My Recent Moral Crisis

Short thoughts on animal ethics and the need for mercy

My instinct is optimism, and my internal Pollyana can’t help herself. She sees the best and she hopes. She gets drunk on the world, wakes up terribly hungover, and gets ready to do it again. Even so, in October I began to spiral as my Substack algorithm offered up more and more articles about factory farming. I branched out, reading vegan polemics, book-length treatments, academic articles.

The horrors mounted quickly. In overcrowded conditions pigs and chickens go mad, gnashing at one another, at times auto-cannibalizing. Sows and cows are confined in pens too small to move, their muscles atrophy and their bodies scab over with sores as they chafe against their constraints. Attempts to kill are rarely clean, automated gassings go wrong, industrial scale electrocutions leave behind twitching bodies. The guillotine would be a mercy, but even the guillotine is too inefficient at this scale.

The films are the worst. There are many. “Dominion” and “Land of Hope and Glory” stand out. They capture footage from inside the farms themselves, and the images are beyond grotesque. Chicks pulverized under boots; piglets dashed, squealing, against concrete floors. I could not watch more than 20 minutes of either without crying convulsively. Optimism is no guardian here.

Here is this system in which I, and almost everyone I love, participate. It destroys billions of sentient, feeling beings. It is clearly evil, and it could not be more normal. Above all, normalcy fueled my sense of doom.

I am not an inveterate radical. I understand that systems are complex, and that perfection is impossible. I do not expect that our actions, as a species, will align with the ideal. We are too fallible, too susceptible to social influence, too narcissistic. That’s okay. I accept us as we are, love us deeply even. Besides, I don’t even know what the true ideal looks like.

What bothers me in the deepest parts of myself, the dread that reaches down into my capillaries, comes from the fact that confronted with immense suffering, we so often decide that the suffering is fine actually. Because we struggle to think hard about tradeoffs, we simply pretend that tradeoffs do not exist. We come to believe that the pain we cause is natural, perhaps even good.¹ In the Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood writes:

Maybe none of this is about control. Maybe it isn't really about who can own whom. Who can do what to whom and get away with it, even as far as death. Maybe it isn't about who can sit and who has to kneel or stand or lay down, legs spread open. Maybe it's about who CAN do what to whom and be forgiven for it. Never tell me it amounts to the same.

I forgive myself for eating cheese and eggs. I forgive my loved ones for eating meat. My capacity to forgive on this subject goes on and on. And this capacity itself, this most noble ability to forgive, is what seems so perverse. Should we forgive evil in ourselves and others? If we are not the subject of harm, do we even have the ability to do so?

I do not know. The alternative though is madness. There is too much bad. It is wise and hard to accept that we cause pain but to keep on going. It is wise and hard to believe in progress without believing in perfection.

What we should not do is imagine that there is nothing to forgive. Living this way is tenuous because it means rejecting a clear division between you and the people who do evil. It threatens a kind of moral collapse where you are unable to make any kind of judgements at all and where all things become ethical soup. I have been guilty of that at times.

But the point isn’t to level out all things. The point is to think about progress and regress instead of good and bad. The point is to reject moral binaries. On one million sliding scales we could be doing better or worse. Don’t worry about flipping switches, think about leveraging your power to readjust those scales. This helps you to avoid insanity, and it is also simply a more accurate model of the world.

Recently, I have been thinking a whole awful lot about mercy. First, because, in our complete power over them, animals desperately need and deserve our mercy.² Second, because we need to extend mercy even to the undeserving. Without it we can never build the communities that give our lives meaning and which transform the world. The challenge is to realize that our enemies do not deserve mercy, that we do not deserve mercy, but to be merciful anyway.

This is the lesson that Shakespeare gives in The Merchant of Venice:

Though justice be thy plea, consider this:
That in the course of justice none of us
Should see salvation. We do pray for mercy,
And that same prayer doth teach us all to render
The deeds of mercy.

Portia gives this speech as a lecture to the Jewish merchant Shylock who is prosecuting Portia’s friend for his failure to repay a debt. Portia wins the case, but contra her high principles no mercy is shown to Shylock. Because he is a Jew, attempting to harm a Christian, Shylock is forced to yield his property and to convert. To the modern reader, if not to the Elizabethan, this is a warning. It is easy to ask for mercy. It is hard to give it.

1. Set aside for a moment that factory farming is very far from nature. Even then, “nature” is a ridiculous moral standard. The natural state of things is not justice, it certainly is not peace. Anthropologists have exploded the myth of the noble savage and the ecological Indian. Death and pain are natural. Ebola and AIDS are natural. Nature can be beautiful and power, but it is good to go beyond it.

2. Immigrants too, deserve mercy. Criminals deserve mercy. The people of Gaza deserve mercy. This is not to say that these groups are the same, just that mercy is a matter of inclusion and exclusion. Being outside the nation, on the wrong side of the justice system, or ruled by a terrorist group does not exclude you from mercy.