Huemer - Dialogues on Ethical Vegetarianism

Dialogues on Ethical Vegetarianism

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.

Michael Huemer is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Colorado, Boulder. He is the author of more than 70 academic articles in ethics, metaphysics, political philosophy, and epistemology, as well as five other books: Skepticism and the Veil of Perception (2001), Ethical Intuitionism (2005), The Problem of Political Authority (2012), Approaching Infinity (2016), and Paradox Lost (2018).

Dialogues on Ethical
Vegetarianism

Michael Huemer

First published 2019
by Routledge
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and by Routledge
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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

2019 Taylor & Francis

The right of Michael Huemer to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this title has been requested

ISBN: 978-1-138-32828-0 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-138-32829-7 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-138-32830-3 (ebk)

Typeset in Sabon
by Swales & Willis Ltd, Exeter, Devon, UK

When I became a vegetarian, in 1971, it seemed that everyone I ate a meal with was asking me why I didnt eat meat. My experience was different from that of Michael Huemer, who tells us that people rarely challenged him on his dietary views. Perhaps that reflects the fact that encountering a vegetarian was more unusual in 1971 than it was when he stopped eating meat in the 1980s.

Some vegetarians and vegans think of their dietary choice as a private matter, like ones religious beliefs. That was never my view. I became a vegetarian because I learned about the way animals are treated in factory farms. After some research and reflection, I reached a shocking but inescapable conclusion: there is an atrocity going on, unseen by most of us because it takes place in huge windowless sheds. In each of these sheds there are hundreds, thousands, or most often tens of thousands of animals living miserable lives so that we can satisfy our preference for a particular kind of meal.

I knew that I should not support that atrocity by purchasing and consuming its products. Keeping my own hands or stomach clean, however, wasnt the point. If we become aware of an atrocity, it is not enough to refuse to take part in it. We should not be bystanders either. We should do what we can to stop it, and telling others about it is an important step in that direction. So although I did not want to push my views on people who showed no interest in them, if someone asked me why I wasnt eating meat, I welcomed the opportunity to tell them about the strong ethical reasons for that choice.

Well, for the first couple of years, I welcomed the opportunity. Then I became tired of repeating the same facts and reasons over and over again, and I thought how good it would be if, whenever someone asked me why I dont eat meat, I could just give them a book and say Read this. When Animal Liberation was published in 1975, I started doing just that.

Now, more than forty years later, I have a better understanding of the many reasons and arguments that people can devise to defend their preference for eating meat. Some of these, like Animals eat other animals, so why shouldnt we eat them? have been refuted often before, and yet, like a jack-in-the-box, they keep popping up again. Others are new. In 1971, no one talked about climate change, so very few people had any idea that methane emissions from farm animals were making a major contribution to warming our planet. Although Huemer has chosen to focus his book on the ethics of eating meat from the perspective of what happens to the animals before they become meat, the need to minimize our contributions to climate change is also an important ethical reason for not eating meat.

Philosophical dialogues go back to Plato, who described, or imagined, conversations Socrates had with Athenians about how we ought to live. Dialogues on Ethical Vegetarianism is a worthy addition to this evergreen tradition. Lively and easy to read, the dialogues that follow capture the experience of doing philosophy as an active participant and not merely a passive spectator. They are also uncannily accurate in presenting what people actually say. Many passages recapitulate, sometimes almost word for word, what people have said to me in conversations about eating meat.

Huemer makes no secret of what side he is on, but he is first and foremost a philosopher and not a polemicist. Hence he is not interested in scoring cheap points against a weak opponent. To refute a philosophical argument, one must first state it in its strongest form. That is what this book does. Then it shows why those arguments are flawed or do not justify eating meat.

In the future, when people ask me why I dont eat meat, I will tell them to read this book.

Peter Singer
Princeton, New Jersey

My Journey

The worst thing I have ever done in my life is that I ate meat and other animal products for many years. I cant explain why I did this, except that I simply had reflected little, if at all, on the ethical status of it. I reflected about many things as a child, but not that. Meat tasted good, and no one seemed to see any problem with it. No one brought any issue to my attention. No one asked me to defend my behavior.