Two Burgers on a Plate: When Death is the Only Difference

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You’re hungry for exactly one burger. There are two hamburgers placed in front of you on a plate. They appear identical. They taste and feel identical and have equal nutritional value. They also share the same cost and have the same environmental impact. They have been studied thoroughly and have the same short and long term health risks and benefits (keep in mind these are both hamburgers, neither of them is super healthy). The only difference is that one burger came from a living cow while the other was constructed from plant matter.
What is the best argument for eating the cow burger over the alternative?
Of course, this is a hypothetical. While I think it is a relatively near future possibility, in reality these variables are not yet flattened in this way. And the 2020 versions each have their relative advantages. The individual diner must construct a hierarchy of moral values in order to choose their burger. For many vegans the character of “sentience” of the cow is a tremendously heavy weight on the scales and is a decisive factor.

I recently posed a question to survey the “best” arguments for eating the cow burger in the situation as I’ve described it. While many are doubtful that the nutrition and taste/texture hurdles could be cleared by the non-cow burger, those who were able to deploy a bit more imagination to get past those factors seemed to be attracted to what must feel like a compelling argument that goes something like this: “if the cow was treated humanely and given a wonderful happy cow life on old-MacDonald’s farm and then painlessly slaughtered in its sleep before being turned into food products, this was a kind of happiness which existed in the world which would have otherwise not have existed. Therefore, the cow burger actually increases some measure of universal “happiness” and is a permissible moral choice.” This argument was fleshed out in Tatjana Višak’s book, “Killing Happy Animals”. Visak finds the argument to be deeply flawed as dependent upon the Total Existence View of utilitarianism which encompasses potential beings rather than the Prior Existence View which entails actual beings (the ones that currently exist). She also rejects the notion that beings are made better off by being brought into existence. But I think there is a deeper problem with the utilitarian framework as applied here generally.

An ad from the “Happy Cow Dairy” company

Again, it would do us well to remember that this idealistic vision of animal husbandry is also largely hypothetical. Over 90% of the world’s meat supply comes from factory farm processes which look nothing like this.
There are some obvious protests to the “killing the happy cow as justification” argument. One is the impossibility of the situation. There is still a death to inflict at the end of the process. Višak asks “How could it be unethical to kick the animal but ethical to kill it?” The killing is still a final act of separation from the social network of the cow world and from its kin and group. The “Catch-22” of delivering a happy decade to the cow would necessitate its relation and interaction with other cows or else it would not be happy, and the slaughter would necessitate a violent separation from those same cows. There is also the practical impossibility of the land use problem where the world’s meat supply would have to occupy an exorbitant amount of land to construct cow-heavens. This would almost certainly make the “identical environmental impact” variable extremely lopsided.

Now, as a creative philosopher I can try to solve all these problems for the “killing happy animals” crowd. So, here’s what I got. We could put the cows in a kind of virtual reality simulation where they spent their lives on a kind of omni-directional treadmill taking up very little space and enjoying a perceived reality of sunny farm days and light banjo music. Pulling the plug to the happy VR world is inevitable at some point though. You laugh, but recently in Russia they experimented with cows wearing VR headsets to reduce anxiety.
There is a kind of genuine dilemma for the vegan here though regarding the question of what we do with all these cows if we aren’t going to eat them. It seems a kind of global sterilization and cow nursing homes where we gently put to rest the last generation of cows would be in order. We also, of course, would be greatly disrupting the tradition and way-of-life of the cattle rancher. This is an inescapable conundrum, but it should not serve as an argument in favor of perpetuating the system in the first place. The absurdity of that line of thinking is made clear by considering other examples.

Imagine two identical t-shirts now. One was made by a 16-year-old in terrible factory conditions in an underdeveloped country. The argument that choosing that shirt over an identical one produced by a clean machinery process because the teenager is able to make a bit of money and support her family and might starve otherwise is not a strictly illogical one. But shouldn’t this wretched conclusion force our minds to realize the flaws in the system which would produce such a wicked dilemma for the world in the first place and motivate us to change it?
We can imagine other illuminating analogies such as two identical diamonds, one synthetically manufactured and the other plucked from the earth with child slave labor. The stone shines just the same. Or two gallons of gasoline, one pumped by a terrorist cartel the other by a friendly neighbor. The car runs exactly the same way. Or two cotton plants which need to be harvested. One uses the method of African slave labor and the other is harvested using a machine.
Is the justification of providing the slave, the terrorist, or the diamond mine child with a job all that convincing?
A cow is not a human. That variable ought not be ignored in my 3 examples. We have to consider the capacity for deep mental states of flourishing and suffering in the case of the cow. Perhaps the slave, the child, and even the terrorist (who presumably has an innocent family), are easier choices for you because the cow presents something closer to the machine picking the cotton. I think this is true! Can a cow really suffer? Let’s look closer at this.

I recently had a long discussion with Jamie Woodhouse, who leads the sentientism movement. His activism sits on a philosophy where sentience (the act of experiencing) is insisted upon as a baseline for any moral consideration. I think this a great place to start and I have happily signed myself up to the label. Giving even the smallest amount of moral consideration to the cow ought to tip the scales in favor of the almost certainly non-sentient plant burger. But sentientism is insufficient to respond meaningfully to the “killing happy cows” argument. To do that we must layer in a richer moral philosophy so we know just how to “consider” different kinds of sentience.
In my discussion with Jamie we stumbled into the label of “humanism”. Setting aside how this banner has been corrupted by a kind of speciesist hyper focus on the human animal at the expense of the others, I think the word “human” demands close inspection.
Humans are special kinds of animals. I would argue that it is precisely this “specialness” that allows for and philosophically demands the moral consideration of sentience. The philosopher Rebecca Goldstein describes the human as the animal which “tries to find its bearings in the world.” Yuval Harari delivers this thought cleanly by offering a kind of question that only humans can ask which goes like this: “what do we want to want?”
I think these lines are useful, important, and oftentimes completely ignored by the extremes of the environmental and animal rights movements. You are prone to hear things like “humans are the virus” or suggestions of rapid depopulation efforts as a way to hand the universe back over to the natural state of things before we upright monkeys messed it all up. We can shamefully sulk back to our place in the natural order of things before we so foolishly believed we were on top of any kind of system.
These are horrifyingly wrong and dangerous thoughts which not only shy away from, but reject outright our moral opportunity to construct a world worth wanting and more importantly a world which might be better than the accidents of nature.
There is a more concrete way to measure the distinction of man and animal. Does the animal create “art”? And by art I don’t mean patterns or rhythmic body movements. Clearly, all animals exhibit those behaviors. I intend to reserve a kind of transcendent definition of art, dance, and philosophy as objects which could only be produced by trying to get our cosmic bearings in a world by wondering if we want to want what we currently want.

If the body movement or pattern has a utility which can be fully explained by a process of nature and evolution in the world, such as the mating dance of a bird of paradise, this, while exquisite and beautiful, is not what I mean when I say “dance”. If the color of a nest is meant to attract a mate or intimidate a predator, again while wondrous, this is not what I mean by “art.”

Art, music, dance, and poetry are creative expressions of animals wondering if they want the “right” things. As to stave off any linguistic confusion, some sensory objects are called “art” in our consumerist society which fail this test. These objects answer instead to a system of “economic survival” in an man-made exchange market, rather than the playground constructed by natural evolution. I wish to crush the element of “utility” in the production of the artistic object and leave only a usage which is aimed at addressing the questions of pondering our bearings in the universe. The fact that this is something which may be impossible and that even our most robust efforts to escape the social/sexual signals of evolution are ultimately futile as pointed out by someone like Robin Hanson in his book “The Elephant In The Brain” is itself a point in favor of a truly “human” artistic expression. The desire to sever the chains of a deterministic evolution is itself a cosmic cry to “want to want something else”, even if we can never really achieve this kind of freedom from evolutionary signaling.
Cows are not making art. Eating a cow after being moved to tears by the art and music which it produced might be rather difficult. The danger for our society is to wonder just how many humans are truly making “art” as well. If we are told that artistic endeavors are mere “hobbies” and meaning is to be derived by the ends which you can extract by engaging in the means of participating in the marketplace, then the path to meaning for the artist is to make sure that his art is easily commodified. This intrinsically undermines the human impulse to make art from the first step. The artist is no longer trying to find his bearings in the world but instead he is pressured to find his bearings in the market.

Perhaps we sense the absurdity of consumerism with the ironically commercial popularity of artists who have pointed at this high wire act with tongue-in-cheek expressions such as Andy Warhol’s infamous Campbell's Soup Can which held a mirror up our market shelves and the ingenious public stunts by Banksy who has carried the satirical tradition into our streets.
I am leaning heavily on the work of Hannah Arendt here who took stock of man’s relation to his world in her 1958 treatise, “The Human Condition” in which she expounded on the modern philosophical cheapening of the activity of man to mere “labor” which she defines as something like the maintenance of nature rather than the artistic construction of a world. She worried that in a world of laborer’s and a consumer society the notion of “happiness” would be a substitute for a desire for meaning. Perhaps this hypothesis is why the “killing happy animals” argument seems so compelling. Is not “happiness” the worthy goal which even us humans are trying to achieve? Man, these cows have it made.
The word “happy” is very carefully selected here, but it is also a cheat. The argument is deployed as a way to tilt the utilitarian math in favor of the continued consumption of animals (albeit after heavy and costly reformation away from the cruelty of factory farming). I am not a fan of utilitarian frameworks generally, but to give them their due, a self respecting utilitarian wouldn’t be so silly as to label a pan on either side of their scale’s fulcrum with “happiness”. The words philosophers are all too familiar with are “flourishing” and “suffering”.
These states must remain distinct from mere happiness and pain or we risk descending into Hannah Arendt’s nightmare, if we haven’t yet. I would suggest a state of flourishing necessitates a genuine pondering of second order desires. These are the meta desires that Harari referred to, the things we want to want.

To simply want a thing and get it, is a kind of happiness, no doubt, but to want to want something, especially something which clashes with an evolved emotional tug of the first order desire, and then achieve that thing, is a kind of flourishing. This is most easily felt in forms of resistance, such as restraining oneself from unhealthy foods as to stay on a diet, or rejecting alluring sexual advances as to honor deeper commitments of romance. The “extra” work of injecting not a justification but a meaning into the act of resistance is the capacity of the human. This is our capacity for story telling which guides the first order desires with a symbolic structure.

Religion and philosophy fits in this slot. In fact, much real “art” focuses on the temptation, torture, and ecstasy of these moments of collision between the levels of desire. Entire religious structures of reward and punishment depend on these pivotal moments.
If this is what we mean by flourishing, and I would insist that we do, I am not sure how a word or suggestion of something like “happiness” could hope to compare. There is an image of an animal which has been so subdued by the false allure of “happiness” as to collapse it into a state of near “cowness”. In the Pixar film WALL-E we meet a ship of homo sapiens who are ensnared in a never ending cycle of first order desires which are dutifly met by an army of automated devices. Not surprisingly the plot depends on the truth that, while this state is a kind of happiness, it certainly isn’t flourishing. And given the chance to head back to their polluted Earth and try to construct an actual world, the ship’s passengers literally fight to reject an eternity of pampering from their tyrannical “happiness” machines.

While some researchers such as Frans deWaal have demonstrated moral complexities and notions of fairness and compassion in the animal kingdom, the fact that we have yet to see any animal versions of Andy Warhol is important.
Wait, am I making an argument to eat the cow? Am I saying that if we ought to care about flourishing and suffering and maximizing the former and a cow is incapable of either, why should we care about how it is treated? No, what I am pointing to is the units of measurement of “happiness” and “flourishing” can not be placed on the same scale. If to flourish is to be aligning our actions with a kind of confidence in our meta desires, then the appropriate questions are not even about the cow, which can not flourish, but about ourselves, who can. The question of “Do I want to want to eat this cow?” is the relevant one when it comes to maximizing flourishing
To even ask such a question is heretical to religious frameworks which consistently dissuade the human from taking on the tasks of Gods. But this is to deny the very essence of what distinguishes “human”. It seems the “humanist” movement has also lost its footing here and is apprehensive of declaring itself as distinct and special as to not appear speciesist or environmentally colonialist. This is a pose of pessimism born out of fear that we can not rise to the occasion of our responsibility.
Jamie Woodhouse proposes a framework of “sentientism” to establish a baseline of moral consideration. I agree with this and I think it is non-controversial when taken at face value. What we care about, to any degree, depends on a thing experiencing anything. While I went to lengths to point out the chasm between happiness and flourishing in this essay, that is not to say that happiness as an experience is worthless, and likewise that experiencing pain is insignificant. Happiness and pain are still contents of sentience and they ought to carry with them the ground floor of any moral philosophy regardless of how high the building goes.

This is true even if the philosophy built upward is of a purely religious conception. Even if “sentience” is merely rendered onto something by the means of a maker, it still takes on a hue of significance. If a divine and good creator made the animals in the Garden of Eden with no inner experience or souls, the creator necessarily cares about the treatment of his creation, his art as it were. This does save the “killing happy animals” argument, but only from a religious story of the animals being sent as gifts with no sentience who only appear to be having experience. This may align with something like Native American reverence for the animal world as sacred where the creatures are only to be consumed with the highest gratitude and care. It would again behove us to remember just how far we have wandered far from the current horror show of factory farmed or even grass fed free range animals.
Sentientism knows about this religious loophole and then, somewhat tangentially, injects a commitment to reason and evidence as a necessary ingredient in the philosophy. While this may feel like a bit of a cheat, and it may be, it is welcome. It demands an honest attempt to answer the question of “How do you know if that chicken experiences anything?”
The classic philosophical problem of other minds is introduced here which acknowledges that sentience (let alone consciousness) can only be experienced in the subjective and therefore can never be certain to be found outside of itself. While this extreme solipsistic lens is true phenomenologically, it is non-functional when one attempts to engage morally or politically with the world.
The problem is granting inner experience to others is an ingrained habit which evolution has guided, rather than the methods of science and reason. This has resulted in the near universal ease with which we suspect other humans are having rich inner experiences simply by assuming they are something like ourselves. And what follows is a sliding scale of ease that it takes to grant sentience to things that look and act less and less human. A monkey falling out of a tree and breaking its arm strikes us a certain way, whereas a porcupine perhaps less, a mosquito even less, and an oyster (which lacks even a brain) even less.

The evolutionarily grooved intuition to grant inner experience is what is often first encountered when a child ponders why the family loves their pet dog and would never dream of eating it but seems to enjoy steak in the evening. Many parents probably fear the day that their child visits a farm and stares into the eyes of a baby sheep if they have mutton on the menu later that week.
These intuitions are strong and somewhat useful moral guides, but reason and evidence suggests we can do better than the accidents of blind evolution which is ripe with species bias and immoral shortcuts. Again, we should remember that reason and evidence in this context are purely “human” capacities. Consciousness studies strive for a scientific method to describe and decipher which systems of matter must be having inner experience. And while the field is young, there are frameworks such as Integrated Information Theory that set the blueprint for a dispassionate approach to describing knowledge processing systems in these ways. But there are also less esoteric and complex frameworks of science and reason to deploy right now. The behavior being documented by more and more of the animal kingdom is consistent with rich inner experience, often much richer and more sophisticated than previously thought. If we grant sentience to the happy humans in the first act of WALL-E, it seems like we ought to at least give that to animals.
Back to the two burgers on your plate. Hopefully you’re still hungry after all this. Go ahead and pick them up in your mind and place them on a moral scale to decide which you ought to eat. The sentience baseline for animals and a commitment to reason and evidence is not very heavy even in my analysis. But it isn’t weightless. Stretch your imagination to where all the variables are flattened and the scales would tip ever so slightly.
But there is something on the side of the cow burger which may be impossible to simulate and that is the culture and nostalgia around thousands of years of animal husbandry. It is disturbingly easy to forecast the culture war around this subject which will undoubtedly coalesce around these rallying cries. We ought to tread lightly in these conversations as to not disparage this factor, though it is difficult not to notice the echoes of the arguments the South made in favor of retaining the institution of slavery based on culture and heritage once the economic, environmental, and safety variables of continuing the practice were fully negated. But the notions of “a way of life” and a “path to happiness through cattle ranching” are real factors which I think society needs to address with larger conversations about flourishing over happiness that I hinted at. These conversations about meaning go far deeper than the ethics of eating cows.
For many non-meat eaters reading this essay, you may think this was a lot of work to do for something that is so obviously morally deterministic like not eating a cow which clearly is living and can experience joy and pain. I agree, it was a lot of work. But I think it's necessary because something can be discovered through the process. What I hope is clear is the need for a call to action to make a world where the identical non-sentience burger arrives.

Of course, it won’t arrive in quite the way I’ve laid out here. The corresponding burger qualities will not align in this way. The current alternatives such as Impossible Burger or Beyond Meats outperform the “real” counterpart on several variables already such as environmental but may lag behind in areas of specific nutrition (a few grams of proteins), taste, and certainly cost.
But let me end this with another fun image to continue my championing of the word “human”.
Sometime in the future, an alien comes down to Earth and says “Hi”. He wants you to be a tour guide so he can find out a little bit more about our society and our mental capacities. You take him to a grocery store and wander the aisles. He asks all kinds of questions about the fruits and the colorful packaging, the cereal aisle would be quite a trip. But then he points to something in the frozen section and asks “Hey, what’s that?” You look over and he’s pointing to a package of alternative ground beef.
You explain that the natural evolution of humans has resulted in us really enjoying the taste of cooked cows. The smell and taste of it makes our mouths water. You explain that the leading theory points to a moment in our evolution where other foods were scarce and we developed biological systems that can break down animal matter and derive nutrients from them. You show him your canine teeth and molars and help him understand all of this. You explain that people really love this experience of eating cow parts and it gives them a lot of joy but people also realized that the practice was not something they really wanted to want because it entailed causing pain and domination over other sentient beings. You can even explain that you don’t think this particular cow sentience is all that valuable but you still recognized that if it was something you could avoid you would.
You explain how we tried a lot of methods to mitigate the pain and waste in the process and some of it was really laudable. And then someone came up with this idea to try to deliver the experience that we wanted but eliminate the moral part of extinguishing sentience that really bothered us. So, this is a package of stuff that is designed to look, taste, feel, and behave just like a piece of an animal that we bred into existence which we are working to humanely retire called a cow.
The alien may ask for a taste test. I’m not sure. But in some ways I think that trying to explain the weird cube of red squishy stuff in the freezer section would be just about the best lesson on what it is to be “human” in the meta-desire questioning sense as you could find.

The 2 burger thought experiment is not reality yet. And it’s certainly not a near future reality for much of the developing world. But I don’t think it is very far off. To accelerate its arrival will take not just a baseline commitment to sentientism but more importantly a rediscovery of the morally courageous part of our “humanness” which lets us even consider being sentientists in the first place.
So, look at the burgers on the scale again. Instead of measuring their moral value by looking at them, let’s look at ourselves. Take the burgers off and place two versions of yourself on the scale, one that chooses the non-cow and another which is indifferent to the choice. This is the right evaluation for the courageous humanist.
The inner dialogue should sound something like this.
“Do we want to eat the cow? Yeah. Do we want to want to eat the cow? No, not really.” So, what are we going to do about it? Build a system where we can flourish, or shrug and just be happy?

Two Burgers on a Plate: When the Only Difference is Death

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