The following first appeared in UNSW’s Tharunka magazine as part of their regular “Hypothetically Speaking” column.
“Cruelty to animals is bad. So is environmental degradation. Is it better to eat food produced using humane but environmentally destructive methods, or food which involves cruelty to animals but has minimal environmental impact?”
By Rachel Hayter
Option 1: Endorse cruelty to animals in food production and ensure a sustainable environment, and thus the survival of life on earth.
Option 2: Endorse the humane treatment of animals in food production and condone the destruction of the environment, and thus the demise of life on earth.
Food and a sustainable environment are both necessary for survival. The humane treatment of animals is not. Protecting animals in the short term, while degrading the environment, is a self-defeating act—in the animals’ case, a different means to the same end. Eventually the environment, sustainer of all life, will be destroyed. Surely the ultimate end, or rather the avoidance of ours, is what matters most?
Although it seems the practical choice, the ethical implications of subscribing to Option 1 are dire. Yes, life on earth is ensured, but at what cost? When our ‘humane-ness’, our humanity, is compromised, what have we left but mere subsistence? Is an inhumane world even worth preserving?
Let’s imagine a world sustained by the logic of Option 1. The moral worth of an action is not determined by intention, or the character of the act itself (e.g. cruelty), but dependent purely on its outcome (e.g. survival). By this reasoning, any apparent moral action which is not necessary for the ultimate survival of the human race is worthless.
Anthropocentrism assumed, let us hope a perfect definition of what it is to be an animal has been established. It seems the only thing protecting individuals from this fundamentalist utilitarianism is our membership to the species Homo sapiens.
Is the distinction between Homo sapiens and animals, including great apes and whales, as pronounced as Option 1 would imply? Is it enough to warrant the institutionalised cruelty by the former to the latter?
Rejecting Speciesism entails an alternative understanding of what it is to be human—a quality of personhood, rather than the evolutionary providence of belonging to a species. The concept of personhood is vague. There can be drawn no precise line between classifications of ‘is’ and ‘is not’. DeGrazia outlines distinguishing properties of autonomy, rationality, self-awareness, linguistic competence, sociability, capacity for intentional action, and moral agency.
By this definition, great apes and whales are cases of paradigm persons and severely mentally handicapped and infant humans are not persons at all. Support of Option 1 has suddenly become more dangerous than anticipated— parallels with Nazism are clear.
Before subscribing to Option 1 based on your animalistic survival instincts, trace the consequences of your decision. Once cruelty has been institutionalised, our moral watershed has been sacrificed.
There exist cases of healthy whales, voluntarily, temporarily beaching themselves, as displays of solidarity to dying, beached group members. Is it morally justifiable to endorse cruelty to one of these animals in the interests of sustaining the life of a human mass-murderer, or rapist? Is an inhumane world even worth preserving?
Socratic Society 
who writes these things? they don’t make sense. every single one i’ve seen is ludicrous.
for example, cruelty to animals (ie raising, killing and eating) ALWAYS involves ‘environmenal impact’.
“Abstraction, the tool of enlightenment, treats its objects as did fate, the notion of which it rejects: it liquidates them.” (Adorno)
Aw, this was an exceptionally good post. Spending some time and actual effort to produce a
really good article… but what can I say… I hesitate a lot and don’t manage to get anything done.
It is really not that complex! The world we’ve created over thousands of years is wrong for us and the animals. Your question is based on the idea that we can not have a planet with mankind and animals cohabitating, sharing resources. But to fix the world for us and the animals would require a major shift in attitude worldwide and it would have to be absolute.
The can be no peace between us and other humans, animals, water, air and all of nature as long as we believe it is a resource that we use and exploit for the survival of mankind, which is your common denominator. The truth is what is bad for the animals is bad for us. What is bad for us is bad for the animals. And that is ultimately bad for life on this planet.
The conflict or problem you suggest is totally manmade and fixable. But getting all seven billion plus to change is impossible. It is the result of the mythical Pandora’s box and most are too busy to care about hope for anyone except how it relates to their own being and not as a universal hive with a common goal or to at as a single mind, whether animal, plant or non-living matter.
We create mechanical systems that have no choice but to be as we design them, and conclude from this that the universe is inhuman. But the universe, quite aside from that mechanics, created the circumstances by which humanity came into being. The fact is that the most fundamental assumptions underlying our reasoning in this are flawed, and do not supply a full explanation of the material world. And a close analysis of the inadequacies of our rational edifice of philosophy and science (as well as our mystical edifice of faith) require a personal contribution to complete. That contribution is a rigor that results, ultimately, in welcoming the return of the contrary, if only in the least term of it. The excluded middle is conceptually corrupt.