Eating Meat: Why Peter thinks Stephen Law is wrong.

Coming soon, for those who would like to continue eating meat. You might like to come back and see if you agree or not with my reasons for thinking that Law is wrong. Most people do not like my reasons; oddly, however, they continue eating meat, even though they don't have any good reasons of their own for thinking that it is morally acceptable to do that!

I will try to post my reasons here later on Tuesday.

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Updated 6:25 PM, October 27

I think that Stephen Law makes a very strong case against eating meat in "Carving the Roast Beast", and if we want to continue eating meat, we do have to address his argument against it. The alternative is to do something that we think is morally wrong, and I hope that does not seem like an attractive answer to Law's ideas.

So where are the weaknesses in Law's essay? As Pin and Ann noted in their excellent summaries of his essay, and as we also discovered in our discussions in class, Law does a very good job of addressing the opposing arguments that people who disagree with him might present. In fact, most of his essay is spent answering opposing arguments. He presents the argument that we need to eat meat to be healthy, and, as we discovered when we read the source that Euy cited, Law points out that this opposing argument is simply wrong: we do not need meat to be healthy; on the contrary, most people would be healthier not eating the meat that they do. Law also introduces the opposing argument that we can morally eat meat because that is natural, but he shows that although it's true that eating meat is natural for human beings, this is a bad argument because exactly the same reason would mean that it was OK to commit rape, murder, and other crimes, all of which are also natural to human beings. And so on for most of his essay: Law introduces a possible opposing argument, and then shows that it's not really a good argument against his main idea.

I think that Law makes one mistake at the beginning of his essay, where he has Gemma argue that it does not matter what sort of life the turkey had, but only that it is killed. This seems wrong to me. If the animal has had a painless life that was not miserable, followed by a fast and painless death, then I think that does make a difference to the morality. Exactly the same sort of idea is used when we compare human lives: we all die, so the death itself is not what makes a human life good or bad. The important thing is what we do in and with our lives, and what happens to us while we exist. I think that Gemma's mother should have argued against Gemma's idea that the kind of life the turkey had led does not matter. Instead, Mrs Wilson agrees that the only thing that matters is that we kill the animal to eat it. But the kind of life we allow the animal does seem to me to be important. If the turkey has had a fairly decent life and is killed painlessly and quickly, that is morally much better than if it lives in misery and is killed slowly and painfully: the pain or lack of pain that humans cause the turkey is morally important, more important than how long it lives. Similarly, we do not think that human lives are good or bad simply because of how long the person lives.

The more important mistake that I think Law makes follows in his response to the first opposing idea, where Mr. Wilson accepts the idea of speciesism, the idea that we need a good reason to treat different animals as morally different when it comes to killing them. Mr Wilson suggests that the relevant difference is that humans have intellectual, emotional and other conscious capacities that are different to those of animals, and that this makes it morally acceptable to treat animals and humans differently. In this part of his essay, Law quotes the Australian philosopher Peter Singer, but although Law's paraphrase and quotation are correct, his conclusion is very different to the conclusion that Singer draws. And I think that Singer is the stronger, and braver, philosopher.

Why do I think that Peter Singer is braver? Because he does not run away from what seems to be true when he does not like the truth.

to be continued - I'm hungry, so I'm going to have some pork bits. You might like to see if you can guess where my argument here is going to go, and if you agree with it or not, also if you like it or not. (So many people hate his ideas that Peter Singer got death threats and needed police protection when he went to lecture at Princeton University in the US. Philosophy can be as dangerous a career today as it was for Socrates 2,400 years ago.)

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References

Law, S. (2003). Carving the roast beast. In The Xmas Files, p. 124 - 140. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson.