No. Many vegans (and vegetarians) aim to minimize unnecessary suffering and believe that eating animals causes unnecessary suffering. A crucial premise of this argument is that animals can suffer pain, discomfort, and possibly even more complex unpleasant thoughts or emotions. What is the evidence for that premise? It's a best explanation (or abductive) argument. We have good reasons, based on a wide range of scientific evidence from psychology and neuroscience, to think that complex nervous systems are required to experience suffering, and the mammals we eat (and probably the birds and perhaps the fish) have nervous systems that support these experiences. Plus the behavior of these animals suggests that they can feel pain and discomfort. Plants do not have nervous systems (or anything analogous) and they do not show the behavior associated with experiencing pain (or anything else). So, we have no reason to think they suffer while they live or when they are harvested. (Personally, I think...

Well, both are immoral and indications of bad character traits (and may 'harden' one for worse acts), assuming that the torturing is gratuitous, as the word suggests. But we have good reasons to think that insects do not experience pain and suffering nearly as much as monkeys and apes (e.g., their nervous systems are not as complex). So, if one measure of the immorality or badness of an act is the amount of unnecessary pain and suffering it produces--and that seems plausible on any moral theory--then yes, torturing an insect would be less immoral than torturing a non-human primate. Please do neither!

I'd suggest doing some research on both the environmental impact of cattle and pork farming and production and the reasons to respect, as you put it, each species. My own research is incomplete, but from what I've seen, pig factory farming is particularly nasty for the environment (e.g., the sewage leaking into waterways in North Carolina), and pigs are likely the most intelligent of the animals we raise for food (some claim they are roughly on par with dogs). I'm not sure how relevant it is that they might eat human babies! (If true, let's make sure not to leave any babies in their pens.) In any case, I think the decision to cut down our production and consumption of all factory farmed animals is overdetermined: there are good reasons based on morality (preventing mass amounts of unnecessary suffering), protecting the environment (note that animal farts contribute to global warming!), and improving our health. Having said this, I admit I still purchase some factory farmed meat for my family. And...

I don't think you are doing anything wrong. But I think that precisely because I think that animals suffering is a bad thing and should be avoided if possible. It sounds to me like you are avoiding it as much as possible--and I assume that when you slaughter them you will do so in a way that minimizes pain and suffering (and likely will not be any worse, and may be much better, than their natural death would be). So, I may be misunderstanding what you mean when you say that you think suffering is bad but you do NOT think "that [suffering] is a reason for people not to eat animals." My own view is that there are many reasons to try to phase out factory farming, the main two being animal suffering and environmental harm. But both of those problems might be minimized by raising animals in other ways--for instance, the way you are raising your chickens. Others may want to provide arguments for why it is wrong to eat animals no matter what. But I have not been convinced by those arguments, mainly...

Well, weakness of will is a human frailty, and philosophers are humans. But I share your intuition that someone who has accepted strong arguments for a conclusion, such as "It is wrong to eat meat," and who faces few difficulties acting on that conclusion, should be able to act on it. It may make you feel better to know that there is a much higher proportion of consistent vegetarians among philosophers than among the general population. But people who study ethics may be no different than other philosophers (except that they condemn meat eating more). See here . Personally, I think that there are good reasons for our society to shut down factory farming (it causes a lot of unnecessary suffering, hurts the environment, and contributes to unhealthy eating habits). But it is not obvious how best to act on that view. I try to avoid factory farmed meat, but mainly to avoid hypocrisy rather than to further the cause (my not purchasing meat is unlikely to have an effect on the industry). But...

You would probably appreciate this recent column in The New York Times on whether it is ethical to eat peas (and other plants): http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/04/28/if-peas-can-talk-should-we-eat-them/ I didn't. I thought it was pretty stupid. Why? Because the sort of "communication" that plants may be capable of does not seem relevant to being an object of ethical concern (which is not to say that we may not have ethical duties to protect the environment, including animals and plants). I'm not sure you are right that more than a few people think insects have ethical value. Heck, given the way we treat and eat factory farmed animals, I'm not sure many people think mammals and birds (other than their pets) have ethical value or deserve ethical consideration. Personally, I think people are wrong about the mammals and birds, probably right about insects (and maybe fish), and certainly right about plants. Why? Because for me, the main reason (and minimal threshold) for a...

You've got it right. If one believes meat-eating is wrong and has reasons and arguments for that view, then one should offer those reasons and arguments to others to try to convince them to stop doing something wrong. The reason meat-eaters respond this way is presumably that they do not think they are doing anything wrong or they think that vegetarians' reasons for avoiding meat are subjective (e.g., they don't like the taste or feel they don't need it) or, more likely, they are trying to avoid confronting reasons, facts, and arguments that would make them have to give up something they like doing. Conversely, some vegetarians might not want to confront meat-eaters because they don't take their position for ethical reasons or because they think the harm involved in meat-eating is minimal enough that they don't need to try to change the world, even if they do think it's wrong enough that they don't want to engage in that practice. The latter view seems difficult to pull off consistently. I say...

Of course, it depends on how one defines 'person'. If one defines person as an organism with a human genome, then dolphins can't be persons and human fetuses are persons. But person ally, I think persons are conscious creatures that are able to think about their own and others' mental states, to represent and understand what they feel and believe, hold dear and hold true. Such self-awareness seems to allow one to represent oneself as a person, as separate from other persons, as continuous through time, as having a future self with interests that should be considered now. These capacities, I believe, are also what make persons autonomous and responsible in ways that non-persons are not. While there are important boundary conditions for personhood, so defined, it may involve many capacities, each of which is possessed to varying degrees, so it may be hard to delineate clearly which creatures count as persons and which don't, and to delineate exactly when an infant becomes a person. (I also...

The answer will depend on what your reasons are for not eating meat. For instance, I do not believe that eating meat is wrong because killing animals is wrong. Rather, I believe it is wrong to cause suffering to those animals we have good reason to believe can feel pain and suffer (unless we are justified in believing that the suffering will relieve more suffering, as is the case with some animal experimentation but is almost never the case with eating animals). So, I try to do what I can to avoid supporting factory farming, which is a manifest case of causing unnecessary suffering. I am not as good as I should be about this commitment. For instance, if I am in a situation where I have to choose between eating factory-farmed meat and not eating (or having to go to great lengths to eat), I tend to eat the meat. If I am served meat and the only way to avoid eating it is to throw it away, I will eat the meat (otherwise, one might even think the animal's pain was even more useless than it otherwise...

Good question, and I think it has a lot of philosophical import. Here's why. What we might call a "true lie" is one where the liar knows what she is doing. She knows that she needs to do or say something to alter what her target believes in order to get him to do something the liar wants. Contrast this with a "behavioristic lie," one that has the effect of getting the target to behave a certain way but without the "liar" knowing how she is doing it. Take the case of a 3-year-old girl who has learned that saying "I'm tired" often gets her out of doing something she doesn't want to do. One night her dad says "It's time to go to bed," so she repeats her standard ploy, "I'm tired." She does not seem to know how her lie works! This difference between "true lying" and "behavioristic lying" seems to make a big difference. Behavioristic lying might not require any especially impressive cognitive abilities. Well, behavioristic learning itself is pretty impressive--and it allows more interesting and...