Dialogues on Ethical Vegetarianism

Michael Huemer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429638008
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

After lives filled with deep suffering, 74 billion animals are slaughtered worldwide every year on factory farms. Is it wrong to buy the products of this industry?

In this book, two college students – a meat-eater and an ethical vegetarian – discuss this question in a series of dialogues conducted over four days. The issues they cover include: how intelligence affects the badness of pain, whether consumers are responsible for the practices of an industry, how individual choices affect an industry, whether farm animals are better off living on factory farms than not existing at all, whether meat-eating is natural, whether morality protects those who cannot understand morality, whether morality protects those who are not members of society, whether humans alone possess souls, whether different creatures have different degrees of consciousness, why extreme animal welfare positions "sound crazy, " and the role of empathy in moral judgment.

The two students go on to discuss the vegan life, why people who accept the arguments in favor of veganism often fail to change their behavior, and how vegans should interact with non-vegans.

A foreword, by Peter Singer, introduces and provides context for the dialogues, and a final annotated bibliography offers a list of sources related to the discussion. It offers abstracts of the most important books and articles related to the ethics of vegetarianism and veganism.

Key Features:

• Thoroughly reviews the common arguments on both sides of the debate.
• Dialogue format provides the most engaging way of introducing the issues.
• Written in clear, conversational prose for a popular audience.
• Offers new insights into the psychology of our dietary choices and our responsibility for influencing others.

Day 1 Suffering, Intelligence, and the Risk Argument

Setting: Two students, M and V, have met for lunch at their local Native Foods Cafe.¹

M:	Hey, V. I’ve never been to this restaurant before. Looks nice.
V:	Yeah, I come here a lot. It’s one of the few vegetarian restaurants in town.
M:	(disappointed) Oh.
V:	Oh, what?
M:	Nothing . . . So we’re going to be eating sticks and leaves then.
V:	No, no. I think you’ll be surprised at how good the food is.
M:	(skeptical) If you say so.

M and V order and then sit down at a table in the corner.

M:	So . . . you’re a vegetarian.
V:	Yep. Been vegetarian for the last three years.
M:	Wow. I didn’t know you were such a crazy extremist.
V:	(laughs) Some people would say that. I think it’s just the reasonable position.

1 A popular US vegetarian restaurant chain (http://www.nativefoods.com/).

M:	Did you know that Adolf Hitler was a vegetarian?^2
V:	(sigh) Godwin’s law already?^3 Yes, I know. Gandhi was also a vegetarian.

(a) The ethical vegetarian position

M:	Well, I guess you can find both good and evil people who have done most things. So what made you give up meat?
V:	I figured out that meat-eating is morally wrong.^4
M:	So if you were stranded on a lifeboat, about to die of starvation, and there was nothing to eat except a chicken, would you eat it?
V:	Of course.
M:	Aha! So you don’t really think meat-eating is wrong.
V:	When I say something is wrong, I don’t mean it’s wrong in every conceivable circumstance. After all, just about anything is okay in some possible circumstance. I just mean that it is wrong in the typical circumstances we are actually in.^5
M:	So you think it’s wrong to eat meat in the circumstances we normally actually face.

2 See Wikipedia, “Adolf Hitler and Vegetarianism,” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adolf_Hitler_and_vegetarianism.

3 Godwin’s law: As an internet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Hitler approaches 1. Also applies to some non-internet discussions.

4 Here, V follows the work of many philosophers. See, e.g., Peter Singer, Animal Liberation (New York, NY: HarperCollins, 2009); Tom Regan, The Case for Animal Rights, 2nd ed. (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2004); Alastair Norcross, “Puppies, Pigs, and People,” Philosophical Perspectives 18, Ethics (2004): 229–45, available at http://faculty.smu.edu/jkazez/animal%20rights/norcross-4.pdf; Mylan Engel, “The Commonsense Case for Ethical Vegetarianism,” Between the Species 19 (2016): 2–31, available at http://digitalcommons.calpoly.edu/bts/vol19/iss1/1/; Stuart Rachels, “Vegetarianism,” pp. 877–905 in The Oxford Handbook of Animal Ethics (Oxford University Press, 2011), available at www.jamesrachels.org/stuart/veg.pdf.

5 Compare Engel, “Commonsense Case,” op. cit., pp. 6–7.

V:

Right.

M and V’s food arrives, and they start in on two appetizing vegan meals.

M:	Okay, you’re right: this is better than I thought it would be. I could enjoy coming here once in a while for something different. But it still seems to me like this ethical vegetarianism of yours is an extreme view.

(b) For vegetarianism: the argument from pain and suffering

V:	I don’t think it’s that extreme. Would you agree that pain and suffering are bad?
M:	No, I think pain is necessary. You know, there is a rare medical condition in which people are unable to feel pain.^6 As a result, they don’t notice when they injure themselves, so they’re in danger of bleeding out, injuring themselves further, and so on. It’s really quite bad. So you see, pain is actually good.
V:	Sounds like you’re just saying that given certain conditions, pain can be instrumentally good. You don’t think it’s intrinsically good, do you?
M:	What do you mean by that?
V:	Well, you’re just saying pain can sometimes have good effects. You’re not saying it’s good in itself, are you? I mean, what if you have to have a tooth drilled at the dentist’s office – do you take the anesthet...