Encyclopedia of Opinion

Question: Should you go vegan?
Position‹2 of 2: Eating animal products is unethical
Argument‹5 of 5: Eating meat causes animal cruelty

Farmed animals have been proven to have feelings, thoughts, and personalities. On today’s factory farms, they’re crammed by the thousands into filthy sheds and wire cages. Some never see the light of day.

The argument

The argument rests on a claim about moral standing rather than about sentiment. Non-human animals are held to possess rights of the same basic kind humans possess, grounded in the fact that they are entitled to the possession of their own existence and have interests of their own — above all an interest in avoiding suffering. That interest is not a lesser version of the human one. It is the same interest, arising from the same capacity to feel pain, and it should be afforded the same consideration as the similar interests of human beings. Applied to meat, the principle is decisive because of what the practice involves and what it is for. Animals raised for food do not merely die; many suffer across their whole lives, and the suffering is a feature of the system rather than an occasional failure within it. Against that stands the interest being served, which is a human preference for one kind of food over another. People can live without eating animals, which makes the meat unnecessary — a matter of taste, convenience and habit rather than of need. That is the comparison the argument asks to be made. On one side, a lifetime of suffering imposed on a being that can feel it; on the other, a preference that could be satisfied otherwise at no cost to anyone's health or survival. No weighing that takes the animal's interest seriously comes out in favour of the preference, and the only route to the opposite conclusion is to discount the animal's suffering for no reason other than that it is not human — which is precisely what equal consideration of interests forbids. Proponents of this position therefore conclude that eating meat causes cruelty which cannot be justified, and that eating animal products is unethical.

Premises

[P1]Animals have rights like humans and are entitled to their own existence and most basic interests. [P2] People have no right to make them suffer their whole lives merely to serve as unnecessary food. [P3] An animal's interest in avoiding suffering deserves the same consideration as a human's. [C] Therefore, because eating meat causes animal cruelty, eating animal products is unethical.

Counter-arguments

Humans are more important than animals. Animals are less intelligent than humans and may not have a consciousness. What we consider to be cruel treatment of animals is nothing but the split second of pain they experience when they are killed.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] Animals do not have rights in the same way people do.