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J Agric Environ Ethics (2015) 28:277291 DOI 10.1007/s10806-015-9534-2
ARTICLES
In Defense of Eating Meat
Timothy Hsiao
Accepted: 13 February 2015 / Published online: 7 March 2015 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2015
Abstract Some arguments for moral vegetarianism proceed by appealing to widely held beliefs about the immorality of causing unjustied pain. Combined with the claim that meat is not needed for our nourishment and that killing animals for this reason causes them unjustied pain, they yield the conclusion that eating meat is immoral. However, what counts as a good enough reason for causing pain will depend largely on what we think about the moral status of animals. Implicit in these arguments is the claim that sentience is sufcient for having moral status. These arguments, however, fail to specify the conceptual connection between the two. I argue in this paper that sentience is not sufcient for moral status. Thus, although animals experience pain as it is physically bad, their experience of it is not in itself morally bad. They are harmed in feeling pain, but this harm is not of a moral kind. This distinction parallels the more familiar distinction between moral and non-moral goods. When considered, this signicantly mitigates the force of sentience-based arguments for moral vegetarianism. Since animals lack moral status, it is not wrong to eat meat, even if this is not essential to nutrition.
Keywords Animal ethics Vegetarianism Moral status Sentience
Some arguments for moral vegetarianism proceed by appealing to widely held beliefs about the immorality of causing unjustied pain.1 Combined with the claim that meat is not needed for our nourishment and that killing animals for this reason causes them unjustied pain, they yield the conclusion that eating meat is immoral.
T. Hsiao (&)
Department of Philosophy, Florida State University, 151 Dodd Hall, Tallahassee, FL 32306-1500, USAe-mail: [email protected]
1 See for example Engel (2000, 2001), Norcross (2004), Rachels (2004), Nobis (2008), DeGrazia (2009). Also see Hooley and Nobis (forthcoming: 2015) for an application to veganism.
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However, what counts as a good enough reason for causing pain depends largely what we think about the moral status of animals. Implicit in these arguments is the claim that sentience is sufcient for having moral status.2 These arguments, however, fail to...