vegetarian shoes

[Robert Charleston <rc3673@student.open.ac.uk>]

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Surely there's nothing necessarily wrong about a vegetarian wearing 
leather shoes per se? Isn't the problem if the animal was killed to 
provide the leather? If the shoes are made from leather from an animal 
that died of old age then wouldn't it be OK?

Less clear cut, though, must be whether a vegetarian is OK to wear leather 
shoes from animals killed to provide meat. I suspect that most 
vegetarians' intuition is that this is not OK. However, given a scenario 
in which meat-eaters would have killed the animal whether or not the 
vegetarian used the leather for shoes, I'm not sure what principle could 
be appealed to to differentiate this from the 'old age' example. In either 
case the animal was going to die, and this was nothing to do with the 
vegetarian wearing the shoes.

Incidentally, Alice assumes in an earlier post that eating meat and 
wearing leather must be i) cruel and ii) selfish. This need not be the 
case. Killing can be merciful, if something is in pain and always will be. 
It can also be painless and without fear if done stealthily. It seems to 
me that what you do with the body afterwards (eat it, wear it) is a 
separate issue. I'm not for a moment suggesting that food animals in the 
UK today are wholly or even largely killed in a way that does not cause 
suffering (though most on traditional farms such as 'Home Farm' in 
Loughborough where I buy my food are treated far better than those who are 
dispatched according to, for instance, Halal methods). I'm just pointing 
out that there is no necessary condition between death caused by humans 
and cruelty. Singer admits as much when he has to (notoriously) complicate 
his basic theory to try and defend against killing that involves no 
suffering.

Similarly, selfish is a relative term. To believe that it is selfish to 
put my eating above an animal's life you have to believe that there is 
some equal moral weight to the two items. If there were a choice between 
my continued living and my fat neighbour watching Trisha today, I would 
not expect anybody to tell me that I was being selfish by putting my life 
above his TV programme. The latter is not as important as the former. To 
say that it is selfish to eat meat or kill for leather is to assume that 
animals have an equal claim to life with whatever humans' reasons are for 
eating meat. This may be so, and it may not be. But it needs arguing for 
not just assuming. Singer tries it with his priciple of equality, but ends 
up suggesting a bizarre utilitarian solution (testing drugs on 
brain-damaged humans and babies, anyone?)

Of course, there may be arguments that establish these points. I'm no 
specialist in this area. If so, I'd be interested in hearing them.

Rab.


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