meat ideal that accounts for ecological effects (namely, habitat reduction). No joy; he only takes the welfare of the farmed animals themselves into consideration. I was also hoping he'd point out the parallel to ems and talk a bit about that. No joy there either, but I can see how that might have been more of a digression than he wanted in this short essay.

[Daniel Hageman · Rating 3 out of 5]

Largely an attack of the argument because of its practical effect, rather than the deeper philosophical principles in theory.