Amateur Moral Theory – Proposition 2 Edition

As I am now a California resident, it seems I will have to begin paying attention to state politics. (Governor Schwarzenegger, you are on notice.) The LA Times editorial recommending a no vote on Proposition 2 is as good a place as any to start.

The egg industry is rife with cruelty to animals. Millions of hens in California are kept in cages so small that every natural instinct is thwarted: They cannot perch, walk or spread their wings. On some farms, cages are stacked and hens on the bottom live in waste.

All creatures, even those bred to provide food, deserve to be treated humanely. That’s the appeal of Proposition 2. It would require farmers to give chickens, pigs and veal calves room to turn around, walk or, in the case of chickens, stretch their wings

Ezra Klein points out even this doesn’t rise to the level of humane treatment, given that the animals are not required to receive natural feed, time at exercise or in the field, or even exposure to sunlight. Still, it’s certainly a step in the proper direction, so how does this turn into a “no” recommendation?

The brute fact is that treating animals humanely is expensive. Stuffing them into cages so small they cannot even turn around, in which they often live in their own waste, and must be constantly feed antibiotics to prevent infection and disease, is cheap. Cheaply treated animals mean cheaply produced eggs/veal/pork, which means a bigger profit margin for the farm in question.

As much as we support the decent treatment of animals, we doubt that passage of the measure would start a national trend. In fact, we fear that it would have an unintended consequence: Because it only regulates eggs produced in California and not eggs that are sold here, it would likely bolster the market for cheaper out-of-state eggs produced where farmers have no similar bans on cages.

According to a University of California Agricultural Issues Center report, cage-free eggs are about 20% more expensive to produce and cost about 25% more to buy. There is a growing demand, but it is still small — about 5% of all eggs nationally are produced by cage-free hens. So California eggs would become more expensive, and many consumers would simply buy the cheaper eggs laid by hens living in cramped conditions in neighboring states or in Mexico. As a result, we fear the result of Proposition 2’s passage would not be better treatment of hens but merely the export of their mistreatment. We recommend a no vote.

So what we have here is a classic collective action problem. An individual farm – or even an individual state – abstaining from inhuman treatment has too minute an effect to change the overall system, meanwhile the incentives of the system punish those who attempt to act humanely and reward those who continue with business as usual. The only way to truly change the system is for everyone to act collectively all at once. (Presumably through the passage of national law.) So the editorial is right about that.

But not all collective action problems are created equal. Let’s say, for instance, you’re wondering if it would be wrong for you to fly half way around the world to attend your sister’s wedding, given the plane ride would dump more carbon into the atmosphere and thus contribute to global warming. In that case, relax. The plane will fly regardless of whether you’re on it, the carbon footprint of the flight is minute in comparison to the overall problem, you’ll incur a moral cost at your sister’s expense by not going, and (most relevant to our purposes) the harm caused by participating in global warming is aggregate rather than direct. So take the plane ride, then get home and continue doing what you can as a citizen to push for a collective solution.

In contrast, an example of a collective action problem that would involve direct harm is something like this: You’re in high school, and your football player buddies decide they’re gonna beat up the runt nerdy kid with the thick glasses after school. If you don’t participate he’ll still get beat up, and your friends may ostracize you for not participating in the smackdown. In this case, there is nothing aggregate about the harm being incurred. Your kicks and punches are landing squarely on the kid, a unique individual human being with inherent dignity and moral worth. So you have a cut-and-dry moral obligation to not participate, even if your non-participation won’t prevent the event from occurring and would come at cost to you.

The question of how our farming industries treat animals falls into the same category as how we treat the kid with the thick glasses. The harm is specific in both circumstances. In the case of the plane ride, the harm is cumulative and done to a system – namely, the ecology. That ecology does have moral worth as it is composed of individual beings, but it is not the beings themselves.

Like us, animals are all unique individuals. Their interior life may be rudimentary in comparison to ours, but they possess the capacity for suffering, and as with us we can speak of this particular chicken or that particular cow, which has never existed before now and will never exist again once it has died. The difference between us and them is one of degree rather than kind. Which means we all fit into the moral framework the same way, even if we don’t all carry the same amount of moral force. While chickens and pigs and cows may not have dignity and worth equivalent to human beings, they possess a level sufficient to require humane treatment, as the editorial itself acknowledges.

And that means that if these creatures deserve to be treated humanely, then they should be treated humanely. Period, full stop. That Proposition 2 will almost certainly fail to start a national trend, and will almost certainly incur economic costs to California’s farmers and economy, is, quite frankly, beside the point.

~ by Jeff on October 17, 2008.