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Question of the Month

Can Eating Meat Be Justified?

Each answer below wins a book. Apologies to the entrants not included.

An argument against eating meat can be made from both environmental and health-related points of view, but the case from the moral consideration of animals – brilliantly expressed from a utilitarian perspective in Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation – seems to me to be the most compelling. As Jeremy Bentham wrote in his Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, “The question is not, Can they reason? nor Can they talk ? but, Can they suffer?”

Sentience appears to be the sufficient and necessary characteristic for someone to have interests. When a living being has the capacity for suffering, it follows that it will at the very least have an interest in not feeling pain. When it comes to fellow human beings, we like to apply the principle of equal consideration of interests: we do not favour specific individuals or groups over others based on some particular characteristics (sex, race, etc). To be morally consistent, I believe we should extend this principle to non-human animals in virtue of their capacity for suffering, and we should regard as morally irrelevant any other characteristic that distinguishes them from us.

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