Why Peter disagrees with Law on eating meat

As you already know, although I like Stephen Law's short essay, "Carving the Roast Beast" (2003), I also think he's wrong. I don't use it as a class reading because I want you to stop eating meat.

His real mistake is at the start, where he states and then immediately dismisses the argument that it is causing suffering that makes eating meat wrong in favour of the much stronger idea that killing "a living thing capable of enjoying life" is wrong (p. 125). First, there are problems in understanding exactly what "capable of enjoying life" means, but presumably Law means enjoying such things as: eating, sex, interacting with other members of the species, and so on. That's probably a good enough definition of Law's phrase "capable of enjoying life", but is it wrong to end the life of something simply because it has that capability? I don't  think that that is why we worry about killing human beings. We worry about killing human beings because they have a much rarer quality: self-awareness, the ability to know that they are enjoying their own life, or not enjoying it, and to make decisions about the course of that life where one of the criteria for deciding is an awareness of being alive as a particular, individual thing, of being a person in fact. This is an experience familiar to every one of us, but unknown to most other animal species, and wholly unknown to every plant and simpler living thing.

An immediate problem now arises because it's not easy to show conclusively whether or not an animal possesses self-consciousness. It's easy enough to judge that an animal is suffering or enjoying itself: when hit, a dog yelps and cringes in pain; when stroked or rewarded with food, it shows signs of pleasure which it would like to continue, just as humans do. But we know that other humans are self-conscious because they can tell us in language that strongly matches up with our own experience of being ourselves, of being a self aware person in a world full of other self-aware persons making decisions as living things taking deliberate account of themselves. Animals do not have the ability to do that, or at least no such sophisticated language ability has ever been clearly demonstrated in any non-human animal. The most popular test for self-awareness is the mirror test, which, although not without it problems and criticisms, some non-human animal species do seem to pass ("Mirror Test", 2012). Since our own self-awareness is the product of evolution and functions of our brain, it is at least possible that other animals do possess at least some such concept of self; that is, that they are in some way persons, not merely bodies experiencing pleasures and pains, and reacting to them, even with intelligence. I don't think we need to settle exactly what other animals do or do not possess self-awareness, thought it seems to me likely that at least some great apes, and perhaps a couple of other mammals, do. And the great apes are not an animal we typically kill and eat. No one has ever suggested that there is evidence that chickens, cats, sheep, dogs, or cows possess self-consciousness; pigs, however, are certainly intelligent and just might pass.

If we accept that the relevant criteria is being self-conscious, then that does separate us from most of  the animals that we like to kill and eat in a way that avoids Law's charge of speciesism: it is not arbitrary, and we can decide on the criteria before we apply it. However, the point that Law raises in the section "The mentally impaired" is now relevant (Law, 2003, p. 129 - 130): the distinction between brain dead humans and food animals has disappeared. Worse, the evidence suggests that even perfectly normal, healthy human babies have anything like self-awareness until at least a few months old. We might now suggest other reasons for not eating human babies, but those reasons will need to be different to the basic reason that makes our food animals relevantly different to us. I'm not going to argue it here, but I favour a modified version of Roger Scruton's argument based on potential (as cited in Law, p. 134), where the relevant modification is that we have good grounds for believing that the particular baby will become a normally self-conscious human person before the age of two years; Mary Midgely's ideas about social bonds might also provide good reasons here, even if they do fail as a morally relevant criteria against speciesism.

And this is where the philosopher Peter Singer received death threats when he took up his position as professor of philosophy at Princeton. Although it is not clear from the quotation in Law (p. 130), Singer follows through this line of reasoning to conclude that in fact it is morally acceptable for, for example, parents to ask a doctor to kill their brain dead baby, and that it is just and moral for the doctor to comply with that wish. In fact, Singer takes the idea that being a person who is self-aware and able to make decisions that take that fact into account so seriously that he argues that abortion is morally permissible even after birth; that is, that it is not necessarily wrong to kill a new born baby (Singer, 1996). If you like the idea that personhood is the relevant difference that separates us from our food, you also need to consider the consequences that logically follow from accepting that argument. If A logically follows from B, and you accept A, then you must also accept B, however much you might hate it, unless of course you have a relevant reason for breaking the logical chain between A and B.

Singer thinks that eating meat is sometimes wrong, but not always or necessarily, not because it means killing an animal that is "capable of enjoying life", but because it often causes suffering, and that causing needless suffering, unlike killing, is morally wrong. Singer would allow that provided the animal lives a happy life, and is killed painlessly, then there is nothing morally wrong with enjoying it for dinner, and this seems right to me. It might be OK to painlessly kill an animal that has not suffered, but causing suffering simply to satisfy our lust for tasty flesh does seem wrong. Law would have done better to stick with Singer's real argument instead of dismissing it so quickly on page 125 (2003).

Please feel welcome to comment.

I thought that the point Crystal raised in class on Thursday, about the meaning of the word moral and what it means to be moral or immoral was something about which there is a lot of misunderstanding, especially among academics in social science fields. (I think whole groups of academics are sometimes seriously wrong in their understanding of ideas from fields in which they are not expert: for example, anthropologists, sociologists, political scientists and other social scientists on the nature of morality; and doctors on health policy.)

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References

Law, S. (2003). Carving the roast beast, in The Xmas Files: The Philosophy of Christmas (pp.124 - 140). London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson

Mirror test. (2012, March 27). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 03:23, April 6, 2012, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Mirror_test&oldid=484211668

Singer, P., (1996). Rethinking Life and Death. New York: St. Martin's Griffin.