KILLING FOR PLEASURE - Ethics and the Beast - page 38

action, in which the part of the action done in the past anticipated and was predic-
ated on an unspecified individual who will function in a designated way. By filling
that abstract individual's projected position, one makes concrete and completes the ac-
tion. 17 The snuff movie victim was not just killed; she was killed so that someone
would watch her die later (analogously: the animal was not simply killed; it was
killed so it would be worn or eaten later). These actions have an extended temporal
structure: a specified beginning with particular agents and victims, and a specified yet
unpopulated end. One completes this disembodied structure when becoming that un-
designated agent.
Apart from completing a temporally extended wrong through consumption, there is,
too, the conceptually distinct wrong of participating in a wrong practice, even when
one's consumption does not increase suffering. Wearing rings made of human bones
is an appropriate example here, though in our context it conflates several distinct
kinds of harm, some of which do not apply in the animal case, so I shall avoid it. A
better example is paying for services provided by child-prostitution establishments that
exist in some countries. Doing so does not necessarily intensify the pain or harm
done to the children involved. The potential “customer” would only be one more in-
distinguishable client in the long day of the child being prostituted. One can even
make a difference for the better: say, tipping generously or behaving nicer than other
clients would. Morally avoiding such practices involves the sort of denied participa-
tion I am outlining, rather than assumptions regarding consequential change brought
about through one's actions.
MORAL VEGETARIANISM
Moral vegetarianism, then, is the position according to which animals should not be
killed for food when nutritional alternatives are available. To eat animals is to parti-
cipate in and to complete a morally wrong act. The emphasis is on refraining from
participation in a wrong done to an entity, where one's participation is not necessarily
an intensification of the harm being done, but an endorsement of a wrong practice.
This understanding of vegetarianism avoids causal connections between vegetarianism
and a reduction achieved or envisaged in the number of animals raised or killed for
food. Nor does it assume that private vegetarianism will lead to collective vegetarian-
ism, or that vegetarianism is a causally effective type of protest against the wrongs of
factory-farming, as is assumed, for example, by demivegetarians (people who do not
see anything wrong in killing animals for food but are appalled by factory-farming
and so eat small quantities of meat, thus protesting against current farming methods).
Note that no equality is assumed between the value or sufferings of animals and of
humans. This brand of moral vegetarianism does not require a prior assumption that