He who is without sin
On factory farming, the Holocaust and hypocrisy
Please read this footnote first.1
Take this as a baseline: factory farms are hellscapes, and the suffering of the several billion sentient beings we have placed inside them is unimaginably horrific. If you’re reading this article, you probably already knew that. If you’re surprised to hear it, then you should read this essay by Bentham’s Bulldog.
Moving on — I ate three slices of pepperoni pizza last weekend. In this post, I want to convince you that this small act means I probably would’ve been a Nazi, and that anyone who buys and eats factory-farmed meat falls into the same moral boat.
Why2 ? Bear with me. Consider the story of Charlie and Dennis.
Orgy-porgy, Ford and fun
On a chilly night, you walk up a narrow staircase and enter a 2nd-floor apartment overlooking the hills of San Francisco. You take off your shoes (the host is very clean), grab a drink, and strike up a conversation with Dennis. He compliments your jacket and poses thoughtful questions.
During this conversation, you ask Dennis about his hobbies. He tells you that he loves to spend time with his family. Every Sunday, he makes a batch of bacon for his wife and their two kids. It’s their weekend tradition. How cute!
Eventually, you excuse yourself to grab another drink. You think to yourself: Dennis is a decent fellow.
Then you start talking to Charlie. He also seems nice: he compliments your shoes and listens carefully to everything you say.
You ask about his hobbies. He says: “Oh, I like to pay a kennel in Oakland to take dogs from the pound, cut off their snouts, tails and testicles with no anesthetic, stuff them in tiny pens where they can’t turn around or move for 99% of their lives, and feed them kibble laced with feces. Once they’re old enough, the kennel beats them so they’ll get into a truck, takes them to a slaughterhouse, and slits their throats. Then every Sunday, I pick up the meat and cook it for my wife. I like it crispy!”
Horrified, you back away from Charlie and tell the host what he said. She gasps and kicks him out of the party. You think to yourself: Charlie is a fucking monster. He might be the worst person I have ever met in my life. You reconvene with Dennis and wonder how such awful people can exist in the modern world.
As you already figured out: everything that the hypothetical kennel does to those dogs is exactly what virtually all factory farms do to pigs3. The pepperoni on my pizza, and the bacon that Dennis cooks every weekend, is sourced directly from a nightmare. In material terms, Charlie and Dennis and I are committing identical crimes.
But only Charlie gets kicked out of the party. Why?
I hope you find this question as disconcerting as I do. Intuitively, I don’t think of myself as a sadistic psychopath. Nor do I think that the vast majority of Americans are sadistic psychopaths.
Yet if you accept three basic premises — (A) Charlie is a monster, (B) pigs are just as capable of suffering as dogs, and (C) Dennis is paying for exactly the same service as Charlie — then it seems very difficult to avoid the conclusion that Dennis is morally equivalent to Charlie, and therefore that anyone who behaves like Dennis is also equivalent to Charlie.
In other words: without a good answer to this question, I must conclude that pretty much everyone I know, myself included, is a monster.
Four Dumb Retorts
Here are four ways to fail at escaping this repugnant conclusion.
Pigs are not morally equivalent to dogs. Therefore, their suffering is irrelevant, just as the potential suffering of any minimally or non-sentient being is irrelevant.
The only principled way this could be true is if pigs were significantly less intelligent than dogs, since we tend to treat intelligence as a proxy for the capacity to suffer. But pigs are at least as smart as dogs. And regardless, intelligence is a really bad proxy for moral worth. Eating healthy adult humans is bad, but no one thinks it’s any better to eat a baby or someone with mental disabilities.
In sum, this response is bullshit. How about Door #2?
Torturing and eating pigs is an unavoidable part of life, while torturing and eating dogs is not. Therefore, we cannot judge someone for doing it, just as we cannot judge them for killing poisonous spiders in their bathroom.
Clearly, this is also not true. In this particular case, the alternative isn’t veganism, or even vegetarianism — it’s not eating pigs. Given that a few billion people manage without it by dint of religious scripture, eating factory-farmed pigs is clearly avoidable. But Dennis is doing it anyway.
The benefits outweigh the costs.
Nope. Pig meat isn’t very healthy, and there are no pathologies that require someone to consume it. Here are the main benefits of eating pigs: they taste good, and it makes some social events easier (at least in the United States). Here are the main costs: you’re paying to wreak unspeakable horrors on an animal that is just as conscious as your golden retriever.
This retort is logically equivalent to a child molester who says: “I know it’s bad, but having sex with children is the best!” And of course, you wouldn’t feel any better about Charlie if he explained the delectable wonders of dog meat and talked about how it’s the centerpiece of his weekly barbecues with the boys.
Dennis doesn’t know anything about factory farms, so you can’t blame him for purchasing meat from them.
I mean, maybe? If Dennis, somehow, really has no idea what happens on a factory farm, then maybe he’s less culpable than someone who does.
But for most people — particularly the kinds of people likely to read this post — that level of ignorance is exceedingly rare. Not everyone is an expert, but I suspect that pretty much everyone knows, at least vaguely, that factory farms make animals suffer very, very badly. I also assume that the average 19th-century Southerner didn’t know exactly what happened on slave plantations, even though they knew about slavery. How do you feel about the 99% of them that weren’t virulent abolitionists?
So none of these responses help us to avoid thinking that everyone we love is a psychopath. In my view, there is only one option left. But you’re not going to like it.
The Moral Law of Social Baselines
There is exactly one way to think that someone who pays to torture and consume pigs is not as bad someone who pays to torture and consume dogs. The former is a social baseline, and that means we can’t judge anyone who participates in it. In other words: if a practice is the norm in a society, then an average level of engagement in that practice is never worthy of moral condemnation.
One implication of this claim is pretty standard fare in left-leaning circles: we call it moral relativism. Infanticide, genital mutilation and ritualized murder — among other abominations — are common across many indigenous cultures. Confronted with these practices, we reply: well, that’s normal within their culture. We might not like certain cultural norms, but we can’t make moral assessments about people who participate in them, because the norms are (by definition) normative.
The next step is obvious, but less popular. When considering practices in Western cultures — slavery in the United States, for example — we can only conclude that an average level of participation was acceptable. I’m not talking about the cinematic overseers who whipped and raped slaves on a whim; presumably, they’re beyond the social baseline. I’m talking about a standard American who purchased cotton shirts and nodded when people said, “Africans are less intelligent, so slavery is good for them.”
Most people were of this sort. So unless you want to conclude that, until recently, the entire country was comprised of psychopaths, you cannot condemn them for going along with the times.
Of course, you see where I’m going here. Maybe you want to say that factory farming is not as bad as slavery, or the Holocaust, or other standard atrocities held up for questions about whether we would’ve done any better.
I think you’re wrong; I think factory farming is as bad, and probably worse, than anything humans have ever done to each other in the course of our bloody history. But if you dispute my claim, fine. You should probably read the aforementioned essay by Bentham's Bulldog, which documents exactly what happens to the animals we consume with gusto.
Even then, we might disagree on the exact moral awfulness of this industry. But how much less atrocious does factory farming have to be before the argument falls apart? If factory farming is morally equivalent to, say, .25 Holocausts: does materially supporting it really make me much better than an average, run-of-the-mill Nazi, who just as passively ceded to Auschwitz?
weren’t there better ones than I
So I think that eating animal products in 2025 is a good signal that you would’ve been a Nazi. Not Mengele himself, by any means — but also not part of any meaningful resistance. Just a regular member of the party, attending rallies and wearing armbands and avoiding Jewish-owned shops as the regime and social mores demanded.
Of course, this is kind of just a statistical fact. Most Germans were Nazis, not Righteous Gentiles, and the German genes (much to their chagrin) of 1939 are no different than yours or mine. So most living people would’ve been Nazis. Yet that claim, incorrectly and illogically, still allows the majority to think they would’ve been in the minority.
But if you’re like me — if you agree that factory farms contain horrors beyond our comprehension, yet still casually support it with your dime, protected by the veneer of the social baseline — then why on Earth should you think that, as a citizen of Salem or Mississippi or Nazi Germany, you in particular would have magically teleported beyond the moral average that you’re occupying right this very second?
In fact, our society makes the path to a just life (in this domain) infinitely easier than it was in Germany. To not be an average Nazi in the eyes of history, you had to overcome the possibility of imprisonment and execution. To not be an average supporter of factory farms, you have to overcome the possibility of less enjoyable food and an occasional awkward dinner. If you’re too scared to come up with a way to tell your in-laws why you’re not eating bacon at breakfast, then you definitely would have been too scared to hide Anne Frank in your attic.
Lest I come across as holier-than-thou: I am, by some standards, worse than most. I learned about factory farms several years ago, and for a while, I stopped eating meat. But then I decided I liked it too much, and started eating it again. What do you make of the Nazi who drops a few capsules of Zyklon B, decides to find a new job because he can’t take the screams, then rejoins a few months later because he couldn’t get a better payday?
Fortunately, I believe my own argument. I believe that I’m not a psychopath, and that I have not surrounded myself with a host of grinning monsters. I’m just a regular guy, like all the other regular guys who have shrugged at all the regular-guy awful things thrust upon them by their culture. It is simply too ridiculous to think otherwise.
And don’t worry, friend. If you’re like me, know that I don’t fault you for it either. How could I? Hypocrites must stick together.
History is often less kind to us, though. Someday, when the torture chambers have been emptied and the last broken bones have sunk beneath the surface of the soil, people will wonder, rhetorically: “Would I have eaten bacon on Sundays?”
Like us, they will applaud themselves on their enlightenment. They will curse the brutality of their peers. Their neighbor voted wrong. They’ll say he would have eaten turkey on Thanksgiving, just as some of us say that our political opponents, unlike us, would’ve raised their arms at Nuremberg.
But you and I will be listening from the depths of hell. We will know the truth.4
I wrote this two months ago, and I didn’t post it. I was too scared to hurt someone’s feelings, even though I was (and remain) quite sure about the obviously incendiary claim.
Then a few days ago, I saw a dead raccoon on the sidewalk. I felt very sorry for him. I wondered if he had seen the car coming, and if so, whether he had raised his human-like hands to stop the blow. I thought about his terror, his widening eyes, his confusion at being run down by an impossibly swift and eyeless beast. And I remembered that there are feelings other than our own: that we, at least, can comprehend the nature of the horrors we have constructed.
I will hurt someone’s feelings with this post. But if it saves a few pigs from a gas chamber, the hurt will be worth it.
You could replace Nazism’ in this post with any other atrocity that was socially sanctioned in its time. I use it because people commonly wonder if they “would’ve been a Nazi,” rather than whether they “would’ve fought for the Confederacy,” and because I am Jewish, which makes it much more familiar to me.
To be clear, I could substitute any major animal product into this essay, including eggs and dairy, and the argument would still hold. It’s all terrible. All of it. And for reasons that will shortly follow, the extreme intelligence of the pigs is not at all central to their moral worth, just as the extreme stupidity of babies doesn’t make them any less valuable than adults. They just work as an especially intuitive example.
For what it’s worth — I don’t like being a hypocrite. So I’m trying to be better. I’m now committed to eating only hunted or fished meat, dairy, and (occasionally) eggs. This does not save me from my own argument, but it prevents some significant number of animals from immeasurable suffering. If you also don’t like being a hypocrite, you should think about doing that too.