Why We Should Be Vegetarians
Michael Allen Fox
Professor of Philosophy, Queen’s University (Canada)
Adjunct Professor of Social Science, University of New England (Australia)
Everyone who is concerned about making the world a better place to live in must
consider, among other things, the food he or she eats. Why? Because food does not
come from nowhere, and how people obtain it has always been an indicator of the way
they have chosen to live, of what they value, of their attitudes toward life, toward each
other, and toward nature in general. I believe most of us today are concerned about the
state of the world; and not only this: most of us are concerned about our health.
Therefore, we should be doubly concerned about what we eat.
But somehow these concerns often fail to translate into an examination of dietary
choices. For some – perhaps most in the Western world, and an increasing number in the
non-Western world – it seems to be enough to declare simply: “I love my meat and
wouldn’t think of giving it up.” This is without doubt an unreflective way to approach
life, however, and one which a philosopher must question. I do not plan to go into the
health-centered reasons for affirming that a diet which does not rely on meat is healthier
than one that does. The largest study on this subject ever undertaken was conducted by
Cornell University scientists in the People’s Republic of China and Taiwan.1 According
to their findings, plant-based diets are significantly healthier in numerous respects than
meat-based ones. Many other studies have confirmed this result in various sample
groups. Thus, there would appear to be reason enough to choose being a vegetarian for
health (that is, prudential) reasons alone. But there are many other reasons too that can
help us make this decision.
The most important among these additional reasons has to do with the
consequences of eating meat for nonhuman animals. First, note the expression just used:
“nonhuman animals.” We customarily forget or don’t even consider that humans are
animals too; we just refer to “animals” as all those other things that from time to time we
may think resemble us in certain respects or behaviours but that, we comfort ourselves
into believing, are not really all that much like us. Animals are those lesser beings that
don’t matter, or don’t matter very much, at any rate. They are those beings that work for
us, serve our needs, and give up their lives for us. And generally we download an
abundance of our problems onto them. For example, we experiment on them in order
(we suppose) to improve our lives, as if their lives had no inherent value (or value to the
animals themselves). We steal their habitats for both important and entirely trivial
reasons. We make them into slaves of our obsession with commodities and profits. If,
on the other hand, we practice thinking of ourselves as animals too, a quite different
perspective emerges. Now we see a continuity between humans and nonhumans rather
than a false and untenable dichotomy. Now we can understand that there exist other
beings that are of value; that have their own purposes independent of ours; that can
experience pain and suffering; and that have a will to live. Historically, there have
always been voices to express these ideas, but they have been in the minority and have
been ignored or marginalized. This is no longer the case. Anyone who is at all aware of
new ideas about nonhuman animals – about their intelligence, communication skills,
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social life, sophisticated behaviours, and evolutionary proximity to us -- has to face the
task of thinking through the complexities of our troubled relationship with them.
I referred above to the consequences for nonhuman animals of turning them into
meat for human consumption. The obvious ones are: pain and suffering, and death. The
level at which the meat industry inflicts these harms on sensitive beings is beyond
comprehension. Peter Singer reports that “Over 100 million cows, pigs, and sheep are
raised and slaughtered in the United States alone each year; and for poultry the figure is a
staggering 5 billion.”2 Jeremy Rifkin observes that in the U.S. 100,000 cattle a day are
killed for meat.3 We can multiply these figures many times over to obtain a world total.
That is why we call the economic sector that generates these statistics “the meat
industry”; but we could just as well label it “the torture and indiscriminate killing
industry,” because that’s truly what it is. It is difficult to explain why any normal person
would not recoil in horror before this meat holocaust. Today, domesticated nonhuman
animals, as they always have been, are purpose bred for eventual slaughter. They are
genetically fashioned, selected, carefully confined, nourished, and often chemically
enhanced for the ultimate goal of turning them into the products that satisfy people’s taste
preferences. Nowhere in this process is it ever considered whether our taste preferences
can only or best be met in this manner, let alone whether our nutritional requirements
must be so addressed. But I would like to return to the character of the meat industry and
what it tells us about ourselves and our society.
There are still a few philosophers who are prepared, like Descartes, to deny that
nonhuman animals really are capable of experiencing pain and suffering, or to argue that
even if they are, such states of consciousness as they may have cannot be compared to
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human ones. I believe that we can safely discount such views, since all the available
evidence – both anecdotal and scientific – clearly indicates that many species of
nonhuman animals are anatomically equipped to be sentient and to exhibit behaviours
that we readily recognize as indicating pleasure, pain, and suffering. It follows that,
whatever ethical theory one holds, the vast amounts of pain and suffering that result from
the rearing, transportation, and slaughtering of nonhuman animals for meat ought to be of
serious concern for each of us. “But why should I care?” you may ask. “What can I do?”
is a likely second question. “And will my choices make a difference anyway?” then will
be asked. Let us look at these issues in turn.
Why should anyone care about the suffering of nonhuman animals? First of all,
why should anyone care about pain and suffering, period? The reason is that pain and
suffering hurt; they are “aversive stimuli” or experiences that have a negative impact, are
disvalued by us, and that we seek to avoid if at all possible. No other reason can be
offered: we care about our own pain and suffering because we don’t like it and it
adversely affects our well-being. OK; but then why should we care about other people’s
pain and suffering, especially if we don’t even know them? Again, the answer is:
“Because it hurts, they don’t like it, and it harms their well-being.” To this, the response
may be: “So what?” But if someone says, “So what?” then there’s nothing else we can
offer by way of persuasion. Harming others is bad because it’s harmful, and what’s
harmful is bad. This is a circular statement, to be sure; but the reason is precisely that it
is meant to convey a self-evident truth, not an argument. Anyone who does not accept
that we should not harm others (who are like oneself) simply because they don’t like to
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be harmed, is unlikely to be persuaded by a different sort of appeal, or indeed by any
appeal at all. We call people like this “amoral” or “sociopaths” or “psychopaths.”
Are we, then, like sociopaths if we care about human pain and suffering, but don’t
care about hurting nonhuman animals? Well, maybe so, in an important sense. But the
point here is not to engage in name-calling or laying on guilt-trips. Rather, it’s to realize
that nonhuman animals can be hurt, that it matters to them, and therefore, should matter
to us. I won’t try to prove that nonhuman animals can experience pain and suffering. As
I noted earlier, this has been confirmed many times over by the evidence. The biggest
breakthrough we can make in our thinking about this matter, it seems to me, is to
acknowledge that it makes no difference what kind of creature we’re talking about; if it
can feel pain and suffer, such pain and suffering matter. Jeremy Bentham put this view
forward more than two centuries ago. Here, I refer to his famous and frequently quoted
remark about sentient nonhuman animals. Bentham says, “The question is not, Can they
reason? nor Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?”4 It is relatively easy today to get
utilitarians to accept this outlook. But Bentham’s insight has a much wider appeal, and
those who hold different ethical views from his can nonetheless relate to what he is
saying with equal facility. Whether pain and suffering are bad in and of themselves or
because of their consequences for our well-being (or both) is not really crucial. What
does count is that they are harmful, and that beings who have these experiences seek
relief from them. In this respect, humans and nonhuman animals are alike, and justice, as
Aristotle observed long ago, means treating like beings alike. 5 Just treatment is to be
understood as fair or deserving treatment. If nonhuman animals are like humans in
respect to the experience of pain and suffering, then so far as it is possible to do so, they
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should be treated alike.
What this means in actual practice is not always easy to
determine, since it is difficult to compare different beings’ pains and sufferings with any
degree of precision; but it is not always all that hard to determine either. In the case of
pain and suffering, it just means that we should try to avoid causing these hurtful,
harmful feelings when it is within our power to do so, and especially when the sacrifice
this requires of us is very minimal. And one obvious way in which it is within our power
to do this is by avoiding direct or indirect acts that produce pain and suffering – such as
buying meat to eat.
The production of meat is not the only cause of nonhuman animal pain and
suffering, to be sure; but it is overwhelmingly the main source of these negative
experiences for other creatures, and we can choose to be on the side of either causing or
preventing this kind of pain and suffering. Again, whether we are utilitarians or not, we
should care about the amount of pain and suffering in the world, and do what we can to
make the world less, rather than more, full of these negative experiences. Surely, this is
what we try to do when we give to charities, help those in need, look after people in
distress, and so on. We help nonhuman animals when they are the victims of wanton
cruelty; why would we not choose to help them escape from the effects of cruel practices
that form a more systematic part of their lives as well?
One objection that may arise at this point comes from a utilitarian perspective.
This is that the amount of pleasure or satisfaction humans derive from eating meat
outweighs the amount of animal pain and suffering we cause in the process. Now aside
from the fact that balancing benefits and harms in this way is notoriously difficult -- even
within the human sphere – I want to suggest that such a line of argument is a non-starter.
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The reason is that the beneficiaries of meat eating are humans and the recipients of harm
are nonhumans. I am not talking here merely about the issue of comparing and balancing
the experiences of members of different species. Rather, I have in mind something much
more fundamental, namely, the issue of weighing benefits to one class of beings against
costs to another class of beings. And this seems to me to involve considerations of
justice. We can look at this issue in two ways. First, if we consider the experiences of
nonhuman animals to be of a comparable character to those of humans, then it has to be
manifestly true that the gustatory pleasures of humans cannot outweigh the pain and
suffering they cause to animals. At a very basic level, it seems reasonable to assume that
the pain and suffering of meat production matter more to the creatures we choose to eat,
for only our most rare gustatory experiences are either intensely or sublimely pleasurable
(and these are, in any case, of very short duration), whereas the harms experienced by
food animals are often agonizing and protracted. Furthermore, the average meat eater is
responsible for the pain and suffering of scores of nonhuman animals during his or her
lifetime. The aggregated pain and suffering of these creatures undoubtedly outweighs the
pleasure of one human by a high degree. Finally, if nonhuman animals have an interest
in their own well-being in the manner I have suggested, then their well-being – which is
surely a very basic interest – must outweigh the nonbasic interest of humans in eating
meat. (Meat eating is a nonbasic interest because for the vast majority of human beings
there are alternative food sources that are capable of providing all of our nutritional
needs. And the alternatives can easily generate pleasurable experiences equal to those
that meat eaters forfeit by giving up meat.)
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The second way of looking at the justice issue is simply that in weighing human
interests against those of nonhumans, we are comparing apples and oranges. That is, we
are trying to rationalize something we prefer by offloading the effects of it onto a
different class of beings that have no say in the matter and are powerless to resist our
actions. This is the same model that fits acts of enslavement, exploitation of children,
experimenting on other humans without their consent, and so on. I wish to make it clear
that the question of comparing the experiences of humans and nonhumans is not the
concern here; what is of concern is the tendency to make others pay the price of our selfindulgence. So it doesn’t really even matter, in the end, whether a utilitarian calculation
can show that the total human pleasure derived from eating meat outweighs the total
nonhuman animal pain and suffering caused by meat production. This is because meat
eating violates the general ethical principle that it is always wrong to benefit from harms
that are inflicted upon innocent, unconsenting, and uninformed recipients, and for which
no compensation is given. I think that this is a principle we all accept. The problem is
that we don’t necessarily see it as applying to nonhumans, as we ought.
Thus far, I have limited my remarks to pain and suffering. But there is also the
matter of killing. Eating meat is essentially tied to killing, unlike many other forms of
harm. Well, of course it will be said that humans have to kill something in order to eat,
and this is true. If we don’t eat meat, then we must eat vegetables, fruits, grains, and so
on. We can eat what certain plants and trees produce without killing them, however,
which is an important difference. But to achieve a wholesome and varied diet, we will
regularly engage in the act of killing plants as well. Plants, however, are not sentient
(they have no nervous systems) and therefore do not experience pain and suffering. Even
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if they did, it would presumably not be of the same order as sentient nonhuman animals
feel. Therefore, even if one believes that the taking of life – any life – is to be lamented,
it is a lesser harm to take the lives of plants than those of nonhuman animals. In addition,
fewer lives need to be taken to feed vegetarians, for in eating lower down on the food
chain, we consume our nutrients directly, rather than derivatively by eating the bodies of
ruminants and foragers (often called “protein factories in reverse” 6) that kill far more
plants for their nourishment than human vegetarians need to. The upshot of this is that,
although humans do need to kill in order to survive, it is not essential to kill sentient
nonhuman animals. There is a choice, and when the choice involves degrees of harm, all
things being equal, choosing the less harmful alternative ought to be our goal.
Perhaps we should pause to consider here whether death is a harm for sentient
nonhuman animals, and why. I think it is, and that the reasons for saying so are pretty
straightforward. These are: (1) that such animals show every sign of preferring to live
when their lives are threatened, as when we bring them to slaughter; (2) that they clearly
have pleasurable experiences (or, in human terms, experiences that are of value to them);
and (3) that each has an identifiable welfare or state of well-being which it strives to
preserve. For any being that meets these criteria, death is a harm.
Hence, death is a
harm to livestock animals.
We must recognize that even a vegetarian way of life takes its toll, which is why
I’ve called it a “less harmful alternative.” Wild nonhuman animals are displaced from
their habitats by farming, and many will inadvertently be killed by plowing and other
practices. Insects designated as “pests” will be intentionally killed too. But because a
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vegetarian economy requires only crops instead of crops plus pasture and feedlots, fewer
nonhuman animal deaths will result than in a meat economy.
Many billions of nonhuman animals are consumed worldwide every year. This
translates into many billions of deaths that are unnecessary from a nutritional point of
view and that violate the justice principle stated earlier. It would seem that only a
deformed, desensitised mind could declare that human-caused pain and suffering on a
very large scale, as in the food industry, do not matter, or are mitigated by aggregated,
minor benefits to ourselves. And it is difficult to understand how widely practiced,
institutionalised cruelty of any kind can contribute to creating decent and just societies
and a non-violent world order. These are the sorts of overarching issues that reflection on
our eating habits makes us confront, and they are as important as any in ethics. What
seems like a fairly trivial matter, and one that concerns taste preferences alone – what we
eat – thus turns into something much more significant. We are all responsible for the
level of harm and violence that we have the ability to reduce or eliminate, and not to do
so when we can is negligent behaviour we should correct.
Another objection often heard is that we could acquire our meat from smallerscale producers, such as organic and free range farms, and operations that practice more
“humane” methods of transportation and slaughter. Those who run this kind of facility
often slaughter their own livestock, which is at least better than placing this burden upon
someone else, as most of us do. But this does not cancel out the fact that unnecessary
killing is the final step in the process, nor can pain and suffering be completely
eliminated along the way. In any event, many nonhuman animals reared on smaller
farms will also end up at large commercial slaughterhouses. And the fact remains that
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they live equally artificially abbreviated lives in these circumstances.
Finally, it is
impossible to imagine how the growing demand for meat, by an increasing world
population of humans conditioned to eating it and regarding it as high-status food, can be
sustained at all, let alone being supplied by small, independent producers.
At the outset, I posed three questions about the conditions under which meat is
produced for human consumption: Why should I care? What can I do? and Will my
choices make a difference? We have answered the first and second. Each of us should
care because suffering and pain are inherently bad kinds of conscious experiences, no
matter to whom or to what they occur.
Causing pain and suffering to innocent,
unconsenting, uninformed sentient beings for trivial reasons is cruel and unjust, and
therefore wrong. We should all be concerned to avoid being the agents of wrongdoing if
it lies within our power to do so. This leads to the second question. What each of us can
do in order to avoid causing pain and suffering to nonhuman animals is first and foremost
to stop eating meat.
It is now time to address our third and last main question. R.G. Frey argues in a
recent article that because of increasing world population as well as growing global
demand for meat, “one’s individual act of becoming a vegetarian” amounts to “virtually
nothing …. One person’s act is simply not going to have an effect on this market.”
Indeed, he asserts that as the vegetarian movement has developed over the last twenty
years, “the number of animals commercially farmed has exploded….”7 Frey does not
document his claim about this allegedly monumental increase in meat production, but let
us assume he is correct. Even so, it does not follow that becoming a vegetarian is a
socially ineffective act, in terms of bringing about change. Twenty years is a very short
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time frame by which to measure a large-scale evolution in attitudes, behaviour, and the
economics of production and consumption. It is a far shorter period in relation to
measuring moral change. While the number of vegetarians in Western industrial nations
may be small, the rising levels of availability of vegetarian food alternatives, vegetarian
and vegan restaurants, and vegetarian publications are highly noticeable. As well, the
influence of interpersonal communications and debate on how people think about and
choose their diets is quite significant. Elsewhere, for example in Asia, there are already
billions of individuals who are either vegetarians or semi-vegetarians by long tradition
and because of the general unavailability of meat. Furthermore, although the short-term
trend may be toward greater meat consumption worldwide, a time will come when the
food production system, in order to avoid complete collapse under the pressure of global
population growth, will have to shift toward targeting vegetarian-based diets, because
they represent a more efficient and sustainable use of land. The world simply cannot
afford the wasteful and devastating consequences of the meat-centered diet forever.
Every kind of major social or political movement has to confront the problem of
how to bring about change. There are, of course, a great many views on this subject,
which we needn’t go into here. But if average people thought that their individual actions
made no difference, change would never happen. If change is thought to be desirable,
then one needs to empower oneself, and this is often done by looking back at historical
movements to see how, from a small protest movement or even from the ideas of a single
thinker, great upheavals have evolved.
To foreclose this possibility in advance by
supposing that nothing can be done just helps to create a self-fulfilling prophecy of
failure. Beyond this, however, we should note that, considerations of change aside, it is
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ethically important to do the right thing, even if the wider impact of doing so is uncertain.
If it is wrong to cause nonhuman animals pain and suffering and to kill them for trivial
reasons so that we can have meat on our tables, then we should stop doing this, even if
there is no guarantee that we will change the world or at least our next-door neighbour’s
outlook on the matter. We have to look to ourselves for the rewards of doing what is
right in any case, not to the outside world – a point to which I shall return later.
“But,” you may reply, “I don’t cause pain and suffering to nonhuman animals or
kill them for trivial or any other reasons. I may eat them, but other people are the ones
who do these cruel things.” True; but as we all know, demand creates supply, and for
that reason, we must all take responsibility for the food production system that depends
upon our eating preferences. We are habituated to not confronting the consequences of
our actions in large areas of life. We prefer to leave the decisions and actions to others,
who act on our behalf, and often we avoid both awareness and accountability thereby – as
do the others who do the dirty work for us. We are too used to seeing meat arrive
magically, as it were, on our grocery shelves and in butcher shops as just “cuts,” already
wrapped in plastic or waiting to be wrapped in paper, as disembodied parts of living
beings from which we distance ourselves in thought and action. Taking responsibility for
our food means understanding fully where it comes from and how it is obtained, and that
we have a crucial, if indirect, role in these things.
In a recent book review, John Newton takes up this question and maintains that
there can be responsible – that is, ethical or morally justified – meat eating. Here are his
requirements:
we have a duty of care to the animals we have domesticated: we need to
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ensure that they are well fed, on a diet as close to their natural one as
possible; well raised; given access to open and free space; and cared for
when sick. We also have a duty of care to the land on which they are
farmed…. [And concerning fish,] we need to ensure that we are not
over-fishing, and that the methods used to extract fish from their habitat
inflict minimal harm.8
In addition, he affirms that meat eaters must take responsibility for the deaths of the
nonhuman animals they eat.
Notice that Newton invokes the concepts of minimal harm and taking
responsibility. This is a constructive move. However, if our goal is to minimize the
harm caused by our diets, we can easily go further than he suggests, and achieve a better
result without much sacrifice.
If so, then we ought to do this.
As for taking
responsibility, what does this mean, for meat eaters? This is a difficult question to
answer. Newton’s argument is that those who eat meat should be exposed to each stage
of the process, including the killing and dismemberment of food animals. Speaking for
myself, however, it is impossible to comprehend how one could experience these things
and yet remain uncaring, unmoved, or in a state of mind that overrides these horrors by
clinging to self-centered taste preferences.
But “taking responsibility” is an ambiguous phrase, and this is where the trouble
lies. It may mean: “I am the agent who caused this result.” Or: “I was involved in
bringing about this result, but so were others.” Or: “Others have caused this result, but I
have benefited from it.”
And in each case, there may or may not be the added
implication that some wrongdoing has occurred. If it has, the judgment that we usually
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expect to follow is that the person making the statement is obligated to do something to
remedy the wrongdoing that has been committed, and acknowledges this fact. In the
context of taking responsibility for meat eating that I have outlined, the question is
precisely whether any wrongdoing has occurred. I have argued that it has, but this
opinion, obviously, is not universally shared. So what, then, does “taking responsibility
for meat eating” amount to, for those who think no wrongdoing is inherent in the
process? Newton explains this to a certain extent; but what gets omitted from his account
is whatever it is that disturbs us – often profoundly – when we witness the fate of
livestock animals. The responsible meat eater will just have to decide to not care about
this, or else to plunge ahead and cling to old habits, regardless of caring. This strikes me
as a very unsatisfying state to find oneself in, but I will leave the issue for those who eat
meat to sort through if they can. In contrast, I have presented the case for linking meat
eating with injustice, and have noted that when an injustice is being committed, the first
step toward putting a stop to it is taking some responsibility for the injustice and some
steps toward remedying it.
What the foregoing discussion reveals, I hope, are two important things about
vegetarianism: (1) that it is a committed response to injustice; and therefore (2) that it
represents more than a peculiar taste preference or a matter of lifestyle or fashion, but is,
instead, part of a comprehensive outlook on how we ought to live.
In short,
vegetarianism is a way of life. It follows that choosing to be a vegetarian involves
developing a sense of responsibility that reaches beyond the human sphere. It entails an
appreciation of the kinship between living beings, as well as a decision to take a serious
look at minimizing the amount of harm that flows from our eating preferences and
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practices. None of us is or ever could be morally perfect, but we all have different
alternatives before us among which to choose; and those acts that contribute to lessening
the levels of violence and agony in the world are surely to be preferred to those that
don’t. Again, this is not an endorsement of utilitarianism, just an ethical truism. The
difficult part is not getting ourselves to agree to this idea; it is getting ourselves to accept
that vegetarianism is part of the strategy that is needed to translate the idea into reality.
I think enough has been said to make it clear that a commitment to vegetarianism
is ethically important and, in my view, compelling. However, no one should conclude
that I am making grandiose claims on behalf of vegetarianism. It isn’t an answer to all
the world’s problems, only a small part of that answer. We might think of it this way: By
being vegetarians, we become part of the solution to global injustice rather than part of
the problem of it. Again, this seems a manifestly preferable position to be in. This brings
me back to a point I made earlier: that the rewards of doing what is right should come
from within us. Being committed to making the world a more just place and to an
outlook that helps promote non-violence contributes to a more satisfying sense of purpose
and of self, I would argue, and therefore, have a lot to do with positive personal
development. So a change in diet, which at first looked like a big, unpleasant sacrifice,
really turns out not to be so at all; and vegetarianism, which may appear, on first
encounter, like some kind of self-punishing asceticism that assumes a condescending
moral vantage-point, is really something quite different in character and very worthwhile
in terms of its consequences.
Does anything more need to be offered by way of
incentives? You be the judge.9
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Notes
1
T. Colin Campbell and Thomas M. Campbell II, The China Study. Dallas: BenBella Books, 2004.
2
Peter Singer, Animal Liberation, new rev. ed. (New York: Avon Books, 1990), p. 95.
3
Jeremy Rifkin, Beyond Beef: The Rise and Fall of the Cattle Culture (New York: Dutton, 1992), p. 154.
4
Jeremy Bentham, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (London: T. Payne, 1789),
Chap. 19, Sec. 1.
5
Aristotle, Politics, Book III, Chap. 9: “justice is considered to mean equality. It does mean equality – but
for those who are equal, and not for all” (Ernest Barker trans., rev. by R.F. Stalley [Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1995], p. 103). Of course, for Aristotle, nonhuman animals were inferior beings that had
no moral status; but so were various classes of human beings (women, slaves, non-Athenians). And justice
for him was a function of one’s contribution to society. Nevertheless, we may borrow his criterion for our
purposes and apply it more broadly and consistently than he was prepared to do.
6
Frances Moore Lappé, Diet for a Small Planet, 20th ed. (New York: Ballantine, 1992), p. 3.
7
R.G. Frey, “Utilitarianism and Moral Vegetarianism Again: Protest or Effectiveness?”, in Steve F.
Sapontzis, ed., Food for Thought: The Debate over Eating Meat (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2004),
p. 121.
8
John Newton, “The meat of the matter,” Sydney Morning Herald, 15 January 2005, “Spectrum” section.
9
I would like to thank Lesley McLean for her helpful comments on an earlier draft of this essay.
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