Classical Liberalism, Cruelty, and the Injustice of Factory Farming

This blog post is an English translation of a piece published on the website of the Juan de Mariana Institute, originally published in Spanish. You may find the original piece here. This post serves solely as a means by which I can share my work with English speakers.

Many have the misconception that classical liberals are indifferent to the plight of nonhuman animals. Against this view, I argue that classical liberals are committed to using the state to protect factory farmed animals from cruelty. First, I show how classical liberals of the past have been committed to anti-cruelty. Then, I explain what a commitment to anti-cruelty is and why it is significant. Finally, I argue that the commitment to anti-cruelty requires that we abolish factory farming. Not only can classical liberals institutionalize their love for animals––they should institutionalize their love for animals in the form of legal protections. 

Classical liberals have always taken a stand against cruelty. In Some Thoughts Concerning Education, John Locke implored parents to teach their children to be kind to animals so they would not grow up to be cruel to humans. Jeremy Bentham argued that cruelty to animals should be punishable by law both because animals feel pain and because humans who treat animals cruelly are cruel to humans. John Stuart Mill, in his Principles of Political Economy, argued that depriving a child of education is cruel. All of this is to say that classical liberals are, and have been, invested in driving cruelty out of society. 

At this point, one might ask what cruelty is. Here is the account of cruelty I endorse: X is cruel to Y when X subjects Y, by act or omission, to an undesired, avoidable, nontrivial, and gratuitous pain or deprivation. If Paula painfully dismembers her former boss as payback for firing her, we would consider her act cruel. Why? Paula’s former boss does not desire the pain he is subjected to; Paula could have avoided dismembering her former boss; the pain Paula’s former boss is subjected to is not trivial; and Paula’s former boss is subjected to pain that is disproportionate to what prompted Paula’s act. Taking Paula’s case as a prime example of cruelty, I submit that the account of cruelty I endorse captures the important features of what makes cruelty cruel. 

To say that classical liberals are committed to anti-cruelty is to say that they want to prevent individuals from being willfully subjected to undesired, avoidable, nontrivial, and gratuitous pains or deprivations. Someone may point out that classical liberals do not need to be committed to anti-cruelty in particular, because they are already committed to safeguarding rights or preventing harms. Anti-cruelty is nonetheless important for classical liberalism since it points out a specific subset of harms that merit attention as well as gives us resources to think about the justifiable bounds of state punishment. Without a commitment to anti-cruelty, classical liberalism lacks much of what makes it appealing. 

I argue that if we are committed to anti-cruelty, we should be committed to the abolition of factory farming. Factory farming is a set of gruesome farming practices that include, but is not limited to, cutting beaks off chickens, confining cows by the hundreds and shocking them with electric cattle prods, painfully removing the horns of rams, tearing off the genitals of piglets, and fitting the noses of newborn calves with spiked rings to prevent them from drinking their mothers’ milk. These practices are normally carried out without anesthetizing the animals. From this description, it is hopefully clear that factory farming is cruel. 

Some classical liberals will insist that some cruelty against animals can be justified if the benefits to humans are great enough. They will say that since meat is a great benefit to humans, then factory farming could be justified. There are several problems with this sort of argument. First, the amount of pleasure humans gain from tasting meat cannot plausibly be used to justify the immense, unimaginable amount of pain animals experience when they are tortured on factory farms. Second, we bring factory farmed animals into the world and, in virtue of this action, are obligated to care for them in certain ways. If someone pushes me into a pool and I begin to drown, they must jump in and rescue me. Similarly, if someone brings a needy animal into the world and the animal relies on them for their needs to be met, the person must meet those needs. Even if factory farmed animals are specifically brought into the world to be eaten, they still have interests that need to be respected. At the very least, they should not be treated cruelly. 

Some classical liberals will argue that abolishing factory farming violates the property rights of factory farmers. If the animals are their property, factory farmers should be able to do with their property what they want––even if that means treating them cruelly. Recall, however, that we prohibit pet owners from treating their animals cruelly. That we do this does not violate the property rights of pet owners. If someone wants to argue that prohibiting people from treating factory farmed animals and pets cruelly violates their property rights, then they have to show what it is that makes humans so different from animals that animals can never be protected by the state. This is harder than one might think. Not all humans are capable of being rational, so we cannot use rationality to distinguish humans from nonhumans. We care for some animals more than we care for some humans, so we cannot use sentimental value to distinguish humans from nonhumans. And we cannot use humanity alone to distinguish humans from nonhumans, because this is as arbitrary as saying that sex, or race, or sexual orientation should be used to determine whether individuals should be protected by the state. I have as much say in my race as I do in my species membership. 

In this short space, I hope to have shown that the principles motivating classical liberalism should motivate classical liberals to seek justice for animals on factory farms. Factory farmed animals are dependent upon factory farmers in an important way, and we owe them lives free from cruelty in virtue of this dependence. Just as preventing a cat owner from microwaving a cat is not a violation of the property rights of the pet owner, it is not a violation of the property rights of factory farmers to prevent them from painfully debeaking chickens or castrating piglets. Hopefully, more classical liberals will come to recognize this truth.