Key Takeaways
- Distancing institutions: Physical and psychological separation from animal suffering
- Willful blindness: Active choice to avoid seeing cruelty
- Tragedy of the commons: Economic incentives for factory farming
- Dynamic justice: Long-term feedback loops between humans and animals
The Moral Contradiction of Compassion
Humans share an innate capacity for compassion, yet we simultaneously inflict vast and pervasive cruelty upon animals. This contradiction is particularly evident in industrial settings, where animals like pigs live and die in “hellish places” known as concentrated-animal-feeding operations (CAFOs). While we recoil at the thought of cruelty, we consume products derived from it without much hesitation—a process enabled by suppressing the negative emotion of compassion.
The key to resolving this contradiction lies in the recognition that to avoid feeling compassion, we do not typically reduce the suffering itself, but rather our perception of it. This realization informs two ancient proverbs: “An ethical man stays away from the kitchen: brutality is perpetrated there every day,” and “He who hears its scream will lose his appetite for its flesh”. These are not mere adages; they are admonitions on how to conserve compassion, signaling the two primary mechanisms by which modern society enables widespread cruelty: distancing institutions and willful blindness. This journey into the “Species” ring reveals that our dominance over animals is absolute only on the surface, and that beneath the layer of ethical evasion lies a powerful, self-correcting dynamic justice.
The Architecture of Evasion
The Rise of Distancing Institutions
Distancing institutions are devices designed to keep humans physically and psychologically separated from the suffering animal. The Industrial Revolution, through specialization and the division of labor, greatly accelerated this process. When consumers specialize in consumption, they delegate the unpleasant tasks of production—the slaughterhouse, the factory farm—to producers, becoming blind to the associated cruelty over time.
Initially, humans were like Robinson Crusoe, integrating consumption and production. The introduction of markets created a single degree of separation, as seen when consumers buy apples grown elsewhere. However, the journey of pork from the CAFO stall to the dinner plate involves multiple entities—the farmer, the slaughterer, the grocer—often creating three or more degrees of separation. This vast distance ensures that consumers know significantly less about how a pig lives than how an apple grows. The slaughterhouse and the fast-food restaurant are intentional structures of ethical distance; they keep animals out of sight and mind until the product is ready to consume.
Willful Blindness and the Burden of Complexity
Coupled with distancing is willful blindness, the active choice to not see certain things, performing a kind of “psychological cleansing” or “moral disengagement”. This can range from developing “psychic numbing” to cope with the cognitive dissonance of petting a dog while eating pork, to the intentional obliviousness displayed by workers on killing floors.
While proximity promotes blindness, complexity is an equally potent driver of evasion. Complex products, like financial derivatives or, on a simpler scale, a birthday cake, dilute the consumer’s attention. A birthday cake involves seven producers (dairy, sugar, egg, etc.), meaning the consumer’s attention paid to the ethical treatment of any single ingredient—such as the egg farmer—is thin. This cognitive thinness allows willful blindness to operate as a heuristic; consumers do not feel obligated to process the ethical costs of every element. Cruelty and blindness form a feedback loop: as cruelty increases (enabled by distancing), the incentive to promote willful blindness grows, accelerating the detachment between action and consequence.
The Economics of Combating Cruelty
The cruelty inherent in factory farming is fundamentally a tragedy of the commons. Economics offers lessons, filtered through the two major ethical frameworks:
Animal Rights (Demand-Side Ethic): This ethic asserts that all sentient beings have the right not to suffer and aims to reduce the demand for animal products entirely. When consumers are pressed to change their choices (e.g., adopt veganism), they often employ evasion tactics like substitution or splintering into various forms of “semi-vegetarianism”. The success of this approach is often dependent on textured information and nudges. For example, a cafeteria making a vegan option the default, requiring a customer to explicitly ask for meat, is a behavioral nudge that reduces demand without requiring a rational decision.
Animal Welfare (Supply-Side Ethic): This ethic seeks to minimize suffering in the aggregate by altering the animal production function. Strategies include raising the cost of cruelty or enhancing compliance. Raising costs can involve implementing systems like “cap-and-trade cruelty permits,” where farmers must purchase permits if their methods exceed calibrated suffering standards. Alternatively, reducing subsidies on corn and soybean would raise feed prices, leading to fewer animals being raised.
Critically, these two ethics must work together. The risk of a pure demand-side strategy (Animal Rights) is counter-intuitive: if veganism reduces the demand for eggs, individual farmers may use smaller cages to cut costs for the remaining production, thus reducing the number of hens but raising the degree of cruelty for those that remain. When both ethics are active—animal rights reducing demand, and animal welfare pressuring for larger cages—they reinforce each other, leading to fewer animals and less cruelty.
The Subversive Justice of the Pig
The seeming absolute dominance of people over CAFO pigs comes at a profound cost, enforced by a long-run feedback loop of dynamic justice. People and pigs form a community where interdependence governs their destinies. People increase the pig population through breeding (due to demand), but pigs, in return, inflict harm via disease and an unhealthy diet (pork).
Attempts by people to promote their own welfare inadvertently trigger the pigs’ “revenges”.
- Attempting Longevity: A policy designed to boost people’s longevity (e.g., better elder care) ultimately results in a decline in the total people population, because a longer life enables a greater amount of pork to be consumed, thus increasing mortality rates linked to pork consumption.
- Attempting Health: Introducing a new anti-cholesterol pill to reduce the adverse effects of pork will not lead to population growth; instead, the people population declines, yet the pork content in their diet remains constant.
- Attempting Profit/Pleasure: Policies that increase the pig population (e.g., vaccines against pig pathogens, or persuasive advertising for pork) ultimately lead to a higher pork content in people’s diets, causing their health to decline.
These are the subtle workings of dynamic justice: when people try to multiply, there will be fewer people; when people try to become healthier, they become sicker; when people try to raise more pigs, the people suffer health consequences. This long-run feedback loop, where attempts to tip the balance of justice backfire, ensures that the cruelty inflicted in the CAFO is never truly free. The absence of open revolt is replaced by a slow, biological correction, a subversive justice that rebalances the scales of suffering between species.