The Ethics of Food and Our Responsibility
Tom Regan’s case for animal rights gives the suggestion that there is a common premise by which all animals and humans live under: that we are all “experiencing subjects of a life”.
Eating meat is an ethical problem because the common practices that involve harvesting the meats and byproducts of animals are cruel and inhumane.
For example the life of a pig is taken by the following conditions: “A typical slaughterhouse kills about 1,000 hogs per hour…The sheer number of animals killed makes it impossible for pigs’ deaths to be humane and painless. Because of improper stunning, many hogs are alive when they reach the scalding-hot water baths, which are intended to soften their skin and remove their hair…”.
The number of animals killed makes it impossible to be humane because these animals are treated as if they were cargo or machinery that are only meant to provide a meal. The goal of a factory-farm in a capitalist economy is to gain as much income by spending as little as possible. Because of this proposition, factory farms must kill as many pigs, chickens, cows, etc., as they possibly could with whatever means is available to them. The aforementioned notion that pigs are sometimes awake while being boiled alive is only one of many conditions that millions of animals are forced to undergo every day that the human race demands meat on their dinner plates.
The utilitarian philosopher Peter Singer suggests that not only do we as human beings owe it to animals to eliminate the consumption of meat in our meals, but that we have an “equal consideration of interests”. An “equal consideration interests” is a consideration of all of those affected when choosing an action. Singer makes this moral principle applicable to both human beings and animals. The following excerpt makes this principle more clear:
“..If only X and Y would be affected by a possible act, and if X stands to lose more than Y stands to gain, it is better not to do the act..The principle of equal consideration of interests act like a pair of scales, weighing interests impartially…they take no account of whose interests they are weighing..”.
In order to accept this principle one must accept the idea that animals and humans are both equal in their demand for rights. What we believe makes a human, a human may not be strictly within the bounds of our species. To prove this, Singer provides a number of accounts that describe animal behavior that resemble act to which we would normally attribute to human beings (i.e. gorillas and chimps learning sign language, pigs and birds looking forward in time). Moreover, Singer explains that animals physiologically contain the same kinds of attributes that humans do to experience pain and fear. Because the animal has demonstrated oneself to the level of human attributes, it is no longer an option to say that animals are any less than human beings.
