KILLING FOR PLEASURE - Ethics and the Beast - page 28

Chapter 3
KILLING FOR PLEASURE
IT IS USUALLY ASSUMED that moral vegetarians are obliged to prove a number
of difficult claims. These include the claim that animals are not automata; that animals
suffer or experience pain; that killing animals harms them; that killing or causing them
pain matters to animals in a way that should make an ethical difference to us; that an-
imals have some kind of moral status; that we have positive or negative obligations to
nonhuman animals; or, more ambitiously, that animals possess rights that, in turn, call
for these negative/positive obligations.
This way of framing the debate and its major stepping-stones has a strong hold on
the philosophical literature on vegetarianism. Yet it is a misleading framework. The er-
ror lies in confusing between justifying widely shared beliefs and drawing the moral
consequences that are plausibly implied by such beliefs given the fact that they are
shared. The immorality of child-torture is, for example, predicated on a belief in the
existence of other minds, the justification of which has been repeatedly contested. Yet
since the belief in other minds is widely shared, the implication for moral action does
not require a proof of this prior claim even if it happens to underlie it. By contrast,
when the underlying beliefs are not shared, implications for action have to await a jus-
tification of these underlying beliefs (e.g., implications for abortion largely depend on
contested beliefs regarding the moral and ontological status of the fetus). This confu-
sion, as well as the attempt to ground vegetarianism on a broader theory of animal
welfare, has led to adopting a misleading framework for this specific debate.
Distinguishing between beliefs held and beliefs proved can show where genuine dis-
agreements between vegetarians and their opponents lie, and delineating these points is
this chapter's first goal. Vegetarian and non-vegetarians will agree that there are some
moral restrictions on our relations with animals. Anticruelty legislation and ethical su-
pervision on animal experimentation within research institutes are indicative of this
shared consensus. Animals should not, for example, be tortured or even painlessly
killed for an insubstantial reason (think of someone who purchases hundreds of healthy
cats and dogs just for the purpose of euthanizing them painlessly). Five nontrivial be-
liefs are implied by this shared condemnation, and it is important to note them since
they are sometimes denied: first, a belief in a morally relevant difference between an-
imals and objects: we are morally indifferent to people who slowly mince and shred
their own furniture, smiling as they do so; 1 second, a belief in animal pain; third, a
belief in the moral relevance of animal pain; fourth, a belief that there are cases in
which such pain should trump even intense human pleasures (suppose that euthanizing