Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
al issues in ethics: the probative status of evaluations; their convention-related status
versus a possible transconvention implicit structure from which they emerge; whether
persuading a radical dissenter is in fact a plausible test for a moral position; what
constitutes proof in ethics; the possible justification for reforming present practices
and sentiments.
I will not plunge into these. Analogous past cases in which curtailing benefits and
pleasures from one group of entities because such involves overwhelming harm to an-
other group did not proceed from discovering a solution to the foundational problems
of ethics. Egalitarian social movements succeed primarily due to numerous pragmatic
contingencies. Their moral case is substantiated through tapping sentiments that some-
times need to be created, until the claims they make turn from idiosyncratic preaching
into vivid and action-guiding prescriptions. Vegetarianism is in the same boat as pre-
nineteenth-century feminism or early-eighteenth-century abolitionism: the sentiments
that are capable of transforming the preferences within the privileged group so that
the harm done will be perceived as overwhelming in relation to the benefits gained
are nonexistent or weak.
The upshot of all this is that one cannot
prove
that killing animals for the pleasure
involved in eating them is wrong. One can show that killing versus pleasure is the
actual equation, and that each instance of eating animal flesh is one application of
this equation with reference to a particular animal's death and a particular pleasure.
One can then point to the continuity between vegetarianism and other social causes
that we typically regard as encapsulating and promoting moral progress, in which
overwhelming harm requires limiting pleasures.
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PERSONAL ACTION AND GENERAL OUTCOME
Yet since personally refraining from eating animal flesh will not save a single an-
imal, endorsing personal vegetarianism does not follow from recognition of the im-
morality of killing animals for food, or from upholding the desirability of collective
vegetarianism. Provegetarians bridge this gap either by arguing that personal action
may affect large-scale outcome (the analogy being voting: negligible impact is over-
whelmingly likely; yet overwhelming impact is a possibility that calls for personal ac-
tion), or by arguing that consuming products that are made through immoral actions
exemplifies the wrong kind of virtue (obtuseness, callousness, cruelty), or by emphas-
izing symbolic support and symbolic protest.
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Opponents of vegetarianism will avoid formulating this problem as a critique of ve-
getarianism since if one accepts the “Voter's Paradox” reasoning here—a reasoning
according to which the benefits of a large-scale desired action are causally detached
from personal action—one is opening a Pandora's box. Tax paying, cooperating with
