Topics Ethics

Question I believe that eating animals is a great evil because of the suffering that it causes to animals. If I tell people this, usually after obnoxiously asking me why I am a vegetarian, they often get offended because they feel that I am "forcing" my opinion on them but in fact I'm just telling it like it is and if they don't like my opinion they shouldn't have asked for it in the first place. But here is what really gets my goat, the whole idea that some people have that being a vegetarian is just a matter of opinion and that since we live in a "free society" somehow that means that we should tolerate a lifestyle predicated on cruelty to animals. According to that way of thinking if the majority of voters agree that meat eating is permissible then nobody has a right to force them to not eat meat. And to me that just seems absolutely ludicrous. We can live in a "free" society all we want but a free society still needs some kind of constitutional backbone that ensures some basic ideals are held sacred or else all you have is the whims and tyrannies of the individual members of that state. I means certainly the idea of not torturing animals because you think they are tasty is something that everyone should hold sacred and if you don't think so then I say too bad. So okay, I imagine most of you who are meat eaters are probably not going to buy this line of thinking and of course most of what I am saying could equally apply to other issues such as abortion. However doesn't the idea of democracy with it's emphasis on tolerance in some ways paradoxically intolerant to those moral beliefs which aren't tolerant but are in the minority?

Accepted:
December 13, 2012

Comments

You've raised several good questions, but I'd like to focus on just one of them. You offer serious moral reasons for being a vegetarian. And anyone who thinks that you're "forcing" your views on them because you argue for your views has a very strange idea of what "forcing" mean. But I wasn't entirely sure what just what sort of intolerance was at issue here. I assume the people you're arguing with don't want to require you to eat meat, so at least that degree of intolerance isn't at issue. Perhaps they think you're argument that the state should be able to require them to be vegetarians. I didn't take that to be your view, but if it were it would be odd to say that they're being intolerant by objecting to such a potential imposition on their behavior.

That said, democratic societies routinely do stop people from acting on at least some sincerely-held moral beliefs. For example: someone might believe they shouldn't allow their children to have blood transfusions. Most democratic countries (certainly the USA) disagree. Some people believe they should be free to practice polygamy. Many democratic countries say no. All this raises hard and interesting questions. In the case of children and blood transfusions, one justification for taking the matter out of the parents' hands is that otherwise the parents are imposing a potentially life-threatening decision on someone who isn't in a position to give proper consent. In other cases (say, laws against homosexual conduct) it's much harder to see what legitimate interest the state might have in imposing its view.

The slogan-sized notion of democracy is that the majority's will should be law. From the point of view of that slogan, the paradox would be in the idea that sometimes a democratic society shouldn't impose the majority's will. However, the idea of democracy is more complicated than the slogan, and as you point out, ideals of tolerance are part of what most people include in their conception of democracy. There's no paradox in adding that there are legitimate limits to what should be tolerated. The hard part is in spelling out useful principles that will help us define those limits. What should be clear is that advocating vegetarianism is something that ought to be tolerated. Whether requiring vegetarianism (not your view, I believe) is something that democratic reasoning could yield is another question. My instinct is to think that it couldn't, but I don't think it's a silly question. On the contrary, I suspect there's a lot to be learned from thinking about it.