You don’t often see thinkers dedicating more than passing remarks against veganism. After all, being kind to animals is not a controversial attitude. On moral and practical grounds, dismissing veganism is not easy. That is why I appreciate Christopher Belshaw’s article Against Veganism, which offers a more thoughtful list of arguments. They are more serious and interesting than the usual talking points vegans are met with.
The article proposes that there are certain situations, outside of self-defence or obvious necessity, where killing and rearing animals for human use is acceptable. The author is careful to mention that ‘the bad practices rife in intensive farming generate powerful arguments against meat, dairy, eggs.’ And I agree – one does not have to be vegan in order to oppose the cruel ways animals are treated on factory farms. This, of course, already means most of the farm animals alive now are mistreated, even by his terms. Belshaw argues there are better ways of doing things.
Interestingly, he lists stronger arguments in favour of killing rather than rearing animals. Let us check them all, one by one. The main points of each argument are quoted directly from the original text.
Arguments Permitting Animal Killing
Painless death is not bad for animals
Even if animals can have overall good lives, such that the pleasure outweighs and compensates for the pain, it is nevertheless not bad for them painlessly to die. […] Because, unlike us, animals lack a consciously-formulated desire for survival. […] So it’s not bad that they die prematurely. Maybe we should concede that self-conscious animals such as whales, elephants, chimps, even dogs, are different here. But these are not the animals we eat.
If only Belshaw did not go into details. Whales, elephants, chimps and even dogs are animals that people eat on a regular basis. This is not only about isolated tribes forced to hunt chimps or the eating of dogs frowned upon by most Westerners. Species of whales have been hunted to extinction and are still eaten in wealthy countries such as Norway or Japan. Only because of overhunting and large efforts from activists are such animals now protected by law.
Photo by Tanner Yould on Unsplash.
Farm animals such as pigs, cows and even chickens (Marino, 2017) have been shown to be as intelligent as dogs or young children. There seem to be solely cultural reasons to prefer some meats over others, not moral ones. A moral standard of refraining from killing ‘self-conscious animals’ would rather lead to veganism (and not towards killing animals that also conveniently happen to be commonly eaten in a particular culture).
Now, we can safely assume happy humans who have a ‘consciously-formulated desire for survival’ want, well, to continue existing. As for animals, one may argue they do not possess such desires, save for ‘whales, elephants, chimps, …
Read the full article which is published on Daily Philosophy (external link)
