Speaking of chickens, this review of a new book about the treatment of chickens under the conditions of industrial farming utterly fails to engage with the moral issue at hand.

The author, Mick Hume, seems to think that factory farming is a mark of progress and anyone who questions whether the end (cheap meat) justifies the means (untold suffering of millions of sentient creatures) is nothing more than a know-nothing hater of humanity and enlightenment.

At no point in the article does Hume consider whether we have any moral duties to animals. Nor does he try to argue that they can’t suffer or feel pain. He simply asserts a version of might makes right: people “need” cheap meat, so whatever we do to provide that is ipso facto a mark of progress.

Hume seeks to discredit concerns about factory farming by asserting that what critics “really” oppose is industrialism and material progress per se:

Like many issues to do with food and farming today, this chicken debate is not really about the details of different techniques for raising them. It is pecking at bigger targets: industrialised farming and, by implication, the social and economic advance of our society. The demand that we should all ‘reconnect’ with the animals that provide our food, for example, is really a call to turn back the clock on a social division of labour that has been developed over centuries.

Of course, this is argument by armchair psychoanalysis and Hume has done nothing to prove this point. I’m not saying that there aren’t environmentalists and animal rights advocates who don’t look askance at our industiral economy, but one hardly needs to be a luddite to question whether the suffering we inflict on animals is justifiable, especially in light of the fact that, at least for most people in the Western world, meat is hardly essential to be healthy. It’s ridiculous on its face to claim that “complain[ing] about the ‘injustice’ done by humans to chickens … is to call into question the entire basis of human civilisation.”

Interestingly, Hume writes that “Regular readers will know that, in an anthropomorphic age when those who suggest that man is superior to beast are branded ‘speciesists’, spiked writers rightly insist upon drawing a clear and uncrossable line between humanity and the ‘animal kingdom’.” As far as I’ve ever been able to tell, spiked is a resolutely secular publication, so I’m curious on what grounds they draw this “clear and uncrossable line.”

But as C.S. Lewis once pointed out, once you’ve given up the idea that there is a metaphysical difference between human beings and other animals and you’ve embraced the doctrine that we can do whatever we like to them, it’s hard to see why, in principle, “might makes right” can’t be extended to other classes, races, or whatever other group stands between us and our interests.

One tires of pointing this out, but it’s possible to recognize degees of moral considerability among various creautres. That one can recognize that animals are wronged when they are treated in the ways characteristic of modern factory farming doesn’t imply that there is no significant moral difference between a chicken and a human being.

(Note, I’m not vouching for the book under review, which I haven’t read. And thanks to Chip Frontz for sending along the link.)