Back in the day I called it new knowledge when youngsters first begin to grapple with the world at large in their first tentative steps outside the creche. Long, passionate arguments based on minute amounts of knowledge within a tightly bounded domain are common dorm room events. Some never grow larger.

Animal cruelty, like abortion, implicates a boundary question. Insofar as the answer to that question lies outside libertarian theory proper, different answers to it could yield very different policy prescriptions from the same libertarian principles, with neither being more or less libertarian. . .

I will note of existing animal cruelty laws that most contain specific exemptions for agriculture and various other industries, in ways that seem hard to justify. At any rate, I'm having trouble coming up with some coherent view on which "Tender meat is tasty" counts as a justification for the appalling way we treat veal calves but "I like watching violent bloodsports" is no excuse for how Michael Vick treated dogs. If abuse with no better rationale than mild enjoyment is "gratuitous," then factory farming is gratuitously cruel. (Lest it sound like I'm on a high horse here, I should note that, by my own lights, I really ought to either be a vegan or at least consume only dairy of known, humane provenance.) Our inconsistency here suggests that animal cruelty laws are less a function of high principle than of the fact that we like both burgers and cute doggies.

Animal cruelty laws are for the entertainment of those who have little if any knowledge of animals or natural systems in general. They are examples and symptoms of urban neuroses, the price humans pay for being cut off from physical reality and cocooned in sensory deprivation environments.

It's not that cruelty is defensible in any instance, it's that what such people define as cruelty reveals their lack of connection with natural systems, and the resultant squick about organic reality. They are plastic people, or perhaps silicon. Upload them as soon as possible so they don't have to engage with reality.

If factory farms are cruel then cities are cruel since they are much alike. In both cases residents are removed from their natural habitats, severely constrained, subjected to abuse and predation from other inmates driven mad by living cheek by jowl with so many others, and yet also given superior and timely medical attention, improved sanitation, a continual supply of food and water, and so live longer with fewer physical ailments than their free range cousins. The death rate for factory farmed chickens, for example, is a little over half as great as for free range chooks.

But the real defect in such cruelty arguments is the assumption that there are alternatives that reduce cruelty. Being a vegan does not reduce harm to animals, it just hides it. Field and row cropping is far more harmful to the animals of the earth than factory farms. When their habitats, their homes, are reduced to bare dirt which is sliced and diced regularly by monster machines there is little room for animal life. In fact, animals are considered pests subject to exclusion or worse.

If you really need to meddle with other people, need to find something about their behavior to forbid, establish tribal taboos as rites of passage and membership, then focus on pleasure. Those who take pleasure in the suffering of others - animal, vegetable or mineral - are miswired, and escalate their hobbies to unacceptable levels with some regularity. Such acts can be forbidden absent the explicit consent of the harmed. Few animals, vegetables or minerals can do this - just people so far.

The silliness of such debates comes from their artificiality, their arbitrary bounds. Only a cartoon version of the world is considered, and the contest proceeds within that simplified world. No useful results are possible, or even desired. It's entertainment, like games or sports. The arbitrary bounds, the rules, are what makes such debates sporting rather than practical. It is worth noting since this is the same problem noted in the earlier post Political Economics. A debate about the relative merits of cap-and-trade vs. tax systems for reduction of carbon emissions is merely sport since neither approach does anything useful about carbon emissions. The debate proceeds without engaging carbon reality, but follows the rules of political contests. Fans in the stands can scream and cheer as if it was real, and experience cathartic relief or deep depression depending on the final score. Then they go home and have another beer since life isn't actually affected.

It isn't all innocent phun though since such deep disengagement with reality can lead to unexpected grief. Societies that become enthralled with such artifical realities decline and sometimes collapse. They lose the ability to make rational decisions since so many of the arbitaray rules would be violated. They make great investments in these alternate realities and can't bear the loss of investment or the hard won consensus that allowed the fantasy to proceed. There are both economic and social costs to waking up from such foolish dreams.

A useful discussion about animals is possible - both familiars and livestock - but it requires far greater knowledge and sophistication than we find in sophomoric political debates.

Update: Really Old Sophomores

A reader points to the famous (well . . . famous to the three libertarian vegetarians I know, anyway) Robert Nozick meditation on our obligations towards animals from Anarchy, State and Utopia:

We might try looking at comparable cases, extending whatever judgments we make on those cases to the one before us. For example, we might look at the case of hunting, where I assume that it's not all right to hunt and kill animals merely for the fun of it.

Actually, it's not just all right, it may be the last hope of some endangered species. Trophy hunters pay huge sums for the fun of hunting and killing. This makes the animals too valuable to kill for other reasons, and provides powerful incentives for those who profit from the hunt to see that the conditions of animal survival and thrival are met.

This is another example of tiny think, the debilitating mental habit of failing to look at the system as a whole or the dynamics of the system over time. Arbitrary bounds are set that preclude useful analysis of the system.

Suppose then that I enjoy swinging a baseball bat. It happens that in front of the only place to swing it stands a cow. . . So the question is: would it be all right for me to swing the bat in order to get the extra pleasure of swinging it as compared to the best available alternative activity that does not involve harming the animal? Suppose that it is not merely a question of foregoing today's special pleasures of bat swinging; suppose that each day the same situation arises with a different animal. Is there some principle that would allow killing and eating animals for the additional pleasure this brings, yet would not allow swinging the bat for the extra pleasure it brings?

Is there any way to produce food that does not kill animals? No, there isn't. Some are more indirect than others, some are unintended yet unavoidable consequences of food production, but the death toll is huge and undiminished whether we eat the animals or simply let them rot where they fall. Failing to consider the food value of the animals, looking only at the presumed pleasure of killing, intentional or not, evades reality.

After failing to devise a principle to distinguish swinging the bat from killing and eating an animal, you might decide that it's really all right, after all, to swing the bat. Furthermore, such appeal to similar cases does not greatly help us to assign precise moral weight to different sorts of animals.

And so drivel is passed off as reasoned argument. By failing to look at the whole issue, instead constraining discussion to an absurd cartoon version of the situation, we end up with sophomoric moral arguments that fail to engage reality.

Humans are hilarious. They get all bent about common and essential things like sex and food, ringing everyday behaviors with all sorts of taboos and dogmas.