Why Eating Animals Isn't Like Owning a Phone

It's a lot worse.

If you ever decide to advocate for animal rights, get ready to have the same conversations over and over. Eventually, you’ll lose track of how many times you’ve had to explain that just because something’s been done for ages, it doesn’t mean it’s right. Your days will be filled with people rambling about the diets of cavemen. You’ll wake up in a cold sweat, haunted by yet another person smugly pointing to their canines as if it proved anything. Life will change. It will be coloured with nonsense and lentils. Your poos will also come out easier.

Most arguments in favour of eating meat are like this, but every now and then you run into one that’s not obviously false. I think they fail still (otherwise I wouldn’t be annoying people about eating animals on the internet), but you need to do some thinking if you want to respond well to crop deaths, or causal impotence, for example.

One such argument is the what-aboutisms you hear knocking about. I’ve seen people get upvoted many times on reddit because they make some remark like “You stand up for animals while typing on a phone made by exploited workers - how ironic!”.

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Same energy.

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I think most people just like pointing to what they think is hypocrisy, but let’s steelman them and tackle what might be an actual argument against meat consumption being wrong.

1. If it’s permissible to buy a phone, it’s permissible to buy meat.

2. It’s permissible to buy a phone.

3. Therefore it’s permissible to buy meat.

Valid and straightforward, but 1 is false.

Are Phones like Meat?

The first things to consider are any symmetry breakers between buying a phone and buying meat. I think there’s a few. First, while people are exploited to make phones, exploitation isn’t required to make phones. It’s at least conceivable, and in fact very possible, to create phones without exploiting anyone. The same can’t be said for meat.

All purchases of meat involve death, and the vast majority of them involve torture. Meat isn’t like buying a phone, it’s like buying a phone that has some weird un-Fairtrade label on it saying “Exploitation guaranteed! Someone suffered immensely for this product!”. If a phone had that label, we probably shouldn’t buy that either. We’re probably not morally required to check every step of the supply chain of every purchase for exploitation, but it’s reasonable to think we’re required not to buy products for which exploitation and death are certainties.

Secondly, it’s very plausible that the amount of harm caused by buying meat far outweighs the amount of harm that buying a phone causes.

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Fish are always forgotten about.

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I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that buying a single phone doesn’t cause months, or even days of torture for anyone.

The very worst part of the supply chain for phones is the mining in the DRC. It’s estimated that 40,000 children work in those mines, with about 255,000 people total. 1.3 billion phones are sold each year and 70% of the cobalt comes from the DRC, so let’s say they make the cobalt for 910 million phones.

255,000 miners means each miner makes the materials for 3568 phones each year. Let’s assume they work 12 hour days, no days off, which would add up to 4380 hours across the year. So, each phone purchase causes about 72 minutes of expected mining (4380 hours / 3568 phones).

However, that’s assuming that all that mining is only for phone production, which it isn’t. Electric Vehicles take the lion’s share. Phones account for 26,000 out of the 175,000 tonnes of cobalt produced each year, which is 15%. That 72 minutes is now down to 10.8 minutes.

So, timewise, the amount of exploitation being caused by the very worst parts of phone manufacture is less than meat production, however there are some other considerations:

1. It exploits people, who are probably more valuable than animals. At least as more valuable as an ordinary person is when compared to a human with the same internal mental life of an animal.

2. There are other steps of the supply chain besides mining that cause harm (Although they’ll be less harmful than making a child mine cobalt).

So, for a ballpark figure, let’s multiply that 10 minutes and say buying a new phone causes 16 hours of animal exploitation equivalent. Obviously that’s a rough estimation, but I think counting those considerations as a 100x multiplier is pretty generous. The only way to get the number considerably higher is if you thought humans were worth orders of magnitude more than animals, but that’s quite hard to justify. Unless you bite the bullet on speciesism, you’d have to say a cognitively ordinary human is worth orders of magnitude more than a human with the same sort of mental life as an animal (babies, people with brain damage, etc) - but that seems false. Plausibly they’re worth more all else being equal, but not hundreds of times more.

So, buying a phone is similar to buying about 8 of litres of milk. That means if vegans are against buying milk, they should be opposed to buying phones as well, right?

Not quite. While the harm caused by a purchase is important, it’s also important to consider the benefits brought to you. Clearly, owning a phone is far more beneficial than owning 8 litres of milk. Boycotting phones would leave you without a device in an age where you very much need one. No email, no internet browser, no GPS. How do you apply for jobs? Find out information for an event you’d like to attend? Educate yourself? Communicate with loved ones that live far away? *Gasp* How do you read my blog?? Not owning a device of any kind would be massively demanding.

Not buying milk, however, isn’t very demanding. you just buy a plant based alternative that tastes basically the same. I get a chocolate one because inside I’m 9.

Additionally, you buy a phone once every few years, whereas people buy milk more regularly. Buying milk isn’t like buying a phone. It’s like buying a phone every few weeks, and each one you only use for a tiny boost in pleasure. You play candy crush on it for a couple of hours then throw it away? If you were buying a phone to regularly to do that, yes, I’d be consistent and say you should abstain there as well (I’d also like to know how you’re affording all that).

Additionally additionally - you don’t even need a new phone! I buy a refurbished phone every 4 years or so and it’s fine. They’ve basically stopped improving, so it doesn’t feel like a drawback. People who spend $1000 on a brand new iPhone every year are chumps. The harm from my phone ownership is definitely less than the harm my milk purchases used to cause. It’s totally dwarfed by my lifetime animal consumption.

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I think that the phone charge (does that count as a pun?) against vegans is a bit disingenuous. I don’t think most people who use it have thought about it a lot, but try to lean on it whenever they feel defensive. Nothing makes the discomfort of being reminded you’re causing harm go away like reminding someone else that they’re causing harm. It’s true, though, we do hurt others by merely existing. That sucks! However we shouldn’t feel like that gives us carte blanche to buy whatever we want. There’s some morally responsible middle ground between starving to death, and funding literal torture houses. Seems like eating the food that doesn’t scream is a good place to start.