KILLING FOR PLEASURE - Ethics and the Beast - page 39

speciesism is wrong or a belief in animal rights. In addition, this formulation of ve-
getarianism allows for eating and using animals that have not died from planned
killing for the purpose of eating them. Some vegetarians will disagree with this con-
clusion (e.g., Cora Diamond in her “Eating Meat and Eating People”). This position
also says nothing against raising animals for food. While the vegetarianism I defend
will avoid participating in current factory-farming practices as well, the position does
not prescribe a ban on raising animals for the purpose of eating them after they die
on their own. While there are excellent culinary and prudential reasons to refrain
from what Sapontzis calls “scavenging,” I do not see a moral reason to do so. A
more inviting possibility is using fur or leather products that come from animals that
have died on their own. There are no prudential reasons to avoid this, and no moral
reasons to do so either.
Vegetarianism thus construed does not entail veganism. The question of the morality
of any use of animals for food products differs from use that involves killing them
for the purpose of eating them. While many uses of animals are wrong, unlike killing
them, the very use of animals for eggs and dairy is not wrong as such. Using anim-
als for these is consistent with their welfare, in the sense that they can lead comfort-
able and painless lives. Here commodification can actually work for animals rather
than against them, since it generates a financial incentive to preserve them. 18 Since
modern factory-farming techniques for obtaining dairy and eggs are extremely cruel,
participating in such practices is wrong too. But such a ban on participation is differ-
ent. First, this ban prescribes selective consumption, which still allows for consump-
tion of egg and dairy products that are raised in morally acceptable ways. Second,
avoiding egg and dairy because of the immoral production practices these rely on
cannot be conceptualized in terms of avoiding the completion of or participation in a
wrong in the same sense of the prostituted child or the killed animals example. Un-
like eggs or milk, no reform done to a child-prostitution establishment will justify
participation. More needs to be said here, but I postpone doing so because the vegan-
vegetarian issue will be taken up in detail in chapter 6.
“BUT EATING ANIMALS IS IN THEIR INTEREST”
Leahy, Scruton, and Hare have argued that collective vegetarianism involves the in-
existence of billions of potential animals and the possible extinction of species that
would not exist if there was no financial incentive to breed them. 19 This argument
is often used in conversation; the attempt being to embarrass the vegetarian into ad-
mitting that the opponent's eating practices are a positive good to the killed animals,
thus reversing the moral poles of the debate. If collective vegetarianism is bad for
animals, then personal vegetarianism predicated on the immorality of killing for eating