Is there any ethical justification for eating meat?Why does it need to be justified at all? If we're talking about ethics of eating meat, then the burden of proof is on its opponents to prove that it's not ethical.
And the angel of the lord came unto me, snatching me up from my place of slumber. And took me on high, and higher still until we moved to the spaces betwixt the air itself. And he brought me into a vast farmlands of our own midwest. And as we descended, cries of impending doom rose from the soil. One thousand, nay a million voices full of fear. And terror possesed me then. And I begged, "Angel of the Lord, what are these tortured screams?" And the angel said unto me, "These are the cries of the carrots, the cries of the carrots! You see, Reverend Maynard, tomorrow is harvest day and to them it is the holocaust." And I sprang from my slumber drenched in sweat like the tears of one million terrified brothers and roared, "Hear me now, I have seen the light! They have a consciousness, they have a life, they have a soul! Damn you! Let the rabbits wear glasses! Save our brothers!" Can I get an amen? Can I get a hallelujah? Thank you Jesus.Life feeds on life feeds on life feeds on life feeds on...
"It's all a sham."I'm not going to take the bait and get emotional about anildash's inflammatory remarks, especially since I obviously provoked some kind of extreme (possibly guilt?) reaction from him, but I'll say this: if you buy free range products, you really have to research the source, because in most cases, especially in major grocery stores, it IS a sham. If you know the small farmer who raises your "meat" and s/he raises them TRULY free range, without chemicals that are harmful to you (including pesticide on their feed, which is common), and s/he slaughters them humanely, I don't have time to have any objection to TRULY free range organic "meat." It bothers me nearly not at all.
Clearly, Shane's in the mood to lecture, not convince. There are plenty of ethical people who eat meat, and apparently only a small percentage of vegans who find evangelicalism unethical.
Not at all. The burden is always on someone who wants to take positive action to justify that action's morality.But most meat-eaters aren't saying that people have a moral duty to eat meat. Rather, the argument is that eating meat is morally neutral. There's no need to justify it just like there's no need to justify any other day to day activity. Do you feel a need to defend yourself for getting out of bed in the morning? Or for brushing your teeth? Or cleaning your room? Of course not. Because the burden of proof rests on those who want to claim that the activity is not neutral. There's simply no reason to justify everything you do until and unless someone provides a compelling reason for why its is wrong.
I wouldnt be so quick to call out 'bullshit' either. A traditional vegetarian diet has been shown to cause blindness and other problems because of a lack of vitamin A, which traditionally is had through animal products. This is why golden rice was made.Vitamin A deficiency is certainly something you want to avoid, but that has pretty much nothing to with maintaining a vegetarian diet or not, as there are many good vegetarian sources (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retinol#Good_sources).
At the risk of derail, all of those actions you listed do have fairly simple justifications. That those justifications are readily apparent is why people don't bother justifying them.True, but then again, the justification for eating meat was considered to be readily apparent for millions of years before vegetarians came along.
The primary justification for a meat diet, that the ease of transporting live meat made it able to reach areas where fresh vegetables could not, has fallen away.I don't think that was really the "primary" justification for eating meat, since humans have been eating meat since long before transportation was an issue. In fact, humans have been eating meat for as long as there have been humans. Eating meat is largely what made us human.
That is opposed to the fact that every meal made of meat stems from the death of a creature that can feel pain and understand pain.With all due respect, how do you know that a plant can't feel pain?
I'll quote Jeremy Bentham: "the question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?"But consider this. Suppose we have someone out there who has suffered nerve damage that leaves him incapable of experiencing pain. Would it then be morally acceptable to carve this guy up and eat him? After all, the question is, "Can they suffer?" And this poor fellow can't.
But consider this. Suppose we have someone out there who has suffered nerve damage that leaves him incapable of experiencing pain. Would it then be morally acceptable to carve this guy up and eat him? After all, the question is, "Can they suffer?" And this poor fellow can't.What an absurd strawman argument. This poor fellow is perfectly capable of letting us know "Yes, I like being alive, please don't kill me." Saying that it is immoral to impose unnecessary suffering hardly implies that it is moral to kill when it doesn't create pain.
This poor fellow is perfectly capable of letting us know "Yes, I like being alive, please don't kill me."And animals are perfectly capable of letting us know that they don't want to be killed. Maybe not linguistically, but it's still perfectly clear from their behavior. Besides, according to Bentham, that's not even relevant. The question isn't about desire. It's about suffering.
Your argument about hunter-gatherers also doesn't work, since hunters require considerably more range. Farming uses limited resources intensively; hunter-gatherer societies use extensive resources lightly.That's simply not true. Hunter-gatherers usually cover a wider ranger, yes. But they don't come anywhere close to consuming the amount of resources it takes to feed the same number of people through farming. Agricultural societies are the most resource intensive societies on the planet. The suggestion that they use the same amount of resources, just distributed differently, is so far from reality that just calling it "wrong" doesn't seem to do it justice.
Biologically, cows are a vastly more sucessful species now than pre-domestication.That all depends on how you define "success." If it's just absolute numbers, then you might have a point. But if we're talking about sustainability, then there's no way that argument works. Cows need humans to feed and protect them now because we've bred them to be that way. But they didn't need us before being domesticated. So the whole "evolutionary trade off" scenario that GregW propose is kind of... insane. The pre-domesticated ancestor of the cow was much fiercer than its modern-day counterpart and more than capable of getting along perfectly fine without humans.
It has been concluded that the posterior, superior parietal lobe is involved in both the creation of a three-dimensional sense of self and an individual's ability to navigate through physical space (Journal 216). The region of the lobe in the left hemisphere of the brain allows for a person to conceive of the physical boundaries of his body (Newberg 28). It responds to proprioceptive stimuli, most importantly the movement of limbs. The region of the lobe in the right hemisphere creates the perception of the matrix through which we move.Emphasis added by me to a passage from This is Your Brain on God.
So I decided I would track down Peter Singer and ask him what he thought. In an e-mail message, I described Polyface and asked him about the implications for his position of the Good Farm—one where animals got to live according to their nature and to all appearances did not suffer.(Emphasis mine.)
"I agree with you that it is better for these animals to have lived and died than not to have lived at all," Singer wrote back. Since the utilitarian is concerned exclusively with the sum of happiness and suffering and the slaughter of an animal that doesn't comprehend that death need not involve suffering, the Good Farm adds to the total of animal happiness, provided you replace the slaughtered animal with a new one. However, he added, this line of thinking doesn't obviate the wrongness of killing an animal that "has a sense of its own existence over time and can have preferences for its own future." In other words, it's O.K. to eat the chicken, but he's not so sure about the pig. Yet, he wrote, "I would not be sufficiently confident of my arguments to condemn someone who purchased meat from one of these farms."
Singer went on to express serious doubts that such farms could be practical on a large scale, since the pressures of the marketplace will lead their owners to cut costs and corners at the expense of the animals. He suggested, too, that killing animals is not conducive to treating them with respect. Also, since humanely raised food will be more expensive, only the well-to-do can afford morally defensible animal protein. These are important considerations, but they don't alter my essential point: what's wrong with animal agriculture—with eating animals—is the practice, not the principle.
Seems to me the only good arguments for eating meat come down to arguments about convenience - which is to say, they ultimately feel unsatisfactory in some way.But why are you automatically assuming right off the bat that it needs to be justified at all? You wouldn't automatically assume any other behavior to be morally wrong, would you? As I said before, it's up to those who are opposed to meat to explain why it's unethical. All anyone else needs to do to "argue for eating meat," is to refute the vegetarian arguments for why it's wrong. And I haven't seen a compelling argument yet for why I should consider eating meat to be unethical.
magodesky - as someone else argued above, there's no particular reason why the burden should be on the dissenters alone. One could easily argue the opposite, that those making the positive decision to eat meat need to justify it.But the dissenters are the ones making a claim. Those defending the eating of meat are not. They're not arguing that eating meat is morally right. They're arguing that eating meat is not morally wrong.
posted by clockzero at 9:46 AM on August 7, 2006