Jamie Oliver has a new campaign. This time it’s against battery chickens. His last one changed government policy on school dinners, so this is something to watch with interest. I think it’s great to see this stuff in the news again. Many of us seem to have an intuition that some nebulous pleasure experience, no matter how finger lickin’ good, is not worth an animal’s pain. This intuition seems to run deep: there is evidence in the repugnance many of us feel toward those who enjoy fox hunting.

Still, if right things emerge from this campaign, I don’t think they will do so for the right reasons. I don’t subscribe to this quintessentially British utilitarianism, a weighing-up of gross pain versus gross pleasure. Is pain all that counts? Is there no moral weight attached to the total circumscription and arbitrary termination of another being? I was always on Neo’s side in The Matrix. Being enslaved and killed doesn’t appeal to me, even if I am treated well. Which does a mind value more fundamentally: freedom from pain, or freedom from the constraints of an oppressive regime? Perhaps it depends on the mind. But I can’t shake the intuition that, in between all the health problems and hock burns, if birds have minds, they think: “How do I get out of here?”

Filed under: ideas, jonathanbirch on January 7th, 2008