I’m amazed at the arguments over vegetarianism. I feel that they are profoundly misguided.
Vegetarianism seems the simplest thing in the world to me (though I am well aware that this simplicity contains many, many assumed evaluations of things). To me it amounts simply to the argument, “you do not have to kill animals to survive, so why would you?”
Because you either enjoy the taste of their flesh or you do not want to deal with the inconveniences of becoming vegetarianism. Both of these simply do not convince me as viable ethical reasons.
Now, the argument with the taste is really disturbing if you use the word “kill” when talking about producing meat. It’s not hard to see how comparable an argument in defense of rape would be. (In fact, it’s really the same argument down to the letter — not simply homomorphic, but actually isomorphic.) People will question the use of the word “kill”, though. “Killing an animal is not wrong” is the only version I can imagine a person arguing in sincerity. The alternative, “killing an animal is less wrong than not eating food I like”, seems just absurd given that no one in their right mind would say not eating food you like is morally wrong in anyway.
So, it’s the issue of killing. This issue brings in the whole question of the ranking of value — for which I have already made it clear that I think there is continuous spectrum of value whose points are not nearly as simple as commonly believed. I would trade the lives of many humans for just one more Shakespeare, immoral as that may sound to others. And I would trade the lives of braindead infants for the lives of chimpanzees who have an intelligence and emotional sensitivity we do not commonly acknowledge.
The killing issue really is the issue of the times. It’s at the core of the abortion argument for which I will say the following: abortion is killing, but sometimes killing is less wrong than letting live. Bringing a child into the world for a lifetime of pain of deprivation is far more wrong than to kill a fetus about two months old, when its level of emotional and physiological sensitivity is little higher than that of shrimp. To bring such a child into the world is not compassion: it is cruelty itself — cruelty in the name of morality, as so often morality with its madman’s absolutism proves to create.
So, killing animals merits the term killing in my mind. And meriting the term, the scales of justice tip so obviously in favor of vegetarianism that I can’t understand arguments against it.
So, though there are million of other arguments built on points of varying levels of truth, I don’t see any need for them. Vegetarianism is a simple question. When you don’t have to kill, you don’t kill.