People Who Eat Meat Act Immorally.

People Who Eat Meat Act Immorally

Introduction

Eating meat gives many people utmost joy and serves as delicious food choice. But most of the meat eaters have never witnessed the brutality of animal suffering, pain, and murder on farms. Before reaching a dinner table to serve people, farm animals go through intense suffering and pain on factory farms (Engel 861). Animals cannot speak but they do have rights.. Eating animals is not only morally wrong; it is also an ethical and philosophical issue. Eating meat is a violation of animal’s basic right to live. People do not want to die and serve as food for animals so why is it fair that animals are killed for people’s nourishment?

Case for Eating Meat

Before making the shout out for the obvious, it is important to understand the reason for people eating meat. Meat eaters make several arguments in support of their eating habits. Giving up meat is considered a substantial sacrifice: meat as a food source is considered as considerable pleasure by many people. Eating meat is a historical practice that is traced to the earliest period of archeological and biblical times. Also, several meat eaters justify that people are more important than animals. Killing and eating animals is defended on the basis that beyond the current standpoint it is difficult to find an ethically and morally consistent arrangement because finding harmony between people-animal relationship is not attainable (Clough 34-37). Most of these arguments can easily be disagreed because they have poor base opinions.

Case against Eating Meat

Welfare and lives of animals are an important issue making people’s pleasure in animal consumption an insufficient moral justification to inflict premature death and unnecessary suffering on them. Acknowledging that people are more important than animals does not permit them to carry out killing animals and causing unnecessary suffering. The present scale of meat consumption means that it is not only a cultural fact, but there is also an economic factor. For people, to shift from eating meat to exclusively vegetarian diet would require a cultural and evolutionary novelty coming with an economic cost. Times have changed, and humanity has evolved, people eat meat because they like it (Clough 34-40). There are philosophical, ethical, and moral issues that further help in understanding the case against eating meat.

Issues

Philosophical. The basic argument in several discussions over philosophical issues of eating meat is encapsulated within the concept of speciesism. Philosophers such as Cora Diamond ask

why people do not kill and eat other people for food and why we fail to treat people in a manner that causes them anxiety or distress, especially when for eating meat, people are willing to kill animals and treat them in a manner that causes animals’ distress (Diamond). People share life and this world with animals and recognizing this fact allows people to see them as virtuous beings. Every person with virtue can see that killing animals for meat is wrong as it violates animal’s right and acts of eating animals is not the ideas of kind, compassionate, sensitive, thoughtful, and mature members of a moral community. Carefully worked out philosophical arguments where moral significance of animals is presented, limited grip on people’s actions and thought will be pointed. Rather than by perceived attitudes underlying the abuse and use animals as cruel or shallow, people looking to live a virtuous life which will modify their attitudes and reject use animals for food.

Ethical. In their book, The Ethics of What We Eat: Why Our Food Choices Matter, animal rights activist Jim Mason and Professor Peter Singer have taken the use of animals as food choice to a whole new level.

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