Vegetarianism

["Nicholas Day" <apyxnd@nottingham.ac.uk>]

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Hey kids,

Sorry if I’m coming in to this a little late, but here’s my thoughts on vegetarianism.  I am one of those evil-doing meat eaters, but I certainly have sympathy for veggies, and I may well be on the edge of breaking – just not quite convinced yet.

I want to look at this from a Utilitarian perspective - I want to describe a Utilitarian position that justifies meat-eating in a particular way, and see if anyone can convincingly break it from the vegetarian side of things (whether from utilitarianism, or rights or whatever.)

A farmer lives off his land.  He grows some crops, and also keeps cows, pigs and chickens.   Occasionally he goes into the woods and shoots rabbits, which he then eats.  One day, on his way to slaughter one of his pigs, he is struck by a crisis of conscience - can he ethically justify his way of life? Though this pig may not have the same level of consciousness as a human, surely it can still feel pain and pleasure and have good and bad experiences?  Considering this revelation about the moral value of animals, he decides that he must do what most benefits animals while still supporting his family’s life.  Would this be achieved by eating only crops instead of animals?  If he decides to become vegetarian he realises that those animals that would exist in the future because he bred them as a source of food would now no longer be – his farm cannot provide enough crops to feed both his family and his animals unless those animals are in turn a source of food.  If he became a vegetarian, though it is true that animals will no longer be killed by him, this is because they will just never exist.  This does not appear to be a solution that benefits the animals and their experiences, because it stops them having any experiences at all.  His new-found moral respect for animals leads him therefore to the view that the rearing of domestic animals for meat is the moral choice – their lives can only be supported if they end them as a source of nutrition for his family, but this is better than never having lives at all.  However, he realises that this does not extend to the rabbits that he hunts and eats – those animals would have come into existence whether he chose to hunt or not; he decides that he must not eat these wild animals, but only those ‘extra’ animals the he can bring into existence under the double-purpose of sustaining his family’s life.  He also realises that this reasoning does not work if the animal’s lives are so unpleasant that they are not worth living.  He therefore releases his chicken’s from their cages 
hope this doesn’t seem to contrived – just trying to make it simple enough that it avoids causal inefficacy problems - i.e. so that if he chooses to eat meat an animal will certainly die.  See Matheny for discussion of that problem if you’re interested, and a solution which is quite wrong ;-) http://www.veganoutreach.org/enewsletter/thresholds.pdf)  

My suggestion then is that the ethical meat-eater is someone who doesn’t eat wild animals, only free-range domestic animals that he believes to live a life that is bearable at the minimum.  A nation of this sort of person would support a population of domestic animals that live pleasant (ish, at least) lives, whereas a nation of vegetarians would reduce most of that population to unconscious, unfeeling plants (i.e. those animals whose lives can only be sustained by money from the meat-industry, which is quite a lot I would imagine, would be lost).  Any thoughts?

Nick (another one)


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