Abstract
In 1906, Henry Stephens Salt published a short collection of essays that presented several rhetorically powerful, if formally deficient arguments for the vegetarian position. By interpreting Salt as a moral sentimentalist with ties to Aristotelian virtue ethics, I propose that his aesthetic argument deserves contemporary consideration. First, I connect ethics and aesthetics with the Greek concepts of kalon and kalokagathia that depend equally on beauty and morality before presenting Salt’s assertion: slaughterhouses are disgusting, therefore they should not be promoted. I suggest three areas of development since Salt’s death that could be fruitfully plumbed to rebuild this assertion into a contemporary argument: (1) an updated analysis of factory farm conditions, (2) insights from moral psychologists on the adaptive socio-biological benefits of disgust as a source of cognitive information, and (3) hermeneutical considerations about the role of the audience that allow blameworthiness for slaughterhouse atrocities to be laid upon the meat-eater.
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Notes
Although Salt was concerned specifically with abstention from animal flesh, the argument as it will be presented here will conclude in defense of abstention from any commodity obtained via a factory farm, including eggs and dairy products.
Millikan concludes his essay with the observation that “if we don’t feel the right way it is impossible for us to consistently behave the right way,” which sounds very similar to Gandhi’s above observation.
Although it has since fallen out of fashion, “kreophagism” was the term Salt and his contemporaries used to refer to the practice of eating meat. With its etymological roots in the Greek term kreas (“flesh”), the word is roughly akin to today’s “carnism”.
Singer’s updated classic (2009: xii) lists only three states that have passed laws to change such practices.
Eisnitz (2007: 122–123) both confirms and critiques this practice.
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Holdier, A.G. The Pig’s Squeak: Towards a Renewed Aesthetic Argument for Veganism. J Agric Environ Ethics 29, 631–642 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10806-016-9624-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10806-016-9624-9