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await compelling arguments. They await persuasion that these beliefs are justified, and
they see no reason to modify their diet until such a justification is produced. Agnost-
ic meat-eaters would charge vegetarians for holding (but not proving) basic beliefs
that underlie their case, say, the belief that killing is harmful for the killed entity, or
that pain is bad for the sufferer. While they do not deny these claims, and may even
credit them with initial plausibility, agnostic meat-eaters would say that we cannot
simply take the vegetarian's word vouching for the truth of these, and that a support-
ing argument is therefore needed.
We now have a typology of dismissals of moral vegetarianism. Let us evaluate
them in turn.
ANTIVEGETARIANISM
Antivegetarianism militates against too much common moral sense (the antivegetari-
an is, recall, rejecting one of the five assumptions above). Disagreement exists as to
what constitutes adequate justification, but (as the euthanized puppies example shows)
people do not believe that killing animals needs no justification whatsoever. It is also
uncontested that some uses of animals constitute abuses of them and are to be pre-
vented even when such restriction frustrates a strong human pleasure (e.g., sadistic
pleasure). Denying that animals feel pain (or that they are responding but unfeeling
automata and are thus objects) has also become unpopular in post-Cartesian bioethics:
animals limp on hurt limbs, react to painful stimuli, have endorphin (even some
worms produce it), and respond to pain-relieving medication. Saying that all this is
“instinct” rather than “pain” as we know it in its human-articulated form is implaus-
ible since it implies, first, that babies' responses to painful stimuli are also “instinct-
ive” rather than morally relevant pain, and second, that human pain is divorced from
the domain of instinct, and something radically different is going on when humans
and nonhuman animals are pricked by a needle. 4 Antivegetarians would have to
work hard to unsettle such convictions, and it is difficult to imagine how they can do
so.
An antivegetarian might deny that killing animals harms them, especially if it is
done painlessly, and that it is thus not a wrong requiring justification. This too is im-
plausible since the obligation to justify any killing of animals is shared across cul-
tures and is at least as old as the topic of Genesis. The obligation to justify killing is
manifested even by critics of pro-animal literature (though they of course challenge
the specific cases wherein killing animals is justified). It is consensual, then, that
killing animals for no good reason (even if it is painless) is wrong. Why? Proposed
answers include appeals to the shared intuition that killing an animal is wrong (exem-
plified, for instance, by avoiding stepping on animals);
5
to the loss of their experien-
 
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