Eating animals

• Utilitarianism:

  • Happiness is pleasure and the absence of pain
  • Bentham: The question is not ‘Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?’
  • Happiness is good (pain is bad) regardless of the creature feeling it
  • Singer: speciesism is immoral discrimination against animals just because they are not human
  • Important differences exist, e.g. reason, emotional depth, self-awareness, moral agency
  • Reply: these differences are not relevant to causing suffering
• Implications:

  • Should we stop eating meat?
  • Would stopping reduce animal suffering more than it would increase human suffering?
  • Suffering is wrong, but killing is not
  • Happy animals that are replaced
• Kant:

  • 'Act only on that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.'
  • 'Everyone' = 'everyone with a rational will', which animals don't have, so any maxim concerning eating animals can be universalized
  • Human beings are ends in themselves, having a rational will and can adopt ends, which is unconditionally good
  • Animals are not rational, so they can be treated as means to our ends
• Kant:

  • We have no duties to animals, but we do have duties regarding animals to people
  • We must not become unkind through how we treat animals
  • Objections: the harm to the animal, not ourselves, is what is wrong; do we have duties to other human beings who aren't rational?
• Aristotle:

  • Animals are not rational and cannot share in eudaimonia
  • Our moral concern with eudaimonia has little place for considering animals
  • Recent virtue theory: there are virtuous and vicious ways of treating animals
• Diamond:

  • Eating meat is often wrong, but speciesism misunderstands ethics and what is important about our relationships to people and animals
  • There is a moral difference between having sex with a person of a different race and having sex with a (consenting) gorilla
  • The capacities of animals and people don't explain why we treat them differently
• Diamond:

  • The source of the moral life isn't the capacities of the animal homo sapiens, but recognizing this animal as a human being
  • Vegetarianism can't be defended by eradicating the differences between human beings and animals
• Eating animals:

  • As fellow creatures, we may eat them, but we need to treat them well or hunt them fairly
  • Respect and pity (compassion)
  • To treat animals in the right way, with the right feelings, for the right reasons
• Eating animals:

  • Different practices involved in eating meat
  • Many feelings and responses to animals conflict with the meat industry
  • We are 'fellow creatures' with other animals as living beings