An Ethical Case For Vegetarianism
Posted on November 9, 2009 by Trent Strong
The following is one of my responses to a post on FreedomainRadio’s forums:
“No, the “red herring” in the moral proposition “It is evil to eat fish” is the word “fish.”
A scientist cannot validly say that his theory of gravity only applies to pink rocks. Since his theory involves gravity, it must apply to all entities that have mass.Similarly, in the example above, UPB accepts only the act of eating, and rejects what is being eaten, since what is being eaten is not an action, but rather what is being acted upon.”
- Stefan Molyneux of FreedomainRadio.com in his book, Universally Preferable Behaviour
And..
“It is amoral (not moral nor immoral) since the fish is in a “state of nature” and cannot choose whether or not to eat.”
- FreedomainRadio Forum Member, Blondie
I do not buy into the statement that because fish are a “state of nature” it is neither moral nor immoral to kill and eat them. I believe the underlying argument here is that it is in the animal’s nature to eat and that the animal does not have the intellectual capacity to choose whether it preys upon smaller, more helpless animals. Animals such as cats are known to “torture” and taunt their prey before they finally decide to kill and devour it. According to the “state of nature” argument because the cat can not overcome its instincts enough to stop torturing and “toying” with their prey before they kill it, the cat is now subjected to the same treatment from humans – and these actions would fall under the amoral category. This basically results in the argument that torturing and slowly killing kittens is an amoral thing to do – because they too do it in nature!
Obviously, that was an extreme example but the underlying principle remains.
So, no, I do not believe because the animal has no ability to control and tame its own instincts it is fair game for humans to kill and eat them.
I also do not believe that “fish” is just an arbitrary additive to the function of “is it evil to eat?” This would be like saying “Is it evil to kill humans?” Of course we all would agree that it is infact “evil” to kill humans, but according to this theory the additive “humans” is just the “red herring” of the moral proposition “is it evil to kill?” If you do in fact presume it is evil to kill, then you must also agree it is evil to kill animals (for food purposes or otherwise) to be consistent with universality. If you do include the additive “humans” into the moral proposition, then you must also include the additive “fish”, which changes the moral proposition entirely.
(This is not an attack on Stefan Molyneux or FDR. I have the utmost respect for Stefan and I believe he is one of the greats in philosophy. I thank him for his vast contributions to humanity and the quest for virtue and freedom.)