Abstract
In an earlier paper, I defended the moral permissibility of eating meat against sentience-based arguments for moral vegetarianism. The crux of my argument was that sentience is not an intrinsically morally salient property, and that animals lack moral status because they lack a root (basic) capacity for rational agency. Accordingly, it is morally permissible to consume meat even if doing so is not strictly necessary for our nutrition. This paper responds to critiques of my argument by Bruers (J Agric Environ Ethics 28(4):705–717, 2015) and Erdös (J Agric Environ Ethics, 2015). I then show that their criticisms are easily dispatched and therefore fail to undermine my defense of meat consumption.
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Notes
As I noted in Hsiao (2015: 282): “It may be intuitively obvious that some property is in some way relevant to moral status, but this in itself does not tell us how it is relevant (which may reveal crucial points that cannot be uncovered by mere reflection on one’s intuitions)…. [A]lthough we do have a strong intuition that pain is linked with moral badness, this intuition does not tell us whether the moral badness of pain derives from the very nature of pain itself or from some further fact that makes pain experiences morally significant. If the latter turns out to be the case, then our intuitions about pain contain a masking effect that affects our ability to discriminate accurately between relevant and irrelevant forms of pain experiences.”
Hsiao (2015: 288) discuss this point.
Hsiao (2015: 285).
See the discussion in Hsiao (2015: 282). Specifically: “What we want from a theory of moral status is a robust conceptual framework for understanding moral status, not just a list of properties that are justified by a mere appeal to intuition. There will need to be theoretical elaboration on why a supposed property or list of properties is relevant to membership in the moral community. Appeals to intuition, though helpful, do not go far in satisfying this requirement.”
Bruers (2015: 714). Although later he says that we “can’t give a definite argument why we should care about preferences.”
Bruers (2015: 716).
In fact, Machuga (2002) argues that evolution is only intelligible in light of teleology and essentialism.
See Feser (2008).
Oderberg (2007) in particular gives a sustained defense of classical essentialism against evolutionary and empiricist objections.
See O’Brien and Koons (2011) for a very helpful summary.
Also see Feser (2014: 9–25) for a devastating critique.
As the Scholastic axiom goes, action follows being (agere sequitur esse).
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Hsiao, T. A Carnivorous Rejoinder to Bruers and Erdös. J Agric Environ Ethics 28, 1127–1138 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10806-015-9582-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10806-015-9582-7