I don’t imagine this will be one of my more popular posts, and I may be in over my head a bit on this one.
Erik Loomis writes:
I have said before and will continue to say that I have no problem if people choose to eat meat, but they should have to witness the killing of the animals they are eating. We should all be forced to take field trips to meat processing plants. Or at the minimum, go to the farms where animals are grown, under whatever kind of humane conditions, and watch an animal die. Nothing would reduce meat consumption as effectively as this.
I’ve never liked this argument about how if everyone actually killed what they ate, we’d all be vegetarians. If I grew up killing animals for meat, dealing with the blood and the gore, the bone and the skin, I wouldn’t be squeamish about doing it today. In fact, if I started butchering animals tomorrow, I bet I’d become accustomed to the task surprisingly quickly. Most anyone would. But the thing is, thanks to the benefits of division of labor in this wonderfully modern society of ours, I’ve never had to kill the animals I’ve consumed. Someone else does that while I do some other menial job, and thanks to some law of economics or other, everyone gets more stuff than if we all produced our own necessities and luxuries ourselves. Hooray! So what’s the difference if I’d be squeamish about it in this context? And is squeamishness the equivalent of morality now? I’d be squeamish about performing heart surgery too.
I do not know how morality enters this conversation anyway. Killing animals and eating them seems to me to be a perfectly amoral thing. I’d go so far as to say that not eating animals is not morally better than eating them. I can’t figure out how it can be. Not without taking some kind of leap of faith about the existence of an august and objective moral code discernible by reason or otherwise.
I don’t believe in such a thing. I cannot understand the basis for extending even the concept of morality to animals. This is because morality, such as I can understand it, is derived from social contract. There is no meaning to the concepts of right and wrong beyond the humans that create them. It goes without saying that animals cannot be a party to a social contract, though I would extend it to animals or beings intelligent enough to be a theoretical party to the social contract (that is you can assume a social contract with a being intelligent enough to enter one, even if practically speaking it cannot do so). And since animals cannot be party to the social contract, we owe them no moral obligations. Since we owe them no moral obligations, it cannot be immoral to eat them. Granted one can choose to refrain from eating animals, even based on one’s own conscience. But that does not make that choice more moral.
I can see the objections. All sadism and cruelty to animals are therefore amoral acts under this reasoning? Well, I guess so. I accept the discomfort of this position at its absurd extremes. As one always must. But I don’t have a problem with extending a personal morality to animals either, based on intuition. That includes a personal belief that eating animals is wrong. I don’t share that particular intuition. And I would characterize it as a charitable impulse, not a moral one. There are other objections I know. But I’m not up to them at the moment.
Feel free to tee off. It’s the only way I’ll ever learn.
162 Responses to “A Sledgehammer, A Chainsaw, and a Barn Full of Cattle”
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I agree with you about the amorality of feeling squeamish.
And since animals cannot be party to the social contract, we owe them no moral obligations.
I’d say that if we have pets, for example, we engage in an implicit social contract with them. “I will take you away from an environment in which you can feed yourself, for my own pleasure and companionship, and I agree, in exchange, to feed you and treat you compassionately.”
I also think that animals have a right to autonomy, to the extent that they don’t engage with us. For example, if I am eating an animal, I am engaging with it. If I am not eating it, or riding it, or keeping it as a pet, or what have you, then it should remain autonomous. It would be immoral for me to say, scoop up a random frog from a wet area and stick a firecracker up its ass (as our President has done).
There’s got to be a phrase for the autonomy of other creatures and things. See, I’d even extend the autonomy to things. It’s not immoral to cut down a tree for the wood, or because it’s blocking my satellite dish. But to randomly stroll through the woods slashing at trees because it’s fun? I’d say that’s immoral.
I guess that all sadism and cruelty with disregard for the presence, the being of the Other is immoral.
I recall from an ethical discussion group I used to participate in that we defined “ethics” as rooted in social contracts, and “moral” as that which is theoretically inherent. Although most people tend to use it as: “Moral” is about sex, and “Ethics” is about money.
One could argue that cruelty to animals (as distinct from simply killing them) could reasonably be regulated under the social contract because of the documented tendency of people who engage in such cruelty to eventually indulge in cruelty to humans as well. If the correlation is strong enough (and it is fairly strong, especially combined with other factors) then animal cruelty could reasonably be considered grounds to compell someone to get psychiatric treatment, if not penal confinement. It would be comparable to drunk driving, which does not in and of itself harm anyone, but so greatly increases the chance that someone will be harmed that society is free to regulate even instances where no one has been harmed yet.
Nice post. I’ve written on this subject before. It’s not a moral thing for me, while it clearly is for evangelical vegans. I don’t see the argument going anywhere, though, b/c just as in the gay marriage debate, you can’t talk grey to a person who can only see black or white.
I agree with you. I was a vegetarian for a few years, but eventually quit because I didn’t want people to think I was one of those Peta idiots.
It seems perfectly natural and normal for animals to eat other animals. Humans have eaten other animals throughout our history. Even when people normally slaughtered their own meat, they still ate it.
I had a couple of random thoughts…
1. Some people might feel that they do engage in a social contract with animals simply through sharing ecosystems & resources… Also, I’m still thinking through this “it’s ok to kill animals because they don’t have a sense of morality” thing. Especially in relation to what some scientists called I think “elephant rage” (people were speculating that elephants attacked a village because of recent hunting of their group). I feel like it wouldn’t be that difficult to discern some type of “animal morality” according to how certain species live in groups. Also: Does this apply to all animals? Endangered species? Recognizably intelligent animals (according to our standards)?
2. Many people see the decision not to eat meat as part of our strictly human social contract. The pollution from agribusiness is shocking (cows especially). It takes significantly more resources of grain & water to feed cows than to produce a vegetarian diet. The term “flexitarian” also applies to those who occasionally eat meat, but often refrain to lessen their impact on the environment.
Intuitively, I feel there is a certain low-level “morality” in nature, and it seems like it’s related to the Greek sin of “hubris”, which we usually define as arrogance or pride but is more at “harming someone else without cause”.
Very few animals, it seems, hurt or kill another animal without some easily accessible reason: food, self-defense, defense of territory or mates, etc. You rarely see an animal attack another “just because they can”. The closest examples I can think of are cats and other primates. You see male lions take over a pride and slaughter the alpha female’s un-weaned cubs, but scientitsts have determined that the death of the cubs triggers the female to go into heat again instead of waiting months until the cubs are weaned. You see domesticated cats “torture” small animals, but this mostly seems to be a perversion of the hunting instinct, and it’s generally recognized as an aberration.
Chimps–usually not meat-eaters–will hunt down and kill juvenile baboons about once a year and eat the flesh as a troupe, almost like some weird “blood ritual” or something. We still don’t have a clear understanding of that behavior, but hunger is not the apparant motive.
People on the other hand, are quite capable of torturing or killing an animal just because they can, because they find it amusing, because they enjoy seeing another creature suffer pain. I don’t know a better definition of “evil” than that: taking pleasure in the physical or mental suffering of another, and actively causing another’s suffering for your own enjoyment.
This is the aspect of vegetarian/vegan moralizing that is the hardest for me. All those animal-friendly faux-leathers and cottons aren’t actually particularly friendly to animals. Masses of fossil fuels and pesticides go into their production. It strikes me that the real moral issue before most of us when deciding what to consume has to do with the impact of industrialization, period.
I have seen my dinner slaughtered while living in Nepal. Since I don’t live in denial about the fact that meat comes from animals, I did not find it that big a deal. My sweet, elderly grandmother spent years living on a farm and regularly slaughtering chickens. She happily gave up that job when she left the farm, not out of squeamishness about the morality of eating meat, but because slaughtering, gutting, and plucking a chicken is a a messy and not particularly pleasant job and she’s perfectly happy to let someone else handle it.
I would be curious to know how Erik feels about anti-abortion groups that parade around with giant pictures of aborted fetuses. It’s the same argument, basically, that if you think something is okay to do, you should be willing to view the consequences in all their graphic, bloody glory.
I don’t see the basis of your argument that non-human animals are not moral agents.
I’ve seen video of a slaughterhouse, and I can’t say it was the most pleasant things I’ve ever seen , but it certainly didn’t put me off eating meat. I guess it’s quite the same as the full on sights, sounds, and smells of the killing floor (I’m going to graduate from Bovine University!) but something tells me if I were to see a cow butchered in front of me, I probably continue eating beef rather guilt free. All animals consume other living things, people are no different, we are biologically designed to be omnivors, the morality comes into play when we indulge our tendency to consume blindly and without care for the consequences of our consumption. The way I’ve heard it explained is that if you consume the flesh of an animal to sustain your own life, you are taking a responsibility for the sustainable continuation of the resource you consume. In many ways we do not do that. With respect to Erik Loomis, the best argument against not eating meat, is that it tastes so much better than tofu. Just remember if a cow had the chance he’d kill you and your whole family.
“We all die in the end. If we’re lucky we die delicious.”
It’s funny, my ex-wife is a vegetarian, and we’ve raised my daughter as one (she gets to decide for herself when she’s old enough). I myself am not one, and my ex, thankfully, has never been particularly evangelical about it. (Like any sane human, she hates PETA.)
I agree the argument itself is somewhat specious–though I also admit that if I had to kill a cow or pig to eat meat, I’d quickly turn to vegetables–unless it was a choice of that or starvation, in which case all bets are off.
That’s a personal decision of personal morality–being true to oneself, and one’s own code of ethics. I don’t presume to decide for others what their ethics should be–that’s my libertarian streak–but I can understand the anti-meat argument, and if I didn’t like bacon so much–and wasn’t able to whistle past the graveyard and compartmentalize the fact that it is not, in fact, manufactured–I would probably find it quite appealing. No reason to harm animals if we don’t have to–and given how little meat humans actually need, and how easily other proteins fill that requirement, we really don’t have to.
Of course, I like bacon; I suppose that makes me a bad person. (Of course, my 3-year-old told me last night that I need to stop eating meat and tell the animals that I’m sorry, so I may get enough moral pressure to stop soon enough….)
I don’t think meat is murder, and I would still eat it even if I did think it was murder. All that sentimental bullshit about how killing animals* is bad! just annoys the living shit out of me.
Still, there is a moral argument for vegetarianism based on resource allocation. It’s not an argument I pay any attention to, but it’s an argument I respect. I’m just saying.
*For utilitarian purposes, that is. Obviously, killing animals for no reason at all is very bad.
I don’t see the basis of your argument that non-human animals are not moral agents.
I don’t see what you don’t see. Are you claiming that animals shape their behavior according to moral considerations? Because if they don’t, then they’re not moral agents.
OK, I’ve been a vegetarian for the last 15 years or so, but don’t urge it on others, or think people need to kill what they eat.
I’ve killed a person. I’ve watched people die. I’ve cut into their flesh. Does that morally absolve me if I want to be a cannibal?
I’ve always been confused by the “if you had to kill it yourself you wouldn’t eat it” argument. I fish, which involves hauling a squirming animal on a hook out of its natural habitat, removing the hook, and cutting it’s guts out. Not exactly a pleasant task, but it’s yet to dissuade me from making fish and chips. Where I grew up it was common to see a dead deer in various stages of processing hanging in every garage or barn, yet when the venison came out no one ever cried “Oh ick! That came from a nasty carcass!” On the contrary, it seems people who kill it themselves are more likely to view carnivory as natural.
I’m pagan, and to me, a carrot is just as sacred as a cow. The same life force beats throug us all. So…I eat what I like, being mindful of the sacrifice the animal or plant has made to enable me to sustain my own life force. I just don’t think a salad is morally superior to a hamburger. Both involve the ending of a life.
“Icky” doesn’t equate to “wrong”. Otherwise there would be no surgery.
All I know for sure is that if you try to hurt either of my dogs, you’ll find out right quick what a painful death feels like.
Beyond that strongly-held conviction, I don’t have any definite opinions about the morality of meat-eating. I’ve heard compelling arguments from both sides.
I’ll note that I first ever heard the ‘you should see what you eat killed’ argument, not from vegetarians, but from rural folks involved in agriculture who thought it would cause city dwellers to not take farms and farmers for granted, or would ‘toughen them up’ in some obscure (and probably weirdly masculine) way.
It would appear that Fronts NYC has somehow turned into an anti-vegetarian Eliza program. I’m impressed. You just have to throw “humans are at the top of the food chain!” in there now.
I thought that at Pandagon of all places people would have stopped making arguments from nature. In their natural state, humans kill each other, but I don’t see anyone defending that as natural.
The “sustainable resource” you’re maintaining is an artificial, human-created, high-consumption breed of bovine (if we’re talking about beef) raised in mass quantities, eating huge amounts of crops, producing huge amounts of shit, and then being slaughtered.
I don’t base my decisions based on what a cow might hypothetically do to me if given the chance. That’s a dumbass moral argument and you know it.
I disagree that “meat” tastes better than tofu, and I think it shows ignorance to make the comparison (rather than with more meatlike substances such as tempeh, which tastes far better than any meat, or seitan). That said, is superior flavor really worth the taking of a sentient creature’s life?
Hilton: I don’t think humans shape their behavior according to moral considerations. In that, I don’t see that non-human animals are any different.
Your statement that it’s somehow all right to kill an animal for a reason but not for no reason places an arbitrary value on that animal’s life: somewhat more than “some sadistic fun” and less than “a few good meals for a human.”
I’m a vegetarian, but not an evangelical vegetarian. The only time I engage in arguments about food choice is when meat-eaters decide that it’s their duty to criticize the morality or reason of not eating meat.
As a vegetarian, I’ve known farm-raised (human) friends who’ve grown up seeing animals slaughtered and can’t see any problem with eating meat. I’ve known others in the same situation who don’t eat meat because they know where it came from.
I do think the “It’s natural” argument is feeble unless you’re going to apply it to all the other unnatural things we do–eating Frosted Flakes, wearing spectacles, etc.
Tom, I do not think the only moral issue is “resource allocation”–I just think it’s wrong to kill an animal (or have one killed) for no other reason than my personal pleasure, which is all eating meat amounts to for most of us. For those people in the world who still need it to live on (and there are some, even in this country), that’s something else.
I don’t think that’s a sentimental argument, but if I annoy the living shit out of you, I’m OK with that.
This is the aspect of vegetarian/vegan moralizing that is the hardest for me.
Please note the agribusiness portion of the original quote. I would maintain that agribusiness is bad for the environment independent of the meat-eating question. (This is all percolating around in my head because it came up in the regional stereotypes thread.) My father used to farm, and is by no stretch of the imagination a vegetarian, yet is appalled at the destructive nature of much of modern large-scale agriculture in his home state. Large hog lots are the most egregious offenders, with flagrant disregard for the water table. As with so much else, scale becomes a problem. Now, could one condemn meat-eating for driving this form of agriculture? I’m skeptical; even twenty years ago, hog farming in Iowa was much more benign, and I doubt there’s been that much of an uptick in domestic pork consumption. So I would agree that the pollution from agribusiness as it is currently allowed in this country is shocking. However, I would not lay the blame on meat eating itself, but on those who push a laissez faire approach to meat production. We’re already back into Upton Sinclair territory these days.
Sorry, I have to take objection here:
“This is because morality, such as I can understand it, is derived from social contract. There is no meaning to the concepts of right and wrong beyond the humans that create them…It goes without saying that animals cannot be a party to a social contract…”
Does this mean, then, that you can kill and eat a two-year old because that two-year old isn’t smart enough to understand morality and right and wrong? How about a six-month old? What about cannibals who eat deceased relatives? Captured prisoners?
I’m not comparing eating cow to eating baby or Dr. Livingston, of course, but to make the argument that one needs to somehow “understand” right and wrong to take part in a social contract, thus avoiding harm, is ridiculous. People differ wildly on their definitions of morality, does that somehow exempt them from the obligations of society? Do cultural norms factor and the ability to understand or agree with them?
Secondly, to the quote you cite, if one is subjected to repetitive violence against animals, one develops an emotional immunity to it, almost necessarily. The same can be said of violence against people, and how soldiers stay sane in prolonged combat situations.
I’m not making the argument that meat eating is like going to war, but it’s true that the vast majority of meat eaters have never seen a cow killed in a slaughterhouse, and I would venture that the first time that they saw such they would be disgusted. I’m not talking about seeing it on TV, either, I’m talking in person. Of course, if you witnessed this scene multiple times, each time it would become less shocking.
As you may have guessed, I am a vegan. However, I’m not evangelical about it and routinely refuse to engage in debates with omnivores. But I will take exception to those who claim that there is no morality behind my diet, because that is certainly not the case. I understand if it is not a shared morality.
I did note it, mds. I just remain puzzled as to why, say, the fossil fuel industry that produces those faux-leather goods is somehow an easier moral sell than the meat industry that produces a pork chop.
I can’t imagine that even the most benign agricultural vegan society would be able to avoid killing living creatures. Insects and rats eat grain, for instance. Will we evolve a form of sustainable agriculture where all these creatures will be spared ? What about domestic animals that aren’t eaten. A frequent argument for vegetarianism/veganism is that it’s not efficient to get one’s proteins by eating an animal that’s eaten the very grains and legumes a human could consume directly. But animals in the wild, or domestic animals that revert to a wild state, will also be competition for those legumes and grains, will they not ? To get our vegetarian fare, we will have to fight and perhaps starve other living creatures even if we’d rather not.
Questions like these are why I don’t have a problem with vegetarianism or even veganism from an aesthetic standpoint, but I do have severe misgivings about approaching it as an issue of collective morality.
Or maybe I still have a grudge against my old vegetarian roommate from twenty years ago who lectured me constantly about my weekly plate of bacon and eggs while she subsisted on a diet of Campbells soups, orange soda, and cigarettes. :p
I’m not bothered as much by the killng of the animal but by the raising and keeping of it in inhumane conditions. I hate the thought of animals penned in such small spaces that they’re practically unable to move, and the fattening of calves for veal or the force-feeding of geese for fois-gras repels me.
I’ve moved to cage/cruelty-free eggs and am looking for a source of free-range meat. I think I could go at least lacto-ovo vegetarian without too much trouble.
I made a few rules for myself when I was younger: 1)I wouldn’t eat anything that I wouldn’t kill myself if I had to be the one to kill it; 2) I wouldn’t eat anything that was still alive when I put it in my mouth (so no raw oysters or bean sprouts); and 3) I wouldn’t anything that was was produced by gavage feeding (so no foie gras). I wish I could remember my thought process in arriving at these three rules, but I do remember coming up with them while I was exchanging Deep Thoughts with two of my friends who were both vegetarian.
I think the people most likely to change their minds about eating meat from the slaughterhouse tour would be those who have never really connected the meat on their plates with the living animal that meat comes from.
I was a vegetarian for a few years, but eventually quit because I didn’t want people to think I was one of those Peta idiots.
I can’t wrap my mind around this. PETA was the driving force behind your decision on whether or not to be a vegetarian? I can think of several bad analogies, but I will refrain.
As to the morality of killing animals…
I believe that it is immoral. Even when I ate meat, I believed that it was immoral. Animals, as far as I am concerned, are thinking, feeling entities. They have a desire to continue living and they feel pain. The idea that behaviour towards animals falls outside the realm of morality can only happen if the ancient view of animals as unthinking automatons incapable of feeling pain as we know it is held. Or so I am thinking.
None of this should be read to say that there are never times where it is moral. There are always exceptions.
social contract theory is not the only plausible ground for morality — and no, divine command is not the only other alternative. if jedmunds scorns “moral objectivity,” fine, but I can’t imagine that everyone writing in to “agree” with jedmunds also agrees with him that social contract theory is the only defensible moral philosophy. i don’t see that in the comments of the person who stopped being vegetarian for fear of being conflated with PETA supporters, nor the person who worries about the environmental impact of faux-leather.
why assume that all moral patients must be moral agents too? there are plenty of counterexamples even if we stay within the human species — folks in comas and folks with severe cognitive disabilities, for example.
also, why assume that nonhumans are not intelligent enough to contract with? our evidence is largely of the form which demonstrates our practical inability to contract them. I am fairly confident of my practical inability to contract with dolphins, and far less confident that I can’t contract with them because they aren’t SMART enough.
plus, jedmunds says he assumes a social contract with those intelligent enough to explicitly contract with but with whom one cannot, for practical reasons, explicitly contract with. this also would seem to assume some objective morality, since self-interest alone cannot justify such contracts. and finally, plenty of social contract theorists are committed to an objective morality. is it Hobbes or bust, jedmunds?
~
I would agree that squeamishness is not morally significant, but suffering quite plausibly is morally significant. one thing which alienation from the production of our food does is make it easier for us to remain blissfully ignorant about the pain and suffering involved. for omnivores like us, the possibility of choice in diet means that much of this pain and suffering is unnecessary. (And yes, in more than a few places in the world this pain and suffering may not be unnecessary, and so for such folks the argument for vegetarianism doesn’t apply. but that doesn’t get the vast majority of us first-worlders off the hook by association.)
so, here’s the moral intuition at play: unnecessary suffering is bad.
is that so implausible?
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the tone and approach of many animal rights supporters which so many people find off-putting is, frankly, just as morally irrelevant as squeamishness is. and asserting how annoyed one is by arguments for vegetarianism is similarly morally irrelevant. look, i find many pro-life advocates annoying too and I dislike their tone, but those things are not reasons for being pro-choice. Pro-lifers are not wrong because some of them wave noxious posters; they are wrong because women have a right to determine who and what gets access to their bodies.
Djur,
Sometimes I forget that not everyone is as big a Simpsons fan as I am, and will forgive you for taking seriously my closing comment about a cow killing your entire family, seeing as how it was a joking reference to a cartoon show episode about vegetarianism. Now as to the sustainable resource argument, I thought I made it clear that people don’t behave or consume in a sustainable fashion. Now as for your comment:
“I disagree that “meatâ€? tastes better than tofu, and I think it shows ignorance to make the comparison (rather than with more meatlike substances such as tempeh, which tastes far better than any meat, or seitan). That said, is superior flavor really worth the taking of a sentient creature’s life?”
Now this just comes down to personal taste, I’ve had tofu, so I don’t think I’m ignorant in making a personal judgement that a patty of processed bean curd just doesn’t cut it for me personally. I have no idea what tempeh or seitan are, so I’ll plead ignorance on that, but once again this is all just about personal opinion. You think tofu tastes better than meat, I disagree. My post was a bit tongue in cheek, but as far as taking the life of a sentient creature goes, or a state of nature agrument for eating meat, I would argue–once again in my own personal opinion–that there is a spectrum of “sentient life” with humans being at one end and, let’s say, plankton on the other. If you believe that taking the life of any animal is the moral equivelent to taking the life of a person, then by all means be a vegeterain, I don’t think so, so I’m not. Does this make me a monster? Once again, its all just a matter of perspective.
I used that same exact comment about social contracts when discussing this years ago with an angry vegan in a journal entry. Instead of agreeing to disagree at best, she decided never to talk to me again.
Anyway… The arguments against eating meat due to the horrors of the conditions that animals live under does give some sympathy, which is why I try to do my best to get my meat locally as much much as possible. If I knew that the cow was raised on a farm a few miles away, I know it is healthier and was probably treated better. But, I live in a small country town. As far as cities go - that cities exist and can be supported at all is a modern miracle of science, industry, transportation, and labor.
As for the considerations for suffering, which is the main basis for most vegetarians and vegans that I talk to - have those people ever seen the fields that migrant labor tend to? Have they seen those workers up at dawn and working into the night with blistered hands for sub-minimum wage? For most food choices, suffering is involved, particularly the suffering of humans. It is for this reason that I think most vegans are a little intellectually dishonest or, at least, ignorant to the conditions of agricultural work.
Eating, when viewed on a macro scale, is a complicated mess in an industrialized world. Unless you grow everything yourself, or know who grew your food, you are contributing to the mess and are likely partially responsible for the suffering of people and or animals. And if that really bothers you… then grow your own food, or limit the number of children you have.
I can’t buy the “animals can’t participate in the social contract & thus morality can’t apply to them” argument. Real cruelty to animals - like starving them to death, random hacking, beating them, setting them to fight each other to death while betting on the outcome, etc. - are not immoral under this rubric. That ain’t right, and not just because people who do this stuff are often a danger to their fellow humans.
I *especially* don’t understand “they’re not covered by morality/immorality but it’s bad to kill them for no reason.” Huh? How can it be bad if morality doesn’t APPLY?! And - why can only moral agents have morality applied to them? Tit for tat is the only basis for morality?
Yes, I think empathy - the basis of morality, not the social contract or potential moral agency, if you ask me - applies to creatures. Squeamishness about blood & guts (that would be me) is not the same thing though.
We DO have obligations to animals. We domesticate ‘em, we use them, we have a responsibility toward them, and not just our pets. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t eat them; it does mean that we shouldn’t cause suffering. A peaceful life on a grassy pasture (or whatever, depending on species) followed by a quick & reasonably painless death is the ideal. Which we don’t reach, but we should be aiming at it.
And as for creatures in the wild, we live in the same world, we have a responsibility, especially to keep some part of that world able to sustain them in their natural state if we can, though personally I disapprove of creatures thinking of humans as appropriate prey. That’s the potential prey in me speaking though…it’s not a moral edict.
Uh, just because animals don’t speak language doesn’t mean that they don’t have effective moral codes. It’s most obvious with apes and cetaceans, of course, but other social animals will also punish or shun members of their group who do things which harm the group, reward those who do what is desired, and develop friendships , and so forth. Their moral codes may not be as complex or articulated or uniform as human codes, and they may not consider the same things wrong that humans consider wrong. But the simple fact that they live in a social context means that they have to have certain rules for interacting with each other that members of the group are required to uphold in order to maintain group membership. And if that’s not a moral code, then what is?
And when animals start to live in human social contexts, as pets or wildlife or work animals or food animals, then implicit in that fact is the notion that there will be some code governing our interactions. Now, because we’re extraordinarily successful social animals, we’ve got pretty much all the power in the relationship, so it’s almost impossible for animals to force us to live by their codes on any large scale. A dog may bite you if you try to hurt it, but then another human will come along and shoot the dog for being a menace. By and large, they’re powerless to force us to engage with them in the same way they are engaged with us. If we treated humans without the power to protect themselves (children, the physically handicapped) in the same way we treat animals, we’d be called monsters, and rightly so.
Now I’m not necessarily going to say that we should never use animals to suit our purposes, but it seems that if we are truly a moral society, then anything we do to them for our own benefit should be balanced by some corresponding benefit to the individual animals involved. If we’re going to kill them for food, fine, but that means we should provide them a pleasant, predator-free life beforehand, and kill them painlessly when the time comes. We shouldn’t keep them in filthy, uncomfortable conditions, mutilate them painfully, or terrify them as they go to their deaths.
My decision to become flexitarian (awesome word, Becky) was based primarily on concerns about the horrors of factory farming (with a side of environmental worry as well). Now, I know factory farming provides a lot of benefits to humans, too, in that most of us can afford to eat meat on a regular basis because factory farming is so cheap, but I’m not comfortable with those benefits coming at the cost of so much animal suffering. And I think it’s a mark against our society that so many people are comfortable with this. There are plenty of other protein sources which can also be produced cheaply, and it seems like we would be a more moral country (and have a smaller environmental impact) if the cruel methods of factory farming were not legal here.
I’d also like to say that those of you who think meat is intrinsically better-tasting than tofu have probably just had crappy tofu. Almost anything can be delicious if it’s prepared well, or nasty if it’s prepared badly (consider, say, a McDonald’s hamburger, or that hideous pre-packaged lunchmeat). And there are plenty of other vegetarian sources of protein as well, such as seitan, which is made from wheat gluten. I’m not gonna say it’s easy to transition to a vegetarian lifestyle when you’re used to eating meat all the time, since you won’t know what kind of foods you can make, and you have to watch your nutritional balance more closely. But it’s certainly do-able, and we’ll probably all be better off in the long run if more people choose to do it.
Do only “moral agents” suffer? Such a question highlights the awkward gap between one who approaches the question logically and those who look at the question as a spiritual issue.
From the spiritual aspect:
Does your desire for certain tastes (given that a nutritious alternative is available) supercede the desires other beings to avoid suffering and to continue living?
All other arguments are rationalizations for why you don’t want to feel guilty about the things that make you go “yum.”
As a vegetarian, I have no misconceptions regarding any “pure life”. We all live off the death of others. The question is, do we do our utmost to limit whatever killing we are responsible for, or do we rationalize as much as necessary to sanctify our personal tastes and desires, such that the level of killing inherent in the sustenance of our life can be dismissed as a non-factor?
Chances are if your great-grandparents wanted a chicken dinner, either great-grandma or great-grandpa went out to the chicken coop and beheaded somebody.
And if you, your parents or grandparents came from a farm family it’s closer down the lineage than that.
When I was a kid (50 years ago) I remember some suburban families that still kept chickens (and not as pets) — probably because this had been a farming community before sprouting tract homes, or at least, families kept gardens and chickens for their own use.
And I remember several Thanksgivings when my father took us to a local turkey farm so we could choose the bird for our dinner.
Fifty and 100 years ago, there were darn few vegetarians in comparison.
Frankly, I liked being a vegetarian, but went through bouts of flu-like illnesses for the the two years I was a vege. A holistic doctor tested my blood, took hair samples and booga booga pronounced that I was one of those who need to eat meat.
I went back (to organic fed) animals and am feeling healthy again, and only thank the goddess that I don’t have to kill ‘em myself.
Off topic but…Since sietan has been mentioned at least twice by now, I feel the need to point out it’s poison to those with celiac sprue along with all other gluten-containing meat/egg/milk substitutes. Anyone considering going vegan should get tested for this disorder first.
Oh, agreed, Miranda. Killing and eating animals doesn’t bother me in the slightest, but I do take exception to how the vast majority are treated beforehand. If we’re using the language of “natural” in our killing of food, how is mistreating it for its entire life “natural,” even within the context of historical human farming?
And I just gave up in trying to find affordable, free-range meat and converted to vegetarianism somewhat recently. Trying to find out if restaurants use free-range is an exercise in futility, too, especially in chain restaurants. Fortunately for me, I’ve never been a fan of eggs, so I guess I’m just lacto-veg?
smelmoth:
Because for you, the pleasure of moral superiorty and the rationalizations toward achieving it are more important than the pleasure of eating. Suit yourself, but it’s no wonder that omnivores roll their eyes when we hear this sort of thing. You are not, in fact, living your life bereft of pleasure in a way that the unwashed around you cannot imagine. You are merely re-orienting or re-prioritizing your own pleasures, and calling that superiority.
I agree with others that factory farming is grotesque. I also agree that the U.S. mainstream culture is obsessed with meat, and lots of it, as the central focus of meals. I dislike this because it means, to me, an aesthetically diminished life and a wasteful one as well. But that’s just my personal opinion, and I’d rather try to persuade doubters with a kick-ass stir-fry than through lecturing them about what they are and are not rationalizing.
I probably wouldn’t eat meat if I had to kill my own turkeys, but I probably wouldn’t eat vegetables if I had to raise my own corn either.
If you claim that rights depend on the ability to assert them, then animals don’t have rights. But on that basis, neither do infants. We get around that problem by claiming the existence of certain rights that inhere to humans qua humans.
On the other hand, while animals don’t have rights I claim we nevertheless have responsibilities towards them, including but not limited to a responsibility to not cause unnecessary suffering - for whatever value of “unnecessary” you wish. (That’s why I feed my pets, make sure they’re properly vaccinated, and have them euthanized when they are in intractable pain, and why I buy my poultry from a processor that raises them free-roaming.)
My 0.02.
Deborah- I really like what you pointed out about entering into an implicit ‘contract’ with an animal when we take a pet. That is something I’ve always felt but you expressed it very clearly.
I do agree that eating animals is an amoral act. It’s an act of survival- human beings are animals, whether that makes us feel all icky inside or not. Personally, I often feel I have more in common with a dog than a rabid chickenhawk Bush voter. And while dogs don’t feel guilty for running down a rabbit when they need to eat, they do in some way feel a taboo or a restriction on eating their own kind (in most circumstances- hunger and starvation change the playing field for every species, and for humans culture can alter our behavior.)
I have witnessed animals being butchered and cleaned for meat and hides. I don’t like (and would rather change) the conditions many animals are kept in prior to their deaths, but I also don’t believe that every act of taking animal life to feed one’s self can be callous or thoughtless.
Cruelty, on the other hand, I object to instinctively, but also on a logical basis: it serves no purpose. It makes sense to kill a cow and eat steak and dress yourself in leather. It’s fulfilling your needs. But setting stray cats on fire ? Serves only a twisted sense of pleasure. It is, and someone will probably kill me for this, like rape- it’s about power, exerting a sick dominance over something that is helpless. I think that’s why it’s so repugnant to us- while we may not be able to enter into a moral contract with every passing pigeon, we are often beholden to a moral contract with ourselves. I wouldn’t watch a stray dog be tortured any more than I would watch a child be abused. I can’t live like that.
Just because this seems to have gone unquestioned so far, it’s worth pointing out that not believing in some objective, eternal morality floating out in the ether doesn’t mean you have to believe that “morality…is derived from social contract.” I don’t believe in moral realism either, but the social contract theory (in morality and in politics as well) has always seemed totally implausible to me. For one thing, it’s a total fiction, since no one ever has the chance to choose or reject the contract. For another, lots of people who couldn’t seriously enter into a contract (social or otherwise) still have political and moral standing — kids, retarded people, etc.
I tend to think of moral questions as analogous to aesthetic ones — you can discuss them coherently, and sometimes even convince people (especially those who share some more basic assumptions) that you’re right, but there’s no objective right answer floating out there in the world.
A large part of morality comes from seeing oneself as more-or-less similar to another creature, which makes harm to that other creature repugnant in this quasi-aesthetic sense. (And the circle of similarity has gotten wider as we have come to see more and more groups — the other sex, other races, people of other sexual orientations — as more-or-less similar to ourselves.)
I don’t see most animals as relevantly similar to humans in most respects, which is why I don’t object to killing animals for food. I do see a small reflection of humanity though in the fear and pain felt by animals in modern slaughterhouse conditions, and so those conditions do bother me morally (though I don’t do nearly enough to stop them).
I believe we, humans, are the stewards of this earth. As such, we owe the earth, its environment, and its residents, including the animals, respectful treatment and care.
I am not yet convinced that such respectful stewardship requires vegetarianism, but I do think that those of us who consume animals and animal products owe it to ourselves (the examined life & all) to become aware of what process the animal went through to get to us. To remain intentionally oblivious to this … well, why not just rent an apartment in a suburban mall somewhere and spend the rest of your life in air-conditioned, plastic comfort listening to Muzak and eating soma?
An obligation of respect for the earth and its creatures can be derived ultimately from self-interest — take care of the earth or it’ll “take care” of you, etc.
Additionally, whether it’s innate or learned, we all know there’s something really wrong when someone hurts animals for fun or for no good reason. You can feel it in the guilt-queasy pit of your stomach.
Apart from the “I know it ‘cause I feel it” approach, there are numerous authorities who have studied animals (pets and others) and concluded that animals think and have emotion. Animals are sentient beings, deserving of better than vivisection (a la Descartes) or worse.
I just don’t buy the theory that humans’ treatment of animals is outside morality.
I don’t know how much sense this will make since I am so fervently upset by we’ll see if it comes out coherent.
Wow, I have to say I am disappointed at the comments left so far with a few exceptions.
I was a true meat lover. T-bone steak and lamb roasts are some of the best damn tasting things on the planet. I lived with two vegetarians for almost a year and continued to consume meat. I knew that PETAs site would bother me as I have revulsion to cruelty and suffering in every situation from Animal Cops to Surgery shows. I could shoot someone in the head to end their suffering before I could cut the same person open to save their life. Illogical but suffering bothers me in a big way. SO I stayed away from PETA.
Now I made all the same arguments to my vegetarian friends, I value all life, I feel bad pulling weeds (they were the lucky survivors of the desert in which I live and now I am yanking them out or the ground). Either plant or animal you are killing life… People since we crawled out of the proverbial puddle have eaten both plant and meat… Then buy free range meat… blah blah blah.
Then I ended up on Milk Gone Wild’s website.
I installed a low-flow shower head and recycle my sink water to water the plants. By eating one less steak a year you save something like 30,000 gallons of water. You could leave the water on while your brush for the rest of your life! So many resources go into raising that animal to the gas consumption to cart it off to be slaughtered. How many resources does it take to just eat the corn you were going to feed to that cow? How much corn would I have to eat to be full as apposed to the amount of corn the cow would consume its entire life before I could eat part of it and get full? For economic and environmental reasons meat-free wins big.
But more than that, the animals are raised in terrible conditions, go to PETA and look at the videos of how these animals are kept, raised, denied medical treatment. Look at dairy cows pumped so full of hormones that their udders are tearing off from the weight, they can’t stand up because their bones are leached of so much calcium.
Even “free-range” eggs have to dispose of all the male chicks that are born. They toss them alive into huge plastic bags and throw them in dumpsters, dumpster after dumpster. Or else they grind them up alive and feed them back to their mothers and sisters.
We have a choice. We can choose to eat other things. That is what makes us different from the animals; we don’t have to rely on whatever is available. Pigs are like dogs, they can be taught to sit and lie down, and come, they answer to their names and yet we carve them up and eat them. Yet we are apposed to eating a dog because it is blessed with a tail that can wag?
I threw out my cheese that day and just ate my tomato and basil alone. I have been vegan since and yes, I miss steak. But I found a lot of other things that taste amazing. In fact my doctor took a full blood panel last month; I had been vegan for 3 months. My protein was great, my cholesterol was great. The only thing they said wasn’t fantastic was my alcohol consumption was low.
You make this into such an abstract discussion about morals and animals being on a moral plan which is all just a bogus excuse to ignore the facts of the situation. You like meat and you don’t want to give it up because you think it would be a hardship. And I am tired of hearing the same “but I’m not a crazy PETA going loony vegetarian” crap. You are doing the same thing that you harp on people for in feminist posts. They say they are feminist but not a “radical” feminist and then go on to bash feminism.
Just because you don’t want to hear it (like global warning or animal cruelty) doesn’t mean you should shoot the messenger (scientists or PETA). Just admit that you don’t have the courage enough to take the leap to do something about it, like petitioning and lobbying and donating to help fight animal cruelty. What makes it wrong to torture one animal but right to torture thousands?
I honestly don’t get how ability to enter into a social contract is the basis for the immorality of mistreating/killing humans. Maybe I just don’t have a clear grasp of what you mean by social contract here. Why would the fact that my dogs don’t understand the human concept of right/wrong make it ok for me to kill my dog on a whim?
IMO, it’s not a question of understanding. It’s a question of interests. Animals have a interest in remaining alive, they actively avoid pain and discomfort (when possible) and they experience fear. Why do we have a right to cause pain, to override animals’ interest in life if it is just a matter of taste and not of survival?
I was a vegetarian for 6 years. I became a vegetarian for a couple of reasons. Environmental impacts from mass-scale meat production agribusinesses are enormous. The biggest problems are the inefficiency of growing and transporting feed, as well as the management of waste. Also, large-scale meat production is inhumane, not only to animals, but also to the underpaid, non-unionized, and often non-English speaking slaughterhouse workers.
I’m not a vegetarian anymore because I started feeling tired and sick all of the time and had some serious and yucky digestive reactions to too much insoluble fiber (sorry, gross but true). Plus, I realized that I had remained a vegetarian for a while because I was afraid to lose that part of my identity–which included feeling morally superior to the meat-eaters. Yes, I’m ashamed, but I will admit it.
But my husband is a butcher (and was when I was a vegetarian, by the way), so I only eat meat that he has cut. We are hoping to get a deep freeze soon so we can buy local, grain-fed beef and pork.
The point is, don’t be wasteful, don’t be cruel, and don’t be an asshole who doesn’t realize where his/her meat comes from. When you buy meat from Wal-Mart, you have not only participated in the death and unnecessary suffering of an animal, you have contributed to pollution, the agribusiness complex, the abuse of the working poor, and the destruction of the neighborhood business. I’ve never eaten a steak that’s worth it.
I’m with J-ha and Jeremy Bentham: “The question is not can they think, but can they suffer.”
Well, having watched my dad fight for years to keep the squirrels out of his bird feeders, I can say with some assurance that there is at least some level of abstract reasoning going on among those little ninja tree rats of Watrous Rd.
I do eat animals, though I haven’t always. Given the choice, I’d rather kill my meal myself, and I’d rather eat an animal that had a life before it came to me. Agribusiness for obvious and legion reasons, rather disgusts me.
As for morality, I suppose that’s why I eat chickens, which I hate (mean, nasty awful filthy post-dinosaurs that they are) and fish (of which I am phobic).
I don’t think it’s fair to assume that folks who choose to be vegan or vegetarian are ignorant of the manual labor that goes into producing most food, nor of the labor that goes into making clothes or pretty much anything else that we consume. We live in a highly-industrialized global culture that is deeply oppressive to many creatures.
But by your logic, vegans and vegetarians are discredited because they’re focusing on non-human animal suffering rather than human suffering. Everyone makes their own compromises in this complicated world. Everyone chooses the issues that they want to focus on; it doesn’t mean that they don’t care about the others, just that there simply isn’t enough energy to focus on all of them at once.
And again, don’t assume that vegans and vegetarians don’t care. There are vegans and vegetarians who are labor organizers.
sorry, didn’t make that clear: that was directed to Will.
I have killed some of the animals I ate: fish, deer, pheasants and even a few rabbits. I was taught how to clean the carcass properly so the meat would be tender and not gamey. You’re right, Amanda, that it is not a big deal and most people would quickly loose their squeamishness.
The argument against eating meat that moves me is the inefficiency of it. On a planet we already overpopulate and over use, getting 300 pounds of meat out of the energy and acreage that could produce several tons of soybeans is a luxury the rich afford at the cost of the hungry and at the cost of future generations who will look back on our diet as extravagant. Eating is necessary but dietary choices are cultural, enduringly cultural. Ours are a hold over from an era when the only way europeans could have protien year round was to smoke the meat or to keep it on the hoof and feed it what did keep: hay. Its more complex than just that but you get the idea: we don’t have to be this wasteful, we WANT to eat these things and habits will die hard. Instead of a life of being overfed and overmedicated and killed quickly in its prime, you typical cow would simply never have lived at all if we went vegitarian. But a lot more humans would eat well once we redefine it as eating nutritious as opposed to comforting and status enforcing foods.
I am also starting to avoid mammals in the hopes that the less genes I share with my food, the fewer of its diseases can afflict me. Probably just whistling past the McDonalds.
Let’s be honest; the reasons to go vegan or vegetarian are pretty damn compelling. But basically, aside from the issue of animal cruelty (which is a big one, I agree), they are no different than the arguments against mass-scale production of food in general. Or mass-scale production of anything.
I think that we all make compromises to live in this society. We do things that we know are morally wrong for our own pleasure and/or convenience. And that’s fucked up.
I don’t notice animal rights activists getting up in arms about all the animals that are killed to produce their vegetables. Won’t somebody please think of the fall armyworm?
I would love to know the plan for 5% of the population to feed the other 95% without modern agriculture or mass production. Why don’t you enlighten us poor idiots who actually work in agriculture as to how we should do our jobs.
Oh, by the way, did you guys know that cows’ consumption of corn is what causes e-coli? If companies would feed cattle either grass or grain within the last two weeks of their lives (not even their ENTIRE lives, just the last two weeks), there would be no risk of anyone getting sick from e-coli.
Nerdgirl:
I think it’s safe to say on a feminist website that many vegetarians object to PETA because of their misogynistic ad campaigns, and the fact that Newkirk is indeed a show-boating asshole.
Perhaps we omnivores do, as you acuse, lack “courage,” in your chosen field of pursuing justice, but it doesn’t follow that we don’t have our own humane causes that we feel every bit as committed to as you do to your own. If you don’t want people to lump you in with so-called “loonies,” you might want to keep that in mind the next time you feel like penning a sermon.
Nymphalidae–I’m not arguing against modern agriculture, and I should be more clear when I talk about the harms of mass-production. I apologize–I was using imprecise language. My problem is with large national agribusinesses that are not stupid; in fact, the people that run them are very smart. They are just short-sided and greedy. I think our country would be much better off with many, many smaller farms owned by individuals and families in which people are paid respectful, living wages, and where animals are slaughtered by farmers and sold in local markets by local butchers. We can do it without Tyson and Cargill and Monsanto.
As to the PETA issue, I think they’re right to point out the pointless cruelty against animals, but I have to take serious issue with their official position that any and all scientific testing on animals is immoral and should be illegal. I think in a rational and yes, moral society we should be able to make a distinction between testing cosmetics on animals or other useless and pointlessly cruel practices like that, but in my opinion it is just as immoral to say that legitimate scientists shouldn’t be able to infect animals with diseases for the express purpose of creating a vaccine or treatment for those diseases. The sacrifice of animals to expand our knowledge of disease or the natural world, I think is a worthy one. Infecting an unsuspecting Chimp with the AIDS virus is disturbing, but if there is even a remote chance that the research done will one day lead to an AIDS vaccine I think any moral person would say that while its sad, the death of that ape is a worthy tradeoff. Although I’d be interested to see what other people think.
wearing faux leather does not imply tacit approval of environmetally destructive meat farming. yes, petroleum products, water, and other resources are necessary to the production of footwear of both the real and faux leather variety. Since we don’t eat our shoes, that has nothing to do with the environmental impact of raising beef for food.
Most beef, even organic beef, is grain fed- corn and soybeans. We don’t get 100% of those calories back as meat. Some of those calories go into growing hooves and horns and internal organs which most people don’t eat. It’s more environmentally friendly to grow the corn and soybeans for human consumption. We wouldn’t need to grow as much, so we would use less land, less water and fewer pesticides. Crops don’t produce methane as a by product, and they don’t poop.
Cows are ruminants. They don’t need a source of protein in their diets as they can synthesize what they need. The sustainable way to grow beef is to feed it things that humans can’t eat - grass and inedible leaves and stems from crops grown for humans. This does result in less available feed and less available meat. So we can’t eat as much meat as we are used to. I think civilization will survive.
I see something a bit different in Erik Loomis’s point than a lot of you, but it’s pretty jumbled, so I think both interpretations have equal merit. I just wanted to throw another one out there.
A lot of people seem to think he’s saying merely that if people had to watch animals killed at all, they’d stop eating meat at all. This is, admittedly, what it looks like he’s saying in a few parts.
But, in a few other parts, he seems to me to be saying that if people had to watch the animals they currently eat killed in the way they are, they’d stop eating meat processed in that way (and, this being by far the most widely available option in an industrialized society, essentially stop eating meat altogether).
Like I said, the point is pretty jumbled, so both interpretations have merit and both fall apart in places, but I thought it deserved mention.
Oh, and Nymphalidae, according to my internet posting principles, I really should have just ignored you, because this “I don’t notice animal rights activists getting up in arms about all the animals that are killed to produce their vegetables. Won’t somebody please think of the fall armyworm?” is a bad argument and you know it.
I don’t notice animal rights activists getting up in arms about all the animals that are killed to produce their vegetables. Won’t somebody please think of the fall armyworm?
*Yawn*
Is there some kind of playbook of dumbass arguments against animal rights out there?
So far we’ve covered
1) Plants are alive tooooo!
2)Animal Rights activists don’t care/are ignorant about human oppression.
3)Veg*ns aren’t absolute 100% pure in terms of environmental or animal harm and therefore are hypocrites.
Seriously, of course we can’t stop all animal death. Even Jainists don’t manage it.How that is somehow an argument for not trying to lessen animal suffering and death doesn’t make any sense to me.
That’s like ridiculing someone for not shopping at wal-mart because every single one of their purchases isn’t made in perfect working conditions.
I think the social contract and moral argument is getting muddy here. We aren’t in a social contract with animals. They’re not part of our civic life. They aren’t citizens inthe sense that other humans are. I am not saying that they’re not part of our social lives or that we don’t have deep, personal attachments to them. But they can not be part of the social-ethical agreements that humans make with each other. By human I mean developing ones (like infants and children, though not fetuses) and incompetent ones (through disability, senility, or mental disease).
The social contract is a human one, made between humans. This doesn’t mean that we can’t make ethical choices about beings and things outside that contract. When we treat animals well, when we avoid causing unnecessary pain as a moral or ethical choice, we’re doing it for ourselves, for our sense of what is right. We’re not doing it because we’re in a reciprocal agreement with animals to act in certain ways. I don’t doubt that my much beloved cats would eat me if I died and the dry food gave out, though I can’t imagine any circumstance that would enable me to eat them
If animals are moral agents (a really dubious assertion and how would anyone know?) their morality probably differs a great deal from anything I would recognize and mine would make no sense to them
Well, it seems that an understanding of what social contracts are and how they function is needed.
The concept of a social contract, firstly, has nothing to do with morality. Social contract theorists came to be originally by looking for a reason that people should work together and obey laws that is not steeped in the divinity of the king as law system (Grotius and Thomas Hobbes). The value of social contract thinking is that it established a system for people to live together through a system of laws based on rights.
Now, rights are a tricky system. There are two kinds of rights. There are freedom-from rights and freedom-to rights. For instance, I have a freedom-from right to enjoy life without getting killed by a stranger who wants to steal my wallet. I have a freedom-to right to pursue working in any job that I like. As much as we like to think of our rights (see: U.S. Constition - Bill of Rights) as Freedom-to rights, they are all actually freedom-from rights. The Constitution establishes that we are able to have free speech, due process in courts, and so forth and the legislature creates penalties for violating these rights. In this sense, rights are only rights because there are counter-incentives to act against those rights.
Someone wrote about how social contracts don’t make sense because people don’t really get to choose whether they enter the contracts or not… and that is fundamentally true. Rights established in a social contract start with the generation that established those rights and we are grandfathered into those rights as citizens of that nation. The reason we continue to have these rights is that we work to keep these rights from being eroded (which is why it is important to pay attention to what our government is doing!).
Social contracts are essentially based in the concept of fear: I do not want these things happening to me, so we’ll create a system of laws that everyone can agree upon to make me feel more secure (protection from the state of nature in which anything goes, and freedom-to actions dominate everything: meaning anyone can kill, steal, etc. at will). Most of our rights established in the Bill of Rights are a direct response to the fears we had from what life was like under the tyrannical rule of King George.
Understanding that, animals are certainly excluded from social contracts for obvious reasons. Animals are not citizens, they certainly can never vote nor advocate for themselves.
Now, none of these things precludes people from making personal choices for animals, advocating for animals, and so forth. But fundamentally, animals do not have the tools to enter a social contract, and due to their obvious utility, are viewed more as property than conscious agents capable of self-determination. I’m ok with that.
I know that animals have emotions and experience pain, and I’m all for proposed reform of the meat industry. Legally and logically I can understand that. But to claim that animals have fundamental rights similar to what we’ve created for ourselves with our social contracts seems like a major stretch for me.
Hopefully this discussion will help one to understand the fundamental difference between babies in a social contract and animals in a social contract.
Morality is not based on social contracts, but as I tend to agree with Nietzsche on - it shouldn’t be based on anything other than our personal views. Laws, which regulate behavior, should reflect the views of the citizens of the society - and thus, an amalgamate view of collective morality. Even with special considerations towards minorities, animals still will have a tough time entering into this system of laws towards freedom-from rights. That we have animal cruelty laws at all suggests compassion beyond what is necessary for a society to function well (though I appreciate these laws).
Discussions based on how we should treat animals and our system of food is important for the future of our society, but I will continue to argue that it is pretty damned difficult to argue with a sense of consistency that animals have, or deserve to have, rights guaranteed by a social contract based on what I’ve stated above. There may be other considerations for animals, but those are going to be found in avenues outside of social contract/rights thinking… and potentially even traditional morality thinking. I think the only real appeals that will have any success will have a utilitarian bent to them that will include considerations about the safety of our food (the crappy conditions of livestock in industrial plants makes food less safe to eat), and dietary concerns related to fostering healthier lives with more balanced diets - perhaps which could be linked to things such as insurance rates, and other incentives to eat better. But for a national push towards total vegetarianism in the legal arena - I just don’t see it happening.
Squeamishness is no indicator of morality.
But it’s as far as I’ll agree.
I find the “social contract” approach to morality to be outlandish. It restricts the ‘observation’ of morality to an external metaphysical framework (in the case of morality) and on fully internalized impulses (in the case of charity and ethics?).
What both have in common is that they put the actual consequences of actions out of consideration.
As far as I’m concerned it’s a very tortured form of willful ignorance.
“I don’t notice animal rights activists getting up in arms about all the animals that are killed to produce their vegetables. Won’t somebody please think of the fall armyworm?”
You make several wild assumptions. An “ARA” (and I’m sure you apply that term as loosely as I do now) isn’t obligated not to consider living organisms in a sort of hierarchy, even if they refuse establishing the Barrier of Absolute Convenience between human beings and everything else. An “ARA” doesn’t necessarily believe that all harm can be avoided. The notion of harm being justified to different degrees come into play in an actual consideration of ethics.
“A frequent argument for vegetarianism/veganism is that it’s not efficient to get one’s proteins by eating an animal that’s eaten the very grains and legumes a human could consume directly. But animals in the wild, or domestic animals that revert to a wild state, will also be competition for those legumes and grains, will they not ? To get our vegetarian fare, we will have to fight and perhaps starve other living creatures even if we’d rather not.”
This doesn’t make sense. We’re growing grains specifically for human consumption, not depleting what already grows “in the wild.” Further, having grown up in an orchard, I can tell you that said orchard did in fact contribute to feeding local wildlife. No matter how you cut it, the facts are clear: it’s way more efficient & eco-friendly to eat a vegetarian/vegan diet than to eat meat.
Further: Read Fast Food Nation. You’ll see that the workers in the slaughterhouses are not exactly better off than those picking fruit for a living.
Obviously there’s human suffering involved in growing vegetation, but this is not that different from any other industry. My mother is physically exhausted after cleaning houses, as I’m sure janitors, truck drivers, etc., are after a hard day’s work. It’s disingenuous to claim that human suffering in the business of raising crops is the same as killing animals. A better comparison would be farm workers vs. slaughterhouse workers.
There’s a clear difference between killing necessary to live (plants, crop pests) and killing to gain pleasure (livestock in large societies).
The social contract is just a facade for “I do what brings me the most benefit.” That is the basis of all human actions.
Katie, my masters advisor works for Monsanto. Do you have any idea how much research at universities and the USDA is funded - in whole or in part - by companies like Monsanto? No, because instead of educating yourself, you believe whatever the pamphlets at your environmental rallies say. I realize it’s troublesome to actually learn the science or to bother to speak with experts. It’s pretty obvious to anybody with any experience in the field that you don’t have a clue, but keep on keepin’ on. Everybody has to have a cause, I guess.
“There’s a clear difference between killing necessary to live (plants, crop pests) and killing to gain pleasure (livestock in large societies).”
That’s sounds almost exactly like the argument that “there’s a clear difference between having sex to procreate and having sex for pleasure.”
“That’s sounds almost exactly like the argument that ‘there’s a clear difference between having sex to procreate and having sex for pleasure.’”
Now that’s a little grotesque.
The similarity is very superficial, or else any line of thought that an harmful act can be justified by its necessity is disqualified. The problem with the anti-sex arguments is the notion that sex is harmful.
For me, which animals I will eat is based primarily on sentiency, or at least my knowledge/perception of it (I try to stay on top of the science, but it’s not my fulltime job). While a tad flip, I tend to say that if I’ve known and/or worked with people who are about as smart as average animal X (dolphin, squid, pig, whale, octopus, pig, elephant, etc), I probably won’t eat that animal. Beef, on the other hand, I don’t eat because I don’t trust the FDA and US agribusiness to keep BSE out of the food supply, and because I don’t endorse rainforest clearcutting.
When I was a kid (50 years ago) I remember some suburban families that still kept chickens (and not as pets)
Still happens.
Yet we are apposed to eating a dog because it is blessed with a tail that can wag?
In some parts of the world, it’s quite common to eat dog. In fact, people in other parts of the world eat animals that we think are off limits.
I have less of a problem with killing animals than factory farming, which is fucking perverse. I have no problem with hunting (if done responsibly, not the “let’s shoot anything that moves school), eating meat, eggs, or dairy, or wearing down, wool, leather or fur (though fur isn’t my style). When my father was young, he used to go hunting with his uncle and cousins up in northern Maine; that’s how they got their meat for the winter.
Finally, about PETA–the reason why people don’t like them isn’t because they’re passionate about animal rights. I can respect that. It’s the misogynistic drek in their ads (women as half nekkid decorations, never saw THAT coming), their anti-fat bullshit (omigawd! like eating meat makes you so fat!!! Ewwwww!) and the ads that trivialize things like, oh, the Holocaust and slavery and shark attack victims and binge drinking.
Oh, and for you anti-tofu folks–TOFU IS DELICIOUS! Jeez. Eat it with a nice tangy ponzu dipping sauce. Yum. Just don’t treat it like it’s meat. And I beg you, don’t put it in a casserole. I’ve seen it done, and it wasn’t pretty. Or tasty for that matter. Made me pretty damn anti-tofu until I lived in Japan.
“Now that’s a little grotesque.
The similarity is very superficial, or else any line of thought that an harmful act can be justified by its necessity is disqualified. The problem with the anti-sex arguments is the notion that sex is harmful.”
It’s just an observation that struck me. You all can choose what you think of it.
“The notion of harm being justified to different degrees come into play in an actual consideration of ethics.”
I consider living things in a hierarchy also. I won’t eat a chimp, but I’ll eat a cow. Chimps can communicate. Cows are too stupid to dig through the snow to get to the grass. So why is your measurement of degrees any better than anybody else’s? Why can’t we all just eat what we want and mind our own business? Probably for the same reason Evangelical Christians aren’t content to merely not use condoms, they have to make sure nobody else uses them either.
I’ve never liked this argument about how if everyone actually killed what they ate, we’d all be vegetarians. If I grew up killing animals for meat, dealing with the blood and the gore, the bone and the skin, I wouldn’t be squeamish about doing it today. In fact, if I started butchering animals tomorrow, I bet I’d become accustomed to the task surprisingly quickly. Most anyone would.
Yes, that’s called “desensitisation”, and it is the cause of torture, murder, and many other things we find awful. It’s no surprise that this applies to nonhuman animals as well.
But the thing is, thanks to the benefits of division of labor in this wonderfully modern society of ours
Uh, hello? Since when does “we can mass murder! Pack ‘em in tighter!” = modern?
, I’ve never had to kill the animals I’ve consumed. Someone else does that while I do some other menial job,
Which makes you a coward — you can’t face your victim.
and thanks to some law of economics or other, everyone gets more stuff than if we all produced our own necessities and luxuries ourselves.
.. Except the animals. They get a life of sheer misery, pain, and torment.
Hooray!
“Hooray for oppression!”
So what’s the difference if I’d be squeamish about it in this context? And is squeamishness the equivalent of morality now? I’d be squeamish about performing heart surgery too.
Squeamishness is not the issue — it’s ethics. Are you willing to be a coward, to never face WHAT YOU PERPETRATE? You, not someone else as in the case of heart surgery. Get this straight: IT IS YOU THAT IS SUPPORTING TORTURE.
I do not know how morality enters this conversation anyway. Killing animals and eating them seems to me to be a perfectly amoral thing.
Torturing them is not amoral. You are assuming that these animals actually have some sort of life before they face an agonising death — and agonising deaths I don’t much care about, but when you are essentially keeping creatures in slavery, then it’s wrong.
I’d go so far as to say that not eating animals is not morally better than eating them.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3251419433163515470&q=earthlings
Watch that. ALL OF IT. And THEN you can say it’s not morally better.
I can’t figure out how it can be. Not without taking some kind of leap of faith about the existence of an august and objective moral code discernible by reason or otherwise.
So torture isn’t wrong? Strange for a “progressive”. Oh wait, that’s right, progressives are AGAINST slavery and oppression, they don’t SUPPORT IT.
I don’t believe in such a thing. I cannot understand the basis for extending even the concept of morality to animals. This is because morality, such as I can understand it, is derived from social contract.
Animals have social law, i.e. social morality. You lose.
There is no meaning to the concepts of right and wrong beyond the humans that create them.
You are misguided. See above. Social law = morality. All social animals have social law.
It goes without saying that animals cannot be a party to a social contract, though I would extend it to animals or beings intelligent enough to be a theoretical party to the social contract (that is you can assume a social contract with a being intelligent enough to enter one, even if practically speaking it cannot do so).
It does not go without saying; it is, in fact, bigoted and simply incorrect to believe that. Plenty of animals are party to social contracts — and simply because you, as a human, cannot understand them, DOES NOT MEAN YOU GET TO HURT THEM.
And since animals cannot be party to the social contract, we owe them no moral obligations.
Incorrect.
Since we owe them no moral obligations, it cannot be immoral to eat them.
Incorrect due to an incorrect premise.
I’m skipping the rest. Quite simply, you are wrong because you make the assumption that animals do not have morality because you have been told that is so. And yet animals have social law that is quite cultural, which serves as a basis for the thought that they have morality.
Logic dictates you kill yourself or stop calling yourself a progressive. Progressives are against oppression.
Becky:
First of all, I read it. Second of all, no strawmen, please. I said nothing about field laborers having it softer than slaughterhouse laborers, or vice versa. I do recall arguing that if you consume a product made of fossil fuels, you are contributing to the death of animals for your own comfort and aesthetic pleasure. For that matter, land allocated to fossil fuel production is land that can’t be cultivated for soybeans, as surely as soybeans fed to animals cannot be fed to humans. I remain unconvinced that there’s anything more morally gray about my once-a-week free-range hamburger than there is about a vegan’s pair of pleather shoes.
A vegan in pleather shoes could endure some more inconvenience and less pleasure to make his/her pursuit of justice more single-minded, and so could I. However, each of us chose our cut-off point in the pleasure-vs.-politics equation, which is how most decisions are made IRL. Nearly everyone is weighing pleasure, customs, and habit when they decide what to consume. I don’t see how it’s avoidable.
See my point above about soybean fields. Cultivated land is not wild land, regardless of where the cultivated product ends up. Every time a field is created, wild land disappears. And even the most dilligent, responsible organic farmer can’t bring in a crop without killing, repelling, or pushing out some form of animal life.
I buy local and cruelty-free products when I can afford to. That’s going to have to do for now.
Nymphalidae–I do know how much money Monsanto gives to research. I work at a school that has had a massive amount of money donated by Monsanto.
I appreciate that. And I understand its importance.
Wal-Mart gives us a lot of money, too. That doesn’t mean that I have to like the company’s actions.
And, honestly, I don’t think I’ve ever been to an environmental rally in my life…
One of my platforms for a better America is that everyone should have to shoot an animal once in high school, skin it and cook it.
It would be done to show people the power of guns, thus a gun safety measure to draw down gun violence, and to show people a respect for the food chain they are disassociated from due to eating out of boxes all the time.
“I consider living things in a hierarchy also.”
But your argument, the “killing pests is wrong” argument obviously rests on the assumption that ARAs systematically don’t possess such a hierarchy. So I was lead to think that perhaps you didn’t hold this notion very dearly.
“So why is your measurement of degrees any better than anybody else’s? Why can’t we all just eat what we want and mind our own business? Probably for the same reason Evangelical Christians aren’t content to merely not use condoms, they have to make sure nobody else uses them either.”
Because I believe my reasoning is better (altough such a comparison isn’t the point of my participation in this discussion). It’s simple. And I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. I feel you also think your measurements are better than mine.
And what constitutes “minding our own business”? I don’t recall calling for legal measures to force you to conform to my moral judgment. We’re simply discussing this. Frankly, I find the comparison with Evangelical Christians to be offensive, and the comparison with birthcontrol to be factually incorrect.
The fact that you rely on a hierarchy of living things for moral evaluation purposes indicates that you don’t think that this is some arbitrarily amoral zone. The use of condoms is, virtually, an amoral zone. Using a condom causes no real harm. Less than killing a worm, in fact.
What we eat is not of so little consequence.
Tofu is gross, sorry folks. I’ve had it prepared by friends and Japanese chefs alike and the only way I can stand it is in miso soup. I suspect it’s one of those foods that contains a nasty-tasting chemical that only some people can detect, like brussel sprouts.
The animals hate our freedom. The animals have attempted to purchase quantities of yellow cake uranium. The animals have quantities of wmds that can reach us in 45 minutes.
If the animals don’t disarm, we must serve them as burgers with melted cheese.
The social contract only has meaning if everyone who participates in it starts from a premise of being the best possible person they can be, I think. “Best” not necessarily in a moral judgment way, but more in the sense of being the fullest expression of the kind of person they want to be. I want to be the kind of person who does the least possible harm (and the most possible good) to the world in which I live - including the people, animals, plants, and other assorted participants. So my contribution to the social contract starts from that premise - the other people involved in the social contract are almost irrelevant.
Which means animals & the question of their inherent morality is almost irrelevant too. I want to be the kind of person who avoids inflicting suffering - so I need to have actual, meaningful knowledge of what it means (every step of the process, including working conditions, manner of killing, etc) to have a slab of meat on my plate in order to be that kind of person & to fully participate in the social contract. That’s my responsibility. I’m not saying that vegetarianism is a moral good; you can certainly extend the argument to include working conditions, harm to land, etc., in farming generally. I’m saying that the real touchstone, to me, is whether or not one is making a fully-informed, conscious decision about what you eat and where it comes from.
Division of labor does not have to mean “factory farm”–even before factory farms existed, there were plenty of people who didn’t kill the animals they ate. And while you may not like killing animals for food, I submit that people who do eat meat aren’t engaging in torture; nor are people who hunt for their food, or raise and kill animals on small family farms. Not killing the animals one eats doesn’t make one a coward–it makes one a product of this society. Most people do not know how to use a bow and arrow or a rifle, and do not live in places where hunting is feasible. Modern urban and suburban living does not give one the chance to raise and kill ones own animals for sustenance.
I have killed my own food, and I’ve heard people rail on and on about how evil I was for bluefishing or someone else for hunting while they munched happily away at factory-raised chicken. But frankly, my catching bluefish and eating what I caught doesn’t put me on par with a torturer. Factory farming, it ain’t.
I don’t think humans shape their behavior according to moral considerations. In that, I don’t see that non-human animals are any different.
Very glib, and very silly. Morality is (at the very least) a consideration (positive or negative) in much human behavior. It isn’t in animal behavior. You can draw whatever conclusion you want from the reality that animals are not moral agents, but you can’t make a convincing case that they are.
Your statement that it’s somehow all right to kill an animal for a reason but not for no reason places an arbitrary value on that animal’s life: somewhat more than “some sadistic fun� and less than “a few good meals for a human.�
Yeah, pretty much. So what?
Sheelzebub:
I love tofu. Even in those Imagine pudding mixes, but I don’t know whether eating it as dessert scores me any virtue points.
As I’ve probably mentioned before, I have my own view of morality that more or less agrees with Christopher M’s. (I wrote about some more of my assumptions here.) I find the social contract as a primary moral principle almost as silly as divine command. Indeed, I think one would barely have to change my argument in that last post to show that in fact you don’t define moral behavior as following the social contract unless we restrict the sort of contracts society gets to impose. Come to think of it, that would take us directly to Spider Robinson’s science fiction story about Earth history and the Krundai farmers. I eat meat myself, but I try to face the facts about its source and minimize the amount of suffering I cause. Also, I try to use the sustenance I gain in accordance with what I consider a worthy purpose.
I’ve been a vegetarian for 13 years, vegan on and off throughout it all, depending on my circumstances. My blood work comes back great in regards to nutrients and organ function.
I think that in the meat industry, with a product that is sold per pound, the drive to produce more, more, more will always lead to severe abuse. To get every bit out of the animals’ bodies that they possibly can, the industry really can’t be bothered with much humane treatment. Hormones to drive up milk production, to bulk up the flesh, it’s all geared towards getting the maximum out of these animals. How can that ever lead to treating these creatures respectfully? And then the issue of sheer waste– smashing/suffocating male chicks, for example. I’m not a fanatic, I don’t harass people for what they eat. But how can any of that be right? Force breeding creatures to mistreat and finally consume their young smacks of ghoulish to me.
Oh, yes, and I eat meat because I think pretty much all livestock would die in short order if we didn’t eat them.
I eat meat. But I think most of us live with a set of internal contradictions. For example most of us would never kill and eat our pets. Nothing makes our pets any different than that cow or pig we ate for lunch except that we have met and interacted with our pets. If geting to know an animal makes you reluctant to eat it than I think there really is something in the argument about killing things yourself. I don’t belive that humans have a privileged place on earth, animals have emotions and they have desires and if you interect with your pets you can see they really do show restraint (say your dog nipping at you but not huring you when annoyed etc). Animals dont have sphisticated pattern recognition and can’t speak or do calculus but thats hardly what we usually talk about when we decide what constitutes a self conciousness. I eat meat because it tastes good. But I’m not going to fool myself into thinkng that its moral by my own definition. If makes you sqeamish to kill your cat it would probably do so to kill whatever. I also believe people should face up to the truth. The truth is that its a relativly nasty thing to kill an animal so I think it would be a great thing to have more people tour meat packing plants, thats where your food comes from, deal with it.
BTW I know people who grew up killing animals but eventually couldn’t take it and stopped eating meat. I also know people who grew up the same way and never converted. I know poeple who took tours of chicken plants and stoppd eating chicken, and people who went to meat packing plants ans just said ‘ehh’. So I think then at least some people who now eat meat but not all would stop if they had to witness it all the time.
I eat meat. But I think most of us live with a set of internal contradictions. For example most of us would never kill and eat our pets.
Ironically, most of our pets would happily kill and eat us. That’s what makes them so endearing to us.
I eat meat because it’s tasty. If someone could convince me that cats/dogs/monkeys were tasty, I’d probably eat that too. On the other hand, I don’t eat fish because I find the taste repugnant. There’s no morality involved in these decisions (well, aside from me giving up pork and shellfish, but that’s part of an entirely different sort of moral stance on diet). No drama about social contracts or emotional appeals to Cute Animals Being Hurt.
Basically, what I’m trying to say here is that diet doesn’t make you any more superior for what decision you make. It’s just a way of keeping yourself from dying of starvation and getting nutrients you need.
“First of all, I read it. Second of all, no strawmen, please. I said nothing about field laborers having it softer than slaughterhouse laborers, or vice versa. I do recall arguing that if you consume a product made of fossil fuels, you are contributing to the death of animals for your own comfort and aesthetic pleasure. For that matter, land allocated to fossil fuel production is land that can’t be cultivated for soybeans, as surely as soybeans fed to animals cannot be fed to humans. I remain unconvinced that there’s anything more morally gray about my once-a-week free-range hamburger than there is about a vegan’s pair of pleather shoes.”
That wasn’t a strawman — and apologies for not quoting the original text to make it more clear: It was seriously suggested that we take into account the labor of people in farms to grow grains/veggies for vegetarians. Which makes no sense, as the workers are no worse off than those in slaughterhouses, and due to the fact that we grow grains specifically for livestock consumption, we’re already growing those crops — so overall, not that many more people working on farms, and no people working in slaughterhouses. Second, speaking of strawmen: I no where mentioned “pleather” — I was strictly talking about agribusiness. I’m not well-read on how the business of leather/tanning functions.
To requote myself: We’re growing grains specifically for human consumption, not depleting what already grows “in the wild.�
“See my point above about soybean fields. Cultivated land is not wild land, regardless of where the cultivated product ends up. Every time a field is created, wild land disappears. And even the most dilligent, responsible organic farmer can’t bring in a crop without killing, repelling, or pushing out some form of animal life.”
I’m not understanding the reasoning here. We’re currently growing crops that we then feed to livestock, and we’re taking up land for massive feedlots. So I’m not sure where growing more veggies/grains for human consumption would mean massive development of wild lands. The main problem to development of land, as I understand it, is linked with our population growth… I won’t get started on that.
And a general comment after reading this thread… not related to the quoted post above. Optimally, we’d all just consume less meat overall. The amount of beef America currently consumes can’t be grown free range/ grass fed. Blaming agribusiness for loose laws is a start, but when we buy the products it “manufactures,” and then refuse responsibility for how the system works, we’re not being very honest. The system is the way it is in part because there’s demand for the product.
I enjoyed Carpenter’s post… the idea of living with “internal contradictions” strikes me as very true! I used to just avoid thinking about the meat industry and what it meant to eat meat because I frankly just liked my chicken strips =) And I’m definitely one of those people that couldn’t handle killing an animal myself. I once “babysat” meat chickens for a family friend, and couldn’t get over one of the chick’s accidental deaths… then I had to question why I so easily ate chicken meat, without worrying about the death of the bird.
What’s always annoyed me about animal rights activists is that their rhetoric is so similar to anti-abortion fanatics–simply switch “babies” and “animals”, and you’d have practically identical arguments, with identical strategies and talking points.
Maybe that doesn’t hold up logically when you look at each case individually, but it makes me resist PETA as much as any right to life propaganda.
So let’s assume for the moment that a social contract theory can possibly be made to square with our intutions about the moral obligations towards all human animals, including the mentally infirm, the damaged, the incompetent, the undeveloped, and let’s assume for the moment that indirect duties not to cause unnecessary suffering in sentient creatures are not entailed by any reasonable form of social contract theory, and let’s assume that there is a morally significant difference between butchering an animal because it gets your rocks off and hiring someone to butcher an animal because you like the taste of meat, and let’s assume, just for the sake of the argument, that no other moral obligations such as those to the environment or, if you prefer, to future generations, or the billions of other human beings who are starving because their land is used grossly inefficiently for grazing cattle rather than simple subsistence of the poorest of world’s poor, the question comes down to whether you are the sort of person who can confront the reality of the life that they are living and still believe that they are a decent person when shown the unecessary suffering their lifestyle presupposes/causes.
And whether it is the suffering of animals your diet causes for convenience and enjoyment, or the systemic violence under which billions of human beings suffer and die each year, the hope is that some simple insight–a photograph, a video, a second hand description–into misery might awaken the human in you for a second and snap you out of your complacency and thoughtlessness.
The argument in a nutshell is presented as forcefully, elegantly, clearly and rigorously as could be hoped here:
http://analphilosopher.powerblogs.com/files/Engel%2c_The_Immorality_of_Eating_Meat.pdf
It is an infinite, if not often naive, faith, I think, in the decency of other human beings that leads some to suggest that if these others just expose themselves to the real world in all of its ugliness it would change them. Sadly, of course, we have an infinite ability to turn ourselves away both literally and metaphorically: Abii ne viderem, lamented the psalmist.
Sigh
I have nothing to say about how moral meat eating is, but I like tofu with a crunchy crust around it. I learned to pat it with a paper towel
or otherwise the coating will come off.
What’s always annoyed me about animal rights activists is that their rhetoric is so similar to anti-abortion fanatics–simply switch “babies� and “animals�, and you’d have practically identical arguments, with identical strategies and talking points.
Yes, exactly. Animal rights activists are the right-to-lifers of the left: the same horrible shock-value imagery (dead fetus, fluffy bunny torture), the same notion of ‘innocence’, the same linguistic extremism (if abortion is murder and meat is murder, then is meat abortion, or is abortion meat?), the same occasional lapses into violence, the same contempt for personal choice.
The politics of sentimentality are lovely in theory but brutal and ugly in practice.
Great post. One thing that bothers me about the “if you saw animals suffering” argument is that it’s so classist. The people who see it eat animals, I assure you.
The either it doesn’t matter or it’s horrible to make animals suffer thing intrigues me. I blame modern religions, weirdly enough. Ancient people didn’t really distinguish themselves from animals as much—their gods had animal form—and weirdly I think we can learn from their perspective. Which is to say we are animals and as such our relationship to animals is like any other interspecies relationship. Some we eat. Some we love. If we just get off our high horse and realize we’re not better or worse, just another species, I think we can move on from there. But religions like Christianity try to make a big deal out of how we’re “higher” than animals, that we have souls and they don’t. This superiority complex is where the needless cruelty comes from. But this superiority complex is also where the urge to be the “protectors” of animals comes from.
I try not to have an ego about this—if there were a 3rd non-animal party looking in, she’s see me and my cats no differently than you see any other mixed species grouping that acts like “family”.
We shouldn’t feel guilty over animal suffering per se. But we shouldn’t think that it’s completely unavoidable. We should respect it, I guess is what I’m saying. When they die and we see their suffering, we should know that it’s just like ours. But that doesn’t make a tiger “immoral” if he eats me.
I think that using nature as a yardstick of what is moral or immoral isn’t that good an idea.
Oh yeah, I would add that anyone who states that if you see an animal’s suffering you couldn’t eat meat anymore is living the stereotype. I grew up where people lovingly raise animals and feel close to them, then slaughter them and eat them. Realizing that’s just the way of life is a big part of growing up. Not that we didn’t have sadists—we did, which is why I’m firmly opposed to teaching people that we are superior to animals. But there was some amount of respect that was still being learned. I’m a vegetarian because I think our wasteful attitude towards animals and the overconsumption of meat is a shame in and of itself, and I’m trying to counteract it. But in a better society with respect to our fellow animals in place, I think meat eating would be fine and probably minimized.
Yeah, the naturalist fallacy is silly, because we’re not above nature. We are simply part of it. That’s my point, Numad. By acting like we’re superior to animals, we’ve managed to lose sight of what the debate is even about.
Rhetorical similarity to a position you hate is not a very good reason for rejecting an argument. Those Big Bang theorists might sound a lot like Thomas Aquinas thinking the universe had a beginning and all, but one wouldn’t think to reject the former because you don’t likt the politics of the Catholic Church, would you?
The analogy between the arguments for the “right to life” position and for animals rights is not a bad as it stands. An analogy was originally posed by Peter Singer between racism, sexism, and speciesism. He referred to an argument against women’s liberation by a guy named Thomas Taylor who claimed that there was a slippery slope and next people would be wantin’ to liberate the animals. Of course, Taylor was more right than his clever irony permitted him to see. The arguments are structurally similar and differ only in the question of what makes a being count morally: Gender, skin color, DNA, biological parents, “species,” possession of language, rational capacities, height, consciousness, potential consciousness? The question is what non-arbitrary dividing line can be defended between morally considerable beings and things.
In many ways, Darwin provides very strong reason to become a vegetarian since the biological difference between human beings and other beings is a matter of degree and not radical kind. A guy named James Rachels argues that Darwin’s views undermines the reasonable possibility of distinguishing moral significance based on species. To do otherwise is to appeal to some morally arbitrary dividing line like “having a soul” “being created in God’s image” or their more modern equivelants “being ’self-conscious’” “autonomous”–all equally mystifying principles of difference to many of our minds. . ..
As an aside, I am always struck by how many people I meet who are vegetarians and never mention it unless necessary. The image of the vociferous animal rights activist who is always making you feel guilty and attacking you for eating meat, I suspect is largely a creation of those who would rather reject the arguer (even if it is in part a fantasy) than the argument, or perhaps a creation of college dorm rooms. . . I have found it far more common to have to defend my moral decisions to insecure meat eaters who won’t let me finish my tofu in peace
.
Sigh, I agree with you that most of the time it’s having to be defensive about vegetarianism. I don’t think it’s a huge deal—I may mention it a lot but I hope never to shove down any throats. I don’t think there’s an argument to be made that eating meat is wrong in and of itself, though. I tend to refuse to eat meat as sort of a silent protest against our culture that encourages massive overconsumption of it.
I just took the time to read “The Immorality of Eating Meat”… and I’m still unconvinced. I think his use of trying to outline our beliefs for us doesn’t really touch on the pragmatic, post-modern realities of our existence. Much of modern philosophy focuses on suffering, and I think he provides an overly simplistic view of suffering: suffering is bad, the world is worse off due to suffering, so any kind of suffering must be avoided. Suffering is a part of existence, a necessary part. I can agree that some suffering should be avoided, but I’m not a total hater on suffering, so to speak. There’s a pragmatic line that each person should find on their own based on their passions and values. If anything, the biggest conclusion that I think can be taken from the article is that we should do what we can to impose changes in the meat industry to make the conditions for the animals better, and to do our best to seek out better alternatives to the worst slaugherhouse businesses.
I think, fundamentally, Engel’s argument is based on emotional appeals. After reading his article, emotionally I feel no different than before. Maybe it would convince those who are more idealistic than me, or those who are more absolutist in their reasoning… personally, his phrasing and logic seemed much too dichotomized for my taste.
I’m right with Amanda Marcotte on this one… maybe growing up in the country makes a difference with how someone views livestock.
I would agree that there is no argument that shows that eating meat is immoral “in and of itself”–whether that is animal meat or human meat, in fact.
But, I do think that there is a extremely strong argument (see the link to Mylan Engel’s brilliant piece) that eating meat for the sake of convenience or taste when it requires massive (or even signficant) suffering for sentient beings is immoral.
This argument is separate from all sorts of other issues, such as whether animals can be used for scientific experiements (which have non-trivial goals, at least), or the Robinson-Crusoe-hunt-to-survive scenario, whether we should stop an animal eating another animal, etc. The difference is that between causing significant suffering for survival and causing significant suffering for a trivial reason.
Sure we can throw out reason or moral considerations to avoid the argument, as some earlier posts seem to desire, but that seems like a hell of a price to pay, and smacks of more than a little desperation to me, at least.
“Very glib, and very silly. Morality is (at the very least) a consideration (positive or negative) in much human behavior. It isn’t in animal behavior. You can draw whatever conclusion you want from the reality that animals are not moral agents, but you can’t make a convincing case that they are.”
Morality as we define it differs from the patterns defining non-human animal behavior by degree, not kind. It’s more complex because we have more complex brains. Complexity doesn’t confer some kind of superiority.
“Much of modern philosophy focuses on suffering, and I think he provides an overly simplistic view of suffering: suffering is bad, the world is worse off due to suffering, so any kind of suffering must be avoided.”
Well, suffering in itself is bad by definition. Suffering often has purpose and that purpose can justify suffering. But it doesn’t seem simplistic to claim that purposeless suffering is a bad thing. I suspect in your next claim (about necessary part of existence) you introduce a premise that conceals benefits from suffering (learning, getting stronger, spiritual redemption or the like).
But, to put the point bluntly, is it simplistic to claim that massive (significant) unnecessary is a bad thing? (all other things being equal). It may be a part of life, but necessity does not imply good.
“If anything, the biggest conclusion that I think can be taken from the article is that we should do what we can to impose changes in the meat industry to make the conditions for the animals better, and to do our best to seek out better alternatives to the worst slaugherhouse businesses.”
Yes! I think in fact that meat eaters should be at the forefront of boycotting cruel meat production!! Only purchasing meat produced in small scale operations and with the strictest “humane” standards! That is the implication of the argument, I think.
You got it exactly, this is a localized argument, not an absolute rejection of meat eating. It only argues that it it immoral to do so under conditions such as we have in modern agribusiness. When the scientists grow your meat in a vat without a nervous system, this argument will no longer have teeth. That is, this argument is “pragmatic” and “relative/situational”–maybe not so po-mo, but who knows what that means anyway. . ..
“Maybe it would convince those who are more idealistic than me, or those who are more absolutist in their reasoning… personally, his phrasing and logic seemed much too dichotomized for my taste.”
If arguments are a matter of personal taste, then this makes sense to me.
“I cannot understand the basis for extending even the concept of morality to animals. This is because morality, such as I can understand it, is derived from social contract.”
You’re defining morality as a social contract between human beings. You’re either ignoring the social contracts of other species or you’re assuming they don’t exist.
Those who study animals within their natural social groups disagree.
I’m actually curious as to why the “plants are living too” argument is fallacial if one justifies ones vegetarianism on “animals are living, etc. ” grounds, because the difference, in terms of sentience between a shrimp and a topiary is not as great as one would think. The most compelling argument for vegetarianism is easily the factory farms/agribusiness one, followed by the cost/ benefit one, at least to me. Admittedly I have a hard time with huntign as a conscept but the times I’ve been it has been far less morally troubling than one who hasn’t been would imagine. Additionally I think Amanda’s point about the classism inherent to many vegetarian arguments is an important one and really should be addressed.
“I’m actually curious as to why the “plants are living tooâ€? argument is fallacial if one justifies ones vegetarianism on “animals are living, etc. â€? grounds, because the difference, in terms of sentience between a shrimp and a topiary is not as great as one would think.”
You really should have picked an anemone, if you wanted to play it this way. No brains, but technically an animal. As for the fallacy, you just basically stated why it is so: plants have no sentience and the great bulk of the animals that are eaten do. I really don’t see why citing shrimps or anemones alter than pretending to be concerned about plants is an intentional warping of vegetarian positions.
“Additionally I think Amanda’s point about the classism inherent to many vegetarian arguments is an important one and really should be addressed.”
Now it’s many arguments? I didn’t know I was such a classist!
“Infecting an unsuspecting Chimp with the AIDS virus is disturbing, but if there is even a remote chance that the research done will one day lead to an AIDS vaccine I think any moral person would say that while its sad, the death of that ape is a worthy tradeoff. Although I’d be interested to see what other people think.”
It’s easy for us to agree with you. Then again, we’re not the Chimp.
Under what definition of sentience would a shrimp, or as you have mentioned an anemone make it but a plant fall short? (Please don’t state the bilogical existence of the brain as a plants vascular system reacts to stimulus in much the sme way as a nervous system would). Do you really not see the classism inherent in condemning people as immoral torturers simply for consuming the protein they need to survive?
SocraticSilence
The first point is that the argument rests on a claim that suffering is bad. In order for suffering there must be sentience. When I am anesthetized if a doctor decides to stick a pin in my foot, (assuming no persistent effects) the act does not harm me as such (there might, however, be ancillary harms like fear of worse indiginities etc.).
Therefore sentience (the capacity to experience pleasure and pain) is a non-arbitrary dividing line between beings that deserve some moral consideration (not necessarily equal) and those that do not. Thus, given the seemingly reasonable belief that plants cannot suffer, and most vertebrates can a rough and ready line can be drawn. It is not a precise line. For example, there is reason to belief that insects like mosquitoes are not sentient, and human beings in irreversible vegetative states. They might fall on the plant side of this distinction.
A perfectly consistent moral vegetarian can probably eat shellfish and maybe shrimp. Not larger fish or any cephalapods both of which almost certainly are sentient.
But yes, because nature is a system of differences of degrees and not kinds there is no certain distinction. If one accepts the principle of not causing unnecessary significant suffering then one probably would err on the side of caution and include animals that just might be sentient.
Plants certainly can be “harmed” but they cannot be aware of being harmed to the best of contemporary science’s knowledge.
Classism is a hard one. I don’t know what the objection involves, perhaps someone can explain it to me.
“Under what definition of sentience would a shrimp, or as you have mentioned an anemone make it but a plant fall short? (Please don’t state the bilogical existence of the brain as a plants vascular system reacts to stimulus in much the sme way as a nervous system would).”
It’s really no use. Following that outlook you could say most animals aren’t sentient at all, since we can’t measure their awareness. This used to be a whole school of thought, if I’m not mistaken. And also, this really makes me think that perhaps you haven’t read my reply carefully? The anemone doesn’t make it, and personally I have nothing little trouble eating shrimp. I really don’t think that these examples make the “plants are living” argument anymore in bad faith in regards to the overall vegetarian positions.
“Do you really not see the classism inherent in condemning people as immoral torturers simply for consuming the protein they need to survive?”
For crying out loud! Yes, if someone needs to eat meat in order to survive I personally don’t think it’s immoral (it’s justified immorality, in any case, see several comments in this very thread), but many people don’t need to eat meat to survive. And I think that usually these people that are the target of vegetarian arguments. And these people go on to make this argument…
It’s a little stomach turning.
OK. On classism. First, I would distinguish between people for whom eating meat is necessary to survive from the rest. In this country virtually no one “needs” to eat meat to survive. There are plenty of other more healthy alternatives avaiable. But I don’t think this is the heart of the accusation of classism the more I think about it.
Presumably the idea is that a “class” has no choice (either economically or through lack of access to information etc) but to eat meat. And so to claim that meat eating is wrong makes one guilty of classism. I hope I have that right.
Bur first of all I see nothing sacred about one’s choices because they are in part economically and circumstantially determined. Sure it may not be one’s “fault” in some sense that one was born where and when one was, but that doesn’t seem to affect the fact that your choices can be morally right or morally wrong.
There seems to be a confusion between two things here underlying the charge as I understand it. First, the claim that an act is moral or immoral and second that a person is moral or immoral for commiting such an act. The first does not entail the second. There are all sorts of exculpatory circumstances (think Oedipus or accidents).
I happen to think that if it is a matter of survival (I mean stuck on an island with no alternatives sort of survival), it **may** be morally innocent to hunt and eat animals. But I am concerned with cases of eating meat for conveniece or taste.
But I probably misunderstand the claim that these arguments are classist.
My thoughts, at Battlepanda:
http://battlepanda.blogspot.com/2006/07/animals-and-contractualist-ethics.html
I’m actually curious as to why the “plants are living too� argument is fallacial if one justifies ones vegetarianism on “animals are living, etc. � grounds
it isn’t. which is why one of the philosophical responses is the Fruitarian movement, which amounts to only eating plant matter that doesn’t kill the whole plant. so, fruit for example, which evolved for the express purpose of being eaten, so animals can carry seeds away from the parent tree.
A few points.
(1) I think tofu is delicious.
(2) I understand that a belief in moral absolutes does not necessarily lead one to contractarianism nor does contractarianism require a rejection of moral absolutes.
(3) the point about assuming a contract with animals intelligent enough to make one or extending our concepts of right and wrong to them was to take into consideration dolphins, chimps, and aliens who might someday invade and decide to eat us, like in V. I’m not sure if that undermines my position that there are no moral absolutes like someone upthread implied, but I think we should assume a moral relationship with any being theoretically capable of making one with us.
(4) the stuff about pets is really good and interesting.
(5) I don’t expect everyone to agree with social contract stuff, but the assertion of moral absolutes I’ll find puzzling.
(6) ultimately, I think we create our own notions of what is right in wrong with each other. I don’t believe there is any content to those notions outside of that relationship with each other.
(7) tom’s right that there are other moral arguments for vegetarianism besides the mere “immorality” of causing animal suffering.
(8) there are also a lot of great non-moral reasons to be a vegetarian.
(9) I don’t doubt amanda and sigh that most meat-eaters are more obnoxious than most vegetarians.
“which amounts to only eating plant matter that doesn’t kill the whole plant”
Is it possible to get all nutritional needs from such a diet?
First off, PETA is not the only animal rights group. There are many other ones. I’m annoyed that people always point to ALF/PETA- because that’s like pointing to some extremist and trying to paint everyone in the group as such.
I am a former vegetarian, I do occasionally eat meat occasionally. I’m not going to lecture anyone about their diet per se, but I think most people can stand to eat less meat as a simply health and environmental benefit. I probably eat one meal a week that contains meat, and usually, it’s small amounts in the form of stir-fries. There are times I go through weeks without having meat, and some weeks, I may have 2 meals in a week that contains meat. However, I do eat far less meat than most people I know. I don’t believe in making people give up meat- but I do try to make delicious dishes to encourage people to eat more veggies.
Also, i see similarities between animals rights and abortion rights. I support the first to a degree, and the latter completely. Abortion rights is about a woman’s ability to have rights over her own body. There’s a difference with self-autonomy (abortion rights), vs the rights of another to have rights over a being that’s completely separate from you (to a degree, animal rights). So, in that respect, I think that the tactics and speaking points of pro-life and animal rights groups may be similar, but the fundamental ideals of animal rights and abortion rights have commonalities as well ( in that pro-life groups want to have rights/control over a separate being’s body).
I have nothing against the consumption of meat per se- I do have something against the overconsumption of it, and the environmental/other concerns that go along with the overvonsumption.
I have friends that are vegans and fruitarians that are incredibly active and healthy. Others, like me, feel better with small amounts of meat. I think it’s always good to alter unhealthy eating habits (more veggies, vegetarianism, veganism, furitarian, raw diet, etc) as long as you really note how your body responds, and act accordingly. Just because I can’t be a vegan/vegetarian, etc does not mean that the diet isn’t suited for someone else.
I agree that squeamishness about butchery will not change that many people’s minds. As I mentioned before, in our meat eating days, by brother (now a vegan) and I (an ovolactopisceovegetarian) helped grind pigs into sausage. I liked fishing.
I disagree that there is no implied social contract between humans and animals. We control the contract, but we may confuse animals about the nature of it. Consider, for instance, the Judas goat, used to convince other goats or sheep that the slaughterhouse is safe. The very name of the spared animal shows that humans are not comfortable with the need to *lie* to the meat animals about the plan.
My Dad named the pigs Pork Chop, Bacon, etc. My brother and I were not allowed to treat the animals to be raised for food as pets, and the few chickens we ever slaughtered were ones who did things like attack the dog or bother our neighbors– who had, in effect, broken the contract.
People in America do not eat dogs, cats, and horses, because the understanding we have of our relationship with those animals. They are pets, or in the case of horses, often work animals. There is no practical reason for them to be considered non-food, but it would feel like we betrayed them.
This is one of the reasons that I actually am bothered less by animals being hunted for meat than by creatures given the factory farm treatment. In the case of hunting, man is simply filling the role of predator, not convincing an animal of its place in the affection of the human, or safety under our care.
I suppose if you believe animals have no feelings or thoughts at all, you could convince yourself that deception is impossible. But observation of animals makes it clear many of them understand some words; that they dream when they sleep; and that the very act of domestication is usually done through the animals accepting humans as members of their extended family.
The arguments are structurally similar and differ only in the question of what makes a being count morally: Gender, skin color, DNA, biological parents, “species,� possession of language, rational capacities, height, consciousness, potential consciousness? The question is what non-arbitrary dividing line can be defended between morally considerable beings and things.
Species has always been a non-arbitrary dividing line, in the non-human world as in the human. If you could ask a dog whether the distinction between it and a cat is arbitrary (which you can’t, because it’s not fucking human), it would first laugh its ass off at the stupidity of the question and then, once it was convinced you were serious about this asinine inquiry, tell you emphatically no.
The fact that humans have historically established truly arbitrary dividing lines within their species does not make the division between species arbitrary. What’s more, suggesting that the differences among races or between men and women is even remotely comparable in magnitude to the differences between species is so disgustingly racist and/or sexist that I’m astonished anyone in a venue such as this would have the temerity to do so.
Do you know why I am not a vegetarian, and probably never will be?
I have celiac disease.
I cannot eat gluten - which means I cannot eat any product containing wheat, rye, or barley. This includes many vegetarian substitutes for animal products, as well as the vast majority of canned, prepackaged, or processed foods.
I am also a poor college student. On my budget, I need to eat meat, unless I want to eat nothing but beans, rice, and the occasional head of lettuce.
To make things worse, my doctor believes I am intolerant to corn and possibly soybeans. There goes tofu and soymilk, two favorites of every vegetarian I’ve ever met.
Is it possible for a celiac to go vegetarian? Sure - but they’d better have more money than I do.
This is what bothers me so much about so many vegetarians who condemn me for eating meat. Most of them treat my disease like an excuse - one person even told me that I just wasn’t trying hard enough to be vegetarian, and that surely it wasn’t as bad as I was claiming.
Here’s the kicker: aside from fish, yogurt, and cheese, which I adore, I can’t stand animal products.
I have not read all the comments on this thread yet, so forgive me if this point has already been made. Apologies also for the rambly nature of this comment.
Jedmunds,
I don’t see that Eric says that “everyone” would stop eating meat if exposed to the conditions in which animals are raised in the passage you quoted. He said that it would be more effective than alternative methods for getting people to act as the ethical vegetarians would have them. So, yes, being exposed to this may well make you immune to the suffering of animals. It might not. That’s perfectly consistent with what Eric was saying.
Now, if you had some reason for thinking that such experiences could not provide us with moral knowledge or that such experiences wouldn’t help people overcome the denial and self-deception they must have if they think there’s nothing wrong with factory farming, that would have made an interesting post but so far as I can see, you really are attacking a strawman here.
As for your remark that you don’t see how morality enters this discussion, your remarks about contractarianism are a bit silly. On any slightly sophisticated contractarian view, you have to idealize in order to determine which arrangements are binding and which ones are not. This is how a contractarian would presumably deal with the problem of marginal cases and in dealing with that problem, they’d have to admit that even given contractarianism there would be a prima facie case against imposing suffering upon animals for our pleasure.
I don’t know if you’ve ever taken any courses in ethics, but this would have caused your instructor fits:
don’t believe in such a thing. I cannot understand the basis for extending even the concept of morality to animals. This is because morality, such as I can understand it, is derived from social contract. There is no meaning to the concepts of right and wrong beyond the humans that create them. It goes without saying that animals cannot be a party to a social contract, though I would extend it to animals or beings intelligent enough to be a theoretical party to the social contract (that is you can assume a social contract with a being intelligent enough to enter one, even if practically speaking it cannot do so). And since animals cannot be party to the social contract, we owe them no moral obligations. Since we owe them no moral obligations, it cannot be immoral to eat them. Granted one can choose to refrain from eating animals, even based on one’s own conscience. But that does not make that choice more moral.
I’ve already mentioned that no contractarians think that duties derive from actual contracts or can only cover individuals capable of understanding the term of such contracts. But apart from that, you’ve neglected Kant’s distinction between duties to and duties concerning something. Kant recognized that not every wrongful action involves one party wronging another. And that is just to deny the inference from “we have no obligations to X” to “It couldn’t be immoral to do things to X”.
Maybe you don’t share the intuition that eating animals is wrong but perhaps you can enlighten us as to where this argument goes wrong (it doesn’t rely on the intuition that eating animals is wrong):
(1) It is prima facie wrong to impose suffering upon the innocent for selfish reasons.
(2) Raising animals for our consumption requires that we impose massive amounts of suffering upon sentient creatures incapable of deserving to suffer for selfish reasons.
(3) In order to show that this practice is not wrong all things considered, some justification is needed for imposing this suffering.
(4) None exists.
(C) The practice is wrong all things considered.
I suppose you’d want to deny (1), so here’s a sub-argument:
(1.1) The suffering of any innocent human being is wrong.
(1.2) While there are differences between human and non-human animals, there is no morally relevant difference that could explain why the suffering of an innocent human being is bad in every instance but the suffering of a sentient non-human animal is never bad.
(1.3) If you knowingly bring about bad effects through your action, this requires a justification in terms of overriding benefits or that the imposition of harm is required in order to discharge a duty.
(1.4) The benefits of factory farming do not outweigh the harms.
(1.5) The harms are not required to discharge a duty.
(1) It is prima facie wrong to impose suffering upon innocent human and non-human creatures for selfish reasons (i.e., reasons of taste, financial reasons, etc…).
There’s no “meat is murder” premise, there’s just a requirement that says knowingly causing the bad requires a justification and a challenge to: (a) say what that justification is; (b) explain how the suffering of an animal doesn’t make the world worse; or (c) admit that your moral beliefs are mistaken.
“Species has always been a non-arbitrary dividing line, in the non-human world as in the human. If you could ask a dog whether the distinction between it and a cat is arbitrary (which you can’t, because it’s not fucking human), it would first laugh its ass off at the stupidity of the question and then, once it was convinced you were serious about this asinine inquiry, tell you emphatically no.”
Well, the point is whether it is a non-arbitrary **moral** dividing line. It is obviously not a moral dividing line at all for beings who are not capable of moral agency. So this is sort of beside the point.
“The fact that humans have historically established truly arbitrary dividing lines within their species does not make the division between species arbitrary.”
No one, I think, would claim that it does. You miss the point, which is that if it unjust to arbitrarily exclude human beings based on a morally irrelvant characteristic (such as skin color etc) then unless a a non-arbitrary morally significant characteristic can be identified that is possessed by humans and not by all animals (soul is the favorite of fundamentalists). then such exclusion from morally considering animals is unjust.
“What’s more, suggesting that the differences among races or between men and women is even remotely comparable in magnitude to the differences between species is so disgustingly racist and/or sexist that I’m astonished anyone in a venue such as this would have the temerity to do so.”
The point is neither racist nor sexist. The question has nothing to do with “magnitude” of difference, or whatever it is that has led you to this facile accusation. It is a point about the grounds on which a being can be excluded or included within the moral community.
The point is that it is not DNA of a certain sequencing, it is not possessing an “essence” of humanity, or a soul, or a body of certain type, or self-consciousness or reason or language or any of the other candidates that have been tried, but the ability to suffer. The ability to suffer makes a being “count” morally, makes its interests relevant to moral consideration. What matters is being able to suffer not to be able to enter into contracts or govern one’s behavior through rational deliberation. That is all the argument claims, and I see nothing racist nor sexist in the argument.
Creationists/religious believers at least have a consistent view about these things. I respect the rationality of a view that sees a “fixed essence” in human beings and all other animals and believes that the suffering of animals cannot matter because animals do not have souls. They can appeal to a non-arbitrary morally significant difference between human beings and all other animals. It’s us scary evolutionists who have trouble doing this now.
Numad, you completely misrepresented why I claimed vegetarian arguments are classist. It’s not about whether or not some people can or can’t eat meat. It’s about how entire classes of people are invisible in the vegetarian argument about how watching an animal suffering would turn people off meat.
Let me put it this way. I say to you, “If people saw the workings of a slaughterhouse, he would never eat meat again.” The rejoinder is, “But people see the workings of a slaughterhouse every day!” In order for my original statement to be true, either a) the slaughterhouse workers don’t eat meat or b) they are not people.
Well, we know they generally do eat meat. So the underlying assumption behind the argument that seeing a slaughterhouse would turn people off meat is that those who work in them are not people. That’s classist. And sheltered to the extreme.
I hated cleaning animal corpses growing up. I’m a softie, but my reason wasn’t that I pitied animals. I thought it was gross, tedious work. My stepfather would hunt for quail and I’d try to be scare when he came back because if I wasn’t, I’d be drafted to degut and pluck their icky, slimy bodies. It sucked really bad and I hated it, but when dinner was served, you’d fucking bet I would eat it. I’d earned it. Same with the 4H kids—I remember going to 4H auctions and kids would be selling the first piece of livestock they’d ever raised by their lonesome. They’d be really proud and they loved their animals. And they would bring it up to the block and the bidding would start and someone would buy it and come take it away….and often the kids would cry. And their folks would comfort them and they’d get over it and keep doing it and keep eating meat because that’s just how it was.
So when I say that vegetarian arguments are “classist”, I don’t mean that we couldn’t quit eating meat. I meant that vegetarian arguments that presume that people only avoid eating meat because they don’t know the reality of it ignore slaughterhouse workers, me, and the kids I grew up with. Of course, I’m a vegetarian now, but that’s for other reasons.
Is it possible to get all nutritional needs from such a diet?
well, think for a minute about what you’re allowed to consume in such a diet.
All fruits, and all varieties, which alone could probably meet most nutritional requirements.
beans and legumes of all types.
in fact, the only things I can think of that would be excluded would be grains, some though not all greens, and root vegetables. depending on who you ask, grains are allowable in certain situations. and I’m not sure what the moral standing is of regrowing root vegetables from cuttings (carrot ends, part of a potato, what have you)
note too that the definition of fruitarian is vague. some say “vegan who devotes 75% or more of the diet to fruits.” some say it has to be 100%. alot of fruitarians say it also has to be raw, and no, the raw food diet isn’t complete.
I’m not one. but it’s clearly possible.
Clayton, most ethics teachers tend not to be the sort who believe that morality is but social convention. Their fits don’t bother me. Nor am I really concerned about various stripes of contractarianism. Gauthier’s the most influential in my thinking, though I don’t care for his consequentialism. I have a materialist’s issues as well with most contractarians. Anyway, yeah, I reject both of your arguments, the sub-argument at 1.2, except with respect to animals who would be intelligent enough to blah, blah, blah.
” First, I would distinguish between people for whom eating meat is necessary to survive from the rest. In this country virtually no one “needsâ€? to eat meat to survive.”
I think it’s unrealistic to assume that it’s logistically and financially possible for poor people who lack both social and financial capitol in this country to eschew meat, or generally eat what most vegetarians I know define as a healthy diet. Vegetarian and organic alternatives are not made available in many of the poorer neighborhoods I’m familiar with. And the people I know who’ve grown up with severe economic disadvantage tell me that cheap meat was an important way - culturally and personally - that their parents kept many kids fed on cheap, highly filling food, and a limited budget.
Certainly, it’s possible for poor people to live vegetarian lives. Obviously, many manage it. But I think access to knowledge about and time for vegetarianism is often a byproduct of the social capitol gained by education. I’m really uncomfortable with the kind of judgmental comments that are being lobbed at all people in this country, as if class were not something that divides us.
I do think the current manifestations of vegetarianism in this country have classist ramifications. That doesn’t mean vegetarianism isn’t the right way to go, but I would prefer to see people admit it.
“Numad, you completely misrepresented why I claimed vegetarian arguments are classist. ”
No. I didn’t. Read the post I was directly replying to. I never addressed your argument. Now, you have the post I was respond to plus several following posts with other explanations of how vegetarian arguments are discriminatory in various ways.
I’m not the one doing the misrepresenting.
“It’s about how entire classes of people are invisible in the vegetarian argument about how watching an animal suffering would turn people off meat.”
Well, in the first line in the first post that I’ve made in this thread I basically stated that even if it were true, that all people would be squeamish if they had to kill animals for their own food, that it wouldn’t matter a fig when considering the morality of the action. And vice-versa. That’s me not buying into the “turned off” argument to begin with.
Including directly above my last post. I already answered why these accusations of classism are essentially beside the point, at least where I’m concerned. I’m pretty much done here.
I think that basically everyone does believe in some sort of hierarchy of animals - that some deserve more “rights” than others - although most people would not admit it nor even be conscious of it.
If you wiillfully kill mosquitos or houseflies (which everyone does), and then feel morally superior because you don’t eat lamb, you have defined your concept of hierarchy as befits your own desires, or delusions.
I live in a country where people eat all manner of insects on a daily basis. Is there anyone out there who grieves for the noble grasshopper? I am rather quite fond of the grasshopper and thankful for all its contributions, but I don’t see anything wrong with farmers eating them, and I’ve done it myself. But it would be silly and wrongheaded of people to eat all the grasshoppers, and therefore screw up the very ecosystem upon which they depend for their survival.
One thing should be established straightaway: animals don’t have “rights.” That is a human social construct. When a cat bats around a cockroach for the pure sport of it, there are no rights involved. That act could certainly be categorized as cruel and abusive, but nobody cares about cockroaches anyway, not even PETA. And so we’re back to hierarchy…
Some may say that is glib, and, besides, we’re smarter than cats. I’m not so sure that we are, and in fact would argue that most people are not. But it is true that we have a certain duty as stewards of the environment, or rather as the chief destroyers of the environment, to curtail our destructive tendencies wherever possible, for the good of nature and ourselves.
Pet cats (and I love cats too, by the way) are in effect some of the most vicious predators going; their toll of wanton destruction of songbird populations is a gruesome fact that would make many people squeamish if they were forced to face up to it, but it’s what cats do. The bird has no rights in that equation, like it or don’t.
Bird lovers argue that human behavior is responsible for the carnage, because the very fact that people maintain cats as pets and provide for their basic needs is what allows the cat to hang around patiently until it can kill a bird, which it doesn’t even need for sustenance. That is a very strong argument, but I don’t know what can be done about it, or even if anything need be done about it; perhaps it’s just one thing to consider in the grand scheme of how all behavior affects other living things in some way or another.
As for cattle, it seems that by now they have lost most of what their original role in nature may have been (apart from the wholesome properties of their dung for beetles, etc.), and exist essentially to provide milk and meat for humans. There are many good reasons to not raise so many of them, apart from health or squeamish concerns, including the vast amount of resources that are devoted to feeding them. It would seem that the larger impacts of our influence in the food chain and environmental exploitation is where we should focus.
We may also consider the modern phenomenon of urban stray dogs. Those creatures have no proper purpose in any natural order; they are creations of human behavior. They exist and multiply in an artificial environment quite apart from their original species, and provide no benefit to to any other living thing, as far as I can tell. And they are a menace, surely.
Much of the behavior patterns of stray dogs can also be seen in that of humans, particularly male humans: too damned many of them; too dirty and very often violent when they are in packs; and many seem to contribute little or nothing to the greater good, while continuing to reproduce at whim and immediately abandoning their offspring.
Kimodo dragons sometimes eat their young, when the population grows too large for what the ecosystem can sustain. That is pure enlightened self-interest, for the greater good, and very wise. Thus it would seem that a dinosaur is much more intelligent in that fundamental regard than human beings on the whole.
Killing far too many animals of certain species - Japanese fishermen come to mind - is just stupid, as it upsets the entire balance of the natural food chain and has many unintended consequences. I think we need to strive for a sense of moderation and good stewardship, and leave the phony morality questions aside, as I understand Amanda to be positing.
I also seem to recall reading once that “for all its pretentions to greatness, humankind owes its entire existence to six inches of topsoil, and the simple fact that it rains.”
After all, when well-intentioned people spout the refrain “save the planet,” they are really displaying a rank human conceit: that we could actually destroy the planet. This is nonsense, because the planet will surely live until its predetermined death, which will only come with the death of its star. We can destroy the planet’s ability to sustain us, but the planet will go on without us in some form or another, as it has undergone so great many changes since its birth. A far more sensible way to look at it would be to say “save ourselves” - which should necessarily imply the protection of as many other plant and animal species as possible, to conserve a balance in nature, and sufficient supplies of water and breathable air.
That is essential for the good of your children and grandchildren, which is what most people claim to be most-interested in, although I do have very serious doubts about the sincerity of such pious pronouncements.
I have to admit I still don’t have a grasp on the claim that vegetarian arguments are “classist” despite Amanda’s and Mandolin’s posts.
I take it that “classism” is either a form of injustice or a prejudice. If the accusation is that vegetarianism advocates some sort of discriminatory systems based on class, then I don’t see it. Vegetarianism does not propose any sanction or make any claims about the distribution of goods or opportunities. Vegetarian arguments generally aim at personal change. Althouhg many animal rights arguments have effects on certain groups of people–banning seal clubbing in Canada would affect those whose economic well-being depend upon it–I don’t see that that is any more “classist” than any other economic decision that is or might be taken by a society.
If the claim is that it conceals a prejudice against poor people specifically, I don’t see it. Some vegetarians might be classist but I can’t see any reason to claim that the argument assumes these prejudices.
More specifically:
“It’s about how entire classes of people are invisible in the vegetarian argument about how watching an animal suffering would turn people off meat.”
“Well, we know they generally do eat meat. So the underlying assumption behind the argument that seeing a slaughterhouse would turn people off meat is that those who work in them are not people. That’s classist. And sheltered to the extreme.”
I would suggest that this is not an argument that vegetarians make as you formulate it. Obviously people can become inured to suffering whether animal or human. This is a tragedy. But the argument is a moral one not a sociological one. You make the argument into a claim about how people *will* behave not how the *ought* to behave. Yes, obviously people work slaughterhouse jobs and eat meat and billions of human beings would wring an animal’s neck for a decent meal. These two facts say nothing about whether what people are compelled to do by circumstances is *right.* (Though I wonder if anyone has ever studied the effects of slaughterhouse work on dietary choice. There has been some interesting work connecting domestic violence and slaughterhouse work, I think. Suggesting that these jobs may contribute to domestic abuse.)
And M:
“Certainly, it’s possible for poor people to live vegetarian lives. Obviously, many manage it. But I think access to knowledge about and time for vegetarianism is often a byproduct of the social capitol gained by education.”
I agree wholeheartedly. That is, lack of access to decent health and dietary information is an effect of social injustice just as much as lack of access to primary medical care. The diseseases that afflict many of the poor and lead to shortened lives and compromised well-being are not merely the result of “personal decisions” but also the result of systemic injustices. I think making good choices about diet for health and morality should be included in the goals of working for social justice. I would only add that this does not imply that the arguments are “classist” but that they intersect with class which is a basic feature of our moral situation in complicated ways that should be acknowledged and confronted. But that doesn’t seem to be all that is meant by “classist” (having class differential impacts). If it is, then we water the term down such that everything is “classist.” I would suggest that it is important to start from the two senses above to preserve the sense of injustice in the term.
Thomas, there’s actually a fairly good justification for the hierarchy of animals. We know a great deal about which animals have what you might call upper level cognitive processes and which don’t and from there we can argue pretty accurately that certain animals suffer fear and pain like we do. Morality is a social contract that is pinned together by empathy. As such, I’d say it’s critical to the human social contract to maintain respect and empathy for animals because we are animals as well. We do not respect them, we do not respect ourselves. And we come up with some of our sillier vegetarian arguments about how causing animal suffering “natural” to us. I think stripped of the pretense that we’re superior to animals, we’d probably be less sadistic to them, but we’d probably be less worried about eating them.
Numad, my apologies. But I was trying to argue with your suggestion that the accusation of classism is irrelevant. I would strongly suggest otherwise. Having upper class white people tell you that they know better than you how an animal suffers when it dies, and you’re a rural person or a slaughterhouse worker, is condescending. And will turn people off. The actual act of doing it can harden empathy or harden sadism, depending on how the person thinks about it to begin with.
[…] A great blog and series of comments on the ” moral questions ” pertaining to eating Meat or not Here. The exchange of ideas across cyberspace is amazing. This is a good example. Makes stiknstein want a thick juicy ribeye. […]
I agree that there can be compelling arguments on both sides. Few life forms can be sustained were it not for consumption of an energy source. Higher forms don’t have the luxury of living off sunlight. Whether you sustain your life with grass, brocoli, gazelles,or are one of them, the quality of your life while you exist is what has value. What happens at the end of it,(or after the end)probably matters little. If there is a moral imperative, it is probably that we should weigh the “quality of all our existances”.
I’m not sure how vegetarianism would break down class-wise (I’m in a poor grad student income bracket, and suspect many vegetarians/pescatarians etc. don’t make tons of money), but as it stands now it does seem to be associated in my mind with a college education. Maybe because going away to college opened up those alternatives to me… not sure if this is the norm. As to the original argument and seeing meat slaughtered, I agree that it seems to ignore class — it really should address where the people who work in ranching/farming, animal husbandry, or slaughterhouses fit in. (I don’t think it was a very convincing argument in the first place.) And although some people in inner cities might have trouble getting lots of fresh veggies, I don’t think that’s the main reason many of those people aren’t vegetarians. I completely agree with Sigh: it’s all about the health information and who it’s reaching, who it’s not trying to reach. Our food pyramid is ridiculous. And the assumption in American culture that meat = THE protein, and that meat must be what’s for dinner every night, is bad for our health and ignores the eating habits of vast parts of the world (and the eating habits of many ethnic groups within America). Meat is expensive. If you want to talk about cheap ways of filling kids up, rice & beans would take the cake. Cheap (especially if you prepare the beans yourself), filling, and a complete protein.
Jedmunds,
So you reject the argument because you think morality is a social convention? I thought that “morality is a social convention” shit went out with Atari.
But even if it didn’t, you still seem to place some significance upon levels of intelligence. Why do those “levels of intelligence” have moral significance? Or, to translate into Jedmunds speak, why think our social conventions are worth taking seriously if they “levels of intelligence” as a test that has moral significance since clearly there are many humans that lack the kind of intelligence we’re speaking of?
I take it that even you’d admit there are compelling moral reasons not to raise developmentally disabled children for food. If you do admit this, then I suppose you’d have to admit that the “conventions” you speak of are either rationally indefensible or provide some other basis for thinking that causing harms to one group is morally significant and to another group, it’s not. So, what are those reasons? Saying that you think morality is a bunch of social conventions doesn’t tell us what those are.
Becky, I’d argue that your lower class status is compromised because grad school is a temporary period with a lack of cash flow, rather than a true, long-term poverty-based existence.
but as it stands now it does seem to be associated in my mind with a college education.
Yes, and religion.
Well, the point is whether it is a non-arbitrary **moral** dividing line. It is obviously not a moral dividing line at all for beings who are not capable of moral agency. So this is sort of beside the point.
Um…the distinction between creatures capable and incapable of moral agency is a pretty goddamn non-arbitrary moral dividing line, by definition.
But take morality out of it for a moment and just look at behavior. The imperatives that drive animal behavior almost never extend to preserving the lives of members of other species. The species is a non-arbitrary dividing line for the closest analogue to morality other animals have.
To argue that we should adopt a completely different standard is to assert the existence of a non-arbitrary moral dividing line between humans and all other animals.
The point is neither racist nor sexist. The question has nothing to do with “magnitude� of difference, or whatever it is that has led you to this facile accusation. It is a point about the grounds on which a being can be excluded or included within the moral community.
Let me be more precise: to suggest that ’speciesism’ is in any way analogous to racism or sexism is disgustingly racist and sexist, and a vile insult to every human who has ever struggled to have his or her rights recognized. The notion of animal ‘rights’ is an inherently odious concept.
Now, let’s be clear: I’m talking strictly about rights here. Many of us would probably agree that it isn’t very nice to do bad things to animals; in certain cases, I support laws prohibiting doing certain bad things to animals. That’s completely different from the notion that animals have rights.
And, going back a ways:
Rhetorical similarity to a position you hate is not a very good reason for rejecting an argument.
First, it isn’t just the rhetoric that is identical; it’s the content as well. Both boil down to the ridiculous assertion that life is ’sacred’, which to anyone who’s paying attention is not just practically untenable but morally insipid. Life (animal, embryonic, human) is negotiable; only the terms are up for debate.
Secondly, the nature (not just the rhetoric) of the two pro-life positions is identical. Both are sentimental in character; both are absolutist; both embrace immoral acts (chronic dishonesty and occasional violence) that are not just excused but mandated by the absolutist nature of their beliefs. Now, this obviously describes the hardliners in both camps; obviously, there are more moderate people committed to both causes. (At the same time, the very nature of the two causes encourages people toward the extreme.) The point is that they are the same. No animal rights advocate should ever look at an anti-abortion advocate (or vice-versa) and think ‘I am better than he/she is’; the two are exactly the same.
I think we are not talking with one another here. I will try to be clearer about what I mean by “non-arbitrary moral dividing line” below.
“Um…the distinction between creatures capable and incapable of moral agency is a pretty goddamn non-arbitrary moral dividing line, by definition.”
Well the question is whether that is relevant for moral consideration. The point is that babies are not moral agents, the severely damaged often are not moral agents. Many of us believe that they deserve direct moral consideration (eating babies wrongs the babies not just society or the parents). So moral agency is an arbitrary moral dividing line for the issue of moral consideration.
Despite the fact that babies can’t respect my rights (crying all the time and stuff) does not mean that they should be excluded from moral consideration. Behavior is an irrelevant standard. To claim that a being who can suffer should have its suffering considered in our moral character is not to say that that being must also be able to take into account our suffering.
“To argue that we should adopt a completely different standard is to assert the existence of a non-arbitrary moral dividing line between humans and all other animals.”
Only if there is some characteristic that can be pointed to that is morally significant. The additional argument–the so called “argument from ‘marginal cases’”–provides the reason to believe that moral agency is being used to mask an arbitrary “speciesist” distinction that claims that babies can be wronged but cows cannot.
“Let me be more precise: to suggest that ’speciesism’ is in any way analogous to racism or sexism is disgustingly racist and sexist, and a vile insult to every human who has ever struggled to have his or her rights recognized. The notion of animal ‘rights’ is an inherently odious concept.”
Hmm well these are nice assertions, I suppose, but in absence of any actual reasoning for them I will leave them as already responded to above. I can’t see how pointing out that suffering is “analogous” in animals and humans (whether bio-chemically or morally) is a vile insult. In fact, there are strong arguments advanced that show that racism and sexism have historically been intertwined with speciesism (Carol Adams, Sexual Politics of Meat and a book I can’t remember on race with a preface by Alice Walker I think, who curiously, I suppose to your mind, doesn’t see the book as a “vile insult.”).
“First, it isn’t just the rhetoric that is identical; it’s the content as well. Both boil down to the ridiculous assertion that life is ’sacred’, which to anyone who’s paying attention is not just practically untenable but morally insipid. Life (animal, embryonic, human) is negotiable; only the terms are up for debate.”
Well no. I don’t see any reason to believe that life is sacred or any reason to believe that the moral argument for vegetarianism etc. rests on such a claim. I don’t recall anyone making this point (perhaps the Jains in India would accept this). This is straw, man.
“Secondly, the nature (not just the rhetoric) of the two pro-life positions is identical. Both are sentimental in character; both are absolutist; both embrace immoral acts (chronic dishonesty and occasional violence) that are not just excused but mandated by the absolutist nature of their beliefs. Now, this obviously describes the hardliners in both camps; obviously, there are more moderate people committed to both causes. (At the same time, the very nature of the two causes encourages people toward the extreme.) The point is that they are the same. No animal rights advocate should ever look at an anti-abortion advocate (or vice-versa) and think ‘I am better than he/she is’; the two are exactly the same.”
Ane well once again no. The posts above have argued that this is not “absolutist” but actually a situational argument. Chronic dishonesty is such a vague claim I will ignore it, but violence is easily responded to. Even the most radical organizations (such as ALF) have never injured a human being physically even if they have stolen and destroyed property. A definition of violence would be useful here, but if nothign else you will be hard pressed to find instances of actual animal rights “violence” though not so hard pressed to find anti-abortion violence (I’ll start with the definition of violence as involving the infliction of physical suffering on a sentient being, recognizing of course its limitations).
Even if the two were similar that surely wouldn’t discredit the one on the basis of the other. Better would be to engage the arguments themselves that using similarities to other positions to govern your beliefs. The question is whether a potential sentient creature deserves moral consideration, or whether only actually existing one’s do.
Whether animal rights activists dress like anti-abortion activisits or the “similarities” you propose is beside the point.
I don’t think the notion of animal rights is odious. It’s just irrelevant. Other species eat other species all the time. Thus it is natural for our species to eat the species we are able to kill an eat. Does it make it right for us to kill animals for our food? That’s a question you have to answer on your own. But inherent in the process of the food chain is the direct need for sustenance, and regardless, you’re going to have to kill something living to get that sustenance.
McBoing:
I’d agree with you in some respects, but since I grew up around or below the poverty line, this isn’t a temporary lack of cash flow but a continuing state. (This is the most money that I’ve ever made, and I won’t even get into what my mother thinks of it.) I still have some trouble believing that someday I’m going to have a cash flow that means not living hand-to-mouth. Or maybe that’s just because I’m in the field of English lit… =) However, the cultural shift is significant, from working class rural Oregon to academia, even if the income bracket is the same (and as you point out, there’s at least the hope that you’ll have a well-paying job with benefits afterwards).
Also: Is religion associated with vegetarianism, or am I just reading that wrong? I thought of Jainism, but besides that, I don’t know many religious vegetarians/vegans, myself.
Becky, many (most?) Hindus are vegetarians, and some Buddhists as well. It’s prevalent in many Eastern religions.
“But I was trying to argue with your suggestion that the accusation of classism is irrelevant. I would strongly suggest otherwise. Having upper class white people tell you that they know better than you how an animal suffers when it dies, and you’re a rural person or a slaughterhouse worker, is condescending.”
What you seem to be demonstrating is that the classism isn’t present in any arguments to begin with. At worst, it’s by omission (or by the “kill it yourself” argument, by omission). What is purposefully classist (and we see race poking its head out now) is this particular reaction.
This is an over reaction.
Amanda: I agree with your specific points, but it seems to me that some of them may be in contradiction to one another.
If we are not superior to animals, then why are we necessarily superior to the ones we deem to be lower in the hierarchy?
I don’t mean to be glib, and perhaps we could all go ’round and ’round on this forever, but just because a cow has a huge brain and a grasshopper has a small one, why does a cow deserve more empathy? A big brain is not in itself indicative of anything, judging from so many human beings that one encounters on a regular basis.
I do agree that “stripped of the pretense that we’re superior to animals, we’d probably be less sadistic to them, but we’d probably be less worried about eating them.”
But it seems to be “classist” to say that some animals feel more fear and pain than others.
If we assign all of our own notions of human-style empathy to animals, because we are animals, then perhaps we should do that across the board?
Granted, that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t kill mosquitos or houseflies, but it does pose an interesting philosphical question. And I don’t pretend to be able to answer it.
I fully support the right of a woman to abort a pregnancy, and I’m not sure that a foetus has “upper-level cognitive processes” - but no doubt many people disagree with me there.
Then again, I’m not sure that a grasshopper does not feel fear and pain, either.
The other problem with the hierarchy issue, is that humans will always find a way to apply it to other humans - as in, people in the World Trade Center somehow felt more fear and pain than do the unknown people of Iraq when we drop bombs on them. Let’s face it: not many Americans have cried and anguished in quite the same regard, no matter how opposed they are to the bombing and occupation.
I merely suggest that the hierarchy slope is very slippery, because there are always people who will direct its twisted course toward their own desired ends, whatever they may be.
It seems to be that the only standard should be fairness, or empathy, and that is an elusive goal, always.
Sigh,
I take your point. Your analysis was correct, and I appreciate that my statement was probably both confusing and, in parts, wrong. Thank you for taking the time to address me.
I suppose I feel that vegetarianism in and of itself is not inherently classist, as in discriminatory. But some/many forms of condemnation of people who do not adopt vegetarian behavior — such as statements that people in this country don’t “need” to eat meat — is classist.
Becky,
Convincing models of class adjust for social capitol, such as what class your parents were, and educational level. Your access to grad school ups you on the class scale, even if it doesn’t do so financially.
It also occurs to me that nature does have its own sublime way of evening the odds.
As humans have become the most powerful animals (not the biggest, but big enough to subdue all of the bigger ones), the only really dangerous predators are the tiniest ones.
Sure, a bear or tiger will maul you if given the chance, but how often does that happen?
Yet a tiny mosquito can kill you dead quicker than you can say jim dandy.
And a virus, ah, a microscopic virus, can kill hundreds of millions in one fell swoop.
It is interesting that a huge water-buffalo must worry about being taken down by lions, but humans are in far more danger from the most humble of bugs.
The hierarchy cuts both ways, it would so appear.
Mandolin: I was agreeing with you in some respects. Cultural capital changes, but let’s face it: grad students face financial constraints while they’re in school (it’s just that we hope to find a way out of them). And in that respect, I find continuities. I’ve had discussions on this, and class is interesting in that you can move up or down on the scale… but I’m not so sure one sheds a class identity that quickly/easily — despite what convenient sociological models say.
But I’m interested in how vegetarianism & class intersect in our society… as my sister and I have both become flexitarians/pescatarians since getting out of our hometown and going to college. And Amanda’s post rung true to me, as even just talking to my mother about my diet choices often comes off as implying that I know better… it becomes preachy quickly.
Becky,
Sorry I misinterpreted you. I didn’t mean to be disrespectful of your experience.
Well, as far as squeamishness is concerned, my rule is that the carnivore has no right to look down his (or her) nose at the butcher. If you’re willing to accept the benefit of the slaughter of animals, you shouldn’t think you’re better than those who do the actual slaughter.
(This gets complicated in today’s world, where factory farming and such leads to terrible cruelty in a variety of ways. If a slaughterhouse is cruel for economic reasons, how much can you be upset by that, if you’re still willing to eat the meat that results, when you’d willingly buy more expensive meat if the cruel practices were banned?)
But I don’t believe morality comes from a social contract. I think morality just *is*. I think it’s only enforceable as a social contract, but needless cruelty to animals, even far away from any cop who could arrest you, or any society that could condemn you, is still wrong.
I don’t have all the answers, but I try to find answers that can suit me. So, for example, I don’t like catch and release fishing. if I’m going to stick a barbed hook through an animal’s mouth, I’m by-god going to eat it (or see to it that someone else does). But there are those who’d be appalled by my willingness to kill for food, rather than harm for sport.
Shrug. As I said, I don’t have the answers… but I do believe there are some real and meaningful questions.
Vegetables
“just because they can’t say anything
doesn’t mean they don’t hear you coming”;
tomatoes in particular feel pain
thin girlish skin and
seeds quaking in jelly at the first prick
and carrots, shrieking silent
like St. Bartholomew as you peel them
from foot to head: they feel,
they feel. Disemboweled peas
slide into tunbrils, dizzy
with air, beets bleed on the
sinkboard, celery wilts with its heart
in our hands, squash
turns pale on our tables
and when you pick up the knife
and walk across the kitchen, shoeheels softly drumming
even the coarse hydra-headed potato hears you humming
Peter Meinke
What lives must eat.
What lives must eat.
Uhh, I wasn’t aware of the real killer tomatoes that go around eating things. Maybe I just wasn’t paying attention.
So, JackGoff, plants don’t consume nutrients, bacteria, and water from the soil, resources that some other plant or animal will die without?
Everything alive consumes resources. There aren’t infinite resources. To survive, everything kills. That’s how life works.
Maybe I should have put a [/joke] tag on it, eh?
I’m not a vegetarian (and not just because my gastroenterologist told me to avoid salads). I don’t like factory farming or cruel agribusiness practices, and I buy organic meats when feasible*.
I agree that he ick factor has no place in morality. I find kissing men off-putting — not to mention most women — but I don’t urge people to give up homosexuality, or sexuality in general.
I don’t know what I’d do if I have to slaughter my own meat, because despite repeated viewings of Good Eats, I have no idea of the process. I’d probably end up leaving 90% of the edible muscle to rot, simply because I don’t know how to get at it.
This discussion is very similar to ones that have been had here about sex, only with representatives from both sides. It’s probably easier to cut out meat and meat-derived foodstuffs (e.g., broth) if you eat purely for sustenance. At least some of the pro-veg arguments are probably more convincing to people who don’t find eating pleasurable in and of itself**, just as people who don’t enjoy sex are a lot more open to arguments for abstinence, and arguments that treat abstinence and non-abstinence as equivalent.
In any case, I don’t think anyone should base their behavior on my reasoning, or tastes, or actions.
Naomi:
I have seen my dinner slaughtered while living in Nepal. Since I don’t live in denial about the fact that meat comes from animals, I did not find it that big a deal.
I’ve never seen my dinner slaughtered in front of me, but I don’t think it would bother me. I’ve certainly been able to watch Anthony Bourdain’s various TV shows without it affecting my appetite. Like you, I know where my food comes from. I wonder how many vegetarians were shocked into it when they learned later in life than many that meat doesn’t come from a store. I wonder, too, how much of vegetarianism comes from the idea (prevalent enough in our culture, even if one isn’t explicitly or currently a Christian) that the physical body is flawed or filthy or disgusting.
My sister doesn’t even like veal or lobster to be on the table. She’s not a vegetarian.
Sheelzebub:
Oh, and for you anti-tofu folks–TOFU IS DELICIOUS! Jeez. Eat it with a nice tangy ponzu dipping sauce. Yum. Just don’t treat it like it’s meat.
Thank you! Tofu is tofu. Meat is meat. They’re two separate things. You wouldn’t force a homosexual to act straight, why are you forcing that poor block of tofu to act like a hamburger?
Ok, it’s not a perfect analogy, but you know what I mean.
Thomas Long:
But it seems to be “classist� to say that some animals feel more fear and pain than others.
Um, what? Do you know what that word means?
*Are such marked up because they’re inherently more expensive to produce, because they’re produced on a smaller scale, or because they’re bought by yuppies? Check all that apply.
**This is a generalization and is not meant to imply that no vegetarians take pleasure in eating, nor that all omnis do.
Sigh: “The question is whether a potential sentient creature deserves moral consideration, or whether only actually existing one’s do.”
Not really. A pro-lifer would say that even a potential human being can react to its environment, sensing pain, etc. They even go so far as to project things like “this fetus is reaching out in agony for its mother to save it from abortion.” Utter nonsense, but try telling them that. Better yet, try proving beyond a doubt that fetuses don’t suffer–you’ll never do it.
Even if you don’t go that far, it’s safe to say that fetuses have the awareness of a worm or something along that order. If your argument is that the ability to suffer is the universal bar by which we measure how much compassion we give a being, it doesn’t matter whether you’re talking about a 10% potential human being or a complete chicken.
I just don’t think it’s possible to say measure in precise, scientific units exactly how much suffering is morally acceptable to inflict on anything–people, animals, babies, plants, whatever. Any scale you choose is ultimately arbitrary, part of a give and take situation. And that arbitrariness doesn’t invalidate the marker you choose, it just forces you to negotiate it with other human beings.
I don’t think people would stop eating meat if we were all responsible for the slaughter and butchering of the animals. I agree that we would eventually become desensitized to it and it would cease to be a big deal pretty quickly. However, I do think it would drastically cut down on the amount of meat eaten. It’s one thing to swing through a drive-thru and order a couple of Big Macs for lunch; it’s another thing to have to slaughter the cow yourself every time you want a Big Mac.
Personally I think most Americans could really benefit from eating less meat. When I was a kid, I remember most of my meals consisted of a mostly-meat main dish that occupied about two-thirds of the plate, a vegetable dish that took up about a quarter, and a slice of bread or two. Now I tend to eat greater portions of vegetables and smaller portions of meat, and I feel better than I ever have. I haven’t been sick in months. I have loads of energy. I can’t say enough about eating a diet that consists first and foremost of grains, vegetables, fruits and dairy, with a little bit of meat for protein. (Of course, I don’t think I could ever go fully vegetarian. I love to eat birds and seafood - and the occassional cheeseburger - way too much.)
Plus, ecologically speaking, eating a diet that is primarily meat based is a huge waste of energy. The amount of grain used to feed one cow can feed many, many people. The clear-cutting and the overgrazing that goes on to ensure that the absurdly high rates of consumption of beef can continue are wrecking major havoc on ecosystems all over the world, as most of our beef is not grown here. And then don’t even get me started on the ecological and political disaster that is cattle ranching in the American West.
Someone wrote few posts back that a lot of what we eat is determined by our culture, and I thought that was dead-on. I was reminded of the passage in Jared Diamond’s Collapse, where he talks about the way the Norse Greenlanders insisted on raising cattle in land that wasn’t suitable for it, because so much of their culture was based around eating cattle. If they were to abandon cattle and start eating seal (and abandon their old ways of hunting in order to adopt the kayak and the harpoon), then what would they have left of their identities as Norse Greenlanders? I think it’s an interesting point to be made, that a lot of Americans eat beef because so much of our identity as Americans is tied in with it. I mean, ask people to name the quintessentially American food, and what do you get? The hamburger. Americans are associated with beef, and that strong cultural association is not only causing our food animals to be raised using some very dodgy practices that not only diminish the flavor of the food but also cause harm to those who eat them (such as hormone injections, turning downed animals into feed and factory farming), but it’s also wrecking the environment AND our health. Frankly, the way our food animals are treated today is shameful. Back in the day, when people killed their own meat, they treated their animals well, and gave them the respect that is due any creature who dies so that we may live. Today, we don’t perceive of them as living creatures worthy of any sort of respect, but rather an inanimate resource like firewood or coal that can just be stacked up and transported around with only a minimum of upkeep. I find this lack of respect for the animals whose bodies we eat to be deeply shameful.
I don’t see anything immoral about meat-eating per se, but I do see something very immoral about the destruction of the environment, the contamination of our food sources with diseases and artificial hormones, and the promotion of unhealthy eating practices as a ploy to generate more business for meat producers. If meat eating could be done in a way that is environmentally sustainable and healthful for ourselves and the animals we are eating then I would feel no qualms about it at all.
hh, I wasn’t aware of the real killer tomatoes that go around eating things. Maybe I just wasn’t paying attention.
Come to my garden sometime. The squirrels have run in fear.
Hershele–your post got me to thinking about what really turned me on to food (beyond the oh, it tastes good thing). I got into food, and cooking, and really savoring every bite when I started reading vegetarian cookbooks, and I think it’s because the authors would describe the flavors of these vegetables I’d never even heard of, describe the fresh herbs, and talk about spices. And I started really smelling spices and herbs, and smelled tomatoes, and really tasted fresh produce. Good lord. It was a revelation. While I like meat–and I LOVE fish (liked it raw before I liked it cooked, go figure)–I credit my enthusiam for cooking and eating to vegetarian cookbooks.
BTW, I’ve got a recipe for zuccinni-stuffed tomatoes with fresh herbs to DIE for.
Oh, man, sheelzebub. Stuffed tomatoes are teh bomb!