Some interesting commentary from reader Vadept to my recent post taking Geroge Dvorsky's anti-meat-eating rhetoric to task. Vadept is a little harder on George than I tend to be; his comments are so though-provoking that I thought I would respond to them at length.

He writes:

His argument is worse than biggoted. It's wrong too. Meat is unhealthy? That's not true: the healthiest diet you can have is lean meats (especially fish and poultry), fresh vegetables and a side of fruit and coarse grains. That's from a heart doctor. Fish oil is some of the best oil you can possibly get, and vegan women often lose their unborn children from a lack of protein. Humans aren't vegetarians by nature, and demanding that they go against their nature will fail.

I tend to agree that a diet of lean meat, fresh vegetables, fruit, and whole grains is an excellent way to go, nutritionally speaking. So I'm not overly eager to jump on George's "Meat is unhealthy" bandwagon. On the other hand, arguing that vegan women often lose their babies may help make the case against the vegan lifestyle, but not the vegetarian lifestyle. To say that vegetarianism "will fail" because it goes against human nature is to ignore the success of vegetarianism in the Hindu world -- for centuries, millions of people have lived perfectly normal lives as vegetarians. (Not vegans. I think that is an important distinction. These folks eat dairy products and other yummy vegan no-nos.)

I'm not sure that Hindu dietary restrictions can be said to "go against human nature" any more than Jewish or Muslim dietary restrictions do. Human nature is a tricky beast, anyway. We have both a biological nature and an ethical / social nature. Suppressing the former in favor of the latter is a distinctly human thing to do -- it's how we end up with codes of sexual conduct, for example. So I don't think that vegetarianism is any more "against" human nature than a lot of other behaviors that humans do, in fact, engage in.

From a moral standpoint, I'm not sure I buy it either. It seems too paralyzing to me. Where do you draw the line? We don't eat cows why, becaue they're mammals? And hurting other mammals is wrong? What about birds? Fish? Bugs? Plants? Where do you draw the line? This sort of attitude eventually results in nihilism. Life feeds on life, and people who don't get that are a little removed from reality.

I don't know where to draw the line. It's tricky. We certainly have no problem drawing the line at human beings. And I wouldn't want to eat, say, a chimpanzee. The Japanese and the Inuit still eat whale meat, but I think most of us would pass. Some people eat horses, dolphins, cats, dogs, rats, guinea pigs. I don't want to eat any of those. The trend in western culture (and this is probably a worldwide trend) seems to be a distinct shortening of the list of animals that it's okay to eat. The line is being pushed further and further out, but I don't think there's anything particularly nihilistic about that.

I've actually been toying with the idea of giving up eating mammals altogether. I get most of the animal protein in my diet from eggs, dairy products, chicken and fish, anyway. (Although I probably take in more whey protein than animal protein.) There are good rational arguments to be made for going in this direction. From a humanitarian standpoint, mammals are more intelligent than chicken or fish, so subjecting them to suffering is arguably worse than subjecting lower animals. From a nutritional standpoint, pork, beef, and lamb can be quite fatty, and there is some research linking the consumption of red meat with various forms of cancer. From an environmental standpoint, cows and pigs produce an awful lot of greenhouse gases. I'm not saying that I've made that decision or that those are my arguments, only demonstrating that reasonable arguments can be made for drawing the line in different ways.

Of course, from a transhumanist perspective, we might someday find a way to get our meat without killing animals, and some people will find that comforting. Some people will go that route because of lower prices, and that's fine too. But by what ethics do you support granting animals the same rights and priveledges as full humans but not, say, punishing them for hurting one another? Do we need to stop treating them as property too?

George does talk about how human beings tend to be "speciesist," and if I read him correctly, he objects to the very idea that animals can be the property of human beings. I think the idea of granting animals the same rights as humans is absurd, pretty much for the reasons Vadept states. We punish a human being who kills another human being. We destroy a bear who kills a human being. But we have no problem with a lion who kills a zebra. I don't see how we could ever protect a zebra's "rights" relative to a lion without completely depriving a lion of its "right" to be a lion. And I think it would be a huge mistake to go there.

However, there are those who claim that animals should not be granted any rights at all, and I think this also may be mistaken.

Most people would agree that we have a moral responsibility not to be cruel to animals. (This applies whether animals are viewed as property or not.) The old adage is that your right to swing your fist ends at my face. If we have an obligation not to be cruel to animals, then it isn't terribly different to say that animals have the right not to be mistreated by human beings. I'm not arguing that animals should be allowed to vote or own real estate, only that an obligation on our part towards them is a presumptive right on their part.

Personally, I think we're a few technological generations away from being able to eat meat which never required the killing of any animal. Geroge acknowledges this as well -- and says that he's all for it. The normal standard of care applied to animals in this day and age is that we shouldn't cause them needless pain. Extend that standard to a future where animals don't have to be killed to produce meat, and I think you have a world where we stop killing animals.

From a completely selfish perspective, I can justify all ethics as a way of investing in the world around me to get a bigger payback later on. You can't do that with protecting animals. A cow doesn't give you anything worthwhile except milk and beef. The notion of presenting robots with a "good example" doesn't wash with me: we don't know what kind of perspective these robots might have, and it may very well be touchy-feely, illogical "morality" that gives rise to the Great Robot Rebellion or whatever people are afraid of.

My body is just meat, my genetics just code, and I am unafraid of messing with either. I'd also be willing to mess with the meat and code of my children. I'm also willing to exploit the meat and code of other animals, whose intelligence is vastly inferior to mine and will be treated as my property regardless. I cannot see how suddenly refusing to DIGEST said meat is somehow "moral highground."

Property? Food? Friends? Choose all that apply.

I assume the bit about digestion is hyperbole. You can digest all the meat you want, and there's no moral issue. You might feel better about digesting meat that came from an animal that was treated well than one that was treated badly. And you might feel better still if it came from a source other than an animal that was killed. But once you're digesting the stuff, I would have to agree that the moral argument is closed.

However, I don't think that simply declaring animals to be property completely resolves the issue.

Animals are a special kind of property. If Michael Vick had been entertaining people by some other kind of competition involving property -- smashing remote-controlled vehicles into each other, for example -- he might have gotten into trouble for breaking some local ordinances, but I seriously doubt he would be facing hard jail time. And it would have represented a big problem with the NFL only if there was gambling involved. Still, Vick is going to do time, he's in big trouble with the NFL, and he is -- rightly, I think -- now a pariah. Condemnations of his behavior aren't even really news; it's news when somebody occasionally comes to his defense. (By the way, would anyone care to start a countdown for the coming Stephon Marbury retraction / clarification?)

Animals are property with feelings. So they are property to which a different standard of care is applied.

I agree that we don't know what moral perspective AIs will have. But if they adopt Vadepts' approach, and they very quickly become more intelligent and powerful than we are, we're in a lot of trouble. The shoe will be on the other foot, as it were. I think it's a good idea to be nice to property with feelings in part because that class of property may one day be extended to include us. If our AI descendants decide that anything with a vastly inferior intelligence is property with no rights, whose value can only be measured in utilitarian terms from the point of view of the AI -- well, that doesn't sound like a particularly fun world. They probably wouldn't eat us, of course, and they would probably be too sophisticated to subject us to anything as nasty as a human equivalent of dog fighting. But they wouldn't be inclined to take our happiness, comfort, or even survival into account when deciding what they want to do with the world.

If the AIs follow a human example in deciding how to treat humanity, I hope they follow Dvorsky's example, not Vadepts's.

UPDATE: Via InstaPundit, Megan McArdle has some interesting thoughts on the question of animal rights.