- Question
- Should you go vegan?
- Position1 of 2›
- Eating animal products is ethical
According to many belief systems, humans are the only animals which have souls. Some believe that animals were put on earth by a creator to serve human beings, and therefore eating animal products is ethical.
The argument
In the Abrahamic traditions — Judaism, Christianity and Islam — animals are described as subservient to human beings, created to provide for them rather than as moral equals whose interests must be weighed against human ones. On this account the morally relevant difference is the soul: human beings are held to possess one and animals are not, and that difference places humans and animals in different moral categories rather than on a single scale of comparable interests. The scriptural warrant proponents cite is Genesis 1:26: "God said, 'Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.'" Two claims are read out of that verse. The first is that humans alone are made in the divine image, which marks the boundary between the ensouled and the unensouled. The second is that dominion over the animal kingdom is granted expressly — the fish, the birds, the livestock and every creature that moves along the ground are named in turn — so that the relationship between humans and animals is settled by design rather than left to be negotiated case by case. If those claims hold, the ethical question about eating animal products does not arise in the form vegans pose it. A being without a soul is not the kind of thing that can be wronged by being used, and a purpose assigned at creation is not one that human beings need to justify further. Using animals for food is then not an exercise of power over a fellow creature that happens to go unpunished, but the ordinary exercise of an entitlement the tradition takes to be built into the order of creation.
Premises
Counter-arguments
Whether or not animals have souls is highly debated in Christianity, and some believe that Adam and Eve were vegetarians as there is no mention that they ate animal flesh. Many animals have the qualities of some people's definition of a soul, such as emotions like grief, joy, embarrassment, and fear. Regardless of whether animals exist for human use, if we do not need animals, we should not harm them. They can still feel pain.
Rejecting the premises
[Rejecting P1] It does not matter what the theological significance of animals are - this does not make it acceptable it eat them.