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The Libertarian case for rejecting meat consumption

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https://quillette.com/2020/01/27/the-lib...nsumption/

EXCERPT (Andy Lamey): If George Orwell were alive today, he would troll vegetarians. In The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), Orwell described with exasperation how mere mention of the words “Socialism” or “Communism” seemed to attract “every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, ‘Nature Cure’ quack, pacifist, and feminist in England.” Orwell suggested that even this list did not include the flakiest leftists of all. And prominent among that group were those who ate no meat, a diet that Orwell associated with dreamy political projects...

Orwell was one of history’s greatest political writers, but on the subject of vegetarianism, he never got past stereotype. Anyone who has regularly eaten a meatless lunch in public knows that the image of vegetarians and vegans as members of the lunar left has lived on well past Orwell’s time. [...] In reality, plant-based diets have long had right-wing adherents.

They include Henry Mark Holzer, who in the early 1970s was not only Ayn Rand’s lawyer, but an animal-rights advocate. Similarly, Matthew Scully had avoided meat for decades before he become a speechwriter for George W. Bush and then wrote Dominion: The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy, which was warmly received by social conservatives. Now comes Michael Huemer, a distinguished University of Colorado academic, with what is (to my knowledge) the first book-length case against meat written by a libertarian, Dialogues on Ethical Vegetarianism.

Huemer’s book is a break from a long tradition of libertarian hostility to animal rights. [...] If the moral concern our society bestows on animals is real, it is also very selective. Those we classify as food receive few rescues. Huemer lists some of the painful methods that are standard agricultural practices. ... The way we extend sympathy to some animals and cruelty to others seems an obvious contradiction. ... There are human beings with mental abilities more limited than those of farm animals.

[...] Philosophers use the term “personhood” to denote those capabilities: They include moral agency, rationality and language use. It is utterly uncontroversial to say that being a person in this sense is sufficient grounds to be worthy of moral consideration. But if so, what justifies extending moral concern to human beings who lack the attributes of personhood? [...] This does not entail that animals are our moral equals. ... But even if sentience is not quite as morally significant as personhood, it is amply significant in its own right. Sentience extends to cows, chicken, pigs and, according to much recent research, fish—effectively all vertebrates and a few stray non-vertebrates such as octopuses. These are beings with a consciousness that looks out onto the world. They experience pleasure and pain, bond with their young and pursue their own purposes, even if they are simple purposes such as seeking food, rest or affection.

[...] Dialogues on Ethical Vegetarianism takes the form of a discussion between a meat-eater and a vegetarian (who, it turns out, is really a vegan). A primary goal of the book is to address arguments that frequently come up in debates over eating animals. “Most who are confronted with the issue deploy some form of distraction,” Huemer writes in the preface, “shifting attention to another issue in the vicinity without directly confronting the morality of their own behavior.” Examples of distraction include turning the conversation to some perceived hypocrisy on the part of proponents of plant-based eating (as though it would invalidate their argument); finding problems with the most extreme version of the animal-rights view; or shifting to hypothetical scenarios in which meat eating would be justified, without acknowledging how those scenarios differ from reality.

One defence of meat eating that is not a distraction appeals to the moral importance of species membership. The moral significance of being homo sapiens is sometimes mistakenly equated with the moral significance of personhood. The difference between the two is illustrated by again recalling human beings who never possess characteristics such as moral agency or full rationality. They are homo sapiens but not persons in the philosophical sense. If species membership itself is morally significant, the outline of a defence of meat-eating begins to emerge from the mist. We can in good conscience treat pigs differently than merely sentient human beings, simply in virtue of the fact that, while they are indeed sentient, they are not human.

This “speciesist” view is part of the moral common sense of our society [...] Huemer’s book is unapologetically anti-speciesist. Even if previous writers have already made this case, a distinctive feature of Huemer’s text is that it addresses many popular defenses of meat-eating. The dialogue format allows one character to put forward a familiar justification for the status quo, only for the other to challenge it... (MORE - details)

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