Ethics of eating meat

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Ethical issues regarding the consumption of meat can include objections to the act of killing animals and the agricultural practices surrounding the production of meat. Reasons for objecting to the practice of killing animals for consumption may include animal rights, environmental ethics, religious doctrine, or an aversion to inflicting pain or harm on other living creatures. Some people, while not vegetarians, refuse to eat the flesh of certain animals due to cultural taboo, such as cats, dogs, horses, or rabbits. In some cases, specific meats (especially from pigs and cows) are forbidden within religious traditions. Some people eat only the flesh of animals who have not been mistreated before slaughter, and abstain from the meat of animals reared in factory farms or from particular products such as foie gras and veal. Others believe that the treatment which animals undergo in the production of meat and animal products obliges them never to eat meat or use animal products.

Another issue, killing other people for food (cannibalism), is considered unacceptable in most human cultures.

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[edit] Ethics of killing for food

Philosopher Peter Singer believes that if alternative means of survival exist, one ought to choose the option that does not cause unnecessary harm to animals. With the exception of a small world minority of people, such as traditionalistic nomadic hunting and herding societies, those who live in agricultural (as opposed to hunter/gatherer) societies are usually free to choose not to eat meat or use animal products.

Most 'ethical' vegetarians argue that the same reasons exist against killing sentient animals to eat as against killing humans to eat. Peter Singer in his book Animal Liberation developed a list of qualities in sentient creatures that gave them consideration under utilitarian ethics and this has been widely referenced by animal rights campaigners and vegetarians. The animal does not want to die and is given no choice; the family and friends of that animal will suffer as a result; the animal has expectations of future enjoyment which are denied; the animal enjoys living, and the animal experiences varying levels of fear and pain in the process of being killed. Ethical vegetarians also believe that killing an animal, like killing a human, can only be justified in extreme circumstances and that consuming a living creature for its enjoyable taste, convenience, or nutritional value is not sufficient cause. Another common view is that humans are morally conscious of their behavior in a way other animals are not, and therefore subject to higher standards.

Author J. Neil Schulman contends that "If human beings are no different from other animals, then like all other animals it is our nature to kill any other animal which serves the purposes of our survival and well-being, for that is the way of all nature. Therefore, aside from economic concerns such as making sure we don't kill so quickly that we destroy a species and deprive our descendants of prey, human animals can kill members of other animal species for their usefulness to us. It is only if we are not just another animal -- if our nature is distinctly superior to other animals -- that we become subject to ethics at all -- and then those ethics must take into account our nature as masters of the lower animals. We may seek a balance of nature; but "balance" is a concept that only a species as intelligent as humankind could even contemplate. We may choose to temper the purposes to which we put lower animals with empathy and wisdom; but by virtue of our superior nature, we decide ... and if those decisions include the consumption of animals for human utilitarian or recreational purposes, then the limits on the uses we put the lower beasts are ones we set according to our individual human consciences."[1]

As noted by John Webster, a professor of animal husbandry at Bristol: "People have assumed that intelligence is linked to the ability to suffer and that because animals have smaller brains they suffer less than humans. That is a pathetic piece of logic, sentient animals have the capacity to experience pleasure and are motivated to seek it, you only have to watch how cows and lambs both seek and enjoy pleasure when they lie with their heads raised to the sun on a perfect English summer's day. Just like humans." [2]

However very few admit that all animals have the capacity to suffer or indeed any kind of consciousness . There is a debate as to where the line should be drawn. Justin Lieber, a philosophy professor at Oxford University writes that: "Montaigne is ecumenical in this respect, claiming consciousness for spiders and ants, and even writing of our duties to trees and plants. Singer and Clarke agree in denying consciousness to sponges. Singer locates the distinction somewhere between the shrimp and the oyster. He, with rather considerable convenience for one who is thundering hard accusations at others, slides by the case of insects and spiders and bacteria, they pace Montaigne, apparently and rather conveniently do not feel pain. The intrepid Midgley, on the other hand, seems willing to speculate about the subjective experience of tapeworms ...Nagel ... appears to draw the line at flounders and wasps, though more recently he speaks of the inner life of cockroaches".[3]

[edit] Treatment of animals

Ethical vegetarianism has become popular in developed countries particularly because of the spread of factory farming, which has reduced the sense of husbandry that used to exist in farming and led to animals being treated as commodities.[citation needed] Some believe that the current mass demand for meat cannot be satisfied without a mass-production system that disregards the welfare of animals, while others believe that practices like well-managed free-ranging and consumption of game, particularly from species whose natural predators have been significantly eliminated, could substantially alleviate the demand for mass-produced meat.[citation needed]

Defenders of factory farming claim that the animals are better off in total confinement. According to F J "Sonny" Faison, president of Carroll’s Foods: "They're in state-of-the-art confinement facilities. The conditions that we keep these animals in are much more humane than when they were out in the field. Today they're in housing that is environmentally controlled in many respects. And the feed is right there for them all the time, and water, fresh water. They're looked after in some of the best conditions, because the healthier and [more] content that animal, the better it grows. So we're very interested in their well-being — up to an extent."[4]

[edit] Animal consciousness

Eugene Linden, author of The Parrot's Lament cites many examples of animal behavior and intelligence that surpass what most people would suppose to be the boundary of animal conscious. Linden contends that in many of these documented examples, a variety of animal species exhibits behavior that can only be attributed to emotion, and to a level of consciousness that we would normally ascribe only to our own species.

Philosopher Daniel Dennett counters that: "Consciousness requires a certain kind of informational organization that does not seem to be 'hard-wired' in humans, but is instilled by human culture. Moreover, consciousness is not a black-or-white, all-or-nothing type of phenomenon, as is often assumed. The differences between humans and other species are so great that speculations about animal consciousness seem ungrounded. Many authors simply assume that an animal like a bat has a point of view, but there seems to be little interest in exploring the details involved."[5]

[edit] Environmental issues

Main articles: Environmental vegetarianism and Anthropocentrism

Some people choose to follow a vegetarian or vegan lifestyle for environmental reasons.

The use of large industrial monoculture that is common in industrialized agriculture, typically for feed crops such as corn and soy is more damaging to ecosystems than more sustainable farming practices such as organic farming, permaculture, arable, pastoral, and rain-fed agriculture

Animals fed on grain and those which rely on grazing need more water than grain crops [6]. According to the USDA, growing crops for farm animals requires nearly half of the U.S. water supply and 80% of its agricultural land. Animals raised for food in the U.S. consume 90% of the soy crop, 80% of the corn crop, and 70% of its grain. [7]. In tracking food animal production from the feed through to the dinner table, the inefficiencies of meat, milk and egg production range from a 4:1 energy input to protein output ratio up to 54:1. [8] The result is that producing animal-based food is typically much less efficient than the harvesting of grains, vegetables, legumes, seeds and fruits, though this might not be true to the same extent for animal husbandry in the developing world where factory farming is almost non existent, making animal-based food much more sustainable.

Anthropocentrism, or human-centredness, is believed by some to be the central problematic concept in environmental philosophy, where it is used to draw attention to a systematic bias in traditional Western attitudes to the non-human world [9]. Val Plumwood (1993, 1996) has argued that anthropocentrism plays an analogous role in green theory to androcentrism in feminist theory and ethnocentrism in anti-racist theory. Plumwood calls human-centredness "anthrocentrism" to emphasize this parallel.

Defenders of anthropocentrist views point out that maintenance of a healthy, sustainable environment is necessary for human well-being rather than for its own sake. The problem with a "shallow" viewpoint is not that it is human centered but that according to William Grey (1993: 473) "What's wrong with shallow views is not their concern about the well-being of humans, but that they do not really consider enough in what that well-being consists. According to this view, we need to develop an enriched, fortified anthropocentric notion of human interest to replace the dominant short-term, sectional and self-regarding conception."

[edit] Argument that plant consumption also kills animals

Professor of animal science, Steven Davis suggest that vegetarianism and veganism wouldn't actually reduce the number of animals killed if we used more cropland for a ruminant-pasture model of livestock production. Whenever a tractor traverses a field to plow, disc, cultivate, apply fertilizer and/or pesticide, or harvest, animals are killed. Based on a study finding that wood mouse populations dropped from 25 per hectare to 5 per hectare after harvest (attributed to migration and mortality) Davis estimates that 10 animals per hectare are killed from farming every year. If all 120,000,000 acres (490,000 km²) of cropland is used for a vegetarian/vegan diet then approximately 1.2 billion animals would die each year. If half of the cropland was converted to ruminant-pasture then Davis estimates only .9 billion animals would die each year, assuming people switched from the 8 billion poultry killed each year to beef, lamb, and dairy products.[10]

Gaverick Matheny, a Ph.D. candidate in agricultural economics at the University of Maryland, counters that Davis' reasoning contains several major flaws, including narrowing the definition of "harm" to include only the killing of animals, and calculating the number of animal deaths based on land area rather than per consumer. Because an equal amount of protein can be produced from 1 hectare of cropland, 2.6 hectares of ruminant dairy, or 10 hectares of ruminant beef, less cropland would be needed for a vegetarian diet. According to Metheny's estimates, 0.3 animals would be killed per person for a vegan diet, 0.39 for a vegetarian diet, and 1.5 in the Davis model. Matheny says that "After correcting for these errors, Davis’s argument makes a strong case for, rather than against, adopting a vegetarian diet." [11]

[edit] Eating meat as a natural behavior

Additional arguments from meat eaters are that because meat eating is (1) a natural behavior (other animals eat meat), (2) a traditional behavior, and (3) in some cases necessary for survival, it is excluded from ethical consideration.[12]

Vegetarians and vegans usually respond to the first argument by pointing out that many natural behaviors of animals are considered appalling when exhibited by humans, for example, rape,[13] intra-species killing,[14] and cannibalism.[15] They argue that other animals should not be looked to as a model for an ethical lifestyle. However, some meat-eaters think it is appropriate to eat different animals because they believe that these animals are not moral agents; that is, these animals are not capable of applying moral reasoning to their actions. This lack of moral agency means both that it is inappropriate to morally praise or blame such animals for their behaviour, and that people need not treat these animals as being of equal moral worth.[16]

Regarding the necessity of animal consumption, vegetarians and vegans contend that meat eating is rarely necessary for survival in the modern world, where agricultural advances have significantly increased the availability of vegetables and vegetable products.[17]

[edit] Sociology of ethics of eating meat

The sociologist Max Weber emphasized the basic fact that people are not satisfied to just engage in behavior but also need to believe that what they do is good or right. Thus some people, both meat-eaters and vegetarian alike, will respond with defensiveness, intolerance, or hostility towards the other, interpreting the other's behavior as calling their own behavior into question. Vegetarians often associate their calls for giving ethical consideration to animals with other movements that have attempted to expand the range of beings given this consideration such as the anti-slavery movement, the women's liberation movement, opposition to racism, child labour, colonialism, and others. All of these activities have at some point been defended on the basis that the suffering incurred is legitimate, natural, necessary, or just.

[edit] References

  1. ^ The Illogic of Animal Rights J. Neil Schulman
  2. ^ The secret life of moody cows John Webster
  3. ^ Leiber, Justin, "'Cartesian Linguistics?'" Philosophia, 118 (1988):309-46.
  4. ^ Scully, Matthew. Dominion, St. Martin's Griffin, 2002, pp. 255-256.
  5. ^ Animal consciousness: what matters and why Daniel Dennett
  6. ^ BBC News - Hungry world 'must eat less meat' by Alex Kirby
  7. ^ Major Uses of Land in the United States, 1997 SB-973
  8. ^ U.S. could feed 800 million people with grain that livestock eat
  9. ^ Naess 1973
  10. ^ S.L. Davis (2001). "The least harm principle suggests that humans should eat beef, lamb, dairy, not a vegan diet". Proceedings of the Third Congress of the European Society for Agricultural and Food Ethics: 449-450. 
  11. ^ Gaverick Matheny (2003). "Least harm: a defense of vegetarianism from Steven Davis’s omnivorous proposal". Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 16: 505–511. doi:10.1023/A:1026354906892. 
  12. ^ Meat: A Natural Symbol. Nick Fiddes. New York: Routledge, Chapman and Hall, 1991
  13. ^ Gowaty, P.A. & Buschhaus, N.,"Functions of aggressive and forced copulations in birds: female resistance and the CODE hypothesis," American Zoologist (1997)
  14. ^ Barash, D.P. (2005). Red in tooth, claw, and trigger finger. The Chronicle Review. 51, B19.
  15. ^ Cannibalism : ecology and evolution among diverse taxa / Publisher: Oxford [England] ; New York : Oxford University Press, Date: 1992.
  16. ^ Roger Scruton, Animal Rights and Wrongs, 1998, Demos, ISBN 1-898309-19-1
  17. ^ You Don't Need Meat -Peter Cox. Bloomsbury, 1992

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