If You Like Animals Stop Eating Their Food

If You Like Animals Stop Eating Their Food

Eating animals

Potential wrongs

Eating animals poses ii moral issues.

• Is it wrong in principle to raise and impale animals so that human beings can eat meat and fish?
• Does it stop existence wrong if the processes involved are carried out humanely?

Eating animals is besides criticised on health and ecological grounds, but this commodity only deals with wrongs to the animals involved.

Violated rights

If you take that animals have rights, raising and killing animals for food is morally incorrect.

An animate being raised for food is being used by others rather than being respected for itself. In philosopher's terms it is existence treated as a means to human ends and non as an end in itself.

This is a clear violation of the animate being's rights.

No affair how humanely an animal is treated in the process, raising and killing information technology for food remains morally wrong.

Simply: This is using 'rights' in a rather technical philosophical sense. When people talk about animal rights colloquially, they are usually talking about fauna interests.

Violated interests

Even the almost humane forms of rearing and killing animals for food always violates the creature'southward nigh bones involvement - to continue living.

Modernistic agriculture oft violates other key animal interests as well - for example:

• to live in natural (or at least, decent) weather condition
• to make gratuitous choices
• to be free from fear and pain
• to live salubrious lives without needing medical intervention
• to eat a natural nutrition
• to enjoy the normal social/family/customs life of its species

Human interests versus animal interests

Many human beings don't believe animals have rights, but practise recall that animals have important interests that should not be violated.

But some of these people bask eating meat and fish, and so face a conflict between beast and human interests: the trivial human interest in eating meat versus the basic animal involvement in staying alive.

The human involvement is classed as petty because human beings don't need to eat meat in order to live.

The animate being interest in staying live is classed as bones, because if the animal is killed then all its other interests are frustrated besides.

• Ethical question: Should the lilliputian human interest in eating meat exist satisfied at the expense of the animal involvement in staying alive?

The rights argument

The rights statement against eating animals

The rights statement is based only on non violating rights. It disregards the consequences of eating animals.

The statement goes like this:

• Higher not-human being animals have rights
• The about basic correct is the correct to exist treated equally an end in oneself, non equally a means to someone else'due south ends
• Raising and killing animals for food uses them as a ways to human gratification, it does not care for them respectfully as ends in themselves
• Eating animals is therefore wrong
• There is no important human need to exist considered in this example
• Philosophers who respect rights and accept that animals have rights should be vegetarians

Trouble: Surely i person not eating animals will have no effect on whether animals are raised and killed for nutrient - so in that location's no bespeak in being a vegetarian...

Wrong! The pointlessness of a single person removing meat from their nutrition is irrelevant to the rights statement for beingness a vegetarian - if something is wrong, a moral person should not practise it.

The consequentialist (utilitarian) argument

This sort of argument is based entirely on the results of an action (or the total result of a lot of similar actions). Information technology is only concerned with the consequences of eating animals.

The argument goes like this:

• We should human activity so as to increase the amount of goodness in the world
• Raising and killing animals for food is cruel and then reduces the full amount of goodness in the world
• If everyone was a vegetarian, there would exist no demand for meat
• If in that location were no demand for meat no one would raise and kill animals for food
• Therefore if everyone was a vegetarian, the total corporeality of goodness in the world would exist higher
• Therefore everyone should be a vegetarian

You may want to enquire yourself whether information technology matters that individual consumers don't themselves commit the wrongful acts of raising and killing the animals.

Problems with the consequentialist statement

Problems with the consequentialist argument

If it is true that the world would be a better place if everyone was a vegetarian, does it follow that any particular individual should exist a vegetarian?

Some philosophers say information technology doesn't. They say:

The meat business concern is so huge that the loss of an individual consumer will brand no difference to it, and so will make no deviation to the corporeality of goodness in the world.

Other philosophers disagree, and say:

Someone who eats meat is approving of and collaborating in the wrongful acts of the agriculture business, and it is morally wrong to corroborate of and collaborate in wrongful acts, even indirectly.

The get-go philosopher might reply:

Because the meat business is so huge, the indirect participation or non-participation of an individual in any wrongful acts that the industry may deport will not influence the continuing of those acts.

Since an individual's acts practice not cause or encourage the wrong-doing to accept place, they are not themselves morally wrong.

The virtue argument

Virtue ethics regard the motivation and character of a person as crucial to whether an act is good or bad.

A morally good act is i that a virtuous person would comport out, and a morally bad act is one that they wouldn't.

Virtuous people alive lives that demonstrate virtue. They are generous, kind and empathetic.

People who participate in a organisation that treats animals cruelly, and that kills animals to provide trivial pleasures to human beings, are behaving selfishly, and non as a virtuous person would.

Since their behaviour is non virtuous, their behaviour is morally wrong, whether or not information technology has any event on whether people continue to enhance and impale animals for food.

One must pass up (even symbolic) support of essentially vicious practices, if a comparably costly alternative that is non tied to essentially savage practices is readily available.

Russ Shafer-Landau 'Vegetarianism, Causation and Ethical Theory', Public Affairs Quarterly 8 (1994)

If You Like Animals Stop Eating Their Food

Source: https://www.bbc.co.uk/ethics/animals/using/eating_1.shtml