AFFIRMATIVE:
I’m a Vegetarian and
You Should Be, Too
MICHAEL HUEMER
WORLDWIDE EACH YEAR, human beings torture and kill approxi-
mately 56 billion animals for our gastronomic pleasure. Two
years of factory farming slaughters more animals than the total
number of human beings who have ever existed on the earth.
I believe meat consumption is, in almost all actual cases,
morally wrong. My basic reasoning is simple and obvious: (1)
pain and suffering in itself is generally bad; (2) it is wrong to
cause an enormous amount of bad for the sake of relatively
minor benefits for oneself; (3) human meat consumption causes
enormous pain and suffering for the sake of relatively minor
benefits for us; therefore, (4) human meat consumption is, on
the face of it, wrong. This strikes me as about as difficult as the
case against torturing babies.
Why do I say only that it’s wrong in “almost” all cases? Well,
there are exceptions. If you must eat meat to survive, that will
typically outweigh the prima facie wrongness of eating meat.
I will not try to catalog all the possible reasons sufficient to
justify meat consumption. In the overwhelming majority of
actual cases, meat eaters do not have any reasons that could
plausibly be claimed to justify the pain and suffering caused
by their practice.
The moral premises of the argument are (1) and (2) above.
I believe them for the same reason that I believe it is wrong to
attack people, wrong to steal, right to keep promises, and so on:
These things seem obvious on their face. Usually, a reasonable
starting point is simple propositions that seem obvious on their
face, provided we have no specific grounds for doubting them.
If we can’t assume (1) and (2), then I don’t know why we should
assume any moral proposition is true. I’m not asking you to
accept some grand philosophical theory. I’m just asking you to
agree that we shouldn’t cause enormous pain and suffering for
trivial reasons.
The most common objection meat eaters give when con-
fronted with this sort of argument is that because animals
lack intelligence (or the faculty of reason, or moral agency, or
something similar), they also lack rights, or their interests do
not matter.
I don’t know what the basis for rights is, and—almost cer-
tainly—neither do you. There are many theories of rights in the
ethics literature that have about the same level of vague plau-
sibility but have different implications for who has and doesn’t
have rights. I accept rights because the idea seems to account for
such things as why one may not kill a healthy patient in order to
distribute his organs to five other patients who need transplants,
why one may not frame an innocent person in order to prevent
riots, and so on. But that doesn’t tell me whether and which ani-
mals might have them.
Whatever the situation may be as regards “rights,” however,
and whether or not there even are such things, I do know that
one should not cause vast pain and suffering for trivial reasons.
Nothing about human intelligence explains why it would be
acceptable to do that. Being capable of carrying out complex
deductions, or grasping abstract objects, or regulating one’s
behavior according to normative beliefs, does not somehow
change that underlying truth.
That is the core point; everything else is a distraction.
Yet while few people explicitly favor animal cruelty, few are
prepared to change their own diets. One reason is that most
people don’t take time to reflect on moral principles. Another
is that most fall prey to “status quo bias,” which causes us to
instinctively reject any radical criticism of current practices.
Status quo bias is why many refuse to take seriously the argu-30 OCTOBER 2018 Photo: bergamont/iStock
PROPOSITION:
Libertarians
Should Be
Vegetarians