Is Eating Meat Defensible?
The morality of killing animals aside from environmental factors
I will start by confessing that I write this article as a meat eater. Let us assume that it is the task of those who eat meat to defend it as a practice and dismantle the vegetarian argument, rather than the task of vegetarians to prove eating meat is wrong. If we were referring to scientific progress, this line of reasoning would be falsificationism; that is, that knowledge advances by disproving and discarding theories that we have trialled. For the sake of simplicity, let’s take the vegetarian argument solely as the theory that killing and eating animals is wrong in and of itself, and ignore other factors (like environmental grounds, cultural differences, availability of food etc.).
Laying out the argument in a basic form there are two premises and one conclusion:
- Killing and eating humans is morally wrong.
- Human are animals, and are not worth more than animals in terms of moral value.
- Therefore, killing and eating animals is morally wrong.
This argument is sound; that is, if you accept premises 1 and 2 then the conclusion follows. To be valid as well as sound, both premises 1 and 2 must be true. I hope that we can all agree that premise 1 is true, but if that upsets any cannibals reading this, I do apologise.
Therefore, to dismantle the argument we must focus on premise 2. It is true that humans are animals, and that we evolved from chimpanzees, a species whose DNA is approximately 98.4% identical to that of humans when comparing single nucleotide polymorphisms. To dispute that humans are worth more than animals we must be able to clearly say how we are qualitatively different to them.
This is quite a challenge. Evolution is a gradual process, and while scientists may pick a date from which a new species starts, there is not a noticeable discrete change from one generation to the next. Picking some stage of development past which humans gained moral value over other animals is fairly arbitrary, and arguably falls short of a clear qualitative difference.
There are various aspects of humanity that one could argue make us different enough. For example, sentience…
