KILLING FOR PLEASURE - Ethics and the Beast - page 37

a draft, personal charitable aid to large-scale goals that one endorses, will all become
irrational. The challenge for vegetarian theory is here not one of responding to a vi-
able critique, but of clarifying the connection between consumption and killing when
one's own actions cannot modify outcome for future animals.

13

General connections between personal action and promoting a desirable goal are
one type of account that comes to mind. Eddy Zemach, a moral vegetarian, tells me
that for him, fairness is the notion doing the work here (reducing the killing of anim-
als is one's objective, and doing one's fair share in promoting this goal prescribes
avoiding eating flesh). Zemach is partly right: such appeal to fairness is a conceptual
link that operates in numerous cases in which the personal and the collective are
linked. But I think that we can get closer to the particularities that distinguish the ve-
getarian example. Avoiding eating flesh, if one believes that it is collectively wrong,
is not merely a case of doing one's fair share. Nor is the problem merely one of
flawed integrity.

14

The most promising route to get at the specific moral structure linking the killing
of animals and the consumption of meat is Curnutt's attempts to relate to the killing
and the consumption as two parts of the same wrong. 15 Curnutt defends this idea
through the principle that it is wrong to cooperate and benefit from a defeat of the
basic well-being of others. This principle explains the wrongness of consumption by
tying it with the harm done to the animal.
But the bond is actually tighter than benefiting or cooperating. It surfaces when fo-
cusing on the philosophy of action implied by Curnutt's “two parts of the same
wrong.” Unfortunately, provegetarian literature has here relied on misleading analogies
between eating animals and using human remains that have been transformed into ob-
jects (favorite examples are using soap or lamps made out of the remains of Jewish
victims of the Nazis, or finding and wearing a ring made of human bone). Instru-
mental usage of human body parts is a symbolic demeaning of a person after death.
Jews were not killed to produce soap. Using such “objects” is wrong since it parti-
cipates in demeaning a person. Such horrid examples also involve disgust, the moral
status of which is complex: disgust is itself an amoral psychological fact that carries
moral implications. 16 Killing animals for food is different. Pleasure rather than repul-
sion is experienced. Another difference is that animals are also not perceived as being
demeaned by using them for the purpose of producing food, clothing, or footwear.
Better analogies that get us to the operating ethical depth-structure of moral veget-
arianism are watching snuff movies, or enjoying art that involves body parts (Melane-
sian head decoration). Victims of snuff movies (I will assume that such movies exist)
have been killed so that someone would watch them die later. Here the consumption
is a completion of the initial action. By “completion” I refer to a temporally extended