KILLING FOR PLEASURE - Ethics and the Beast - page 29

the puppies gives the person intense plea-sure); fifth, a belief that killing animals,
painless or not, is a harm done to the killed animal, and that some justification for
doing so is required.
Proving these beliefs is an important task. But disputants in the vegetarian debate
make two mistakes: first they suppose that proving these is a burden that vegetarians
need to carry alone; second, that vegetarians need to carry this burden at all. Why
prove beliefs that everyone shares anyway? 2 Here the philosopher's urge to examine
the supposedly obvious hampers moral clarity. The philosophers who are interested in
animals will work hard to prove, say, why animal pain matters morally; they will in
turn get challenged on these arguments by other philosophers, and the ensuing debate
will create the mirage that the moral status of a contested aspect of the animal issue
(here vegetarianism) depends on the validity of the proof of this anterior claim. Chal-
lenging a defender of vegetarianism to prove why painlessly killing an animal harms
the animal is as plausible as demanding a feminist to solve the Other Minds problem.
In one way both are reasonable requests: vegetarianism is predicated on a belief in
the harm involved in animal death in much the same way that feminism is predicated
on the assumption that other people exist. Philosophers are interested in the problem-
atic basis for these latter assumptions. But at the same time these challenges are not
to the point as proponents and opponents share the beliefs in question anyway. Justi-
fying the condemnation of painless killing of animals is an important question, and I
do not mean to shortcut it through this argument. My claim, up to this point, is not
substantive but methodological (I am not, for example, claiming—yet—that accepting
the five beliefs above necessitates adopting moral vegetarianism): contesting the justi-
fications of beliefs is different from rejecting these beliefs. Put differently, the case
for moral vegetarianism appeals to coherence within existing beliefs that are com-
monly held by nonvegetarians and then proceeds to claim that eating animals does
not cohere with them.

3

This distinction generates a typology of possible philosophical opponents of moral
vegetarianism. To begin with, those who actually reject one or all of these beliefs (as
opposed to contesting the justification of them) will also be rejecting vegetarianism.
Deny that animals feel pain, and you are on your way to dismissing moral vegetari-
anism. Call this “antivegetarianism” as distinguished from “nonvegetarianism.” An an-
tivegetarian positively rejects one or more of the five assumptions above, while a
nonvegetarian accepts them but does not see why they imply vegetarianism. These
two opponents of vegetarianism should be distinguished from a third distinct oppon-
ent, whom I will call “the agnostic meat-eater.” Unlike the antivegetarian, agnostic
meat-eaters do not positively reject one of these fundamental assumptions, but, unlike
nonvegetarians, they do not accept them either. Theirs is the position of those who