Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
fliction of suffering on others requires justification? It seems that our “argument” is
no more than our preference not to live in this way. Such a preference has its reas-
ons and is thus rationally better than living in a world in which suffering can be ar-
bitrarily inflicted. But an argument showing that A is rationally preferable to B
should not be confused with an argument showing that B is wrong, which is what, in
effect, the agnostic meat-eater is asking for.
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I specified five widely shared beliefs regarding animals: that killing them with no
good reason (even when painless) is wrong; that they can experience pain; that their
pain is morally relevant; that our dealings with them are morally different from our
dealings with objects; and that their suffering should sometimes trump intense human
pleasure. Denying these beliefs, as the antivegetarian does, is implausible. Agnostic
meat-eaters ask for arguments for these beliefs before they would change their diet.
The philosophically broad answer to this challenge relates to animals sharing morally
relevant properties, as argued in the previous chapter. The narrower answer is that
there is something basic and nonderived in repulsion felt toward someone torturing an
animal. This reaction has little to do with rights that the animal does or does not
have (nor do I think, incidentally, that the repulsion to someone torturing a child
primarily relates to an infringement of rights). Each of the five beliefs is basic in this
sense. Against the agnostic meat-eater I am claiming that asking for argumentative
backing here is as plausible as asking for arguments in support of the belief that pain
is (usually) bad. Agnostic meat-eating can function as a reasonable critique of veget-
arianism only if it makes sense to raise the problematic nature of basic moral beliefs
in any area of applied ethics and proposed moral reform.
NONVEGETARIANISM
If my argument so far is sound, nonvegetarianism should be the genuine position
that a thoughtful opponent of moral vegetarianism should endorse. Nonvegetarians, I
claimed, are those who oppose torturing animals and who would condemn euthanizing
healthy animals for no reason. I claimed that these necessarily endorse the five beliefs
above, and that therefore the important question between vegetarians and their oppon-
ents is not whether or not these beliefs are justified, but whether these beliefs imply
that killing animals for the purpose of eating them is wrong. So after discarding the
objections of antivegetarians and agnostic meat-eaters, we can finally take on this
question: is killing animals for food wrong, given these shared assumptions?
Evaluating the morality of killing animals for food begins by breaking up “food”
into its two components: nutrition and pleasure. Broad agreement exists as to the
ability to have a fully nutritious vegetarian diet. At the same time, for most of us
such a diet cannot compete with the culinary pleasure afforded by a nonvegetarian
