What are the pros and cons of vegetarianism?

Encyclopedia of Opinion

Question: What are the pros and cons of vegetarianism?
Position1 of 2›: Pros of vegetarianism
Argument‹2 of 5›: Eating meat is immoral

Animals are sentient beings who have feelings and can experience pain. Therefore, killing them and using them for food is immoral.

The argument

Animals are intelligent, sentient beings who can feel pain and suffering. Regardless of whether these animals are raised in cramped living spaces in factory farms or raised in larger ranges, they will end up killed as a result of our need for meat and will therefore go through suffering and pain. Although other animals eat meat as well, we humans are "capable of making choices based on ethics." We have a moral obligation to reduce the suffering and pain in this world as much as possible, and we can do that by not killing animals and eating meat.

Premises

[P1]Animals are sentient beings capable of experiencing pain and suffering, and raising them for meat inevitably inflicts such suffering. [P2] Unlike other animals, humans are capable of making ethical choices and have a moral obligation to reduce suffering where they can. [P3] Choosing not to eat meat is a concrete way to act on that obligation. [C] Therefore, eating meat is immoral, and vegetarianism is the ethically correct choice.

Counter-arguments

Taken strictly, the suffering argument does not single out meat. Crop agriculture also kills animals through field deaths and habitat loss, and many people live in environments — rangeland, marginal terrain — where raising livestock is the most viable food source. Critics argue that humane, pasture-based systems can give animals good lives and a quick death, locating the wrong, if any, in factory farming rather than in eating meat as such. The premise that we have an overriding obligation to minimise all animal suffering is itself a contested moral position, not a settled fact. So the argument at most indicts cruelty and industrial farming, not meat-eating in general.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] Suffering and animal death are not unique to meat production, since crop farming also kills animals, so the premise does not isolate meat as the wrong. [Rejecting C] The conclusion follows only on a contested premise about minimising all animal suffering, and humane systems can raise animals without the cruelty the argument targets.