9 Eating Animals is Immoral
9.1 Introduction
In what follows, I will defend the view that, in most cases, buying and eating meat is morally impermissible. First, I will argue that there is no good reason to think that eating meat is morally permissible. In particular, I address three common reasons for thinking that it’s not wrong to eat meat: that it is natural to eat meat, that it is necessary to eat meat, and that people have always eaten meat. Second, I argue directly for the immorality of buying and eating meat, by developing an analogy in which puppies are subjected to much the same treatment as farm animals (sections 9.5–9.6). I then defend my argument from analogy against various objections (sections 9.7–9.8).
In defending the claim that it is morally impermissible for you to eat meat, I will be making some assumptions about you. First, I am assuming that you know that the meat you eat is the flesh of slaughtered animals. A friend of mine once had the following conversation with her children at the dinner table:
Them [eating chicken]: “Mom, where does chicken come from?”
Her: “Well… it comes from chickens. You’re eating a chicken.”
Them: “C’mon, mom!! Seriously, where does chicken come from?”
Perhaps you didn’t know. Now you know.
Second, I am assuming that the meat you eat was killed in order to be eaten. Perhaps you eat only dead animals you find in the road. In that case, go for it; my arguments do not apply to you.
Third, I am assuming that you do not live in some faraway land, where you have to eat meat because there is no way to get your hands on tofu, broccoli, oatmeal, avocados, almonds, beans, pumpkin seeds, hummus, lentils, quinoa, tempeh, peanut butter, veggie burgers, or other such alternative sources of protein. I am assuming that you are not stranded on a deserted island with nothing to eat but wild boar. Perhaps I’m wrong. If you are currently stranded on a deserted island, go ahead and eat the boar.
More generally, just because you can imagine some possible situation in which it’s morally okay to do a certain thing, that doesn’t mean it’s morally okay to do that thing in ordinary situations. If a hiker gets caught in a blizzard and will freeze to death if he doesn’t break into someone’s empty cabin for the night, it’s morally okay for him to break in. That obviously doesn’t mean that it’s morally okay for you, right now, to break into a random person’s home. If the Nazis are at the good Samaritan’s door, it’s morally okay for her to lie to them to save the Jews hiding in her attic. That obviously doesn’t mean that it’s morally okay for you, right now, to lie to whomever you want, whenever you want. And just because it’s okay for certain people to eat certain types of meat in certain situations, that doesn’t mean that it’s okay for you—in the situation you currently find yourself in—to eat whatever meat you want whenever you want.
9.2 The Argument from Precedent
In the United States, we consume somewhere around ten billion farm animals per year. Eating lots of animals involves killing lots of conscious creatures, creatures that are capable of experiencing pain, discomfort, fear, and distress. Is there some good reason to think that eating meat is morally permissible, despite all the killing and suffering that is involved in getting the meat off of those animals and onto our plates? Sure, meat is delicious, and bacon is especially delicious. But the pleasure you get from eating bacon doesn’t make eating meat morally acceptable, any more than the pleasure a sadist gets from kicking puppies makes kicking puppies morally acceptable. So let us see if we can do better.
The first argument we’ll consider for the moral permissibility of meat-eating is that there is such a strong precedent for eating meat. People have eaten meat all throughout human history. By eating meat, we aren’t doing anything different from what our ancestors have done.
The argument evidently runs as follows:
PR1 is indisputable. But PR2 is obviously false. People have murdered other people throughout human history as well. If PR2 were true, then that would mean that it’s morally acceptable for you to murder people. But, of course, it isn’t morally acceptable for you to murder people.
You may object that while it’s true that there have always been murderers, it’s not true that most people have been murderers throughout human history. This suggests a way of reinstating the Argument from Precedent, without the overly strong premise PR2:
Since it isn’t true that most people throughout human history have been murderers, PR2* (unlike PR2) doesn’t have the absurd consequence that you are permitted to murder people. But other counterexamples are easy to find. For instance, there has been a widespread practice of people beating their children throughout human history. That certainly does not mean that it is morally okay for people now (or even back then) to beat their children.
Perhaps you doubt that child abuse was so prevalent through human history. But let me ask you this: in order to figure out whether it’s morally acceptable now for people to beat their children, do you first have to sort out how common it’s been in human history? Of course not. You already know it’s wrong, regardless of how many people have done in the past. Humans have a long history of all sorts of immoral practices: slavery, torture, persecution, and discrimination. What’s right or wrong has nothing to do with what sorts of practices our ancestors did or didn’t approve of, or how many of them engaged in those practices. There is no reason to accept anything like PR2 or PR2*.
I should emphasize that my objection to these arguments from precedent does not rest on the assumption that killing animals for meat is morally equivalent to these other objectionable practices. Everything I have said is compatible with thinking that child abuse is far worse than slaughtering animals. Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. My point is just that, as with these other practices, the long history of meat-eating doesn’t by itself give us any reason to think that meat-eating is morally acceptable.
9.3 The Argument from Naturalness
Let’s turn to a second possible defense of meat-eating. Here, the idea is that eating meat is natural. This could mean a couple of different things, so we’ll need to look at different ways of clarifying this appeal to naturalness.
First, the idea might be that it’s part of the natural order of things for animals to eat other animals. Cheetahs eat gazelles. Sharks eat seals. We eat chickens and pigs and cows. This is just part of nature.
The argument evidently runs as follows:
There is no denying NO1. But just like PR2 above, NO2 is open to endless counterexamples. Other animals engage in cannibalism, force themselves sexually upon unwilling partners, kill the weakest members of their groups, chew off the heads of their partners during intercourse, and kill innocent humans. Needless to say, these are not things that it would be morally acceptable for you to do. And yet, if NO2 is true, then it follows straightaway that it is morally acceptable for you to do these things. So, NO2 must be false. Yet without NO2, it is unclear how to get from the indisputable truth of NO1 to any interesting conclusion about the moral acceptability of eating meat.
(Does this mean that it’s immoral for cheetahs to eat gazelles? Of course not. Because they’re incapable of moral thinking, and thus incapable of recognizing actions as moral or immoral, cheetahs aren’t morally accountable for their actions. But since we are capable of recognizing actions as moral or immoral, we can be held morally accountable when we perform those same actions.)
A theme is emerging. Defenses of meat-eating cite some uncontroversial fact about eating meat, for instance that humans or nonhuman animals regularly eat meat. A conclusion is then drawn about the moral permissibility of eating meat. To get from the uncontroversial premise to the moral conclusion, however, we need to assume that we have identified some right-making feature: that, in general, the fact that our ancestors or nonhuman animals have done something makes it okay for us to do it. And that underlying assumption, on closer inspection, turns out to be grossly implausible.
Let’s see how this same problem arises for a second way of developing the idea that eating meat is natural. Here the idea is that we have a natural capacity for eating meat. Other animals have mouths and guts and taste buds that are adapted for a vegetarian diet. Not us. We have just the right kinds of teeth and digestive systems for getting nutrition from meat, and we naturally enjoy eating it. Therefore, the idea goes, it’s morally permissible for us to eat meat.
What is the argument here? It seems to be the following:
CP1 is of course true. But CP2 is obviously false. There are plenty of things that you are naturally capable of doing that are not morally permissible: lying, stealing, enslaving other human beings, torturing puppies, and so on. Just because nature has endowed you with the ability to do something and even if you find that doing that thing comes naturally to you—that hardly entails that it’s morally okay for you to do it. Indeed, morality is often a matter of overcoming our natural impulses.
9.4 The Argument from Necessity
Perhaps the most common defense of the moral permissibility of meat-eating is that eating meat is necessary. Necessary for what, though? Obviously it isn’t necessary for survival. You probably know some vegetarians, and you can check their pulse for yourself.
Maybe the idea is that, even if you can survive without eating meat, you can’t be healthy without eating meat. For instance, it is sometimes suggested that you can’t get the necessary amounts of protein without eating meat. If that’s right, then perhaps the following argument can be used to establish the permissibility of eating meat:
We already saw, however, that NP1 is false. I listed a number of alternative sources of protein in Section 9.1 (broccoli, peanut butter, etc.), and it is well known that getting your protein from these sources is healthier than getting it from meat. There is no truth to claim that eating meat is necessary for getting enough protein. Indeed, a number of top athletes some of the healthiest people on the planet—are vegetarians, including tennis pro Venus Williams, Olympic medalist Carl Lewis, and UFC fighters Nate Diaz and Colleen Schneider. So it undoubtedly is possible to have a healthy diet without meat.
Moreover, even if meat-eating were necessary for getting optimal amounts of protein, there would still be a question of whether meat-eating is permissible. Suppose you are a prisoner of war, and—while you are in absolutely no danger of dying—you are not as healthy as you could be because your captors aren’t giving you enough protein. Would it then be morally permissible for you to steal your fellow prisoners’ rations? Of course not. Morality doesn’t permit doing whatever it takes to get the FDA recommended amount of protein. So NP2 is demonstrably false as well.
9.5 Meet Your Meat
Thus far, all we have seen is that standard arguments in defense of meat-eating all fail. In other words, we have no good positive reason to think that meat-eating is morally acceptable. That’s not yet to say that eating meat is morally unacceptable. But I do want to draw this stronger conclusion. So let me turn now to an argument that eating meat is immoral.
Once again, though, I want to narrow the scope of my argument somewhat. I will not try to argue that eating meat is immoral in all cases, or even that it is immoral in all cases in which alternative sources of protein are readily available. Rather, I want to restrict my argument to cases in which the animals being eaten endured a great deal of suffering before ending up on your plate. If you frequent the pricier “pasture raised” portion of the meat aisle, there is some possibility that these animals were raised on a small family farm and treated kindly, that they spent their days goofing around with the children of the household, curled up at night with their animal families in a warm barn, and were treated to a painless death. I won’t try to argue that it is immoral to eat such animals.
Most of the meat consumed in the United States, however, comes from concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs), also known as “factory farms.” This includes pretty much all the chicken, beef, and pork products you’re buying if you’re not making a concerted effort to seek out humanely raised meat. Animals in CAFOs spend much of their lives in cages or otherwise cramped conditions. They are regularly mutilated: chickens have portions of their beaks sliced off, cattle are dehorned and castrated, and pigs are castrated and have their tails cut off, typically without anesthesia. The slaughter, as you can imagine, is no picnic either. Animals typically aren’t slaughtered on site, but are instead transported—often long distances, in all kinds of weather—to slaughterhouses, and the slaughter is (let us say) an imperfect process, given the sheer number of scared and squirming animals coming through the slaughterhouse each day.
Needless to say, this is not cruelty for cruelty’s sake. Conditions in the farming industry have made it all but impossible to turn a profit from a small, idyllic farm, and farmers are forced to scale up in order to make ends meet. Confining the animals to small spaces is necessary for keeping costs low, and the mutilations help curb the distraught animals’ tendency and ability to attack and harm one another. Farmers are not trying to harm the animals. They care about their animals’ well-being. Some even install “happy cow back scratchers” for their cattle. The suffering involved in CAFOs, by their lights, is a regrettable but unavoidable consequence of the industry. But this is their livelihood, and as long as you keep buying, they will keep supplying.
I should add that I am no expert on the meat industry, and it is difficult to find good information on the treatment of animals in CAFOs, due in part to “ag gag” laws and other efforts by agribusiness lobbyists to restrict access to these sites. One can find footage online of animals in CAFOs being treated horrifically, but of course animal welfare groups are going to highlight the most egregious cases of mistreatment they can find. One can also find footage of animals being treated humanely in CAFOs, but of course farmers are going to put their best foot forward. So we can’t expect videos from these sources to give us a representative look at the treatment of animals in CAFOs. My advice (as a non-expert) for getting at least some reliable sense of the present-day realities of animal farming is to track down and browse some online “how-to” guides for beak trimming, dehorning, castrating, and tail-docking, as well as online catalogs selling farmers equipment for performing these mutilations.
9.6 Fred and His Puppies
I will assume in what follows that when you eat meat, you are buying meat that came from a CAFO—which, as I said above, is almost certainly the case if you are not making a special effort and financial sacrifice to buy only humanely raised meat. (If you are making this effort, the argument does not apply to you. But a revised version of the argument might. More on this in Section 9.9.) I will argue that it is immoral for you to buy and eat that meat by presenting you with a fictional case involving the horrific treatment of puppies, and arguing that there is no morally relevant difference between what is done in this fictional case and what you are doing when you eat meat.
Here is the case:
And here is the argument:
The idea behind FP1 is that, whenever there is some moral difference between two actions—for instance that one is immoral and the other isn’t there must always be some explanation of why they differ morally. Absent some such explanation, it would be arbitrary to say that the one action is immoral and the other isn’t.
FP2 should strike you as obvious. Some, despite finding it obvious, may still wring their hands, remembering that in some cultures dogs are routinely killed and eaten for food. If you are wringing your hands, you should remind yourself that there are also cultures in which they routinely mutilate the genitals of young girls. Next, you should re-read Section 9.2 above and remind yourself that the fact that lots of people engage in some practice doesn’t make it morally permissible, for them or for you. The fact that some people mutilate their own daughters’ genitals, raise dogs for food, or (for that matter) confine, mutilate, and slaughter farm animals, does not by itself settle the question of whether any of these practices are morally acceptable. Finally, with all this in mind, I invite you to re-read COCOAMONE FARM with fresh eyes, ask yourself whether Fred’s actions seem immoral, find your moral compass, and admit that FP2 is something that you agree with.
How about FP3? I don’t expect this premise to strike you as obvious. Indeed, you’ve probably already thought of several differences between what Fred is doing and what you do when you buy and eat meat. So let us consider some of the putative differences.
9.7 Morally Relevant Differences
There are plenty of differences between the case of Fred and his puppies and the case of you and the farm animals whose flesh you are buying and eating. Labrador puppies are cute and cuddly, for instance, whereas chickens and pigs are ugly and smelly. That’s a difference. But it isn’t a morally relevant difference. How cute or ugly something or someone is doesn’t make any difference to what we are morally permitted to do to them. } So, what might be a morally relevant difference between the cases, that is, a difference that could potentially make for a moral difference? I’ll consider five possibilities: that puppies aren’t bred to be consumed, that Fred’s cruelty is unnecessary, that meat (unlike chocolate) has actual health benefits, that Fred (unlike you) is directly harming the animals, and that Fred giving up cocoamone would have an actual impact on the amount of animal suffering whereas you giving up meat would have no impact.
First, one might point to a difference in what puppies and livestock are bred for. Puppies, the idea goes, are bred to serve as human companions, whereas chickens and pigs are bred for human consumption. But there is reason to doubt that this is a morally relevant difference. If someone were breeding human children specifically so they could be put to work as slaves, enslaving those children would be just as immoral as enslaving any other child.
Furthermore, we can simply revise the COCOAMONE FARM case so that this difference disappears.
By revising the case in this way, we eliminate the difference that was supposed to be morally relevant. Yet what Fred does to these puppies still seems wrong, even though they were bred for the sole purpose of being slaughtered for their cocoamone. So FP2 remains true—despite changing the details of what Fred does—and the proposed objection to FP3 fails.
Second, one might contend that, whereas the farm animals’ suffering is unavoidable, Fred’s cruel treatment of the puppies is entirely unnecessary. If all he needs is the cocoamone, why extract their teeth and cut off their tails and keep them in small cages?
Well, here’s the thing. Fred lives in a small two-bedroom apartment, and it would be complete chaos if he gave those twenty dogs the run of the house. There’s no reasonable alternative to keeping them in cages. Of course, being all cooped up like this makes them crazy and aggressive, and castrating them curbs their aggression, while removing their teeth and tails diminishes their ability to harm one another. Why not get a bigger apartment? And why no anesthesia? He can’t afford it! Why not extract the cocoamone from their brains without slaughtering them? One does not simply “extract the cocoamone.” It’s not as if there’s a little pouch in there filling up with the stuff. There’s no way to get at it without grinding up the brain and straining it out. So, we have failed to identify a difference between the cases, let alone a morally relevant difference. In both cases, the suffering is an unavoidable consequence of the only feasible and financially sound way of obtaining the relevant resource (be it meat or cocoamone).
Third, one might contend that the morally relevant difference is that meat, but not cocoamone, makes a positive contribution to one’s health. Not so fast. Cocoamone does make a positive contribution to Fred’s psychological health. He loves the taste of chocolate, and the thought of never tasting it again is very depressing for him. Perhaps you’ll object that meat doesn’t merely make a positive contribution to one’s health; meat (unlike cocoamone) is necessary for a healthy diet. But as we saw in Section 9.4, that’s just false. There is nothing, protein included, that’s needed for survival or health and that can only be gotten from meat.
Fourth, one might say that Fred directly harms the puppies in COCOAMONE FARM, whereas you do not directly harm any farm animals. The farm animals have already been confined, mutilated, and slaughtered by the time you buy and eat the meat. (Notice, by the way, that this is the opposite of the common refrain that it’s okay to eat meat as long as you’d be willing to kill it yourself. Here, the idea is that it’s okay precisely because you’re not killing it yourself.)
In response: the absence of direct harm doesn’t typically absolve someone of moral responsibility. If I hire a hitman to kill someone, intuitively what I have done is no less wrong than if I had committed the murder myself. In any case, we can revise the Fred story once more to eliminate the putative difference.
Now, Fred is not directly harming the puppies. But his hands are not clean; it is immoral for him to hire Nysha to set up a cocoamone farm. So FP2 remains true even when we revise the story to incorporate something more analogous to the indirect harm of buying meat. The putative morally relevant difference between the cases disappears and can no longer serve as an objection to FP3.
9.8 The No Impact Objection
Let’s consider one last attempt to identify a morally relevant difference between you and Fred. Here, the idea is that if Fred stops what he’s doing whether that’s running a cocoamone farm himself or paying Nysha to do it for him—there will be a substantial decrease in the number of puppies confined, mutilated, and slaughtered for their cocoamone. That number will drop to zero. By contrast, if you stopped buying and eating meat, in all likelihood it would make no difference whatsoever to the number of farm animals confined, mutilated, and slaughtered for their meat.
Why think that your decision to stop buying meat will have no impact on animal suffering? The average meat-eater consumes the equivalent of twenty-five chickens per year. So suppose you give up meat for a whole year, and twenty-five chickens’ worth of meat goes unpurchased as a result. It is not as if the barons of the meat industry are going to take notice and say: “Egad! Last year we sold eight billion chickens, and this year we only sold 7,999,999,975. We’d better confine, mutilate, and slaughter twenty-five fewer chickens next year.” Demand is going to have to shrink by thousands of animals per year before anyone takes notice, and that’s not something you yourself can make happen just by giving up meat.
This does look like it has what it takes to be a morally relevant difference. If one action actually has an impact on the amount of suffering in the world, and another has no impact whatsoever, then that very plausibly makes for a moral difference between the two actions.
That said, this ultimately is not a convincing objection to FP3. For once again, we can revise the case to make the difference disappear:
It’s wrong for Fred to order a second mousse, now that he knows about the puppy suffering involved in making it. And yet canceling the order would have had no impact on the amount of puppy suffering. They slaughter all the puppies before dinner service even begins, and they’ll slaughter twenty more tomorrow even if they end up with some leftover mousse tonight. So there is no morally relevant difference between what Fred does in SECOND DESSERT and what you do when buying and eating meat. The objection to FP3 has been defused.
How, though, can Fred’s actions in SECOND DESSERT be immoral if they have no impact? The obvious answer is that he is part of a group whose actions collectively do make an impact, namely the restaurant’s customers. The restaurant keeps slaughtering the puppies only because customers keep ordering the mousse. The customers are doing something immoral, and Fred’s actions are immoral by virtue of contributing to the impact that the group as a whole has on puppy suffering. This is the same reason why it’s wrong to throw your plastic bottles in the garbage rather than recycling them, even though the results will almost certainly be the same even without your small contribution. And this is the same reason why it’s wrong to buy meat, even if your personal meat consumption doesn’t by itself make a difference. (Of course, the meat that you and others purchase today is from animals that are already dead, so you’re not contributing to the suffering of those animals. But you and others are affecting the next generation of farm animals, by incentivizing farmers to continue raising and mistreating them.)
I’ll close by considering a variation on the no-impact objection. It is sometimes objected that even if everyone switched to a vegetarian diet, that wouldn’t make any difference to the amount of animal suffering. After all, farming crops results in the deaths of countless mice and other field animals that get caught up in farm machinery. Cutting out meat would lead to less killing of livestock, but this would just be replaced with more crop farming and thus more mouse killing. Since we have to eat something, the idea goes, and since animals are going to be dying either way, we may as well eat meat.
I find this unconvincing for several reasons. First, one must take into account not just the quantity of the deaths but also the quality of the lives. The mice killed in crop farming live normal lives up until they are killed by the farming equipment, whereas livestock in CAFOs are subjected to a lifetime of confinement with mutilated bodies. Second, it’s far from obvious that a worldwide switch to vegetarianism would result in any increase in the number of field animals killed. In the U.S., only about a quarter of farmed crops are directly consumed by humans, and more than half are grown and farmed to serve as animal feed. Replacing the latter with crops meant for human consumption would likely lead to an overall decrease in crop farming and mouse killings, as well as reducing the number of mice killed in laboratories while developing and testing antibiotics for farm animals. Third, there are feasible, nonlethal methods of driving mice from the fields before farming them, whereas there are no nonlethal methods of slaughtering animals for their meat.
9.9 Beyond Factory Farming
I have argued that eating meat cannot be justified on the grounds that people have been doing it for all of recorded history, or on the grounds that eating meat is necessary, or on the grounds that eating meat is “natural.” I also argued that it is immoral for you to buy and eat meat produced in CAFOs, which is pretty much all the meat you’ve been buying assuming that you haven’t been going out of your way to buy humanely raised meat. If I’m right about this, then my arguments are highly relevant to most people’s eating habits. If you have been casually buying meat at supermarkets, restaurants, and fast food establishments, then you are doing something immoral and ought to change your dietary practices.
Is it ever morally permissible to eat meat or other animal products? The Argument from Fred’s Puppies only establishes that eating meat from CAFOs is immoral, and not all meat comes from CAFOs. That said, the Argument from Fred’s Puppies can be adapted to shed light on other sorts of cases.
First, consider eggs and dairy products like cheese and milk. Just like the meat you buy, pretty much all of the eggs and dairy that you buy comes from CAFOs. Dairy cows and egg-laying chickens endure the same sorts of confinement and mutilations as the cows and chickens raised for meat. In light of that, we can revise Fred’s case to show that it is immoral to buy and consume eggs and dairy that come from CAFOs.
What Fred does is immoral. But there’s no morally relevant difference between him caging and mutilating the puppies for their cocoamone, and you buying and consuming eggs and dairy from CAFOs. (See Section 9.7 for a reminder about why Fred has no choice but to cage and mutilate the puppies.)
How about meat from humanely raised animals? Here, again, we can look to Fred for guidance.
Is Fred doing something immoral? I would say so, though I’ll admit that what he does in PAINLESS DEATH isn’t nearly as bad as what he does in the original COCOAMONE FARM case. If you agree that it’s wrong for Fred to slaughter puppies for their cocoamone even if he otherwise treats them well, then you should agree that it’s wrong for you to buy meat even from humanely-raised farm animals.
How about eggs and dairy from humanely raised animals? For instance, suppose that someone keeps chickens and cows as pets, treats them well, never slaughters them, and sells their milk and (unfertilized) eggs. Would it be wrong to buy and consume their milk and eggs? To find the answer, let’s consider what would be the analogous case for Fred:
This case seems to combine all the best features of the previous two cases with none of their problematic features. Certainly Fred isn’t doing anything immoral. So, by parity of reason, there’s nothing immoral about buying eggs and dairy from humanely raised animals on a no-kill farm.
Finally, what about lab-grown meat? We currently have the technology to “grow” beef in a laboratory—just the meat, with no animal attached without any living animals being harmed in the process. Someday soon, you may be able to buy this lab-grown meat in stores and restaurants. Would that be immoral? Once again, we can answer the question by imagining Fred getting his cocoamone in an analogous way:
When we drastically change the details of the case in this way, it no longer seems like Fred is doing anything immoral. No animals have to die or suffer in order for him to get his cocoamone. Since there is no morally relevant difference between what Fred does in COCOAMONE LAB and buying labgrown meat, and since Fred isn’t doing anything immoral in COCOAMONE LAB, there’s nothing immoral about buying and eating lab-grown meat.
What we’ve just seen is that the arguments of this chapter don’t support the extreme view that it’s never permissible to buy or consume meat or other animal products. But even though I haven’t shown that eating meat is always immoral, I have shown that it’s immoral to buy any of the meat (and most of the eggs and dairy) that’s presently for sale in stores and restaurants.
Suppose you are convinced that you ought to stop buying and eating meat. But you can’t bring yourself to cut out meat completely, perhaps because you love Taco Bell too much or because grandma will be crushed if you refuse to eat her Christmas roast. What’s a wannabe vegetarian to do? What I would say is that morality comes in degrees. It’s wrong to eat meat, but it’s far worse to eat meat at every meal than to eat meat just on holidays and a Taco Bell Double Decker Taco now and again. So, my advice is to make a good faith effort to decrease your meat consumption, to once a day or once a week. In other words, you can become a “reducetarian.” Then, when you’re ready, you can transition to a 100% (or 99%) vegetarian diet.
Reflection Questions
- Can the arguments from precedent or naturalness be defended against my objections? Or can you think of a superior line of argument in defense of eating meat?
- Can you think of a plausible way of arguing against premise FP2, that what Fred does is immoral? Make sure that your argument in defense of slaughtering puppies won’t double as a defense of slaughtering human infants.
- Can you defend one of the putative morally relevant differences discussed in sections 9.7 and 9.8 against my objections? Or can you think of a morally relevant difference that was not discussed?
- If not for the meat industry, the billions of animals raised and slaughtered annually for food would never have existed. Could this fact be used as the basis for an argument in defense of eating meat? Why or why not?
- What should someone who accepts the Argument from Fred’s Puppies think about freeganism, the practice of eating only meat that someone else has purchased or thrown in the dumpster and that would otherwise go to waste?
Sources and Resources
I am still working on reorganizing this section.
The discussion of the Arguments from Precedent, Naturalness, and Necessity draws heavily from Lowe (2016). The Argument from Fred’s Puppies and subsequent discussion is drawn from Norcross (2004). The argument from killing mice in Section 9.8 is drawn from Archer (2011), and the response to that argument is drawn from AllAnimalsAustralia (2014). The statistics in Section 9.8 about the proportion of crops grown to feed animals are drawn from Plumer (2014).
Anderson (2004) Chignell et al. (2016) Diamond (1978) Engel (2019) Gruen (2011) Harman (2011) Huemer (2019) Jauernig (n.d.) Korsgaard (2015) Lomasky (2013) McMahan (2010) Singer (1975) Foster Wallace (2004)
Humane Ventures (n.d.): animal kill clock Bojack Horseman: Chickens (2015) : Bojack episode Doggett (2014): wireless phil