Why John Rawls Should've Been A Vegetarian

Like so many political philosophers before him, John Rawls was blithely dismissive of the rights of animals. This does not particularly distinguish him from most people, but what does, I believe, is that his political philosophy provides an unusually strong basis from which to make a case for vegetarianism. I believe that morality and ethics provide an unavoidable imperative to be a vegetarian anyway, but I'm always on the look-out for additional arguments in favor of animal rights, and I think I've found one. It's fairly long, so it takes place after the fold.

Rawls' works A Theory of Justice and Justice as Fairness: A Restatement are, in effect, a re-working of traditional social contract theory. Under the prototypical social contract argument, best exemplified by either Thomas Hobbes or John Locke, we begin arguing from a state of nature in which there is no government, and then proceed to discover why it is advantageous all around for the people in that state of nature to make a social contract and form a government. Rawls thinks this is a poor way to go about political theory, in part because in the state of nature the strong could bully the weak; i.e., the strong could get the weak to accept a social contract that would be better than the state of nature even for the weakest, but would still be unjust. Instead, he proposed to view society as a fair cooperation between free and equal citizens, and he came up with a novel idea for how those free and equal citizens should think about their fundamental social policies: the original position. This is a thought experiment in which, essentially, each member of society appoints a delegate to a grand convention which will ratify principles of justice, which shall govern the basic structure of society. (What the basic structure is is a subject of some debate. Rawls defined it as the distribution of primary goods, including basic rights and economic goods. Many have critiqued the narrowness he seemed to imply in the definition.) There's a catch to this convention, though, and a reason why the members of society don't just attend themselves, but instead appoint phantom delegates: those delegates do not know whom they represent. All they know is that they represent someone who will live in society under the principles of justice they select, and that they are to advocate fiercely for their constituent's interests.

(As an aside, I believe that the original position is a reworking of Rousseau's concept of the general will that makes it easier to discern. The general will is Rousseau's idea that "AS long as several men assembled together consider themselves as a single body, they have only one will which is directed towards their common preservation and general well-being." I believe that Rousseau, with his idea that citizens in casting votes are voting not their own interests but their view of the general will, wanted determinate individuals to think selflessly and of the whole, while Rawls uses indeterminate individuals thinking selfishly to achieve the same end result.)

Rawls then argues that, in the original position, under this so-called veil of ignorance, the delegates will select the following two principles of justice: 1) everyone is guaranteed a full scheme of basic liberties, which shall be compatible with the same scheme of liberties being granted to all, and 2) all social inequalities must both be attached to offices open to all and exist to the advantage of the least-well-off in society (i.e., the assumption is total equality, and inequalities must increase overall prosperity enough that the least-well-off benefits overall). His argument for these principles under the original position is simple: each delegate might be representing the least-well-off in society. And if they are, there are in severe dereliction of duty in either agreeing to principles which rob their constituent of their basic liberties or to principles which are worse for their constituent than total social equality.

I believe one could take a slightly less hard-line approach, and say not that delegates represent unknown constituents in the convention but that the members of society form the convention, but do not know who they are. Under this system, I believe, the first principle of justice would still hold, but a slightly weaker version of the second might attain. This is because individuals might be willing to accept a small risk of being slightly worse off than under total equality as the price of a chance of being much better off, while a representative in Rawls' construction can never risk so betraying the interests of their client. The difference, fundamentally, is that the delegate's constituent either is the least-well-off or is not, and if they are, a violation of the so-called difference principle would make them worse off as a net matter, while an individual who does not know his or her social station faces an array of possibilities and can therefore give at least some weight to an average. In either situation, however, no one would accept principles that allowed even one person to live an unacceptable life.

My proposed modification to this system is to include that the delegates do not know the species of their constituent. It is my further contention that this change would lead to a society that utterly outlawed meat-eating and other practices like the production of leather or fur, as well as hunting. First I will address the question of whether it is appropriate to include species distinctions in the veil of ignorance. One objection is based on Rawls' notion of "society as a fair cooperation," i.e., animals are not capable of participating in this cooperation, so they are not entitled to its benefits. This seems a fairly grievous objection; indeed, Rawls' lead-up to the original position is based largely on this idea of cooperation. But I have an even more powerful objection to the objection, which is to simply suggest that we follow its logic all the way through. What if we exclude all those who cannot contribute to the cooperation from its protections? Children are not excluded; the cooperation is long-term, and children ultimately do contribute even if they do not in, say, their first year. The aged and utterly demented, however, might be reasonably excluded, as might the completely mentally disabled. If we exclude them from consideration as we do animals, then there is no reason as a society even to keep them alive: they consume valuable resources that we cooperators could be using to further our just society. But this idea is laughable. I believe that there is a notion intrinsic to "society as a fair cooperation" that includes taking care of those who, though no fault of their own, are unable to participate in the cooperation. (This is a usage of what I call the Singer Criterion, after Peter Singer: when presented with a potential distinction between humans and non-humans that justifies the regime of meat-eating, ask whether it truly excludes all non-humans and includes all humans. They have a tendency to fail the test.)

The other objection I will consider is that animals do not deserve consideration because they are not sentient, and therefore have no interests to be taken into account. But this objection plays right into my hands. Non-sentience is not a valid reason to exclude a being from the constituency of the original position. Suppose that you were attending this convention, and you knew that you were representing a cow, but you also knew that your constituent was totally non-sentient. I maintain that you could reasonably do nothing but abstain, and certainly could not object to a proposed principle of justice. After all, your constituent has no perception, and therefore no interests! They don't give a damn what happens to them. So it makes no sense to disenfranchise those who are not sentient: they will disenfranchise themselves, because they are not sentient.

If there is another objection to including animals in the original position, I would like to hear it. I am reasonably confident that it would be equally flawed as the two I have addressed.

Having concluded, therefore, that it is reasonable to include species in the list of social positions covered by the veil of ignorance, it only remains to show that this leads to vegetarianism's being adopted. I hold that it does. This is, in part, a factual argument. In addressing the objection from non-sentience, I argued that assuming non-sentience for the sake of argument we should still enfranchise the non-sentient. But that argument is over, and the assumption is withdrawn. In other arguments on the same subject I have made a point of arguing that animals are sentient, the better to prove my case. Here, I do not even need to do this: I just need to show that they might be. Suppose that there is an 0.01% chance that cows are sentient, and you are a delegate to the original position convention. You know that you might represent a cow. You know that if you do represent that cow, and it is sentient, you are in the strongest possible dereliction of duty if you agree to let cows be routinely killed for production of food or other goods. (If you doubt this, go watch some videos of cows in factory farms, picture yourself as the cow, and get back to me.) Since the possibility of this scenario is non-zero, you cannot reasonably agree to a meat-eating society.

Furthermore, even under my watered-down original position, this result still holds. Suppose you are attending this convention, knowing that you will live under the rules it proposes, but you do not know who you are. But you know that there will be cows, and that you might be a cow. And that there is a non-zero chance that you will be a sentient cow. Now I will stipulate for the sake of argument that meat-eating makes humans as a whole much much happier, though I believe this to be false. I hold that the life of a meat cow, or a meat chicken, or a meat pig, or a meat whatever, is in the category of an utterly unacceptable life to such an extent that, even in this somewhat less risk-averse scenario, it would still be a risk that could never be worth taking. Again, if you disagree, watch some videos about this stuff, picture yourself as the poor helpless animal, and get back to me.

I would also contend that since there is essentially as little reason to think that plants or fungi are sentient as there is to think rocks are, which is to say zero, and likewise bacteria and protozoa etc., there is no harm in including them in our hypothetical convention. Yes, rocks. The rocks get a delegate, as do the stars, and the clouds, and the computer I type this on, but they can, after all, only abstain.

Therefore, if we accept the arguments of John Rawls so far as to endorse the original position, we must conclude against allowing the regime of meat-eating that humans have constructed. Neither the argument from cooperation nor the argument from sentience is a good reason to keep animals, or anyone from that matter, out of the original position's constituency. And once we allow animals and everybody else into that convention, we must avoid the meat-eating regime out of the inherently risk-averse tendencies of the original position. Therefore, John Rawls should have been a vegetarian.