Mar 1, 2012 — Eating Meat and Eating People - Oxford Scholarship Oxford Scholarship Online Biology History Mathematics Philosophy Public Health and Epidemiology ANIMAL RIGHTS CASS R. SUNSTEIN MARTHA C. NUSSBAUM Business and Management Law Music Physics Religion Print publication date: 2005 Print ISBN-13: 9780195305104 Animal Rights: Current Debates and New Directions Cass R. Sunstein and Martha C. Nussbaum Eating Meat and Eating People Cora Diamond Classical Studies Linguistics Neuroscience Political Science Social Work Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: March 2012 DOI: 10.1093/acprof: oso/9780195305104.001.0001 DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195305104.003.0005 Abstract and Keywords 8/26/15 2:10 PM Economics and Finance Literature Palliative Care Psychology Sociology Go to page: Go This chapter presents commentaries on Peter Singer's approach to animal rights. It contends that Singer's attack on 'speciesism' mischaracterises the moral issues at stake and contends that if people are to be on the side of animals, it must be for reasons different from those used by Singer and others who object to the current human use and mistreatment of animals. The chapter argues against the call to stop the killing of animals for food and the use of animals in scientific research. Keywords: animal rights, Peter Singer, moral issues, speciesism, misuse of animals, animals for food, scientific research This essay is a response to a certain sort of argument defending the rights of animals. Part I is a brief explanation of the background and of the sort of argument I want to reject; part II is an attempt to characterize those arguments: They contain fundamental confusions about moral relations between people and people and between people and animals. And part III is an indication of what I think can still be said on as it were-the animals' side. http://www.oxfordscholarship.com.ezp-prod1.hul.harvard.edu/view/10.../acprof:oso/9780195305104.001.0001/acprof-9780195305104-chapter-4 I The background to this chapter is the discussions of animals' rights by Peter Singer and Tom Regan and a number of other philosophers.¹ The basic type of argument in many of these discussions is encapsulated in the word speciesism. The word, I think, is originally Richard Ryder's, but Peter Singer is responsible for making it popular in connection with an obvious sort of argument: that in our attitude to members of other species we have prejudices which are completely analogous to the prejudices people may have with regard to members of other races, and these prejudices will be connected with the ways we are blind to our own exploitation and oppression of the other group. We are blind to the fact that what we do to them deprives (p.94) them of their rights; we do not want to see this because we profit from it, and so we make use of what are really morally irrelevant differences between them and ourselves to justify the difference in Page 1 of 9 Eating Meat and Eating People - Oxford Scholarship 8/26/15 2:10 PM treatment. Putting it fairly crudely; if we say, "You cannot live here because you are black," this would be supposed to be parallel to saying, "You can be used for our experiments, because you are only an animal and cannot talk." If the first is unjustifiable prejudice, so equally is the second. In fact, both Singer and Regan argue, if we, as a justification for differential treatment, point to things like the incapacity of animals to use speech, we should be committed to treating in the same way as animals those members of our own species who (let us say) have brain damage sufficient to prevent the development of speech- committed to allowing them to be used as laboratory animals or as food or whatever. If we say, "These animals are not rational, so we have a right to kill them for food," but we do not say the same of people whose rationality cannot develop or whose capacities have been destroyed, we are plainly not treating cases alike. The fundamental principle here is one we could put this way (the formulation is based on Peter Singer's statements): We must give equal consideration to the interests of any being which is able of having interests; and the capacity to have interests is essentiall dependent only on the capacity for suffering and enjoyment. This we evidently share with animals. Here I want to mention a point only to get it out of the way. I disagree with a great deal of what Singer and Regan and other defenders of animals' rights say, but I do not wish to raise the issue how we can be certain that animals feel pain. I think Singer and Regan are right that doubt about that is, in most ordinary cases, as much out of place as it is in many cases in connection with human beings. It will be evident that the form of argument I have described is very close to what we find in Bentham and Mill; and Mill, in arguing for the rights of women, attacks Chartists who fight for the rights of all men and drop the subject when the rights of women come up, with an argument of exactly the form that Singer uses. The confinement of your concern for rights to the rights of men shows that you are not really concerned with equality, as you profess to be. You are only a Chartist because you are not a lord.² And so too we are told more than a century later that the confinement of moral concern to human animals is equally a denial of equality. Indeed the description of human beings as "human animals" is a characteristic part of the argument. The point being made there is that just as our language may embody prejudices against blacks or against women, so may it against nonhuman animals. It supposedly embodies our prejudice, then, when we use the word animal to set them apart form us, just as if we were not animals ourselves. It is on the basis of this sort of claim, that the rights of all animals should be given equal consideration, that Singer and Regan and Ryder and the others have argued that we must give up killing animals for food, and (p.95) most drastically cut back-at least-the use of animals in scientific research. And so on. That argument seems to me to be confused. I do not dispute that there are analogies between the case of our relations to animals and the case of a dominant group's relation to some other group of human beings which it exploits or treats unjustly in other ways. But the analogies are not simple and straightforward, and it is not clear how far they go. The Singer-Regan approach makes it hard to see what is important either in our relationship with other human beings or in our relationship with animals. And that is what I shall try to explain in part II. My discussion will be limited to eating animals, but much of what I say is intended to apply to other uses of animals as well. II Discussions of vegetarianism and animals' rights often start with discussions of human rights. We may then be asked what it is that grounds the claims that people have such rights, and whether similar grounds may not after all be found in the case of animals. All such discussions are beside the point. For they ask why we do not kill people (very irrational ones, let us say) for food, or why we do not treat people in ways which would cause them distress or anxiety and so on, when for the sake of meat we are willing enough to kill animals or treat them in ways which cause them distress. This is a totally wrong way of beginning the discussion, because it ignores certain quite central facts-facts which, if attended to, would make it clear that rights are not what is crucial. We do not eat our dead, even when they have died in automobile accidents or been struck by lightning, and their flesh might be first class. We do not eat them; or if we do, it is a matter of extreme need, or of some special ritual-and even in cases of obvious extreme need, there is very great reluctance. We also do not eat our amputated limbs. (Or if we did, it would be in the same kinds of special circumstances in which we eat our dead.) Now the fact that we do not eat our dead is not a consequence-not a direct one in any event-of our unwillingness to kill people for food or other purposes. It is not a direct consequence of our unwillingness to cause distress to people. Of course it would cause distress to people to think that they might be eaten when they were dead, but it causes distress because of what it is to eat a dead person. Hence we cannot elucidate what (if anything) is wrong-if that is the word-with eating people by appealing to the distress it would cause, in the way we can point to the distress caused by stamping on someone's toe as a reason why we regard it as a wrong to him. Now if we do http://www.oxfordscholarship.com.ezp-prod1.hul.harvard.edu/view/10.../acprof:oso/9780195305104.001.0001/acprof-9780195305104-chapter-4 Page 2 of 9 Eating Meat and Eating People - Oxford Scholarship 8/26/15 2:10 PM not eat people who are already dead and also do not kill people for food, it is at least prima facie plausible that our reasons in the two cases might be related, and hence must be looked into by anyone who wants to claim that we have no good (p.96) reasons for not eating people which are not also good reasons for not eating animals. Anyone who, in discussing this issue, focuses on our reasons for not killing people or our reasons for not causing them suffering quite evidently runs the risk of leaving altogether out of his discussion those fundamental features of our relationship to other human beings which are involved in our not eating them. It is in fact part of the way this point is usually missed that arguments are given for not eating animals, for respecting their rights to life and not making them suffer, which imply that there is absolutely nothing queer, nothing at all odd, in the vegetarian eating the cow that has obligingly been struck by lightning. That is to say, there is nothing in the discussion which suggests that a cow is not something to eat; it is only that one must not help the process along. One must not, that is, interfere with those rights with which we should usually have to interfere if we are to eat animals at all conveniently. But if the point of the Singer-Regan vegetarian's argument is to show that the eating of meat is, morally, in the same position as the eating of human flesh, he is not consistent unless he says that it is just squeamishness, or something like that, which stops us eating our dead. If he admitted that what underlies our attitude to dining on ourselves is the view that a person is not something to eat, he could not focus on the cow's right not to be killed or maltreated, as if that were the heart of it. I write this as a vegetarian, but one distressed by the obtuseness of the normal arguments, in particular, I should say, the arguments of Singer and Regan. For if vegetarians give arguments which do not begin to get near the considerations which are involved in our not eating people, those to whom their arguments are addressed may not be certain how to reply, but they will not be convinced either, and really are quite right. They themselves may not be able to make explicit what it is they object to in the way the vegetarian presents our attitude to not eating people, but they will be left feeling that beyond all the natter about "speciesism" and equality and the rest, there is a difference between human beings and animals which is being ignored. This is not just connected with the difference between what it is to eat the one and what it is to eat the other. It is connected with the difference between giving people a funeral and giving a dog one, with the difference between miscegenation and chacun à son goût with consenting adult gorillas. (Singer and Regan give arguments which certainly appear to imply that a distaste for the latter is merely that, and would no more stand up to scrutiny than a taboo on miscegenation.) And so on. It is a mark of the shallowness of these discussions of vegetarianism that the only tool used in them to explain what differences in treatment are justified is the appeal to the capacities of the beings in question. That is to say, such-and-such a being- a dog, say-might be said to have, like us, a right to have its interests taken into account, but its interests will be different because its capacities are. Such an appeal may then be used by the vegetarian to explain why he need not in consistency demand votes for dogs (though even there it is not really adequate), but as (p.97) an explanation for the appropriateness of a funeral for a child two days old and not for a puppy it will not do; and the vegetarian is forced to explain that-if he tries at all-in terms of what it is to us, a form of explanation which for him is evidently dangerous. Indeed, it is normally the case that vegetarians do not touch the issue of our attitude to the dead. They accuse philosophers of ignoring the problems created by animals in their discussions of human rights, but they equally may be accused of ignoring the hard cases for their own view. (The hardness of the case for them, though, is a matter of its hardness for any approach to morality deriving much from utilitarianism-deriving much, that is, from a utilitarian conception of what makes something a possible object of moral concern.) I do not think it an accident that the arguments of vegetarians have a nagging moralistic tone. They are an attempt to show something to be morally wrong, on the assumption that we all agree that it is morally wrong to raise people for meat, and so on. Now the objection to saying that that is morally wrong is not, or not merely, that it is too weak. What we should be going against in adopting Swift's "Modest Proposal" is something we should be going against in salvaging the dead more generally: useful organs for transplantation, and the rest for supper or the compost heap. And "morally wrong" is not too weak for that, but in the wrong dimension. One could say that it would be impious to treat the dead so, but the word "impious" does not make for clarity; it only asks for explanation. We can most naturally speak of a kind of action as morally wrong when we have some firm grasp of what kind of beings are involved. But there are some actions, like giving people names, that are part of the way we come to understand and indicate our recognition of what kind it is with which we are concerned. And "morally wrong" will often not fit our refusals to act in such a way, or our acting in an opposed sort of way, as when Gradgrind calls a child "Girl number twenty." Doing her out of a name is not like doing her out of an inheritance to which she has a right and in which she has an interest. Rather, Gradgrind lives in a world, or would like to, in which it makes no difference whether she has a name, a number being more efficient, and in which a human being is not something to be named, not numbered. Again, it is not "morally wrong" to eat our pets; people who ate their pets would not have pets in the same sense of that term. (If we call an animal that we are fattening for the table a pet, we are making a crude joke of a familiar sort.) A pet is not something to eat; it is given a name, is let into our http://www.oxfordscholarship.com.ezp-prod1.hul.harvard.edu/view/10.../acprof:oso/9780195305104.001.0001/acprof-9780195305104-chapter-4 Page 3 of Eating Meat and Eating People - Oxford Scholarship 8/26/15 2:10 PM houses, and may be spoken to in ways in which we do not normally speak to cows or squirrels. That is to say, it is given some part of the character of a person. (This may be more or less sentimental; it need not be sentimental at all.) Treating pets in these ways is not at all a matter of recognizing some interest which pets have in being so treated. There is not a class of beings, pets, whose nature, whose capacities, are such that we owe it to them to treat them in these ways. Similarly, it is not out of respect for the interests of beings of the class to which we belong that we give names to each other, or that we treat (p.98) human sexuality or birth or death as we do, marking them in their various ways-as significant or serious. And again, it is not respect for our interests which is involved in our not eating each other. These are all things that go to determine what sort of concept “human being" is. Similarly with having duties to human beings. This is not a consequence of what human beings are; it is not justified by what human beings are. It is itself one of the things which go to build our notion of human beings. And so too-very much so-with the idea of the difference between human beings and animals. We learn what a human being is in-among other ways-sitting at a table where we eat them. We are around the table and they are on it. The difference between human beings and animals is not to be discovered by studies of Washoe or the activities of dolphins. It is not that sort of study or ethology or evolutionary theory that is going to tell us the difference between us and animals: The difference is, as I have suggested, a central concept for human life and is more an object of contemplation than observation (though that might be misunderstood; I am not suggesting it is a matter of intuition). One source of confusion here is that we fail to distinguish between "the difference between animals and people" and "the differences between animals and people"; the same sort of confusion occurs in discussions of the relationship of men and women. In both cases people appeal to scientific evidence to show that "the difference" is not as deep as we think; but all that such evidence can show, or show directly, is that the differences are less sharp than we think. In the case of the difference between animals and people, it is clear that we form the idea of this difference, create the concept of the difference, knowing perfectly well the overwhelmingly obvious similarities. It may seem that by the sort of line I have been suggesting, I should find myself having to justify slavery. For do we not learn-if we live in a slave society-what slaves are and what masters are through the structure of a life in which we are here and do this, and they are there and do that? Do we not learn the difference between a master and a slave that way? In fact I do not think it works quite that way, but at this point I am not trying to justify anything, only to indicate that our starting point in thinking about the relationships among human beings is not a moral agent as an item on one side, and on the other a being capable of suffering thought, speech, etc; and similarly (mutatis mutandis) in the case of our thought about the relationship between human beings and animals. We cannot point and say, "This thing (whatever concepts it may fall under) is at any rate capable of suffering, so we ought not to make it suffer." (That sentence, Jonathan Bennett said, struck him as so clearly false that he thought I could not have meant it literally; I shall come back to it.) That "this" is a being which I ought not to make suffer, or whose suffering I should try to prevent, constitutes a special relationship to it, or rather, any of a number of such relationships-for example, what its suffering is in relation to me might depend on its being my mother. That I ought to attend to a being's sufferings and enjoyments is not the fundamental moral relation to determining how I ought to act toward (p.99) it—no more fundamental than that this man, being my brother, is a being about whom I should not entertain sexual fantasies. What a life is like in which I recognize such relationships as the former with at any rate some animals, how it is different from those in which no such relationships are recognized, or different ones, and how far it is possible to say that some such lives are less hypocritical or richer or better than those in which animals are for us mere things would then remain to be described. But a starting point in any such description must be understanding what is involved in such things as our not eating people: No more than our not eating pets does that rest on recognition of the claims of a being simply as one capable of suffering and enjoyment. To argue otherwise, to argue as Singer and Regan do, is not to give a defense of animals; it is to attack significance in human life. The Singer-Regan arguments amount to this: Knee-jerk liberals on racism and sexism ought to go knee-jerk about cows and guinea pigs; and they certainly show how that can be done, not that it ought to be. They might reply: If you are right, then we are, or should be willing to let animals suffer for the sake of significance in our life-for the sake, as it were, of the concept of the human. And what is that but speciesism again-more highfalutin perhaps than the familiar kind but no less morally disreputable for that? Significance, though, is not an end, is not something I am proposing as an alternative to the prevention of unnecessary suffering, to which the latter might be sacrificed. The ways in which we mark what human life is belong to the source of moral life, and no appeal to the prevention of suffering which is blind to this can in the end be anything but self-destructive. III Have I not then, by attacking such arguments, completely sawn off the branch I am sitting on? Is there any other way of showing anyone that he does have reason to treat animals better than he is treating them? http://www.oxfordscholarship.com.ezp-prod1.hul.harvard.edu/view/10.../acprof:oso/9780195305104.001.0001/acprof-9780195305104-chapter-4 Page 4 of 9 Eating Meat and Eating People - Oxford Scholarship 8/26/15 2:10 PM I shall take eating them as an example, but want to point out that eating animals, even among us, is not just one thing. To put it at its simplest by an example, a friend of mine raises his own pigs; they have quite a good life, and he shoots and butchers them with help from a neighbor. His children are involved in the operations in various ways, and the whole business is very much a subject of conversation and thought. This is obviously in some ways very different from picking up out of the supermarket freezer one of the several billion chicken breasts we Americans eat every year. So when I speak of eating animals I mean a lot of different cases, and what I say will apply to some more than others. What then is involved in trying to show someone that he ought not to eat meat? I have drawn attention to one curious feature of the Peter Singer sort of argument, which is that your Peter Singer vegetarian should be perfectly happy to eat the unfortunate lamb that has just been hit by a car. I want to (p.100) connect this with a more general characteristic of the utilitarian vegetarians' approach. They are not, they say, especially fond of, or interested in, animals. They may point that out they do not "love them." They do not want to anthropomorphize them, and are concerned to put their position as distinct from one which they see as sentimental anthropomorphizing. Just as you do not have to prove that underneath his black skin the black man has a white man inside in order to recognize his rights, you do not have to see animals in terms of your emotional responses to people to recognize their rights. So the direction of their argument is: We are only one kind of animal; if what is fair for us is concern for our interests, that depends only on our being living animals with interests—and if that is fair, it is fair for any animal. They do not, that is, want to move from concern for people to concern for four-legged people or feathered people-to beings who deserve that concern only because we think of them as having a little person inside. To make a contrast, I want to take a piece of vegetarian propaganda of a very different sort: Learning to be a Dutiful Carnivore Dogs and cats and goats and cows, Ducks and chickens, sheep and sows Woven into tales for tots, Pictured on their walls and pots. Time for dinner! Come and eat All your lovely, juicy meat. One day ham from Percy Porker (In the comics he's a corker), Then the breast from Mrs. Cluck Or the wing from Donald Duck. Liver next from Clara Cow (No, it doesn't hurt her now). Yes, that leg's from Peter Rabbit Chew it well; make that a habit. Eat the creatures killed for sale, But never pull the pussy's tail. Eat the flesh from "filthy hogs" But never be unkind to dogs. Grow up into double-think- Kiss the hamster; skin the mink. Never think of slaughter, dear, That's why animals are here. They only come on earth to die, So eat your meat, and don't ask why. -Jane Legge3 What that is trying to bring out is a kind of inconsistency, or confusion mixed with hypocrisy-what it sees as that-in our ordinary ways of thinking (p.101) about animals, confusions that come out, not only but strikingly, in what children are taught about them. That is to say, the poem does not ask you to feel in this or the other way about animals. Rather, it takes a certain range of feelings for granted. There http://www.oxfordscholarship.com.ezp-prod1.hul.harvard.edu/view/10.../acprof:oso/9780195305104.001.0001/acprof-9780195305104-chapter-4 Page 5 of

May 26, 2006 — Follow Catholic Education Resource Center Explore Catholic Education Resource Center About Apologetics Marriage & Family Social Issues Religion Reflections Search About Apologetics Marriage & Family Social Issues Religion Reflections Search More We're sorry, the page you are looking for is missing. Here are some links you might find helpful. Home Contact

Jan 8, 2004 — Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture The Consumption of Animals and the Catholic Tradition John Berkman Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture University of St. Thomas Volume 7, Number 1, Winter 2004 pp. 174-190 10.1353/log.2004.0002 Article View Citation Related Content Additional Information Purchase/rental options available: Rent from DeepDyve In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture 7.1 (2004) 174-190 [Access article in PDF] The Consumption of Animals and the Catholic Tradition John Berkman HISTORICALLY, MOST IF not all Catholics have abstained from eating animal flesh as an expression of their faith. Although most have abstained only for certain periods of time, others have abstained permanently. While Catholics have abstained for a variety of reasons, this essay focuses on distinctively theological reasons Catholics, especially in the early centuries of Catholicism, have chosen to abstain from consuming animal flesh. On the one hand, this essay will show how such abstinence has been an aspect of the spiritual practice of fasting and a response to the capital vice of gluttony. On the other hand, it will show how such abstinence has been predicated on Catholic doctrines concerning creation and nature, the Fall, and eschatology. The history of Catholic thought on why a person should or should not consume animal flesh is complex, and yet no scholarly history of this subject is readily available. Furthermore, there is no overarching history of more general Christian attitudes toward animals. 1 This may partially account for the fact that most general commentators on the ethics of eating animals treat the Catholic tradition on [End Page 174] this question in a way that is simplistic at best, generally making no attempt to seriously analyze the depth or breadth of, for example, patristic teaching about abstaining from consuming animals as part of Christian askesis ("training"), or considering how such abstinence from animal flesh has been a central part of the Christian practice of fasting. While relatively little serious overarching analysis has been done with regard to the consumption of animals and the Catholic tradition, at least two things are clear. First, despite what some zealous advocates assert, there is no reason to believe that Catholic (or Orthodox or most Protestant) Christianity has ever been a strictly "vegetarian" faith. 2 Second, contrary to what some recent advocates for animals are prone to proclaim, no even-handed assessment of the Catholic tradition as a whole can baldly assert that Catholicism has been averse to abstaining from animal flesh or that it has been inimical to concern for other animals. 3 It will be impossible to address comprehensively the tradition; thus my treatment of the question will be necessarily selective. Because I will focus on types of reasoning about abstaining from animal flesh, historical contextualization will be limited. Furthermore, it will not be possible to adequately address the large question that runs through the entire tradition as to whether the Catholic ethic is properly seen as perfectionistic (with allowances made for the weak) or as more modest, expecting obedience to fundamental moral principles but considering the more rigorous aspects of the faith as counsels of perfection for those who enter "religious life." 4 I am aware that one could question whether the relatively few sources I draw on from Scripture, from patristic and medieval theologians, and from current magisterial teaching adequately represent the Catholic tradition. My modest goal is to show (even in the limited sources I present) that the Catholic tradition has a significantly more complex and diverse view regarding the consumption of animal flesh than typically is recognized. [End Page 175] I shall present three kinds of reasoning—medicinal, ascetical, and eschatological—for abstinence from animal flesh. These reasonings are not independent or mutually exclusive. Although all three are interconnected and build on one another, different authors and different periods in the tradition significantly diverge with regard to the emphasis placed on each. Medicinal abstinence focuses on abstention from animal flesh for the sake of health. However, by "health" one should not think primarily of the contemporary understanding of physical health (e.g., lowering one's intake of cholesterol and saturated fats). For most of the Christian tradition, physical health cannot be neatly separated from spiritual health. Thus, when patristic authors advocate a simple, meatless diet in the interests of health, they have foremost in mind health as a kind of spiritual purity. Many ancient... collapse You are not currently authenticated. If you would like to authenticate using a different subscribed institution or have your own login and password to Project MUSE Authenticate

Jul 19, 2021 — Should Catholics be vegan? Join Fr Rob and Justine in the season opener of the Catholic Influencers Podcast as they discuss this and break open this week's upcoming Sunday Gospel reading. 17th Sunday in Ordinary Time Gospel: John 6:1-15 Topic: Catholics & Veganism For a shorter, more reflective explanation of the Gospels, be sure to check out our sister podcast Catholic Influencers Fr Rob Galea Homilies. Listen to the Podcast: http://frgministry.com/podcast​​​​​​​ SUPPORT US http://frgministry.com/donate​​​​​​​ ONLINE COURSES https://courses.frgministry.com​​​ WATCH Fr Rob Galea's Youtube Channel: http://youtube.com/frrobgalea​​​​​​​ FRG MINISTRY FRG Ministry: http://frgministry.com/​​​​​​​ https://www.instagram.com/frgministry​​

Mar 31, 2021 — This inescapably controversial study envisions, defines, and theorizes an area that Laura Wright calls vegan studies. We have an abundance of texts on vegans and veganism including works of advocacy, literary and popular fiction, film and television, and cookbooks, yet until now, there has been no study that examines the social and cultural discourses shaping our perceptions of veganism as an identity category and social practice. Ranging widely across contemporary American society and culture, Wright unpacks the loaded category of vegan identity. She examines the mainstream discourse surrounding and connecting animal rights to (or omitting animal rights from) veganism. Her specific focus is on the construction and depiction of the vegan body--both male and female--as a contested site manifest in contemporary works of literature, popular cultural representations, advertising, and new media. At the same time, Wright looks at critical animal studies, human-animal studies, posthumanism, and ecofeminism as theoretical frameworks that inform vegan studies (even as they differ from it). The vegan body, says Wright, threatens the status quo in terms of what we eat, wear, and purchase--and also in how vegans choose not to participate in many aspects of the mechanisms undergirding mainstream culture. These threats are acutely felt in light of post-9/11 anxieties over American strength and virility. A discourse has emerged that seeks, among other things, to bully veganism out of existence as it is poised to alter the dominant cultural mindset or, conversely, to constitute the vegan body as an idealized paragon of health, beauty, and strength. What better serves veganism is exemplified by Wright's study: openness, debate, inquiry, and analysis.

Jan 1, 2021 — Catholic Social Teaching on Care for Creation and Stewardship of the Earth The Catholic Church has a well-documented tradition of Care for Creation and Stewardship of the Earth. This resource includes elements of Catholic teaching that highlight this tradition. This resource is intended to serve as an introduction on this issue; it is not comprehensive. Audience with Representatives of the Churches and Ecclesial Communities of the Different Religions Pope Francis, March 2013 "The Church is likewise conscious of the responsibility which all of us have for our world, for the whole of creation, which we must love and protect. There is much that we can do to benefit the poor, the needy and those who suffer, and to favor justice, promote reconciliation and build peace." Renewing the Earth: An Invitation to Reflection and Action on Environment in Light of Catholic Social Teaching, 1991 (no. 2) "Our mistreatment of the natural world diminishes our own dignity and sacred- ness, not only because we are destroying resources that future generations of hu- mans need, but because we are engaging in actions that contradict what it means to be human. Our tradition calls us to protect the life and dignity of the human person, and it is increasingly clear that this task cannot be separated from the care and de- fense of all creation." World Environment Day, Pope Francis, June 2013 "We are losing the attitude of wonder, contemplation, listening to creation. The implications of living in a horizontal manner [is that] we have moved away from God, we no longer read His signs." DSTARENCE CATHOLIC Renewing the Earth: An Invitation to Reflection and Action on Environment in Light of Catholic Social Teaching, 1991 (no. 8) "Created things belong not to the few, but to the entire human family.” BISHOPS The Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, 2005 (no. 466) "Care for the environment represents a challenge for all of hu- manity. It is a matter of a common and universal duty, that of respecting a common good, destined for all, by preventing any- one from using 'with impunity the different categories of beings, whether living or inanimate—animals, plants, the natural ele- ments simply as one wishes, according to one's own economic needs.' It is a responsibility that must mature on the basis of the global dimension of the present ecological crisis and the conse- quent necessity to meet it on a worldwide level, since all beings are interdependent in the universal order established by the Crea- tor. ‘One must take into account the nature of each being and of its mutual connection in an ordered system, which is precisely the 'cosmos". World Day of Peace, Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI, 2007 "Alongside the ecology of nature, there exists what can be called a 'human' ecology, which in turn demands a 'social' ecology. All this means that humani- ty, if it truly desires peace, must be increasingly conscious of the links between natural ecology, or respect for nature, and human ecology. Experience shows that disregard for the environment always harms human coexistence, and vice versa. It becomes more and more evident that there is an inseparable link be- tween peace with creation and peace among men. Department of Justice, Peace and Human Development 3211 4th St. NE Washington, DC 20017 (202)541-3160 usccb.org/jphd • The Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, 2005 "There is a need to break with the logic of mere consumption and promote forms of agricultural and industrial production that respect the order of creation and satisfy the basic human needs of all. These attitudes, sustained by a renewed awareness of the interde- pendence of all the inhabitants of the earth, will contribute to elimi- nating the numerous causes of ecological disasters as well as guaranteeing the ability to re- spond quickly when such disas- ters strike people and territories. The ecological question must not be faced solely because of the frightening prospects that envi- ronmental destruction represents: rather it must above all become a strong motivation for an authen- tic solidarity of worldwide di- mensions" (no. 486). The Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, 2005 (no. 462) Charity in Truth (Caritas in Veritate) Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI, 2009 Address to Diplomatic Corps, January 2010 Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI "The protection of the environment, of resources and of the climate obliges all international leaders to act justly and to show a readiness to work in good faith, respecting the law and promoting solidarity with the weakest regions of the planet." (no. 50) "With the progress of science and technology, questions as to their meaning increase and give rise to an ever greater need to respect the transcendent dimension of the hu- man person and creation itself." CATHOLIC "[T]his concern and commitment for the environment should be situat- ed within the larger framework of the great challenges now facing man- kind. If we wish to build true peace, how can we separate, or even set at odds, the protection of the environment and the protection of human life, including the life of the unborn? It is in man's respect for himself that his sense of responsibility for creation is shown." On the Development of Peoples (Populorum Progressio), Pope Paul VI, 1967 "Already on the first page of Sacred Scripture we read these words: Fill the earth and subdue (Gn 1:28). By these words we are taught that all things of the world have been created for man, and that this task has been entrust- ed to him to enhance their value by the resources of his intellect, and by his toil to complete and perfect them for his own use. Now if the earth has been created for the purpose of furnishing individuals either with the ne- cessities of a livelihood or the means for progress, it follows that each man has the right to get from it what is necessary for him. The Second Ecumen- ical Vatican Council has reminded us of this in these words: 'God destined the earth with all that it contains for the use of all men and nations, in such a way that created things in fair share should accrue to all men under the leadership of justice with charity as a companion.” (no. 22) BISHOPS "How can we forget, for that matter the struggle for access to natural resources is one of the causes of a number of conflicts, not the least in Africa, as well as a continuing threat elsewhere? For this reason too, I forcefully repeat that to cultivate peace, one must protect creation!" Economic Justice for All, 1997 (no. 34) citing St. Cyprian "From the patristic period to the present, the Church has affirmed that misuse of the world's resources or appropriation of them by a mi- nority of the world's population be- trays the gift of creation since 'whatever belongs to God belongs to all." Global Climate Change: A Plea for Dialogue, Prudence and the Common Good, 2001 "At its core, global climate change is not about economic theory or political platforms, nor about partisan advantage or interest group pressures. It is about the future of God's creation and the one human family. It is about protecting both 'the human environ- ment' and the natural envi- ronment. It is about our hu- man stewardship of God's creation and our responsibil- ity to those who come after us." Department of Justice, Peace and Human Development 3211 4th St. NE .Washington, DC 20017 (202)541-3160 usccb.org/jphd

Apr 20, 2020 — Roger Scruton Non-Moral Beings The account of moral reasoning that I have just sketched offers an answer, even if not a fully reasoned answer, to the question of animals. In developing this answer,…

Jul 11, 2019 — David Clough is Professor of Theological Ethics at the University of Chester. He is the founder of CreatureKind (http://becreaturekind.org), a project aiming to engage Christians with farmed animal welfare. On Animals is David Clough's landmark two-volume academic monograph on the place of animals in Christian theology and ethics. David speaks at Harvard Law School during his North America book tour, setting out the challenging core message of the book for Christian thought and practice.

Oct 17, 2018 — The fur trade is a multi-million-dollar industry. It is estimated that over 100 million animals are killed in fur farms worldwide annually. This book provides an in-depth analysis of the state of fur factory farming worldwide, and an ethical critique of the main arguments propounded by the fur industry. Consideration is also given to an attempt to justify fur farming through the concept of “Welfur." Andrew Linzey and Clair Linzey argue that from any ethical perspective, fur factory farming fails basic moral tests.

Sep 14, 2018 — Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy Menu Browse Table of Contents What's New Random Entry Chronological Archives About Editorial Information About the SEP Editorial Board How to Cite the SEP Special Characters Advanced Tools Contact Support SEP Support the SEP PDFs for SEP Friends Make a Donation SEPIA for Libraries Entry Navigation Entry Contents Bibliography Academic Tools Friends PDF Preview Author and Citation Info Back to Top Moral Vegetarianism First published Fri Sep 14, 2018 Billions of humans eat meat. To provide it, we raise animals. We control, hurt, and kill hundreds of millions of geese, nearly a billion cattle, billions of pigs and ducks, and tens of billions of chickens each year. To feed these animals, we raise crops. To raise crops, we deforest and use huge quantities of water. To quench these animals, we use still more water. In turn, these animals produce staggering amounts of waste, waste that poisons water sources and soil. They produce staggering amounts of greenhouse gasses. To raise these animals and produce this meat, farmers and slaughterhouse workers labor in conditions from onerous to brutal. If controlling, hurting, or killing animals is wrong or if the production of these environmental effects or effects on people is wrong or if consuming the meat produced is wrong, then a breathtaking level of wrong-doing goes on daily. Many fewer than a billion humans are vegetarian, have diets excluding meat. They are vegetarian for various reasons: because it’s healthy, because their parents make them be vegetarian, because they don’t like meat. Some are vegetarian on moral grounds. Moral vegetarianism is the view that it is morally wrong—henceforth, “wrong”—to eat meat. The topic of this entry is moral vegetarianism and the arguments for it. Strikingly, most contemporary arguments for moral vegetarianism start with premises about the wrongness of producing meat and move to conclusions about the wrongness of consuming it. They do not fasten on some intrinsic feature of meat and insist that consuming things with such a feature is wrong. They do not fasten on some effect of meat-eating on the eater and insist that producing such an effect is wrong. Rather, they assert that the production of meat is wrong and that consumption bears a certain relation to production and that bearing such a relation to wrongdoing is wrong. So this entry gives significant space to food production as well as the tricky business of connecting production to consumption. §1 introduces relevant terminology and an overview of the main positions. §2 explains meat production, the main moral arguments against it, and some responses to those arguments. That section—like the rest of the entry—focuses on medium-sized land animals. Yet fish and insects are killed in a number that dwarfs the number of land animals killed. Some issues these killings raise are covered in §3. None of the foregoing is about consuming animals. §4 covers moral arguments from premises about meat production to conclusions about meat consumption. §5 considers some extensions of the arguments in §2. It wonders about which arguments against meat production can, if sound, be extended to show that animal product production or even some plant production is morally wrong. This last idea is relatively new. §6 briefly summarizes some other new issues in the moral vegetarian literature. 1. Terminology and Overview of Positions 2. Meat Production 2.1 Animal Farming 2.2 The Schematic Case Against Meat Production 2.2.1 Suffering 2.2.2 Killing 2.2.3 Harming the Environment 2.2.4 General Moral Theories 3. Fish and Insects 4. From Production to Consumption 4.1 Bridging the Gap 4.2 Against Bridging the Gap 5. Extending Moral Vegetarian Arguments: Animal Products and Plants 5.1 Animal Products 5.1.1 Eggs 5.1.2 Dairy 5.2 Plants 5.2.1 Plants Themselves 5.2.2 Plant Production and Animals 5.2.3 Plant Production and the Environment 5.3 Summary of Animal Product and Plant Subsections 6. Conclusion: Where the Debate About Vegetarianism Stands and Is Going Bibliography Academic Tools Other Internet Resources Related Entries 1. Terminology and Overview of Positions Moral vegetarianism is opposed by moral omnivorism, the view according to which it is permissible to consume meat (and also animal products, fungi, plants, etc.). Moral veganism accepts moral vegetarianism and adds to it that consuming animal products is wrong. Whereas in everyday life, “vegetarianism” and “veganism” include claims about what one may eat, in this entry, the claims are simply about what one may not eat. They agree that animals are among those things. In this entry, “animals” is used to refer to non-human animals. For the most part, the animals discussed are the land animals farmed for food in the West, especially cattle, chicken, and pigs. There will be some discussion of insects and fish but none of dogs, dolphins, or whales. Primarily, this entry concerns itself with whether moral vegetarians are correct that eating meat is wrong. Secondarily—but at greater length—it concerns itself with whether the production of meat is permissible. Primarily, this entry concerns itself with eating in times of abundance and abundant choices. Moral vegans need not argue that it is wrong to eat an egg if that is the only way to save your life. Moral vegetarians need not argue it is wrong to eat seal meat if that is the only food for miles. Moral omnivores need not argue it is permissible to eat the family dog. These cases raise important issues, but the arguments in this entry are not about them. Almost exclusively, the entry concerns itself with contemporary arguments.[1] Strikingly, many historical arguments and most contemporary arguments against the permissibility of eating meat start with premises about the wrongness of producing meat and move to conclusions about the wrongness of consuming it. That is, they argue that It is wrong to eat meat By first arguing that It is wrong to produce meat. The claim about production is the topic of §2. 2. Meat Production The vast majority of animals humans eat come from industrial animal farms that are distinguished by their holding large numbers of animals at high stocking density. We raise birds and mammals this way. Increasingly, we raise fish this way, too. 2.1 Animal Farming Raising large numbers of animals enables farmers to take advantage of economies of scale but also produces huge quantities of waste, greenhouse gas, and, generally, environmental degradation (FAO 2006; Hamerschlag 2011; Budolfson 2016). There is no question of whether to put so many animals on pasture—there is not enough of it. Plus, raising animals indoors, or with limited access to the outdoors, lowers costs and provides animals with protection from weather and predators. Yet when large numbers of animals live indoors, they are invariably tightly packed, and raising them close together risks the development and quick spread of disease. To deal with this risk, farmers intensively use prophylactic antibiotics. Tight-packing also restricts species-typical behaviors, such as rooting (pigs) or dust-bathing (chickens), and makes it so that animals cannot escape each other, leading to stress and to antisocial behaviors like tail-biting in pigs or pecking in chickens. To deal with these, farmers typically dock tails and trim beaks, and typically (in the U.S., at least) do so without anesthetic. Animals are bred to grow fast on a restricted amount of antibiotics, food, and hormones, and the speed of growth saves farmers money, but this breeding causes health problems of its own. Chickens, for example, have been bred in such a way that their bodies become heavier than their bones can support. As a result, they “are in chronic pain for the last 20% of their lives” (John Webster, quoted in Erlichman 1991). Animals are killed young—they taste better that way—and are killed in large-scale slaughterhouses operating at speed. Animal farms have no use for, e.g., male chicks on egg-laying farms, are killed at birth or soon after.[2] Raising animals in this way has produced low sticker prices (BLS 2017). It enables us to feed our appetite for meat (OECD 2017). Raising animals in this way is also, in various ways, morally fraught. It raises concerns about its effects on humans. Slaughterhouses, processing this huge number of animals at high speed, threaten injury and death to workers. Slaughterhouse work is exploitative. Its distribution is classist, racist, and sexist with certain jobs being segmented as paupers’ work or Latinx work or women’s (Pachirat 2011). Industrial meat production poses a threat to public health through the creation and spread of pathogens resulting from the overcrowding of animals with weakened immune systems and the routine use of antibiotics and attendant creation of antibiotic-resistant bacteria. Anomaly (2015) and Rossi & Garner (2014) argue that these risks are wrongful because unconsented to and because they are not justified by the benefits of assuming those risks. Industrial meat production directly produces waste in the form of greenhouse gas emissions from animals and staggering amounts of waste, waste that, concentrated in those quantities, can contaminate water supplies. The Böll Foundation (2014) estimates that farm animals contribute between 6 and 32% of greenhouse gas emissions. The range is due partly to different ideas about what to count as being farm animals’ contributions: simply what comes out of their bodies? Or should we count, too, what comes from deforestation that’s done to grow crops to feed them and other indirect emissions? Industrial animal farming raises two concerns about wastefulness. One is that it uses too many resources and produces too much waste for the amount of food it produces. The other is that feeding humans meat typically requires producing crops, feeding them to animals, and then eating the animals. So it typically requires more resources and makes for more emissions than simply growing and feeding ourselves crops (PNAS 2013. Industrial animal farming raises concerns about the treatment of animals. Among others, we raise cattle, chickens, and pigs. Evidence from their behavior, their brains, and their evolutionary origins, adduced in Allen 2004, Andrews 2016, and Tye 2016, supports the view that they have mental lives and, importantly, are sentient creatures with likes and dislikes. Even chickens and other “birdbrains” have interesting mental lives. The exhaustive Marino 2017 collects evidence that chickens can adopt others’ visual perspectives, communicate deceptively, engage in arithmetic and simple logical reasoning, and keep track of pecking orders and short increments of time. Their personalities vary with respect to boldness, self-control, and vigilance. We farm billions of these animals industrially each year (Böll Foundation 2014: 15). We also raise a much smaller number on freerange farms. In this entry “freerange” is not used in its tightly-defined, misleading, legal sense according to which it applies only to poultry and simply requires “access” to the outdoors. Instead, in the entry, freerange farms are farms that that, ideally, let animals live natural lives while offering some protection from predators and the elements and some healthcare. These lives are in various ways more pleasant than lives on industrial farms but involve less protection while still involving control and early death. These farms are designed, in part, to make animal lives go better for them, and their design assumes that a natural life is better, other things equal, than a non-natural life. The animal welfare literature converges on this and also on other components of animal well-being. Summarizing some of that literature, David Fraser writes, [A]s people formulated and debated various proposals about what constitutes a satisfactory life for animals in human care, three main concerns emerged: (1) that animals should feel well by being spared negative affect (pain, fear, hunger etc.) as much as possible, and by experiencing positive affect in the form of contentment and normal pleasures; (2) that animals should be able to lead reasonably natural lives by being able to perform important types of normal behavior and by having some natural elements in their environment such as fresh air and the ability to socialize with other animals in normal ways; and (3) that animals should function well in the sense of good health, normal growth and development, and normal functioning of the body. (Fraser 2008: 70–71) In this light, it is clear why industrial farming seems to do less for animal welfare than freerange farming: The latter enables keeping animals healthy. It enables happy states (“positive affect”) and puts up some safeguards against the infliction of suffering. There is no need, for example, to dock freerange pigs’ tails or to debeak freerange chickens, if they have enough space to stay out of each other’s way. It enables animals to socialize and to otherwise lead reasonably natural lives. A freerange’s pig’s life is in those ways better than an industrially-farmed pig’s. Yet because freerange farming involves being outdoors, it involves various risks: predator- and weather-related risks, for example. These go into the well-being calculus, too. Animals in the wild are subjected to greater predator- and weather-related risks and have no health care. Yet they score very highly with regard to expressing natural behavior and are under no one’s control. How well they do with regard to positive and negative affect and normal growth varies from case to case. Some meat is produced by hunting such animals. In practice, hunting involves making animals suffer from the pain of errant shots or the terror of being chased or wounded, but, ideally, it involves neither pain nor confinement. Of course, either way, it involves death.[3] 2.2 The Schematic Case Against Meat Production Moral vegetarian arguments about these practices follow a pattern. They claim that certain actions—killing animals for food we do not need, for example—are wrong and then add that some mode of meat production—recreational hunting, for example—does so. It follows that the mode of meat-production is wrong. Schematically X is wrong. Y involves X. Hence, Y is wrong. Among the candidate values of X are: Causing animals pain for the purpose of producing food when there are readily available alternatives. Killing animals for the purpose of… Controlling animals… Treating animals as mere tools… Ontologizing animals as food… Harming humans…. Harming the environment… And among the candidate values of Y are: Industrial animal farming Freerange farming Recreational hunting Space is limited and cranking through many instances of the schema would be tedious. This section focuses on causing animals pain, killing them, and harming the environment in raising them. On control, see Francione 2009, DeGrazia 2011, and Bok 2011. On treating animals as mere tools, see Kant’s Lectures on Ethics, Korsgaard 2011 and 2015, and Zamir 2007. On ontologizing, see Diamond 1978, Vialles 1987 [1994], and Gruen 2011, Chapter 3. On harming humans, see Pachirat 2011, Anomaly 2015, and Doggett & Holmes 2018. 2.2.1 Suffering Some moral vegetarians argue: Causing animals pain while raising them for food when there are readily available alternatives is wrong. Industrial animal farming involves causing animals pain while raising them for food when there are readily available alternatives. Hence, Industrial animal farming is wrong. The “while raising them for food when there are readily available alternatives” is crucial. It is sometimes permissible to cause animals pain: You painfully give your cat a shot, inoculating her, or painfully tug your dog’s collar, stopping him from attacking a toddler. The first premise is asserting that causing pain is impermissible in certain other situations. The “when there are readily available alternatives” is getting at the point that there are substitutes available. We could let the chickens be and eat rice and kale. The first premise asserts it is wrong to cause animals pain while raising them for food when there are readily available substitutes. It says nothing about why that is wrong. It could be that it is wrong because it would be wrong to make us suffer to raise us for food and there are no differences between us and animals that would justify making them suffer (Singer 1975 and the enormous literature it generated). It could, instead, be that it is wrong because impious (Scruton 2004) or cruel (Hursthouse 2011). So long as we accept that animals feel—for an up-to-date philosophical defense of this, see Tye 2016—it is uncontroversial that industrial farms do make animals suffer. No one in the contemporary literature denies the second premise, and Norwood and Lusk go so far as to say that it is impossible to raise animals for food without some form of temporary pain, and you must sometimes inflict this pain with your own hands. Animals need to be castrated, dehorned, branded, and have other minor surgeries. Such temporary pain is often required to produce longer term benefits…All of this must be done knowing that anesthetics would have lessened the pain but are too expensive. (2011: 113) There is the physical suffering of tail-docking, de-beaking, de-horning, and castrating, all without anesthetic. Also, industrial farms make animals suffer psychologically by crowding them and by depriving them of interesting environments. Animals are bred to grow quickly on minimal food. Various poultry industry sources acknowledge that this selective breeding has led to a significant percentage of meat birds walking with painful impairments (see the extensive citations in HSUS 2009). This—and much more like it that is documented in Singer & Mason 2006 and Stuart Rachels 2011—is the case for the second premise, namely, that industrial farming causes animals pain while raising them for food when there are readily available alternatives. The argument can be adapted to apply to freerange farming and hunting. Freerange farms ideally do not hurt, but, as the Norwood and Lusk quotation implies, they actually do: For one thing, animals typically go to the same slaughterhouses as industrially-produced animals do. Both slaughter and transport can be painful and stressful. The same goes for hunting: In the ideal, there is no pain, but, really, hunters hit animals with non-lethal and painful shots. These animals are often—but not always—killed for pleasure or for food hunters do not need.[4] Taken together the arguments allege that all manners of meat production in fact produce suffering for low-cost food and typically do so for food when we don’t need to do so and then allege that that justification for producing suffering is insufficient. Against the arguments, one might accept that farms hurt animals but deny that it is even pro tanto wrong to do so (Carruthers 1992 and 2011; Hsiao 2015a and 2015b) on the grounds that animals lack moral status and, because of this, it is not intrinsically wrong to hurt them (or kill or control them or treat them like mere tools). One challenge for such views is to explain what, if anything, is wrong with beating the life out of a pet. Like Kant, Carruthers and Hsiao accept that it might be wrong to hurt animals when and because doing so leads to hurting humans. This view is discussed in Regan 1983: Chapter 5. It faces two distinct challenges. One is that if the only reason it is wrong to hurt animals is because of its effects on humans, then the only reason it is wrong to hurt a pet is because of its effects on humans. So there is nothing wrong with beating pets when that will have no bad effects on humans. This is hard to believe. Another challenge for such views, addressed at some length in Carruthers 1992 and 2011, is to explain whether and why humans with mental lives like the lives of, say, pigs have moral status and whether and why it is wrong to make such humans suffer. 2.2.2 Killing Consider a different argument: Killing animals while raising them for food when there are readily available alternatives is wrong. Most forms of animal farming and all recreational hunting involve killing animals while raising them for food when there are readily available alternatives. Hence, Most forms of animal farming and all recreational hunting are wrong. The second premise is straightforward and uncontroversial. All forms of meat farming and hunting require killing animals. There is no form of farming that involves widespread harvesting of old bodies, dead from natural causes. Except in rare farming and hunting cases, the meat produced in the industrialized world is meat for which there are ready alternatives. The first premise is more controversial. Amongst those who endorse it, there is disagreement about why it is true. If it is true, it might be true because killing animals wrongfully violates their rights to life (Regan 1975). It might be true because killing animals deprives them of lives worth living (McPherson 2015). It might be true because it treats animals as mere tools (Korsgaard 2011). There is disagreement about whether the first premise is true. The “readily available alternatives” condition matters: Everyone agrees that it is sometimes all things considered permissible to kill animals, e.g., if doing so is the only way to save your child’s life from a surprise attack by a grizzly bear or if doing so is the only way to prevent your pet cat from a life of unremitting agony. (Whether it is permissible to kill animals in order to cull them or to preserve biodiversity is a tricky issue that is set aside here. It—and its connection to the permissibility of hunting—is discussed in Scruton 2006b.) At any rate, animal farms are in the business of killing animals simply on the grounds that we want to eat them and are willing to pay for them even though we could, instead, eat plants. The main objection to the first premise is that animals lack the mental lives to make killing them wrong. In the moral vegetarian literature, some argue that the wrongness of killing animals depends on what sort of mental life they have and that while animals have a mental life that suffices for hurting them being wrong, they lack a mental life that suffices for killing them being wrong (Belshaw 2015 endorses this; McMahan 2008 and Harman 2011 accept the first and reject the second; Velleman 1991 endorses that animal mental lives are such that killing them does not harm them). Animals could lack a mental life that makes killing them wrong because it is a necessary condition for killing a creature being wrong that that creature have long-term goals and animals don’t or that it is a necessary condition that that creature have the capacity to form such goals and animals don’t or that it is a necessary condition that the creature’s life have a narrative structure and animals’ lives don’t or…[5] Instead, the first premise might be false and killing animals we raise for food might be permissible because [t]he genesis of domestic animals is…a matter…of an implicit social contract—what Stephen Budiansky…calls ‘a covenant of the wild.’…Humans could protect such animals as the wild ancestors of domestic cattle and swine from predation, shelter them from the elements, and feed them when otherwise they might starve. The bargain from the animal’s point of view, would be a better life as the price of a shorter life… (Callicott 2015: 56–57) The idea is that we have made a “bargain” with animals to raise them, to protect them from predators and the elements, and to tend to them, but then, in return, to kill them. Moreover, the “bargain” renders killing animals permissible (defended in Hurst 2009, Other Internet Resources, and described in Midgley 1983). Such an argument might render permissible hurting animals, too, or treating them merely as tools. Relatedly, even conceding that it is pro tanto wrong to kill animals, it might be all things considered permissible to kill farm animals for food even when there are ready alternatives because and when their well-being is replaced by the well-being of a new batch of farmed animals (Tännsjö 2016). Farms kill one batch of chickens and then bring in a batch of chicks to raise (and then kill) next. The total amount of well-being is fixed though the identities of the receptacles of that well-being frequently changes. Anyone who endorses the views in the two paragraphs above needs to explain whether and then why their reasoning applies to animals but not humans. It would not be morally permissible to create humans on organ farms and harvest those organs, justifying this with the claim that these humans wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for the plan to take their organs and so part of the “deal” is that those humans are killed for their organs. Neither would it be morally permissible to organ-farm humans, justifying it with the claim that they will be replaced by other happy humans.[6] 2.2.3 Harming the Environment Finally, consider: Harming the environment while producing food when there are readily available alternatives is wrong. Industrial animal farming involves harming the environment while producing food when there are readily available alternatives. Hence, Industrial animal farming is wrong. A more plausible premise might be “egregiously harming the environment…” The harms, detailed in Budolfson 2018, Hamerschlag 2011, Rossi & Garner 2014, and Ranganathan et al. 2016, are egregious and include deforestation, greenhouse gas emission, soil degradation, water pollution, water and fossil fuel depletion. The argument commits to it being wrong to harm the environment. Whether this is because those harms are instrumental in harming sentient creatures or whether it is intrinsically wrong to harm the environment or ecosystems or species or living creatures regardless of sentience is left open.[7] The argument does not commit to whether these harms to the environment are necessary consequences of industrial animal farming. There are important debates, discussed in PNAS 2013, about whether, and how easily, these harms can be stripped off industrial animal production. There is an additional important debate, discussed in Budolfson 2018, about whether something like this argument applies to freerange animal farming. Finally, there is a powerful objection to the first premise from the claim that these harms are part of a package that leaves sentient creatures better off than they would’ve been under any other option. 2.2.4 General Moral Theories Nothing has been said so far about general moral theories and meat production. There is considerable controversy about what those theories imply about meat production. So, for example, utilitarians agree that we are required to maximize happiness. They disagree about which agricultural practices do so. One possibility is that because it brings into existence many trillions of animals that, in the main, have lives worth living and otherwise would not exist, industrial farming maximizes happiness (Tännsjö 2016). Another is that freerange farming maximizes happiness (Hare 1999; Crisp 1988). Instead, it could be that no form of animal agriculture does (Singer 1975 though Singer 1999 seems to agree with Hare). Kantians agree it is wrong to treat ends in themselves merely as means. They disagree about which agricultural practices do so. Kant (Lectures on Ethics) himself claims that no farming practice does—animals are mere means and so treating them as mere means is fine. Some Kantians, by contrast, claim that animals are ends in themselves and that typically animal farming treats them as mere means and, hence, is wrong (Korsgaard 2011 and 2015; Regan 1975 and 1983). Contractualists agree that it is wrong to do anything that a certain group of people would reasonably reject. (They disagree about who is in the group.) They disagree, too, about which agricultural practice contractualism permits. Perhaps it permits any sort of animal farming (Carruthers 2011; Hsiao 2015a). Perhaps it permits none (Rowlands 2009). Intermediate positions are possible. Virtue ethicists agree that it is wrong to do anything a virtuous person would not do or would not advise. Perhaps this forbids hurting and killing animals, so any sort of animal farming is impermissible and so is hunting (Clark 1984; Hursthouse 2011). Instead, perhaps it merely forbids hurting them, so freerange farming is permissible and so is expert, pain-free hunting (Scruton 2006b). Divine command ethicists agree that it is wrong to do anything forbidden by God. Perhaps industrial farming, at least, would be (Halteman 2010; Scully 2002). Lipscomb (2015) seems to endorse that freerange farming would not be forbidden by God. A standard Christian view is that no form of farming would be forbidden, that because God gave humans dominion over animals, we may treat them in any old way. Islamic and Jewish arguments are stricter about what may be eaten and about how animals may be treated though neither rules out even industrial animal farming (Regenstein, et al. 2003). Rossian pluralists agree it is prima facie wrong to harm. There is room for disagreement about which agricultural practices—controlling, hurting, killing—do harm and so room for disagreement about which farming practices are prima facie wrong. Curnutt (1997) argues that the prima facie wrongness of killing animals is not overridden by typical justifications for doing so. 3. Fish and Insects In addition to pork and beef, there are salmon and crickets. In addition to lamb and chicken, there are mussels and shrimp. There is little in the philosophical literature about insects and sea creatures and their products, and this entry reflects that.[8] Yet the topics are important. The organization Fish Count estimates that at least a trillion sea creatures are wild-caught or farmed each year (Mood & Brooke 2010, 2012, in Other Internet Resources). Globally, humans consume more than 20 kg of fish per capita annually (FAO 2016). In the US, we consume 1.5 lbs of honey per capita annually (Bee Culture 2016). Estimates of insect consumption are less sure. The UN FAO estimates that insects are part of the traditional diets of two billion humans though whether they are eaten—whether those diets are adhered to—and in what quantity is unclear (FAO 2013). Seafood is produced by farming and by fishing. Fishing techniques vary from a person using a line in a boat to large trawlers pulling nets across the ocean floor. The arguments for and against seafood production are much like the arguments for and against meat production: Some worry about the effects on humans of these practices. (Some workers, for example, are enslaved on shrimpers.) Some worry about the effects on the environment of these practices. (Some coral reefs, for example, are destroyed by trawlers.) Some worry about the permissibility of killing, hurting, or controlling sea creatures or treating them merely as tools. This last worry should not be undersold: Again, Mood and Brooke (2010, 2012, in Other Internet Resources) estimate that between 970 billion and 2.7 trillion fish are wild-caught yearly and between 37 and 120 billion farmed fish are killed. If killing, hurting, or controlling these creatures or treating them as mere tools is wrong, then the scale of our wrongdoing with regard to sea creatures beggars belief. Are these actions wrong? Complicating the question is that there is significantly more doubt about which sea creatures have mental lives at all and what those mental lives are like. And while whether shrimp are sentient is clearly irrelevant to the permissibility of enslaving workers who catch them, it does matter to the permissibility of killing shrimp. This doubt is greater still with regard to insect mental lives. In conversation, people sometimes say that bee mental life is such that nothing wrong is done to bees in raising them. Nothing wrong is done to bees in killing them. Because they are not sentient, there is no hurting them. Because of these facts about bee mental life, the argument goes, “taking” their honey need be no more morally problematic than “taking” apples from an apple tree. (There is little on the environmental impact of honey production or (human) workers and honey. So it is unclear how forceful environment- and human-based worries about honey are.) This argument supporting honey production hinges on some empirical claims about bee mental life. For an up-to-date assessment of bee mental life, see Tye 2016, which argues that bees “have a rich perceptual consciousness” and “can feel some emotions” and that “the most plausible hypothesis overall…is that bees feel pain” (2016: 158–159) and see, too, Barron & Klein 2016, which argues that insects, generally, have a capacity for consciousness. The argument supporting honey production might be objected to on those empirical grounds. It might, instead, be objected to on the grounds that we are uncertain what the mental lives of bees are like. It could be that they are much richer than we realize. If so, killing them or taking excessive honey—and thereby causing them significant harms—might well be morally wrong. And, the objection continues, the costs of not doing so, of just letting bees be, would be small. If so, caution requires not taking any honey or killing bees or hurting them. Arguments like this are sometimes put applied to larger creatures. For discussion of such arguments, see Guerrero 2007. 4. From Production to Consumption None of the foregoing is about consumption. The moral vegetarian arguments thus far have, at most, established that it is wrong to produce meat in various ways. Assuming that some such argument is sound, how to get from the wrongness of producing meat to the wrongness of consuming that meat? This question is not always taken seriously. Classics of the moral vegetarian literature like Singer 1975, Regan 1975, Engel 2000, and DeGrazia 2009 do not give much space to it. (C. Adams 1990 is a rare canonical vegetarian text that devotes considerable space to consumption ethics.) James Rachels writes, Sometimes philosophers explain that [my argument for vegetarianism] is unconvincing because it contains a logical gap. We are all opposed to cruelty, they say, but it does not follow that we must become vegetarians. It only follows that we should favor less cruel methods of meat production. This objection is so feeble it is hard to believe it explains resistance to the basic argument [for vegetarianism]. (2004: 74) Yet if the objection is that it does not follow from the wrongness of producing meat that consuming meat is wrong, then the objection is not feeble and is clearly correct. In order to validly derive the vegetarian conclusion, additional premises are needed. Rachels, it turns out, has some, so perhaps it is best to interpret his complaint as that it is obvious what the premises are. Maybe so. But there is quite a bit of disagreement about what those additional premises are and plausible candidates differ greatly from one another. 4.1 Bridging the Gap Consider a productivist idea about the connection between production and consumption according to which consumption of wrongfully-produced goods is wrong because it produces more wrongful production. The idea issues an argument that, in outline, is: Consuming some product P produces production of Q. Production of Q is wrong. It is wrong to produce wrongdoing. Hence, Consuming P is wrong. Or never mind actual production. A productivist might argue: Consuming some product P is reasonably expected to produce production of Q. Production of Q is wrong. It is wrong to do something that is reasonably expected to produce wrongdoing. Hence, Consuming P is wrong. (Singer 1975; Norcross 2004; Kagan 2011) (The main ideas about connecting consumption and production that follow can—but won’t —be put in terms of expectation, too.) The moral vegetarian might then argue that meat is among the values of both P and Q: consuming meat is reasonably expect to produce production of meat. Or the moral vegetarian might argue that consuming meat produces more normalization of bad attitudes towards animals and that is wrong. There are various possibilities. Just consider the first, the one about meat consumption producing meat production. It is most plausible with regard to buying. It is buying the wrongfully-produced good that produces more of it. Eating meat produces more production, if it does, by producing more buying. When Grandma buys the wrongfully produced delicacy, the idea goes, she produces more wrongdoing. The company she buys from produces more goods whether you eat the delicacy or throw it out. These arguments hinge on an empirical claim about production and a moral claim about the wrongfulness of producing wrongdoing. The moral claim has far-reaching implications (DeGrazia 2009 and Warfield 2015). Consider this rent case: You pay rent to a landlord. You know that he takes your rent and uses the money to buy wrongfully-produced meat. If buying wrongfully-produced meat is wrong because it produces more wrongfully-produced meat, is it wrong to pay rent in the rent case? Is it wrong to buy a vegetarian meal at a restaurant that then takes your money and uses it to buy wrongfully-produced steak? These are questions for productivists’ moral claim. There are further, familiar questions about whether it is wrong to produce wrongdoing when one neither intends to nor foresees it and whether it is wrong to produce wrongdoing when one does not intend it but does foresee it and then about whether what is wrong is producing wrongdoing or, rather, simply producing a bad effect (see entries on the doctrine of double effect and doing vs. allowing harm). An objection to productivist arguments denies the empirical claim and, instead, accepting that because the food system is so enormous, fed by so many consumers, and so stuffed with money, our eating or buying typically has no effect on production, neither directly nor even, through influencing others, indirectly (Budolfson 2015; Nefsky 2018). The idea is that buying a burger at, say, McDonald’s produces no new death nor any different treatment of live animals. McDonald’s will produce the same amount of meat—and raise its animals in exactly the same way—regardless of whether one buys a burger there. Moreover, the idea goes, one should reasonably expect this. Whether or not this is a good account of how food consumption typically works, it is an account of a possible system. Consider the Chef in Shackles case, a modification of a case in McPherson 2015: Alma runs Chef in Shackles, a restaurant at which the chef is known to be held against his will. It’s a vanity project, and Alma will run the restaurant regardless of how many people come. In fact, Alma just burns the money that comes in. The enslaved chef is superb; the food is delicious. The productivist idea does not imply it is wrong to buy food from or eat at Chef in Shackles. If that is wrong, a different idea needs to explain its wrongness. So consider instead an extractivist idea according to which consumption of wrongful goods is wrong because it is a benefiting from wrongdoing (Barry & Wiens 2016). This idea can explain why it is wrong to eat at Chef in Shackles—when you enjoy a delicious meal there, you benefit from the wrongful captivity of the chef. In outline, the extractivist argument is: Consuming some product P extracts benefit from the production of P. Production of P is wrong. It is wrong to extract benefit from wrongdoing. Hence, Consuming P is wrong. Moral vegetarians would then urge that meat is among the values of P. Unlike the productivist argument, this one is more plausible with regard to eating than buying. It’s the eating, typically, that produces