Cheap Meat Relies On Moral Atrocities Being Hidden From Us

How the true moral cost of the actions we take are hidden from us deliberately, and what to do about it.

If you enjoy this post, liking it is the best way to support me.

---

What does it take to build a civilization that rules the world? How many children, animals, and countries have to be sacrificed to the God of Progress before we decide to stop?

This is not an anti-capitalist post. The innovation that capitalism incentivizes has created so many technologies that really do make the world an unambiguously better place for all, such as vaccines, Google, and Edison’s famous lightbulb. The share of humans in extreme poverty since 1990 has gone down from 36% to 9%. Unbounded technology is a boon for the entire human race, and it makes everyone’s lives better. But I want to focus on this: the incentives that unchecked markets cause atrocities like factory farming to be separated and hidden as best as physically possible from us, to confuse our intrinsically altruistic and caring moral sense into not realizing what we’re really doing, for we would surely object.

What can a single person do?

…

Some of my friends like to say capitalism is bad, and they have some good points. But I think their best points are not complaining about their desk-job, or the price of the Nintendo Switch 2. Because the average American is the main beneficiary of market forces. The market has to appeal to the consumer, to Joe Average in middle America, to convince him to spend his money on their product in strict competition, so they had to make their product the cheapest and best. This is all great for Joe, but so much is sacrificed in the margins.

Modern society is built on separating you from the tower of cruelty used to create much of what you love in your life. Teslas, powered by batteries whose cobalt is dug by children as young as seven in Congolese mines. A chocolate bar, with cocoa harvested by more than 1.5 million children working on farms on West African plantations. And the worst of all in sheer scale, a breaded chicken wing, separated from the animal whose beak was cut off and who lived their entire life standing beak-to-feather with other chickens in its own feces.

Let me be clear: If you’re homeless or unemployed or suffering, I’m not asking you to “be grateful for what you have.” There are people whose lives are bad in America because of circumstances out of their control; America is certainly not a utopia. But if you have a place to live and a job in America, you have a number of options and material goods unmatched when compared to the conscious experience for any being in all of Earth’s short history. To help illustrate this, here are some things that an average American has that 99.9999999999999999% of all conscious beings (correct number of 9s¹) in all of existence have never had:

• Unlimited clean water

• Curated food selections

• Seasonings

• A soft place to sleep, safely

• Climate controlled rooms

• Toilets

• Hot showers

• Mass produced, affordable clothing

• Curated TV, movies, and books

• A GLOBAL INFORMATION NETWORK WITH ALL THE KNOWLEDGE IN THEIR SPECIES’ HISTORY, BEAMED AT THE SPEED OF LIGHT TO ANY OTHER HUMAN ON EARTH

Anyway, I don’t blame middle class Americans for not realizing how good they have it. You can’t compare your experience to someone who you’re… uh, not. In the modern day, there’s an epidemic of people who feel depressed, anxious, and lack meaning in life. These people are not “faking.” They’re miserable, aimless, unmotivated, and angry at the world and the systems they grew up in. The desk-job, a critique of capitalism I mocked a couple of paragraphs ago, really can be soul-crushing, even if it’s far better than many alternatives.

Just because you technically have access to lots of things, stuff, doesn’t mean that fulfillment in life is easy, and social media and the status games relentlessly shit on them and show them an endless onslaught of people more successful than them. Some of this is also due to the hunt for profit, and some is not. Either way, evolution generally frowned on people who felt completely satisfied and fulfilled in all their pursuits, and didn’t try to make their position in life better. The people always paranoid, searching for more potential threats, won the day back when we had to worry about bears eating us or whatever, I’m sure. But this endless craving for more has nowhere to stop. The sheer number of Americans dissatisfied with their lives is an important and interesting enough point that I’m dedicating a whole post to it, releasing soon.

But there’s a lack of imagination when imagining how much worse it could be. Compare the average American to those in impoverished countries, or those in warring countries, or animals in the wild, or factory farmed animals, or pretty much any conscious being throughout all of history, and ask them to choose, and the American life is better every time. Yet there’s subreddits that feel the idea of working at all is too much of an indignity to bear, and their lives are miserable having to spend 40 hours a week at an air-conditioned desk. It’s so difficult to understand the sacrifices made halfway across the world to provide you with the life you lead, because the sacrifices are in the shadows, deliberately hidden by those who wish for profits.

I stand with those who want to make lives better for those who are the least fortunate on this beautiful, blue marble we call home!

Saying that, I truly believe almost every person is trying to do good in the world. So maybe that proclamation I just made of who I stand with doesn’t actually say very much at all. In fact, this worldview, where the bad stuff is pushed as far away from the consumer as possible, doesn’t make sense if people don’t care about doing good. Why not slaughter the chickens at the table, right in front of everyone? Why wouldn’t a company actively promote that they got the cheapest labor, as a brag: the prices are cheap! Why not get rid of all the charities that already exist? No. Of course people prefer to buy “free-range” chicken over regular if they cost the same. But they don’t cost the same, do they? And instead of knowing what free range means, people mostly have an image in their head.

This is why I’m no libertarian. It feels like one of the best ways to solve this issue is to have people who care in government. Of course, they first need an incentive to do so, and more people to recognize the issue. The difficulties with getting good people into government and guiding the people to the biggest issues in society could be a whole ‘nother post, but having a government that does nothing and letting the market run wild, relying on the labeling and boycotts that already don’t work today, seems like the worst way to go about it. Leaded gasoline is an easy success story: once regulators put a cap on it, companies phased it out worldwide in <15 years. We can use this playbook on factory farming, if we so choose. But it comes in the form of stopping the natural way of the market.

People say, “each individual can’t make a difference, every company is inhumane and terrible.” Firstly, I’ll say it’s a crucial error to put all companies in the same category. If you assume all companies are evil because some are, there’s no incentive for any company to become good, because people won’t care! But secondly, I worry they’re ignoring the truth that it works the other way around, too. The companies are the ones most beholden to this race to the bottom that having the coveted “cheapest price” is so important². If people aren’t willing to confront the chain that leads the TEMU products to their door, instead thinking “wow, so much cheaper!” then the altruistic companies can’t find any footing, and they’ll fail. Some company is gonna pursue whatever could make them rich. I’m not saying that companies that use child labor and animal cruelty aren’t horrible. They’re obviously more horrible in what they’ve done than mostly anyone else. The people making the actual child-working animal-torturing decisions in their companies are more evil than any random Joe could be. What I am saying is that these people making the decisions are just as separated from the actual morality as you are. They just have to have a nice meeting in an air conditioned office to “expand their reach” and decide to open another factory farm where chickens are packed like sardines. And it’s trivial that their evil decisions are more evil than you create, because the more power you have, the more you can affect the world with your decisions, good or bad. I heard some obscure movie quote once, “With great power comes great responsibility.”

I couldn’t find one with less pixels, oops. Or I guess what I’m really looking for is technically MORE pixels, though that’s the opposite of how it’s commonly used. Weird.

I’m asked why I care so much about moral hypotheticals. It’s indeed because the system is designed to separate you from the morality of the actions you take as much as possible. As one character says in the fantastic show you should watch The Good Place, “Humans think that they’re making one choice, but they’re actually making dozens of choices they don’t even know they’re making.” If you had to watch the entire process and life of the genuinely mouthwatering chicken that reaches your plate, you’d be less than hungry. The act of consciously not confronting the evil in the banal decisions we make every day, leaving your morality unexamined, is what forces the companies to not care in an attempt to give you the cheapest price.

Importantly, some of the evils in these banal decisions are worse than others, and it’s necessary to follow the chain all the way back to see how bad each company is individually. If you care about how brands position themselves politically over the actual harm of the supply chains they cause, you’ll end up in the situation where the most successful boycotts are unrelated to their real practices. Their advertising departments messed up, yet no one cares about the harm the actual products create. I’ve seen backlash against Nestlé online, which is great because them and the other big chocolate brands, like I said before, have over 1 million children doing farm work for pennies. Don’t misunderstand me: the social issues that have captured the hearts and minds of America are important. But in terms of scale of cruelty compared to something like Nestlé, it’s not even close. There’s a prioritization problem in the human brain here. And honestly, I look at the billions of animals suffering in the dark, one-foot-wide area that they’ll live their entire lives in before being killed, and I wonder how cruelty on this scale is possible. Of course, I’ve never even seen a live broiler chicken. That’s the whole game. Statistics on a screen.

I have seen a normal farm, though. My aunt owns one, and some cows, chickens, pigs and horses. It’s a nice farm. The animals are well fed, have enough space to move around in, and the chicken’s beaks are not cut off. If this is what factory farming was, and I think this is the image that gets conjured up for most people, and I don’t blame them for not feeling angry. I’m interested in suffering of conscious beings during their lives, and these animals seem to live relatively good ones. My thoughts here are that people really do care about animals, like dogs, and wouldn’t want them to suffer needlessly as a result of their decisions. If polled, people condemn factory farming. But the process has abstracted away so much of the harm that it’s hard to care about learning the exact brands you should buy when you have your own life to wrangle under control. Factory farming remains evil.

…

So, where do we from here? I implied earlier that the individual can make a difference, what should the individual do? This is the part where I probably should say, “restack this post to every human on earth, and we can stop all the bad in the world and rejoice in our shared altruistic intentions!!!1!” but I’m not that naive. Companies have had a long time to painstakingly, efficiently separate the intrinsic moral sense we have within us from the actual negative impact of our actions, all in search of profit. I’m not some immune paragon who “sees the world like it really is”, with a huge amount of sympathy by seeing big numbers indicating large amounts of suffering. No — I arrived at this conclusion by playing around with my values and what I prioritize, not through my instinctive moral sense in my head, because humans are unmoved by spreadsheets on a screen and are easily moved by horrible things happening in front of them. The fact that we’re wired to care about what we see instead of what we can’t, even if they have the same moral weight, is so obvious from an evolutionary perspective I’ll leave it at that. It’s probably better to not be moved by the scale of suffering represented in the data we have, though, because living a happy life makes one more agentic and is intrinsically good, and the scope of the world’s suffering is too much for anyone to bear. Much has been said about the leftist who has taken all the suffering in the world on their shoulders and been rendered useless.

I guess I do strongly believe that this prioritization game, where we try to figure out which companies and industries cause the most suffering, needs to be more of a talking point, at least in smart circles of people who make decisions. It’s like trying to make altruism, and being a good person, more effective… hm… Alright, you got me, I believe the Effective Altruism movement does a great job of trying to figure out which things are worse than other things, and they’ve identified this “what do we prioritize” issue and made it their brand. They’ve recognized that charity is actually super efficient compared to the other forms of improving the world, and are trying to find out what to prioritize there, too. Remember that boycott problem I mentioned? Interestingly, a dollar routed through a proven charity gives around 10 times more money to the people you’re trying to help than a dollar given to a different company in a boycott³. Setting a $25 donation to repeat on a pre-vetted, quality charity genuinely feels like doing nothing at all but helps more than most of the other moral decisions you make. Work smarter, not harder. This dedication to having good actions go further is something I admire. The more influence the movement gets, and the more people who recognize that they want to help the most people they can from it, the better we all can be. They have lots of thoughts on the best ways for an individual to influence the world to make it a better place, and I think their discussion and community is always nice and interesting. I encourage looking at their website or forum. Most of all I think they’re correct, and if more people were correct, that would be nice.

When I look around the world, I want it to be good. I know others want the same thing. Companies have spent a lot of time making us feel good while shoving all the bad stuff they do out of sight. I don’t know everything, and I don’t have all the solutions, but I know I want to make the world a better place in an effective way.

If you enjoyed this post⁴ or think it’s important, the best way to support me is to like it. I’d also appreciate it if you subscribed using this big button — if you’re interested in seeing more posts like this it’s the best way for me to support you. I get to deliver delicious content right into your mouth. If you’re not sure whether you want to subscribe off of one post, read some other good posts of mine here and here and decide then.

1. Estimates off of the best guesses for the total amount of conscious beings who have ever lived on earth.

2. Alright, because I didn’t want to mention it in the article, I’ll say it 5 times here instead. Yes, it’s my favorite blog post of all time. Yes, I was inspired by it for this piece. Moloch, Moloch, Moloch, Moloch, Moloch.

3. Check the comments for more precise numbers and the studies I examine. This is broadly true, given that a high percentage of money given to GiveWell charities reaches factory farming or stops child labor, and there’s lots of leakage in supply chains from reaching the actual farmers.

4. Also, note, I changed the title of the article and the first paragraph because the original one didn’t fit into substack’s little box, which seemed important.