Jean Kazez is a professor of animal rights at SMU and author of the recently published Animalkind: What We Owe The Animals. She also blogs at the excellent In Living Color, which is how I discovered her.

What struck me about her site, and then inspired me to ask her for an interview, was the nuance in her discussions of animal rights, morality and her vegetarianism. Unlike some blogs (*ahem* let them eat meat *cough*) In Living Color is very comfortable in grey. I haven’t read Animalkind, but based on James Garvey’s review of it, it’s just as non-dogmatic as her online writing:

Our thinking about animals is a mess. We moo at a cow in the countryside, maybe pat a little lamb on the head, then enjoy burgers and kebabs for lunch. Philosophers have tried to tidy things up in two ways. The old school argues that animals are more like things than people, so why not treat them as we wish? Recent philosophers say that animals are like us in some morally relevant sense, and we must therefore treat them with the respect owed to human beings. Liberate them from zoos, labs and factory farms, give them rights, and so on.

Jean Kazez explores a middle path between these views in her book, Animalkind. Animals aren’t just things, she says, but they’re not our equals either. Our lives matter more, but animal lives do still matter – we have to treat them with all due respect, depending on the value their lives have. It’s complicated – and you have to think things through carefully, case by case. Kazez takes the world’s ragged edges seriously. The result is a readable, compelling, and thought-provoking account of our difficult relationship to animals. 

Naturally, then, Kazez is on the shitlist of abolitionist vegan leader Gary L. Francione and his consistency-obsessed followers. She critiqued Francione’s off-putting, puritanical approach to reducing the suffering of animals and instantly became their symbol for compromising animal welfarist saboteurs.

Which just makes me like her even more. But of course we don’t agree on everything. Jean started off by saying, “Thanks for this interview, Rhys. You’re a hilarious satirist of a certain segment of the animal rights world that needs to be satirized, but I want to make it clear at the outset that I’m not an ex- or anti-vegan.”

Hmm… balance. Can this blog withstand the consideration of another viewpoint? Read on and find out.

How long have you been vegetarian?

I’ve been a vegetarian for 17 years. I became a vegetarian not long after seeing The Animals Film. I’d been thinking about these things for years, but the disturbing images in that movie made me “ready” to make a change. The truth is, though, that I didn’t actually make the change until I met my husband some months later. He was already a vegetarian, but more for health reasons. I talked him into the idea that the moral reasons were more important.

On your blog you’ve been discussing whether a moral position can be scientifically proven. My understanding of your view is that while science might illuminate facts that may affect our moral decisions, it cannot in itself show that something is objectively right or wrong. Does that mean that the moral obligation to not eat animals cannot be objectively proven?

Some people think we need religion to know what’s right and wrong, because they think rightness is really acceptability to God, and wrongness is unacceptability to God. In the blog post where I talked about these things, I was responding to a recent lecture by Sam Harris. He challenges the religious view of morality by arguing that rightness really has to do with human well-being, not God. He thinks we can use science to study well being, and therefore we can used science to study what’s right and wrong.

I have various doubts about Harris’s view, but one is that I don’t think “objective proof” (as you put it) must be either religious or scientific. That’s a false dichotomy. “Objective proof” is what you’ve got when you’ve made a good argument. You’ve been logical, you’ve got your facts straight, and your reasoning holds up when you apply it in other domains as well. I do think there are good arguments against eating meat. You can call that “objective proof” if you like, though of course ethics isn’t mathematics.

So we determine morality through logic?

“Logic” in the narrow sense has to do with whether your premises have the right structure to yield your conclusions. A good argument has to be logical, but it has to be more than that. The premises have to be true. Moral arguments start from various kinds of premises. Some are claims about what’s good or bad, what we ought to do, what situations are morally comparable to other situations, and the like. Just sitting and pondering all that, it seems like moral arguments must be utterly subjective. But when you actually engage in it, moral argumentation proceeds in an orderly way. You make an argument, an opponent finds ways to challenge a premise, you talk about counterexamples or hypothetical situations.

Obviously, I’m not really telling you in depth what “determines morality”—that’s a very difficult question. I’m just saying I think morality is in the realm of reason.

Sometimes while I was vegan I would have moments of doubt, but I resolved them this way: “Eating animals may or may not be wrong, but not eating animals definitely isn’t wrong. So to be on the safe side, I won’t eat animals.” Do you ever feel that vegetarianism is a Pascal’s wager of sorts?

In Pascal’s wager, you’re supposed to think it’s worth giving up your Sunday mornings and sitting in church trying to believe because the pay-off is so enormous, even if the chances of receiving it are unknown. You don’t get to read the paper and eat pancakes, but you get some unknown chance of receiving eternal life.

With giving up meat, you wager your roast beef sandwich, but what’s the unknown pay off? Being morally innocent, not violating rights, etc. Another unknown payoff is saving animal lives and preventing suffering, because there’s actually room for debate about whether vegetarians make a difference to the number of animals killed. Those payoffs may not have quite the oomph of eternal life, but I can see the parallel.

There’s this further parallel: I think going to church starts being pleasant for some people, so the unknown payoff becomes less important. That’s true for many vegetarians too. You come to like what you’re eating, and enjoy the bloodlessness, etc.

In regards to whether vegetarians make a difference in how many animals are killed, I’d point out that farmers don’t tend to liberate excess animals when demand goes down. So if not eating meat has any effect, it is to make it so fewer animals are born and then killed. That’s why some people say that veganism or vegetarianism is actually bad for animals in comparison to buying humanely raised meat: veg*ans are “opting out” rather than directing money toward farms that improve the lives of non-theoretical animals that are actually in the world.

When people eat humanely raised meat, the lives of existing animals improve, and this less cruel model might catch on and spread. Whereas if all the people who cared about animal treatment just gave up meat all together, the only meat eaters left would be indifferent omnivores supporting factory farms. So if we love animals, this argument goes, we shouldn’t take them off our plates; we should eat them humanely.

I suspect you disagree.

On a humane farm animals get to live lives that are mostly happy. You might think it’s fine to breed them, even if you’re also later going to brand them, dehorn them, kill them, etc. I don’t think this reasoning can be dismissed lightly, but it also should cause discomfort. Think of the movie “The Island,” where people are created just to become organ donors. They have pleasant lives, and theoretically they’re not supposed to know what’s going to happen to them. You might say their lives were worth living, so it was better to create them and kill them than not to create them at all. We can see there’s something fishy about this reasoning.

There’s probably also something wrong with the reasoning that supports humane farming on grounds that the animals do benefit from getting to live. This is tricky, and there’s more to be said about it, but on the whole I don’t think we can excuse animal farming by saying it benefits animals.

Since all food production involves the death of animals, even when the food isn’t meat, some people criticize vegans for caring more about intent than reality. How much does intent matter?

Let’s say there’s an omnivorous ultra-locovore who doesn’t care much about animals — she thinks it’s better for health. Somehow her diet accidentally leads to less actual animal death than the diet of an animal-loving vegan whose processed and packaged vegan foods inadvertently kill a lot of animals in the process.

Could the selfish locovore be considered more moral because her diet has better results, even if it doesn’t have better intentions? Or does the positive intent of the vegan who tries to live a cruelty-free life outweigh the actual results?

I don’t think it makes sense to suppose that the vegan will cause more deaths. Plant farming does cause accidental deaths. But so does animal farming. (1) If you feed the animals grain, all the accidental deaths from plant farming are also involved in animal farming, but multiplied, since it takes 20 pounds of plant protein to get one pound of beef protein, etc. (2) If you pasture the animals, there are still accidental deaths. Wild animals lose their habitat as a result of pasture. Those that still live on grazing land have less to eat, less water, and lose migratory routes because of fencing. So—I reject the presupposition behind the question.

But (you may say)—just suppose! So let’s suppose more deaths did result from the vegan diet, and fewer from the locovore diet, though the former were accidental and the latter intentional. One thing I would want to know before reaching a verdict is how the animals eaten by the locovore were treated. If there’s a factory farm next door to me, and the crops for the animals are grown nearby, I can call myself a locovore and eat these animals. I think the vegan diet is better in this case. The field mice got to have a real life, which matters more than the total quantity killed by combines.

But now suppose we’re talking about a locovore who only buys from Joel Salatin’s idyllic farm in the Shenendoahs—the one made famous by Michael Pollan. Again, I see no reason to believe this is true, but let’s suppose a vegan diet does have a higher death toll, though all the deaths are accidental. With all the facts laid out like that, what should we think? Is it better to accidentally kill 100 animals than to deliberately kill 10? I don’t think so. There isn’t a major difference between deliberately causing a death and doing something that will foreseeably cause a death. Even the people involved are not significantly different, in terms of respectfulness, compassion, etc. So if the facts were as stipulated, there would be no reason to be a vegan.

As I said, I don’t think those are the facts. Animal deaths are reduced, not increased, by a vegan diet.

Many vegans frame veganism as a striving for moral neutrality, an absence of guilt (“the moral baseline”). Essentially, veganism is the least anyone can do. But in a defense of vegetarianism (while comparing it to veganism), you framed it differently: “I am suggesting [vegetarians] are like people who don’t give most everything to charity and adopt a perfectly green lifestyle.”

This makes it sound like you see being vegetarian and vegan as actively doing good. Vegans are giving everything to charity in a sense and vegetarians are giving less but still something. Where do meat eaters fall, then? Do you see them as neutral, not doing anything good but also not doing anything bad?

A little terminology would help here. We could say that a vegan diet is obligatory—it should be chosen. In that case, anything else is wrong. Vegetarianism is wrong. Being an omnivore is wrong.

On the other hand, we could say that a vegan diet is supererogatory—it’s admirable to choose it, but beyond the call of duty. In that case, the other diets aren’t wrong. They just aren’t as admirable. At the near-vegan end, they’re pretty admirable, and at the carnivorous end, they’re not admirable at all.

I think it makes most sense to say a vegan diet is obligatory, not merely supererogatory, for most of us most of the time. You should not kill and cause suffering when it’s unnecessary, and for most of us it seems to be unnecessary to eat animals. Milk and eggs involve killing and causing suffering too, so veganism, not just vegetarianism, is obligatory.

Now, that sounds all very black and white, and the idea of the moral baseline is that in fact it is black and white. Either you’re a vegan, or you’re not, and we shouldn’t recognize ethical differences among the alternatives. But that makes no sense. Even if all options but veganism are wrong, there are degrees. We can look at specific diets and quantify how much death and suffering they cause. A person is doing better the less killing and harming they’re involved in.

Seeing shades of grey is extremely important in all areas of our moral lives. Let’s take another moral issue—letting people die from preventable causes in developing countries. Peter Singer has been arguing for 40 years now that it’s wrong to let people die, if we can prevent their deaths without sacrificing any necessities. His latest book, “The Life You Can Save,” makes the case powerfully.

Let’s use the word “donanism” to refer to a way of life that avoids letting people die as much as possible. Donans (pronounced like “don(ut)” plus “(veg)ans”) would never eat out, buy ipods, take vacations, etc. Singer thinks donanism is not merely supererogatory, it’s required. You’d have to read him to find out how persuasive this is, but I find it persuasive.

Now, suppose you have Singer’s view about giving, and you combine it with the “moral baseline” concept. Then you’d have to say that all seemingly generous contributors to Oxfam and the like are the same—they’re doing wrong—if they’re not donans. Obviously, this is silly. Big donors to Oxfam are not just like people who don’t donate at all.

The same goes for veganism. If it’s the right thing to do for many of us, most of the time, it doesn’t follow we should lump together all alternatives as equivalent. Morally, they are not equivalent. Near-vegans do better than vegetarians, and vegetarians do better than omnivores.

Now, you might think that non-donans “just” let people die, whereas non-vegans are complicit in killing. And you might think there’s a huge difference between killing and letting die. Singer doesn’t think so, and I don’t think the difference is so great as to undermine the point here. But some people think there’s a big difference, so let’s switch to another example.  

When we are environmentally irresponsible, we risk killing future people, not just letting them die. It might be reasonable to postulate a principle of “smallest ecological footprint”—i.e. that we should use resources and produce emissions and pollution only as much as we must, to provide ourselves with necessities. The people who live up to this principle might be called “greenans,” to keep the rhyming scheme going. I think it’s plausible that greenans do what’s obligatory, not just what’s supererogatory. But once again, it’s surely not all the same how much we deviate from being greenans. There are shades of green.

Now, how should we view people who deviate from the obligatory? This is going to vary from case to case. You can deviate from the obligatory in lots of ways—by stealing a penny, by telling a little lie, by not switching off lights, by buying yourself an ipod instead of donating to Oxfam, by drinking a glass of milk, by committing a rape or abusing a child. By recognizing shades of grey (or green) we don’t automatically settle how harshly to judge wrongdoers.  

I think non-vegans have a lot in common with both non-donans and non-greenans. We talk about diminished responsibility when a person can’t see the wrongness of their behavior or can’t control themselves. That seems to be the situation when it comes to all these things. It’s really hard to see buying an ipod as meaning that you’re letting people die. It’s hard to see not turning off the lights as causing harm to future people. It’s really hard to see drinking a glass of milk as anything but innocent and wholesome. In all three cases, we also have problems with self-control. We want the ipod, we’re lazy about the lights, we’re used to the milk. In cases like this, it’s especially important to validate gradual progress instead of being harshly judgmental.

Sorry for the very long answer. You satirize vegan purism a lot on your blog, and the thinking behind that turns on the “moral baseline” concept, so I wanted to make it clear why I don’t care for it either.

You’ve blogged a few times about Gary L. Francione’s fiery brand of abolitionist veganism. What do you make of this movement? Why are some animal advocates drawn to this all-or-nothing ideology that puts so much importance on personal purity?

I started blogging about Francione back in November when I made a casual remark that brought a pack of his followers to my blog, as well as the man himself. These folks were incensed because I’d criticized Francione, something that’s apparently not allowed. They subjected me to all sorts of ad hominems, badgered me for not being a vegan, and subjected me to the whole Francione catechism. I think It would be a very bad thing if people like this became the public face of the animal rights movement.  

Do you think that’s a legitimate possibility?

I wish I knew the answer. Certainly I think that’s what Francione wants. To clarify why I think it would be bad thing…

There are issues about tone and manners, but also questions of substance. When I teach Animal Rights, there are almost never any takers for the sort of abolitionist view defended by Tom Regan, much less for an even more radical view like Francione’s.

Students are receptive to all sorts of pro-animal thinking, including views that would lead to major change, but not to the idea that animals have the sort of rights that people do. They are impatient with referring to animals as “persons,” don’t care for the idea that animal liberation is like slave emancipation. Nobody ever thinks all animal research should come to an end. Anything that sounds like “cats are people too” doesn’t appeal. Not even to the most pro-animal students in the room, who include vegans and vegetarians.

I think the animal movement would shrink and lose traction if it were wedded to that sort of thinking.

In one of your recent entries, you pointed out the difference between abolitionist tactics against human slavery and abolitionism for animals. For one, an anti-slavery abolitionist would not have called another abolitionist a hypocrite for putting sugar in his tea, even if slaves were involved in the production of that sugar. I think this is a good point against purity veganism, but couldn’t it also be used against any form of ethical eating, as long as you aren’t hurting and killing the animals yourself? Can someone eat meat (maybe even factory farmed meat) and still work toward a better world for animals?

Anti-slavery abolitionists wouldn’t have wasted time and energy on each other’s indiscretions, because emancipation was the goal, not personal purity. Yes, it’s a bit hypocritical to use slave-produced sugar in your tea, if you’re an abolitionist, but obsessing about such things wasn’t going to lead to the end of slavery. I don’t think “purity veganism” does much good for animals either.

As to meat-eaters doing good for animals: sure. I’ve read that over half of animal activists are neither vegetarians nor vegans. Look at the pictures of Humane Society workers rescuing animals after Hurricane Katrina. Are all those people vegans? I bet they aren’t. Does it matter? To an animal being pulled out of harm’s way, safety is safety. The rescuer’s dinner plans are immaterial.

When vegans refer to eating animal products as unnecessary, they usually characterize the reasons people eat animal products this way: taste, convenience, tradition/habit. Vegans dismiss those reasons as selfish and not nearly enough to justify killing animals. Are vegans right? Or are those things more important than vegans believe? But beyond that, are those really the only reasons people eat meat, dairy and eggs?

First of all, I do think the critical question is “necessity.” We can eat animals when it’s necessary—whenever there’s some serious benefit to ourselves at stake. (But we can’t eat each other even out of necessity. Why is there that difference? That’s one of the central questions of my book.)

When we decide what counts as a “serious benefit” we’re implicitly making a judgment of balance. We’re asking ourselves whether the benefit is serious enough, considering the cost in killing and suffering to animals. If the benefit to me is staying alive, just about anyone is going to say “serious enough.” Most people will say the same thing when the benefit is avoiding a serious health problem. How serious is serious?  

I had a student recently with an interesting predicament. She has a potentially life-threatening blood disorder and winds up in the hospital periodically. Her doctor says it’s best for her to eat some meat. She talked to an MD associated with one of the major animal advocacy organizations, who said that wasn’t necessary, which I found a little presumptuous. He’s certainly no expert on her blood disorder. But anyway, she went on to tell him she simply felt comforted by drinking chicken soup while in the hospital. Apparently her psychological need for chicken soup didn’t impress him. I’m inclined to be more accepting.

But now as to the rest of us. People in developing countries and northern climates and the like are another story, but most people in affluent countries just have reasons of taste to choose animal products over alternatives. Mainstream nutritionists do say that vegetarian and vegan diets are healthful.

It would be puritanical to regard food pleasure as unimportant. Pleasure is a good thing! The problem comes when we think about balance. Is my enjoyment really important enough to warrant killing or inflicting suffering on another being? I think the answer is obvious in some cases. Surely nobody has to eat veal or pate au foix gras. There are enough delicious alternatives that a preference for those flavors over others can’t be important enough to warrant what’s done to the calf or goose. I also don’t really see how a person can have to eat chicken or beef or pork rather than good vegetarian alternatives.  

What I personally have most trouble with is milk products. If you eliminate beef from your diet, maybe one meal per week is going to be any different. Big deal! If you eliminate milk, that means a change at practically every meal. I have a particular problem with it because I dislike soy products. Giving up milk would mean bad coffee, the end of cheese, giving up on all sorts of baked goods, etc. I’m not going to say these things are utterly trivial, or feel ashamed for caring about them, but are these pleasures “serious enough,” considering what has to be done to animals for me to enjoy them? I’m a little uncertain how to think about the whole matter, but right now I’d say “probably not.”

So I have to admit that my vegetarian diet isn’t the right choice. That gives me an incentive to make changes, to trend toward veganism, but it’s not a black and white thing. I see not being a vegan like the fact that I am also not a donan or a greenan. It’s unsettling to think you should be doing more, and motivating, but not something to be utterly ashamed of.

Why am I uncertain about the matter of taste? Imagine someone with unusual taste buds. But for the animal products in their food, everything would taste like cardboard to them. It seems odd to say they must lose out on all taste enjoyment. That’s where it leads, if you don’t attach any moral weight to food enjoyment. I think we have to give eating pleasure some weight, but exactly how much? It’s hard to be precise or definitive about this.

A lot of former vegans say that by the end of their veganism, they felt physically miserable and that going back to eating animal products again made a huge difference, improving their mood and other health issues (despite mainstream nutrition groups saying veganism shouldn’t cause these problems).

Your student said she was psychologically comforted by chicken soup. But these ex-vegans, including myself, feel that animal products physically made them feel much better. Are these instances where animal products might be “necessary”? Or are the vegans right who say that we did veganism wrong and that if we really cared we would have found a way to make ourselves feel better without sacrificing animals?

I’m not inclined to question anybody’s experience, if they’re being honest with themselves. I do wonder if some people exaggerate health issues because they can’t stand the idea that they’re doing something wrong (wrong by their own principles). I think we ought to admit that being good is hard. There are lots of areas of our lives in which most of us don’t do all we should. It’s better to own up to our shortcomings than rationalize.

I’ll buy that some people really don’t feel good on a vegan or vegetarian diet. Temple Grandin, who wrote a very nice endorsement of my book, wrote to me about the health problems she had when she tried vegetarianism. I heard the same thing from a student in my animal rights class—someone very committed to animals (she was going to vet school and wanted to specialize in oncology). I also know people who find it easier to eat less if they eat meat. Somehow satiety comes after fewer calories. So—I’m for honesty, but also for recognizing individual differences.

All that being said, nobody in my vegetarian family has had any problems. I felt no worse when I gave up meat, but also no better.

When I decided I needed to leave veganism, I didn’t even consider lacto-ovo vegetarianism because my vegan education had taught me that dairy and eggs are as bad as meat, if not worse. Do you think those vegan arguments do more harm than good?

Take eating eggs vs. eating chicken. The truth of the matter is that it takes a few chickens to supply one person with eggs every day for a year (plus we should include an equal number of male chicks in the cost—who are immediately killed.) Each laying hen will live over a year, and produce about one egg per day. On the other hand, it takes maybe 100 chickens (they live for about 7 weeks each) to keep you eating chicken every day for a year. That’s about 150 chicken-weeks to get eggs, and 700 to get meat. If you’d be buying cage-free eggs and humanely raised chicken, the treatment of the two is similar. Perhaps the biggest difference is in the number of debeakings, trips to slaughterhouses, and moments of being slaughtered. The cost in death and suffering of eating eggs is undeniably lower than the cost of eating chicken meat.

I think it’s clear that sliding from veganism to vegetarianism is better for animals than sliding all the way to being an omnivore. Vegan arguments that paint things in very black and white terms may help recruit a few vegans, but at the risk of alienating a much larger group of people who might be willing to be vegetarians or half-time vegans, or one-day-a-week vegans.

Many vegans are going to be frustrated that you see the rightness of veganism but can’t give up your milk. So on behalf of my vegan readers, I have to ask… what about trying almond milk, hemp milk, rice milk, oat milk or coconut milk?

I’m puzzled by vegans who fret over vegetarians. What is it that upsets them so much about someone who shifts just ¾ of the way to a vegan diet? Why is that so disturbing, compared to someone who doesn’t make any shift at all? You have some interesting theories about the policing of boundaries in your post “Vegan Shitlist: Self-Proclaimed Veg*ans Who Eat Meat” (which is laugh out loud funny). I’m baffled.

But I’m also receptive to making changes. I was offered the suggestion about different kinds of milk a couple of months ago and tried making cappuccino with a couple of kinds of soy milk and with rice milk. It didn’t go well. On the other hand, about a year ago I started switching from regular ice cream to soy ice cream, which can be pretty good.

In your book, you argue that, “Egalitarianism within our species is required, even though egalitarianism between species is not.” To me this sounds like you’re saying it is bad to be a racist or sexist but okay to be a speciesist. I know this is a complicated topic that probably takes up a good number of pages in your book, but could you give a summary of this view?

I don’t regard myself as a speciesist. Anyone who thinks about animal issues will grant that there are differences between what we can do to members of different species. For example, we can spay a dog without his consent, but we can’t sterilize people without their consent. To say this is not at all to be a speciesist, but to be sensitive to genuine differences.  

I think there are enough differences between humans and animals, and differences in what we may do to them, that the language of equality doesn’t make much sense. To explain what I mean does take many pages of my book, but let me give an example. This is a modification of an example from the animal rights philosopher Tom Regan.  

Suppose you’re on a sinking lifeboat. There are four 100 pound people on the boat and 100 1-pound rats. If you don’t get rid of 100 pounds of weight, the boat will sink. If you are hyper-egalitarian, then you will think a rat’s life is worth no more and no less than a human being’s life. Thus, the right thing will be perfectly clear. You must throw one person overboard and save all the rats. You don’t have any choice—that’s your obligation.

Now I think that just can’t be right. So we must think about different lives differently. (I discuss this at length in my book.) That is not automatically speciesist, any more than it’s got to be speciesist to think it’s different to sterilize animals than to sterilize people. But when we value different lives differently, it does mean we’re not egalitarians, at least in a certain important respect.

“Speciesism” isn’t simply seeing or treating animals and humans differently. It’s prejudice or bias. The way I see it, of course we don’t want to be speciesist. Who would want to be prejudiced or biased? It just doesn’t follow at all that we must see and treat humans and animals in all the same ways or even call them “equals.”

I think most people would consider it sexist to say that if we need to get rid of weight on a boat, and there was a man and a woman on the boat, obviously we would have to throw the woman over because her life isn’t as valuable.

I see what you mean about neutering or spaying a dog without their consent not being speciesist even though we wouldn’t do the same to a human. And it’s also not speciesist to say a dog shouldn’t vote, since dogs are dogs and they can’t vote. But giving more value to our own lives seems different to me than these cases, which represent appropriately different treatment based on dissimilar biological situations.

A woman being capable of bearing children and a man not being able to is an inequality of sorts, but it’s not a prejudice. I feel that is similar to the neutering example with animals. But to say that all women are inherently better than men because they can have children would be sexism.

So how is valuing the lives of humans over other animals not speciesist? Is the definition of speciesism just more lax than other prejudices?

Peter Singer is the one who really put “speciesism” on the map, and it’s interesting how nuanced his discussion is in the first chapter of “Animal Liberation” compared to the way people use the word today. Singer defines “speciesm” as a bias or prejudice in favor of one’s own species. If you overcome speciesism, where will you be? Singer thinks you will give equal consideration to equal interests. For example, if a human and a rat are suffering identical pains, he thinks a non-speciesist will react the same way to one as to the other. (My book has a long discussion about whether he’s right.)

Singer is very clear that he does not think it’s speciesist to save the lives of humans before rats (see pg. 17-24). That’s not because rats are just rats, or because they are yucky looking and have weird long tails. If those feelings made you save humans first, that would be speciesist. It’s because there’s an objective difference between people and rats: there is more of value in a human’s life. He also says a human being can have a type of interest in going on living that’s impossible for a rat. We should save rats, if we can, but humans before rats, if we must set priorities.

The person who saves men before women simply can’t say the same things. There are so few differences between men and women that a person who saved men first would have to be basing that on superficial differences. Likewise with blacks and whites. If you saved whites first, you’d have to be driven by bias, because there just isn’t any deep, relevant difference. But when we look at rats and people, we do see major differences, not just superficial ones. It’s OK to see them—it’s not a sign of prejudice!

So what’s the extra “good” that’s in the life of a human being? We can discuss and debate that—it’s not an easy question. More or less, it’s the good of greater autonomy, knowledge, self-awareness, emotional complexity, creativity, and the like. Yes, those are our characteristics, and we’re the ones making the value judgment. So you might suspect bias. But that’s not the only possible explanation. If Barack Obama were listing the characteristics of the best speakers, he’d have to list his own…and thereby look biased.

In fact, the explanation why he listed his own would be that he’s a superior speaker, not that he’s biased. The whole business of value comparisons makes many people uncomfortable. They think it’s just humans lording it over animals. But that’s not so. In many areas of ethics, we’ve got to compare lives. That’s true if we’re talking about who should receive organ donations, which humans should be saved first in an emergency, etc. We really do need to think in these terms—and we should not immediately assume it’s all a matter of bias.

Do you think any human is in reality a true, consistent anti-speciesist?

Probably not. Using the term as I think it should be used, an anti-speciesist is entirely unprejudiced about species. It goes against our inborn instincts to care a whole lot about anyone outside our “tribe,” and animals are well outside our tribe.  So we have to continually work at overcoming our biases, instead of feeling secure that we’re bias-free.

If humans are more important than animals, is there some truth to the argument that people shouldn’t be vegetarian or vegan for the animals because doing so creates rifts between friends and family members, and thus reduces the quality of life of humans?

The “rift” argument is one of those that’s at the “serious” end of the spectrum.  I am very disinclined to go home for a family occasion and refuse to eat what my mother has cooked. As a vegetarian, it’s easy to meet in the middle. If I were a vegan, I think I’d have to cook separately. Generally, I don’t want to divide myself from the world. I want to experience people, places, and things deeply, and not sequester myself.

As a vegetarian I can do that, especially if I relax the rules a bit when on the road. I think these kinds of reasons for killing and inflicting suffering are stronger than taste reasons, but are they really “good enough” so that eating meat to avoid a rift is not wrong at all? I’m not sure. It might be wrong that I do this, but I’m quite sure it’s not the worst of my sins.

Why should someone who is a speciesist consider being vegetarian or vegan?

I’ve been teaching an animal rights class for many years and most students admit to pro-human bias. I try to convince them that bias is a bad thing, but a lot of them never budge. Nevertheless, when I show movies like PETA’s “Meet Your Meat,” they’re horrified. They don’t want to be complicit in treating animals like that, even if (as they believe) animals generally matter less than people. Many tell me they stop eating meat after seeing the movie—some just briefly, but some long-term. It’s not that they shed all their biases. They just decide they don’t want to support the cruelty they’ve seen onscreen.

Similarly, you were persuaded to give up meat because of disturbing images in The Animals Film. How morally relevant is disgust? If animals had no blood, didn’t cry in pain and didn’t really resist death, fewer people would be vegetarian and vegan. But these non-resistant, bloodless animals might still suffer and have interests that philosophically ought to be considered. Is animal rights philosophy just creating logical arguments in response to a feeling of repulsion at the sight of blood?

When I show that film, we discuss whether it is accurate, manipulative, etc. One part that might be considered manipulative is all the blood. A lot of people viscerally recoil at the sight of blood. The fact that a slaughterhouse is a bloody place isn’t automatically grounds for moral disapproval. An operating room can be a bloody place too.

What I find most disturbing in that movie is not in fact the copious blood, but the rough handling of the animals. You see chickens being thrown around, pigs being beaten, cows being electrically prodded. There is total indifference to animal well-being. I do recoil at that, and don’t see why I shouldn’t. We don’t have to respond with Spock-like coolness when we see wrongdoing. We should care about these things. If we didn’t, we wouldn’t be motivated to do anything about them.

Is how we treat animals more important for the animals, or for what it says about us?

It’s all about the animals. That’s why vegan purism makes so little sense to me.

At my blog I once wrote a post about the idea of making deals with other people to increase good behavior. I’ll contribute 5% to Oxfam if you will. I’ll be a vegan half the time if you’ll be a vegan half the time. Given how hard it is to do all that we should, these kinds of deals are a great idea. They don’t generate perfect vegans, or perfect greenans, or perfect donans, but so what? In all these areas where progress is hard to achieve, more benefit will come, ironically, if we make and validate modest efforts instead of demanding perfection.