Still Earlier Singer: A Book Review, 1973

Peter Singer's Animal Liberation grew out of book review he wrote for The New York Review of Books in 1973, a full fifty years ago. Here is a bullet-point summentary of that review; I am using the reprinted version of the review, pages 11-30 in Why Vegan?, Penguin Books – Great Ideas, 2020. The book reviewed was Animals, Men and Morals, edited by Stanley and Roslind Godlovitch and John Harris.

• “…a demand that we cease to regard the exploitation of other animals as natural and inevitable, and that, instead, we see it as a continuing moral outrage [pp. 11-12].”

• Bentham gets a look in (which now (2023) is more-or-less obligatory)!: ‘The question is not, Can they reason? Nor Can they talk? But, Can they suffer?’

• Do animals suffer? (People seem to want to believe that the answer is no.) But animal physiology and behavior seems to suggest the capacity for suffering -- which also is pretty much all that we have to go on when we consider whether other human beings are capable of suffering. (The capacity of our commonly farmed animals to suffer is not now contested, really. Controversy continues with respect to bivalves and insects.)

• Singer is frequently associated with the word “speciesism” (a parallel, for example, to sexism and racism). But he is always careful to indicate, as he does in this book review, that the term originates with Richard Ryder, not with Singer himself.

• The paradox of animal experimentation: the animals we experiment upon need to be like us (so that we can learn something about ourselves from the experiments) but also not like us (so we can justify the cruel experiments that we would not allow upon humans).

• “Man may always have killed other species for food, but he has never exploited them so ruthlessly as he does today [p. 27].”

• Some of the worst abuses of farm animals: veal, battery cages, maiming and removing body parts without anesthesia

• Will people change their behavior? (Fifty years later, the answer is still no, for the most part.)

Early Peter Singer: Preface to Animal Liberation (1975)

We now have almost 50 years later Peter Singer, in the form of Animal Liberation Now. But maybe there is something to be said for a short glance at the original. The version I am using is a reprint of the original preface, pages 1-10 in Why Vegan?, Penguin Books – Great Ideas, 2020.

• “This book is about the tyranny of human over non-human animals [p. 1].”

• “The struggle against this tyranny is a struggle as important as any of the moral and social issues that have been fought over in recent years [p. 1].”

• The moral issue at stake has nothing to do with being an animal lover; the argument concerns “reason, not emotion [p. 5].” Portraying activists as “animal lovers” is a method of excluding animal welfare from serious moral or political consideration.

• The crux of the matter: the rational and moral imperative to provide “equal consideration of interests [p. 3]” to animals and to humans...

• ...and that means all animals: “When the United States Defense Department finds that its use of beagles to test lethal gases has evoked a howl of protest and offers to use rats instead, I am not appeased [p. 4].”

• “I ask you to recognize that your attitudes to members of other species are a form of prejudice no less objectionable than prejudice about a person’s race or sex [pp. 6-7].”

• The animals themselves cannot organize, cannot voice a protest.

• Many people (including meat eaters) are beneficiaries of the current system, so they are hard to persuade.

• Another prejudice is the unexamined view that concerns with animal suffering are trivial in a world where many humans suffer.

• The unfortunate near necessity of using the term animal to refer to only refer to non-human animals, which seems to support a notion of difference between humans and the rest of the animal kingdom. (Singer was writing before the coining of the useful word "anymal!")

• The wastefulness of animal agriculture, feeding billions of farm animals who then we eat, instead of cutting out the middle anymal. (This resource-intensive approach to feeding humans is one of the main reasons that plant-based meat (and dairy and egg) alternatives will eventually out-compete the morally-unacceptable industrial farms.) 

Cornish et al. (2020) on Animal Welfare Labels

Amelia Rose Cornish, Donnel Briley, Bethany Jessica Wilson, David Raubenheimer, David Schlosberg, Paul Damien McGreevy, “The Price of Good Welfare: Does Informing Consumers About What On-Package Labels Mean for Animal Welfare Influence Their Purchase Intentions?” Appetite 148: 104577, 2020. 

•  Most people care about the welfare of the animals that we eat  

• It's even possible that people think that more “humane” products taste better 

• The “Heuristic-Systematic Model,” a version of System 1 and System 2 (Thinking, Fast and Slow); System 1 decision making might mean you just buy what you always have bought 

• Food labels can be confusing; there's “…a proliferation of new and unfamiliar on-package labels [p. 2]” Are industry-provided labels reliable? 

• Online survey with some 1600 Australian respondents, almost ¾ female 

• The respondents are asked about their purchase intentions for meat and eggs, given different labels and prices; some of the labels provide more detailed information about animal welfare than the others

• The purchase intention questions are followed up by an “animal attitude” survey 

• Young people and females are more sympathetic to animals 

• Older people (and males) think the current level of farm animal welfare is better than what other age groups think -- and interest in buying higher welfare products wanes as views of current welfare improve 

• Lower income people are less likely to buy (more expensive) higher welfare meat 

• People who grew up in the city, and highly educated people, are more likely to buy the higher welfare versions 

• The main result: more detailed label info leads to an increased intention to purchase higher welfare products 

Lades and Nova (2022) on the Ethics of Nudging Folks Away from Meat

Leonhard Lades and Federica Nova, “Ethical Considerations when Using Behavioural Insights to Reduce People’s Meat Consumption.” University College Dublin, Geary WP2022/09, October 25, 2022 (pdf). 

• Food choices depend on the choice architecture, so nudge-style, demand-side policies like instituting plant-based meals as defaults can reduce meat consumption

• Examples of food nudges include: vegan or vegetarian defaults; positioning of plant-based items at compelling locations; providing “sustainability” labels; and conveying information about growing low-meat social norms 

• Nudges sometimes present ethical questions; the authors recommend using the FORGOOD method to systematically consider potential ethical issues 

• FORGOOD: Fairness (distributional impacts); Openness (avoiding manipulation, with graphic warning labels or very persuasive defaults as examples of nudge-style policies that could  be ethically problematic); Respect (for autonomy, freedom of choice, non-stigmatization…); Goals (overcoming internalities? externalities?); Opinions (public acceptability, before or after the nudge?); Options (policy alternatives to nudges); and, Delegation (can choice architects use their power wisely?)

• "In short, the paper suggests that choice architects should apply behavioural interventions to reduce meat consumption only when these interventions are FORGOOD [p. 14]."