Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
The deeper way of framing the question is not in terms of a value-pleasure opposi-
tion, but in terms of conflicting values. Pleasures are not necessarily distinct from
values. Some pleasures are goods, the pursuit of which is itself a value. Culinary val-
ues need not be moral values. But they can still constitute values (rather than pleas-
ures) that compete with the value of avoiding eating animal flesh. Alternatively, a
person may hold that all values (hedonic ones included) are moral, maintaining that
this stems from an overarching eudaimonistic principle that governs ones choices and
form of life. Both alternatives frame the vegetarian debate as a clash between values
rather than as a choice between what is pleasing and what is morally correct. What
is the vegetarian response to such formulations?
Commensurating pleasures and deprivations (or balancing pleasures against values or
values against conflicting values) is notoriously difficult to clarify theoretically. We
daily make such evaluations on a private as well as institutional level without a uni-
fied theory regarding how we do this. When they are questioned, our preferences ulti-
mately lack probative force. Avoiding killing humans for fun is today a trivial judg-
ment in which one compares values and pleasures. Yet gladiator-fighting indicates that
people did take pleasure in deadly fights. Can such pleasure of many be trumped by
the value of the lives of gladiators? Today, one would assert that no pleasure or ag-
gregate of pleasures of this kind justifies the death of another. Such pleasures are im-
moral, and the craving that such pursuits satisfy can be replaced by nondeadly sports.
Suppose, now, that a hypothetical defender of fights to the death teleported from
some Roman arena denies that such substitutes provide the same intense pleasure that
fights to the death involve (the analogy to the vegetarian issue being claims of the
“Nothing done to tofu will compete with a juicy steak” sort). We cannot simply de-
mand that he give up his pleasure, if he challenges us to explain why the death in-
volved in the practices he loves so much overrides his intense pleasure. We can ap-
peal to notions like rights or the sanctity of life. But these make no sense in the
nonegalitarian setting of ancient Rome and must strike him as dubious and forced in-
novations. His judgments will probably resemble those who today reject the applica-
tions of notions like rights to animals. The debate would probably stop there.
Comparative judgments regarding conflicting values or goods lack probative force.
They spring from a rich matrix of sensitivities that do not exist universally. Rejecting
the moral status of gladiator-fighting from our present perspective is much easier than
doing so from within a cultural outlook that has not yet devised an egalitarian con-
ception and a sensitivity to the importance of human life. But this is a practical dif-
ference. On the level of rational debate the impasse is as fierce. What can one say to
a defender of fights to the death? What constitutes a good argument showing that the
pleasure of such sports cannot outweigh the harm they involve? We reach foundation-
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