Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
tial opportunities; to the deprivationof achieving their potential; to the principle of
minimizing the pain that is inevitably involved in killing; or to the opportunity of
minimizing harm even when that harm does not involve pain (after defending the
idea that a being can be harmed even if it cannot conceptualize the harm as present
or impending). Other answers have been suggested: whatever makes us see the pain-
less killing of people as harm cannot be restricted to humans once one attempts to
clarify why the painless killing of humans is wrong. Or, killing an animal takes from
it all that it has (regardless of how this affects the overall calculus of pleasure and
pain, that is, whether the animal can be replaced by another experiencing animal) and
it is unjust to do so when this can be avoided. Or, might cannot make right.
Such answers have been mounted from different perspectives within pro-animal lit-
erature and have been brought into conflict in the past since many provegetarian au-
thors disagree on the specific moral basis for diet reform. Since one goal of this
chapter is to show that vegetarianism need not be an outcropping from some broader
considerations regarding animal ethics, we can afford to be eclectic here: unjustified
killing of animals is wrong in all the senses above. It is inevitably painful, it is an
act of violence, it is probably wrong in many of the senses in which killing people
for no substantial reason is wrong, and it harms the animal by taking from it all that
it has regardless of the pain it does or does not experience. Like other prima facie
wrongs, this one too needs to be vindicated when it is done. Whether or not killing
for food is a sufficient justification will be taken up later, but contesting the idea that
killing animals as such harms them, as the antivegetarian claims, requires substantial
arguments that can unsettle some very strong and widely shared convictions.
Critics may object to my appeals to shared beliefs. Beliefs do not turn into truths
merely because they happen to be endorsed by a collective. Yet this objection ignores
the distinction between justifying claims and examining what follows from these
claims, assuming that they are held. Antivegetarianism clashes with beliefs most of us
hold. “Too bad for these beliefs” is a possible reply, but what does it mean in this
context? Deny animal pain and you are there with pre-Darwinian bioethics. Dismiss
pain's moral relevance and you join company with all kinds of sadists.
Peter Carruthers is admirably consistent when he claims that torturing a cat when
the torturer is unseen is morally unproblematic. Swallowing this horrifying counterin-
tuitive outcome of his own version of a direct/ indirect duties approach (rather than
seeing it as a
reductio
of it) is Carruthers's own suggestion. Antivegetarians will have
to endorse a strange position of this kind on pain of inconsistency. Claiming that en-
tities are not harmed when they are painlessly killed is a sophism: if it is invalid in
the case of humans, why should it persuade in the case of animals (unless “harm” is
a species-dependent notion, but why should it be?
6
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