{"id":5656,"date":"2014-04-08T13:24:16","date_gmt":"2014-04-08T17:24:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=5656"},"modified":"2014-04-08T14:23:23","modified_gmt":"2014-04-08T18:23:23","slug":"a-bloodmouth-carnist-theory-of-animal-rights","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=5656","title":{"rendered":"A bloodmouth carnist theory of animal rights"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Some weeks ago I was tremendously amused by a report of an exchange in which a self-righteous vegetarian\/vegan was attempting to berate somebody else for enjoying Kentucky Fried Chicken.  I shall transcribe the exchange here:<\/p>\n<pre>\r\n>There is nothing sweet or savory about the rotting\r\n>carcass of a chicken twisted and crushed with cruelty.\r\n>There is nothing delicious about bloodmouth carnist food.\r\n>How does it feel knowing your stomach is a graveyard\r\n\r\nI'm sorry, but you just inadvertently wrote the <em>most METAL<\/em>\r\ndescription of eating a chicken sandwich in the history of mankind.\r\n\r\nMY STOMACH IS A GRAVEYARD\r\n\r\nNO LIVING BEING CAN QUENCH MY BLOODTHIRST\r\n\r\nI SWALLOW MY ENEMIES WHOLE\r\n\r\nESPECIALLY IF THEY'RE KENTUCKY FRIED\r\n<\/pre>\n<p>I am no fan of KFC, I find it nasty and overprocessed. However, I found the vegan rant richly deserving of further mockery, especially after I did a little research and discovered that the words &#8220;bloodmouth&#8221; and &#8220;carnist&#8221; are verbal tokens for an entire ideology.<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>First thing I did was notify my friend Ken Burnside, who runs a T-shirt business, that I want a &#8220;bloodmouth carnist&#8221; T-shirt &#8211; a Spinal-Tap-esque parody of every stupid trash-metal tour shirt ever printed.  With flaming skulls!  And demonic bat-wings! And umlauts!  <em>Definitely<\/em> umlauts.<\/p>\n<p>Once Ken managed to stop laughing we started designing.  Several iterations. a phone call, and a flurry of G+ messages later, we had the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.reagencydesign.com\/collections\/54275-all-products\/products\/6194566-bloodmouth-carnist-s-xl\">Bloodmouth Carnist T-shirt<\/a>. Order yours today!<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/d2a2wjuuf1c30f.cloudfront.net\/product_photos\/14199013\/bloodmouthcarnistcomp_original.jpg\" alt=\"Bloodmouth Carnist T-shirt\" \/><\/p>\n<p>By the way, the skull on that shirt is me, sort of.  Ken asked me to supply a photo reference, so my wife and I went to a steakhouse and she snapped a picture of me grinning maniacally over a slab of prime rib. For SCIENCE!<\/p>\n<p>This had consequences. An A&#038;D regular challenged me in private mail to explain why my consequentialist ethics don&#8217;t require me to be a vegetarian.  <\/p>\n<p>I broadly agree with Sam Harris&#8217;s position in <a href=\"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=2628\">The Moral Landscape<\/a> that the ground of ethics has to be the minimization of pain.  But I add to this that for pain to be of consequence to me it needs to be have an experiencer who is at least potentially part of a community of reciprocal trust with me.  Otherwise I would be necessarily paralyzed by guilt at killing bacteria every time I breathe.<\/p>\n<p>The community of (potential) reciprocal trust includes all humans, possibly excepting a tiny minority of the criminally insane. It presumptively includes extraterrestrial sophonts, if we ever discover those. I think it is prudent and conservative (in the best sense of that term) to include borderline and near-borderline sophonts like higher primates, elephants, whales, dolphins, and squid.  In principle it includes any animal that can solve the other-minds problem &#8211; which probably includes some of the brighter birds.  I think this category can be roughly delimited using the <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Mirror_test#Animal_species_capable_of_passing\">mirror test<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>For different reasons, the community of trust includes non-sophont human commensals.  My cat, Sugar, for example, who shows only dim and occasional flashes of behavior that might indicate she models other minds, but has a strong mutual-trust relationship with my wife and myself.  We know what to expect of each other; we like each other.  This is a kind of reciprocity with ethical significance even though the cat is not sophont.<\/p>\n<p>Another way to put this is to remember the Golden Rule, &#8220;Do as you would be done by&#8221; and ask: what animals have the ability to follow it, the right kind of informational complexity required to support it?  <\/p>\n<p>Cows, pigs, chickens, and fish are not part of my potential community of trust.  They don&#8217;t have minds capable of it &#8211; the informational complexity required doesn&#8217;t seem to be there at all (though suspicions have occasionally been raised about pigs; I&#8217;ll revisit this point).  Thus, their deaths are not intrinsically ethically significant to me, any more than harvesting a head of lettuce is.<\/p>\n<p>Cruelty is a different matter.  I think we ought not engage in cruelty because it is damaging and coarsening; people who make a habit of being cruel to non-sophonts are more likely to become cruel and dangerous to sophonts as well.  Thus, merely killing a food animal is ethically neutral, but careless cruelty towards one is wrong and deliberate cruelty is evil.<\/p>\n<p>(Nevertheless, I report that the above vegan rant inculcated in me a desire to stomp into a roomful of vegans and demand my food &#8220;twisted and crushed with cruelty&#8221;.  I really don&#8217;t like it when people try to jerk me around by my sensibilities as though I&#8217;m some kind of idiot who is unreachable by reasoned argument. I find it insulting and want to punch back.) <\/p>\n<p>These criteria could interact in interesting ways, and there are edge cases that need more investigation.  I think I would have to stop eating pork if pigs could count the way that (for example) crows can &#8211; some pigs reportedly come close enough to passing the mirror test to worry me a little.  I can readily imagine that pigs bred for intelligence might come near enough to sophont to be taboo to me.  On the other hand, a friend who grew up on a hog farm assures me that pigs bred for meat are stone-stupid; according to her, it&#8217;s only wild pigs I should be even marginally concerned about.<\/p>\n<p>Otters are another interesting case; they seem very playful and intelligent in the wild, occasionally use tools, and can form affectionate bonds with humans. I&#8217;d very much like to see them mirror-tested; in the meantime I&#8217;m quite willing to  to give them the benefit of the doubt and consider them taboo for killing and eating.<\/p>\n<p>There you have it.  The bloodmouth carnist theory of animal rights.  Now if you&#8217;ll excuse me I&#8217;m going to go have a roast beef sandwich for lunch.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Some weeks ago I was tremendously amused by a report of an exchange in which a self-righteous vegetarian\/vegan was attempting to berate somebody else for enjoying Kentucky Fried Chicken. I shall transcribe the exchange here: >There is nothing sweet or savory about the rotting >carcass of a chicken twisted and crushed with cruelty. >There is&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=5656\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">A bloodmouth carnist theory of animal rights<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5656","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-philosophy","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5656","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5656"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5656\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5660,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5656\/revisions\/5660"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5656"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5656"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5656"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}