I know at least two libertarians who take animal welfare and their moral worth seriously—me and another guy on Substack. We’re also both Christians, but I guess that still doesn’t qualify us as intellectuals, right?
(1) In the hen-consequentalism section, in your estimates of net welfare per hen, did you add the life-years of positive hedonic experiences?
(2) I don't think a deontological libertarian can accept the Pigouvian tax on eggs at all, because she would say that the damages are owed to the hen. But the hen can't make use of the money. Maybe you could use the damages to buy positive experiences for the hen, but I don't think this would work.
(3) You should write a monograph on the history of the American Libertarian movement. You've already written half of it in the Rothbard piece.
> In his history of the modern American libertarian movement, the late David Boaz touts Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill — two of the Anglo fathers of animal welfare — as luminaries of libertarian philosophy. But if Bentham and Mill were around today, they’d be about as welcome in the mainstream libertarian movement as Marx and Engels.
"Bentham and Mill were 'classical liberals' and so are we" is a popular libertarian meme, but it's historically illiterate nonsense. Mill was a latent - and later overt - utopian socialist, while Bentham was the first of all the neoliberal technocrats, born two centuries too early, and the only one autistic enough to have actually been sincere. Neither would have recognized anything approaching an absolute "NAP", or defended markets on any sort of non-utilitarian grounds.
Narveson’s argument that "The reason we treat non-rational persons as if they had rights is that there are other rational people who care about them" seems like it should also account for animals in the same way as it does for babies, etc. Do animal rights activists not count in the same way as parents in his telling or is it also necessary for "rational people" to be able to "end[] up in a similar situation". If the second, I would like to see his explanation of how rational people (i.e. adults) can end up in the situation of being babies (insert joke here).
Politically, this is a nonstarter. People want to eat eggs, people have eaten eggs for millennia. People used to raise chickens in a much nicer way, but can't now with hyper urbanism and population growth. Someone who says, "You must live in the big city to make green public transportation work, but you can't eat eggs! You have to eat bugs - I mean algae - I mean" will just be a cartoonish villain toppled by some kind of Caesarism.
Doing a thing for millennia is no justification that it should continue to be done. Humans have practiced slavery for a millennia, and half of America tried to topple the influence of who they deemed a "cartoonish villain" via a whole civil war, in order to prevent a reduction in the practice they personally benefited from.
The infants and disabled reducto doesn’t really do it for me. Infants are the sort of creature capable of rationality; they just haven’t gotten there yet. The cognitively disabled are a harder case. I think it would be reasonable to say that a species with an IQ of 50 shouldn’t have full human rights. I’d argue we give them rights not for moral reasons but for prudential reasons — saying every biological human gets rights avoids line-drawing and possible discrimination problems.
I do think one can argue that just sub-rational creatures like elephants, other great apes, and dolphins shouldn’t be enslaved for entertainment. Or even food!
A Pigouvian tax on animal cruelty in our food system sounds great, but instead of hoping and waiting for it to happen, people can take action themselves by offsetting their meat consumption through donations to effective charities, e.g. with FarmKind's animal welfare offset calculator (www.compassioncalculator.org). It's far more cost-efficient than the tax would be anyway.
Meanwhile, if you're a Libertarian and not into Pigouvian taxes then offsetting seems all the more vital as a Coasean solution to animal suffering that doesn't require government intervention – people can address the issue directly through voluntary transactions rather than waiting for policy changes.
It seems to me that offsetting makes sense for market-lovers and haters alike!
I get the utilitarian points (as that's my general leaning), but I'm curious how a deontological system is meant to deal with the potentially-conflicting "right to exist" and "right to not suffer". Increasing demand violates the latter; maybe decreasing demand violates the former? You could uphold both by improving their conditions with money from elsewhere, I guess. But it seems like it's a question of "would a chicken rather live in bad conditions, or not at all" which is pretty similar to where the utilitarians end up. And while the latter is quite likely, I'm quite uncertain on stuff like this – how do we know what "neutral welfare" even looks like? Maybe evolution optimised life to "suffer overall, but fear death", maybe it optimised welfare to "avoid extremes whatever the conditions". So I'm never quite as sure of "they should be fewer" as "their conditions should be improved"
Well, the deontological libertarians would say there's no right to exist (or at least not a "right to be brought into existence") and bringing a chicken (or a human child) into existence is supererogatory. But once they are made to exist, it's impermissible to aggress against them. So I don't see why there would be a conflict here.
Even if in current conditions their welfare is definitely net-negative, this might become trickier to assess if conditions were substantially improved in the future
They call me a veganarcho-capitalist😏
A non-Paleo libertarian
🤣🤣
I know at least two libertarians who take animal welfare and their moral worth seriously—me and another guy on Substack. We’re also both Christians, but I guess that still doesn’t qualify us as intellectuals, right?
Well if you started publishing in philosophy journals that would be a welcome development 🤷♂️
I didn’t see that you said “at least” and was confused how you could know only 2 of us
I'm a libertarian and I've dealt with animal rights here: https://themusingindividualist.substack.com/p/thoughts-on-killing-animals
I think many libertarian meat eaters will simply bite the bullet on killing defective humans though.
Great article mixing two interests of mine. Thank you.
(1) In the hen-consequentalism section, in your estimates of net welfare per hen, did you add the life-years of positive hedonic experiences?
(2) I don't think a deontological libertarian can accept the Pigouvian tax on eggs at all, because she would say that the damages are owed to the hen. But the hen can't make use of the money. Maybe you could use the damages to buy positive experiences for the hen, but I don't think this would work.
(3) You should write a monograph on the history of the American Libertarian movement. You've already written half of it in the Rothbard piece.
1. Yes, I took the numbers from Grilo and he accounts for that.
2. I don't think so. They support punishment for murder even though no restitution can be paid to the murder victim.
3. Thanks idk. It's sort of a recreational project and I don't think it's important or relevant enough to put in that much effort.
> In his history of the modern American libertarian movement, the late David Boaz touts Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill — two of the Anglo fathers of animal welfare — as luminaries of libertarian philosophy. But if Bentham and Mill were around today, they’d be about as welcome in the mainstream libertarian movement as Marx and Engels.
"Bentham and Mill were 'classical liberals' and so are we" is a popular libertarian meme, but it's historically illiterate nonsense. Mill was a latent - and later overt - utopian socialist, while Bentham was the first of all the neoliberal technocrats, born two centuries too early, and the only one autistic enough to have actually been sincere. Neither would have recognized anything approaching an absolute "NAP", or defended markets on any sort of non-utilitarian grounds.
Narveson’s argument that "The reason we treat non-rational persons as if they had rights is that there are other rational people who care about them" seems like it should also account for animals in the same way as it does for babies, etc. Do animal rights activists not count in the same way as parents in his telling or is it also necessary for "rational people" to be able to "end[] up in a similar situation". If the second, I would like to see his explanation of how rational people (i.e. adults) can end up in the situation of being babies (insert joke here).
Brb, getting a "no step on snek" tattoo
Politically, this is a nonstarter. People want to eat eggs, people have eaten eggs for millennia. People used to raise chickens in a much nicer way, but can't now with hyper urbanism and population growth. Someone who says, "You must live in the big city to make green public transportation work, but you can't eat eggs! You have to eat bugs - I mean algae - I mean" will just be a cartoonish villain toppled by some kind of Caesarism.
Doing a thing for millennia is no justification that it should continue to be done. Humans have practiced slavery for a millennia, and half of America tried to topple the influence of who they deemed a "cartoonish villain" via a whole civil war, in order to prevent a reduction in the practice they personally benefited from.
Our distant ancestors will live to see slavery practiced again and Lincoln considered a villain, and the vegans of today considered retarded.
The infants and disabled reducto doesn’t really do it for me. Infants are the sort of creature capable of rationality; they just haven’t gotten there yet. The cognitively disabled are a harder case. I think it would be reasonable to say that a species with an IQ of 50 shouldn’t have full human rights. I’d argue we give them rights not for moral reasons but for prudential reasons — saying every biological human gets rights avoids line-drawing and possible discrimination problems.
I do think one can argue that just sub-rational creatures like elephants, other great apes, and dolphins shouldn’t be enslaved for entertainment. Or even food!
A Pigouvian tax on animal cruelty in our food system sounds great, but instead of hoping and waiting for it to happen, people can take action themselves by offsetting their meat consumption through donations to effective charities, e.g. with FarmKind's animal welfare offset calculator (www.compassioncalculator.org). It's far more cost-efficient than the tax would be anyway.
Meanwhile, if you're a Libertarian and not into Pigouvian taxes then offsetting seems all the more vital as a Coasean solution to animal suffering that doesn't require government intervention – people can address the issue directly through voluntary transactions rather than waiting for policy changes.
It seems to me that offsetting makes sense for market-lovers and haters alike!
good article! (comprehensive,even to me!)
I get the utilitarian points (as that's my general leaning), but I'm curious how a deontological system is meant to deal with the potentially-conflicting "right to exist" and "right to not suffer". Increasing demand violates the latter; maybe decreasing demand violates the former? You could uphold both by improving their conditions with money from elsewhere, I guess. But it seems like it's a question of "would a chicken rather live in bad conditions, or not at all" which is pretty similar to where the utilitarians end up. And while the latter is quite likely, I'm quite uncertain on stuff like this – how do we know what "neutral welfare" even looks like? Maybe evolution optimised life to "suffer overall, but fear death", maybe it optimised welfare to "avoid extremes whatever the conditions". So I'm never quite as sure of "they should be fewer" as "their conditions should be improved"
Well, the deontological libertarians would say there's no right to exist (or at least not a "right to be brought into existence") and bringing a chicken (or a human child) into existence is supererogatory. But once they are made to exist, it's impermissible to aggress against them. So I don't see why there would be a conflict here.
Ah, I see. Forgot how to think like a deontologist for a moment, my bad
Even if in current conditions their welfare is definitely net-negative, this might become trickier to assess if conditions were substantially improved in the future