Question In a hypothetical situation I am a vegan talking to a meat eater who buys his meat from a supermarket and has no interest in where it came from. I say that I don't think people have the right to eat meat unless they are willing to learn about what it takes to provide that meat, witness it first hand or even produce it for themselves. He says that he doesn't want to know where it came from and is quite happy for someone else to do the dirty work if they are happy to and does not feel at all guilty. Is he morally wrong and do I have a valid argument?

Accepted:
September 10, 2009

Comments

This is a neat situation because the meat eater is so unrepentant! It must be infuriating for the vegan. I fantasize the meat eater holds a juicy burger while the debate goes on. Precious!

I think the philosophical question at heart has to do with ignorance. Is purposefully dwelling in ignorance morally acceptable?

Notice this is not the same thing as Is purposefully dwelling in ignorance psychologically comfortable? We know the answer to that last question is yes. That's why the prisoners in Plato's Allegory of the Cave have to be dragged up to the sunlight.

So on to is purposefully dwelling in ignorance morally acceptable. There are some instances in which I think we can say yes, ignorance is acceptable. For example, I have heard it said that the famous philosopher Peter Singer (who advances the view that most Westerners should donate all excess funds to the world's poor) can't play football/soccer and think about the poor at the same time. Say this story is true: he purposefully decides to shut his mind off to the world's suffering in order to play football because if he thought about the poor while playing he would neither play well, nor enjoy himself. But we know from Singer's writings that he surely redirects his efforts to the world's poor and does not remain ignorant to them for very long.

In the case of the plight of animals, I suspect many of us turn our minds away from their suffering deliberately so that we can function in our ordinary lives, eat hot-wings, wear leather, etc. But I agree with you that to turn your mind away from real suffering (human or animal) on a lasting basis is morally hazardous. We might falsely elevate our own importance, or simply forget what it feels like to have empathy for others.

If you said all of that, I think you'd be putting your point a little too strongly. I can innocently prefer not to witness how some things are produced, and prefer not to do the producing. I might just be claustrophobic, and prefer not to go down into the mines. I might hate the smell of a paper mill. It's another matter to deliberately remain in ignorance, to purposely avoid knowing whether or not some wrong is taking place.

How can you convince the meat-eater to learn? I think the key concept here is complicity. If you are buying a product, then you are complicit in whatever went on to produce it. If we buy products made by child workers, we sustain those practices. If we refuse, we help bring them to an end. If necessary, you might want to resort to a thought experiment. If his favorite after shave could only be produced by torturing a thousand grandmothers, wouldn't he want to know that...and stop buying it?

Hopefully you can convince your meat-eating friend that he's complict, and should be better informed. It's another matter to get him to change his ways. I personally think "one step at a time" is good advice. If a large number of people take small steps (giving up veal, switching to cage-free eggs, signing animal welfare referenda, etc), that will add up to large benefits for animals. I know these things are hard from personal experience: though I think it would be better to be a vegan, I am still just a vegetarian.

Another issue here is whether someone "has the right" to eat meat, even if they know full well where it came from. Suppose Smith claims to "have the right" to eat a slab of beef because she killed the cow. I would strongly disagree. It was wrong of her to kill the cow and wrong of her to eat it. I'm not exactly happy using the notion of "rights" in this context. But the point is that doing wrong in full knowledge is still doing wrong. It may be even worse. If Smith is so insensitive to suffering that she happily kills the cow and eats the meat, I would say this is much worse than eating the meat without really knowing what suffering was involved in its death.

Insensitivity to suffering is indeed a bad thing. But Sally Haslanger's seeming implication that a willingness to kill animals and eat them requires insensitivity to suffering is highly contentious.

I might happily go out of a late evening with gun and dog to get a rabbit for the pot (good sustainable food, and the proliferating beasts are bit of a pest, even with the foxes, buzzards, stoats and even local cats very busily doing their bit). Maybe that shows I'm not at all sentimental about about the bunnikins of children's story books, but must it show insensitivity to suffering? Why so? On the contrary, I take a gun which will give a clean kill, I'll put a sick animal out of its misery, and so forth.

On the common land that runs almost into the centre of Cambridge, handsome Red Poll cattle are now raised by the local vet exercising her ancient commoner's rights as a local resident (sustainably using grazing that would otherwise go to waste). They are very well looked after and then locally and humanely slaughtered and sold for meat on the market. Again, are we to say that our vet, of all people, must be insensitive to animal suffering? I think not.

There may (or may not) be good reasons not to eat those rabbits or that beef. But supposing that doing so somehow must show an inappropriate level of insensitivity to suffering isn't one of them.

The phrase "insensitive to suffering" might mean--(1) "culpably unaware of it" or "unsympathetic to it." Or it might mean (2) "trivializing it" or "giving it too little weight."

If you shoot a rabbit, that's got to cause the rabbit to suffer quite a lot. Surely there's a good chance of not achieving a "clean kill." If you think the suffering you cause is worth it, for the pleasure of eating rabbit stew, then arguably you are trivializing the animal's suffering. So you are insensitive to it in the second sense.

It could be, but doesn't have to be, that you are also insensitive in the first sense. In fact, hunters I speak to (I teach an animal rights class in Texas) often seem very invested in the notion that it doesn't hurt animals much to be shot. They don't respond with sympathy to animals that surely are, in fact, suffering.

Even humanely raised beef cattle do suffer--when they are branded, castrated, dehorned, and probably when they are slaughtered. I don't think we can dismiss the worry that people involved in the practice, whether directly or as customers, are insensitive to suffering in one or both of the two senses.