Animal Ethics

JANUARY 20, 2008

Ethical vegetarianism is the thesis that killing and eating animals is morally wrong whenever equally nutritious plant-based alternatives are available. The case for ethical vegetarianism starts with several uncontroversial premises. No one disputes that these actions cause the animals an enormous amount of pain and distress.

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Animal Ethics

NOVEMBER 9, 2009

In the weaker form of the argument it is maintained only that eating meat tends to make people less sensitive to people’s inhumane treatment of other people and more willing to accept people’s brutality and inhumanity to other people. People who do not eat meat tend to be less cruel and inhumane to persons than people who do eat meat.

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Animal Ethics

JULY 8, 2012

Sadistic torturers provide perhaps the clearest example of cruelty in this sense: they are cruel not just because they cause suffering (so do dentists and doctors, for example) but because they enjoy doing so. For example, a woman is not cruel if she occasionally fails to feed her cat. Let us term this sadistic cruelty.

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Animal Ethics

FEBRUARY 6, 2007

The dark secret behind factory farm profits—cruel and inhumane animal husbandry—is getting out. Factory farmers treat animals inhumanely for no good reason. Since morally decent individuals oppose treating animals inhumanely for no good reason, factory farming is becoming an increasingly hard sell.

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Animal Ethics

APRIL 16, 2009

The overwhelming passage in November of Proposition 2 in California, which banned tight confinement of many of the animals raised for food, is a fine example of the power of publicity to educate people about the atrocities we commit to those animals who have no voice of their own. Animal agriculture is inherently inhumane.

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Animal Ethics

JUNE 4, 2009

Meat-packing companies might encourage, for example, an increased dog population to take up the slack. It can be argued instead that by eating meat one is giving one’s tacit consent or approval to the present situation, that the only way to be true to one’s moral conviction that the present treatment of animals is inhumane is not to eat meat.

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Animal Ethics

DECEMBER 23, 2006

Jonathan Hubbell, a philosophy major at the University of Texas at Arlington, is the newest member of the Animal Ethics blog, and once again, I would like to welcome him aboard. In his fresh and candid first post (available here ), Jonathan admitted that he is struggling with the issue of ethical vegetarianism.

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