A Meat and Dairy Article from All-Creatures.org

Is There Moral Justification to Eat Meat?

From Gregory F. Tague, Earth Tongues/EcologicalCitizen.net
June 2023

Humans do not have a duty to eat meat; rather, we have a duty to restore the fitness of the planet we’ve compromised. This duty can be fulfilled in large part by dramatically shifting away from livestock farming and meat eating, as these practices are intrinsically cruel and a significant source of environmental damage.

This article discusses and rejects the anthropocentric claim, proposed by Zangwill, that we have a moral duty to eat meat. It argues that Zangwill ignores both the extensive ecological damage caused by animal agriculture, and the cruelty and suffering that it entails. Using a framework proposed in Marino and Mountain, it then diagnoses Zangwill’s argument as proceeding from a broader cultural phenomenon: the human attempt to cope with our existential dread of death, by denying our mammalian nature and depersonalizing other, non-human, animals. Once we reject this human exceptionalism, we will see that our moral duty is not to eat animals but to respect the intrinsic value of their lives. 

In answering the question, philosopher Nick Zangwill would say yes; bio-psychologist Lori Marino and co-author Michael Mountain would say no. Zangwill argues “that eating meat is morally good and our duty when it is part of a practice that has benefited animals.”

Against this injunction, Marino and Mountain demonstrate that the human denial of death motivates us to distance ourselves from other animals so that we justify harms to them – harms which include raising animals as our food.

The final calculation is rather simple. Contra Zangwill, humans do not have a duty to eat meat; rather, we have a duty to restore the fitness of the planet we’ve compromised. This duty can be fulfilled in large part by dramatically shifting away from livestock farming and meat eating, as these practices are intrinsically cruel and a significant source of environmental damage.

Zangwill, the meat-eating animal

In a nutshell, Zangwill’s argument is that “eating meat is morally good primarily because it benefits animals”. He argues this from sentientist premises: that animals are sentient beings and that their flourishing is morally valuable. Zangwill points out that if humans did not eat meat, most domesticated animals would not exist, as farmers would cease to care for or breed them. Thus, he argues, “eating meat is an essential part of a practice whereby valuable conscious lives have been and are being created”. Hence, he concludes, in respect to those cases where animals raised for meat have “a significant quality of life” meat-eating is our moral duty. Indeed, “[e]ating meat is an act of kindness”.

What should we make of this argument – that the non-human life worth living is one that fills the human belly? The only way Zangwill can reach his conclusion is by ignoring the ecological context within which the practice of meat-eating currently exists. What is more, his argument treats animals as resources for humans and not as ends in themselves.

To begin with, Zangwill explicitly limits his argument to those animals which enjoy “good lives” – and admits that this may not apply to those raised on factory-farms. However, most of the world’s meat comes from the latter, so he’s creating an illusion. Meat from supposedly happy ‘free-ranged’ animals is not going to feed the already eight billion human stomachs. The corporate meat industry is driven by the profit-motive, not ethics, and factory-farmed meat is the most profitable.

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Please read the ENTIRE ARTICLE HERE, including:

• Zangwill, the meat-eating animal
• A diagnosis of Zangwill’s argument
• What duty do we have to animals?  

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Posted on All-Creatures.org: June 20, 2024
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