In the entry “How Animals Eating Each Other Royally Screws Veganism” (which I probably should have given a more philosophical sounding title), I pointed out the obvious: vegans are flirting with nihilism when they say there is nothing morally wrong with non-human omnivores eating other animals simply because these flesh-devouring devils don’t have a conscience and thus don’t believe in right and wrong.

If it were inherently wrong to intentionally kill a gazelle, I theorized, then it would be wrong to do so even if you weren’t aware that it was wrong to kill a gazelle. Otherwise, there would be nothing wrong with eating meat if you weren’t aware of its wrongness — a stance that vegans admittedly do sort of lean toward when they say that eating meat is less immoral before you’ve seen Earthlings. 

If zero moral rules apply to creatures who experience zero sensations of right and wrong, then wouldn’t only one moral rule apply someone who experiences only one sensation of right and wrong? In other words, if animals are off the hook because they don’t experience any morality, it would seem to follow that individual moral rules only apply to people who feel those particular rules. You can’t say that everyone who is capable of feeling right and wrong is obligated to follow every plausible moral rule, because there are just too many of them, most of which are compelling to some people but not others. Which would mean that it is not immoral for us to eat meat as long as we do not personally feel that it is immoral to do so. 

Arguably.

The reason I’m dusting off this oldie is that a commenter who recently barraged it with comments disagreeing with my conclusions (wtf?!) did concede one of the points I made: if it is not morally wrong for animals to commit violence because they are not guided by moral considerations, then the actions of amoral human psychopaths also cannot be judged wrong.

Through experience, observation and training, psychopaths do know what is popularly accepted as right and wrong, and they realize they’ll be punished for behavior deemed wrong if they are caught. However, this obedience to rules they do not believe in is no morally different from a dog who is trained, through fear of punishment or through positive rewards, to behave in ways humans like. In both cases, if the amoral being violates the training, they cannot be said to have committed an objective moral wrong, since they have no conscience, do not experience the sensation of wrongness, and so operate outside of morality.

And abolitionist-esque vegans agree!

The commenter wrote:

To the extent that a psychopath isn’t guided or motivated by moral considerations (whether by themselves or in conjunction with other beliefs and desires), and if this is a necessary condition for moral agency (which seems likely), then the psychopath is not doing something that is morally wrong - no objective moral principle applies to her. That would be so, even if she were to meet the already mentioned necessary condition for moral agency - ability to conceive of and think about moral issues. Fulfillment of these two conditions probably comes as a package deal in people who are ‘hooked up right’ (to use the jargon of moral psychiatry/psychology).

Of course, the dog under the envisaged circumstances isn’t doing anything wrong (no objective moral principles apply to him) since he doesn’t meet either of the alleged necessary conditions for moral agency thus mentioned - he can’t grasp right or wrong, nor be motivated to act by moral considerations. Neither the dog nor the psychopath you describe are objectively morally wrong, since neither are moral agents.

And it does seem clear that psychopaths are generally not motivated by internal moral considerations. As someone wrote on an anti-social personality board:

my problem is i cannot comprehend morals. i wouldn’t mind having them but i really cannot understand them. there are other social things i cannot understand either. sometimes i wonder if my frontal lobe functions normally bc ive really honestly tried to understand certain things (like morals) and cannot get it.

If an inability to understand morals frees other animals from rules rules rules, it should do the same for humans. To suggest otherwise would be the basest form of specieisism, treating psychopaths as moral agents just because they belong to a species dominated by moral agents, even though they — like other animals — lack the brain functioning required for morality.

Of course, even if we can’t say that vicious, destructive actions by psychopaths are either good or bad, we’d still want to punish psychopaths who violate the rules of morality, just as we would want to keep lions from eating our children; it’s no consolation that a loved one was killed by a being who lacks a moral compass and thus didn’t technically do anything immoral.

This troubling condition may not be all bad, however. Psychopathic humans, if used properly, could offer valuable services to members of the moral community who want some things that moral feelings prevent them from taking. Most relevant for this blog, humans for whom the rules of morality do not apply open up the possibility of morally neutral animal use.

For vegans who believe that there’s nothing inherently wrong with amoral beings committing what we would consider atrocities if morally functioning humans performed them, animal use should be okay if amoral humans were responsible for every immoral aspect of it (exploitation, suffering and death). If animal rights vegans cannot object to slaughterhouses created and run by grizzly bears, they cannot object if amoral humans run them. 

These amoral animal handlers would function like Shabbos goys who can do forbidden work for observant Jews on Shabbat by being exempt from the religious rules preventing them from laboring on the day of rest. What is immoral for those of us with a conscience becomes morally neutral in the gruff amoral hands of psychopaths - even Tyson Chicken.

On humane farms, amoral humans could artificially inseminate cows, separate calves from their mothers, dehorn and castrate steers, and drive animals to the slaughterhouse, where everyone involved with the killing would also be a confirmed amoral sociopath. All the remaining farm tasks would be similar to farm sanctuary work, which vegans don’t find to be immoral. 

You could even have a morally neutral factory farming if you managed to staff all the cruel positions with those exempt from the laws of morality. 

There would still need to be debate over procedure. The commenter I quoted earlier asserted that it would be wrong to train a psychopath to kill pest animals to protect crops, even if the actual killing of the animals is not wrong for the psychopath. This strikes me as too stringent. Isn’t it okay to train someone to do something that would be wrong for the trainer, but not wrong for the person being trained, as long as the trainer doesn’t teach through demonstration? Would it be wrong to use a rubber mouse to train an inept cat to hunt mice? 

To be on the safe side, you could take a page out of the Shabbos goy playbook and use savvy indirectness to make sure the hands of the moral are not sullied. Farm owners could “hint” to the confirmed psychopath that they might like to be castrating that steer. The training could be an “innocent” conversation about what castration entails, never explicitly acknowledging that the psychopath is being taught how to do this so they can really do it. And payment could be in advance, presented as a gift, so that the psychopath’s amoral interventions could qualify as friendly favors rather than paid labor. 

Or, to make it simple, you could have a farm run and staffed entirely by amoral humans. There may already be a few factory farms like that. 

And if it’s not wrong for psychopaths to raise animals in cruel, confined conditions, how could it be wrong to purchase the products of such a farm incapable of either right or wrong? It would be the moral equivalent of eating the remains of another animal’s kill. 

Unless, of course, you’re vegan for suffering reduction reasons. But then you should probably get to work on phasing out carnivores.