KILLING FOR PLEASURE - Ethics and the Beast - page 34

food. This clarifies the moral issue, which is no longer the moral status of killing an-
imals for food , but killing animals for the unique and irreplaceable culinary pleasure
that eating them affords. In his Animal Rights and Wrongs , Roger Scruton draws a
distinction that avoids the unpleasant sound that killing for pleasure has (he is dis-
cussing angling), saying that one does not kill for fun (which connotes sadism), but
killing is the price of fun. 9 Scruton's point is a good one: angling, hunting, or eat-
ing animal flesh is not sadistic. And this is why the description I choose is “killing
for pleasure” rather than “killing for sadistic pleasure.”
Enter pleasure. The distinct, irreplaceable, and at times intense pleasure of eating
animal flesh need not be denied. Animal flesh not only opens up numerous culinary
possibilities but also functions as a focus of many social and religious activities, such
as the outdoor barbecue and the Christmas turkey. All such pleasures are denied to
vegetarians, who instead become social spoilsports who force nonvegetarians to modi-
fy the traditional character of these. Some vegetarians will say that in their own in-
ternal hedonistic calculus, these losses are superseded by a new kind of pleasure, in-
volving a sense of moral completeness and perhaps even purity that comes with do-
ing the right thing. 10 Yet for other vegetarians (me) such talk is too abstract, and
their moral choice is experienced as a downright loss. Personally, I am even put off
by vegetarians who seem to never have had much of a zeal for eating meat, and I
lose sympathy when I read passages in the writings of moral vegetarians in which
“vegetarian cuisine” is praised over its immoral alternative. The unhedonistic (and
therefore humanly narrow) perspective regarding the meaning of eating that sometimes
animates such writings—R. M. Hare admits that he and his wife hardly eat out and
so his demivegetarianism is not difficult for him—alienates vegetarians such as my-
self, who have had very intense experiences in eating (as well as cooking) meat, and
thus experience their own moral choice as extracting a high price indeed.
Does the harm involved in killing animals trump such loss? The superficial way of
framing this question is in terms of moral values as opposed to pleasures. The super-
ficiality resides in the way by which casting the question in this way plays into the
hands of the moral vegetarian. Since pursuing moral values typically involves curtail-
ing pleasures or the pursuit of pleasures, underscoring the pleasures of eating animal
flesh is simply beside the (moral) point: a case for moral vegetarianism need not be
required to show that vegetarianism is the happiest or most pleasurable way to live,
but that it is the moral way to do so even if it does prescribe tough limitations.
People who justify eating animal flesh through saying that the pleasure this gives
them overrides the wrong done to animals have, in effect, conceded the moral claims
of the vegetarians.