Many vegetarians consider the production, subsequent slaughtering and consumption of meat or animal products as unethical. Reasons for believing this are varied, and may include a belief in animal rights, or an aversion to inflicting pain or harm on other living creatures. Many believe that the treatment which animals undergo in the production of meat and animal products obliges them to never eat meat or use animal products, even if this is a considerable inconvenience. In addition to the ethical issues involved, some vegetarians find meat, animal products, and their production unappetizing or emotionally disturbing.

Ethics of killing for food

Philosopher Peter Singer believes that if alternative means of survival exist, one ought to choose the option that does not cause unnecessary harm to animals. With the exception of a small minority of people, such as nomadic hunting and herding societies, everyone is free to choose not to eat meat or use animal products without sacrificing their health.

As noted by John Webster, a professor of animal husbandry at Bristol: "People have assumed that intelligence is linked to the ability to suffer and that because animals have smaller brains they suffer less than humans. That is a pathetic piece of logic, sentient animals have the capacity to experience pleasure and are motivated to seek it, you only have to watch how cows and lambs both seek and enjoy pleasure when they lie with their heads raised to the sun on a perfect English summer's day. Just like humans."

In his book Animal Liberation, Peter Singer developed a list of qualities in sentient creatures that gave them consideration under utilitarian ethics, which has been widely referenced by animal rights campaigners and vegetarians. Singer provided a number of reasons to bestow moral consideration on an animal, such as that the animal does not want to die and is given no choice, that the family and friends of that animal may suffer because of its death, that the animal has expectations of future enjoyment which are denied, that the animal enjoys living, and that the animal experiences fear and pain when killed. Utilitarian philosophers would say that killing an animal, like killing a human, could only be justified in extreme circumstances and that the creation of a meal for its taste, convenience or nutritional value is not sufficient cause.

Treatment of animals

Ethical vegetarianism has become popular in developed countries particularly because of the spread of

Consciousness of plants vs animals

Recent experiments have shown that feelings may not be limited just to animals, but possibly to plants as well , and experiments by Jagadish Chandra Bose showed that plants can respond to environmental and physical changes; in fact, this had been observed long before formal experiments were conducted. Visual examples are the sunflower and insectivorous plants that can "sense" light and "feel" touch. Critics of ethical vegetarianism often use such experiments to try to draw a parallel between plant and animal life as these studies indicate that plants might be worthy of ethical consideration. Many people critical of the conclusions some have made from these studies point out that a response to light in a plant is an example of phototropism, and a response to pressure one of thigmotropism, neither of which actually implies that plants can consciously "sense" their surroundings as an animal would.

Peter Singer, who argues for vegetarianism out of the ethical obligation to reduce suffering, points out in Animal Liberation that there is much more reason to believe that animals with central nervous systems feel pain and suffering akin to human pain and suffering than that plants without such systems do. People averse to inflicting pain should eat those beings that suffer the least pain and he concludes that between plants and animals this would be plants. Furthermore, pain exists in animals as a way of producing a strong and concerted effort to stop the pain by promoting it to the top of the 'levels of consciousness'. As plants probably do not have levels of consciousness in the same way as animals they have little evolutionary incentive to develop the intense pain that animals do. Few animals can survive dismemberment, whereas most plants can - some even benefit.

Ethical discussions between vegetarians and meat eaters

Traditionally meat eating has been defended in Abrahamic religions on the basis that animals have no soul, do not feel pain or think or otherwise are not worthy of ethical consideration. The denial of animal pain and thought has been largely refuted, especially for higher order animals, by neuroscience, behavioral and evolutionary biology although the idea survives in some religious contexts. Many hunter gatherer tribes would actually apologise to the

A more sound argument in favor of meat-eater involves ascribing any kind of rights only to creatures with free will. This theory argues that animals with no free will do not have any moral responsibility and therefore do not have any rights. Therefore it is not morally to kill them for any reason whatsoever, including for consumption.

It has been noticed that when confronted with vegetarianism many meat eaters make arguments which they would not accept in other contexts, suggestive of some form of cognitive dissonance. Some, after accepting animal sentience argue that killing animals is acceptable as long as they do not feel pain. This would suggest that painlessly killing a human was acceptable — something very few of those people would agree with, euthanasia killings notwithstanding.

Other meat-eaters make more coherent and sound arguments. For example, some argue that vegetarianism actually doesn't actually reduce the number of animals killed, although as a group, vegetarians must reduce the demand for meat for consumption, the animals might be killed in indirect ways. For example, critics like Steven Davis, professor of animal science at Oregon State University, argues that the number of wild animals killed in crop production is greater than those killed in ruminant-pasture production. Whenever a tractor goes through a field to plow, disc, cultivate, apply fertilizer and/or pesticide, and harvest, animals are killed. Davis gives a small sampling of field animals in the U. S. that are threatened by intensive crop production, such as: opossum, rock dove, house sparrow, European starling, black rat, Norway rat, house mouse, Chukar, grey partridge, ring-necked pheasant, wild turkey, cottontail rabbit, gray-tailed vole, and numerous species of amphibians. In one small example, an alfalfa harvest caused a 50% decline in the gray-tailed vole population. According to Davis, if all of the cropland in the U. S. were used to produce crops for a vegetarian diet, it is estimated that around 1.8 billion animals would be killed annually.

Some counter by claiming that such an argument seems to deny moral responsibility for things which one pays another to carry out and suggests one does not have a responsibility to exclude oneself from something which one considers immoral - again something few would agree with. Some meat eaters explain themselves on the basis that if animals were not farmed for consumption they would not live at all. The principle that not bringing a being into existence is ethically inferior to creating a being and then killing it is rarely applied. It would suggest that not having a child if one could was immoral in itself and even immoral when compared with having a child and then killing it.

Another suggestion is that because meat eating is a natural or traditional behaviour, in some cases necessary for survival, it is excluded from ethical consideration. Vegetarians usually respond that many natural behaviours would be appalling if exhibited by humans, such as the torture young whales deliberately inflict on baby seals before eating them or the behaviour of the cuckoo which kills other birds as they hatch and takes over a nest. Humans are considered morally conscious of their behaviour in a way other animals are not and meat eating is rarely necessary for survival in the modern world. Natural, traditional or evolutionarily beneficial behaviour is not necessary good; in fact, this is a common example of the naturalistic fallacy and the appeal to tradition. In reality, most people in meat-eating societies (and some vegetarian societies) do not make a conscious ethical decision to eat meat (or eschew meat) but do so because it is socially acceptable and they have done so since childhood. Like defences of many such behaviours the arguments above are generally ad hoc justifications of a belief that has not been reasoned through previously.

The sociologist Max Weber emphasized the basic fact that people are not satisfied to just engage in behavior but also need to believe that what they do is good or right. Thus both meat-eaters and vegetarians often respond with defensiveness, intolerance, or hostility towards the other, interpreting the other's behaviour as calling their own behaviour into question. Vegetarians often associate their calls for giving ethical consideration to animals with other movements that have attempted to expand the range of beings given this consideration such as the anti-slavery movement, the women's liberation movement, opposition to racism, child labour, colonialism and others. All of these activities have at some point been defended on the basis that the suffering incurred is legitimate, natural, necessary, or just. The psychology of why human beings tolerate or go along with suffering and the destruction of nature when it is acceptable within their own society but condemn similar behaviour in other societies is a common issue within sociology. .

References

• Davis, B et al. Becoming Vegan: The Complete Guide to Adopting a Healthy Plant-Based Diet. Tennessee: Book Publishing Company, 2000.

See also

• Economic vegetarianism
• Environmental vegetarianism
• Vegetarianism
• Vegetarianism and religion
• Vegetarian nutrition