Journeyman Philosopher

More then once in my life span as a vegetarian have I been approached by individuals claiming that I was not consistent with my view. This is as I still eat vegetables and thus take life. In such a manner, they think, am I not contradicting my vegetarian claim? The answer is simple, no.

This is a point that arises from people not understanding what the main argument for vegetarianism is. Most vegetarians of modern influence directly or indirectly adopt Peter Singers argument of speciesism as their main reason for becoming vegetarian. His argument criticizes our inconsistency as a people when viewing other species in comparison to our own. He claims, and I totally agree with him, that whenever we take into account the suffering of a different species and weigh it with the suffering of a homo-sapiens, the homo-sapiens usually takes precedence. In a sense then, we are literally being racist to other species; we are not valuing their wants as they are simply not us.

But this is wrong is it not? What reason do we have to consider ourselves superior over other species, why do we value ourselves higher? Whichever argument we attempt to bring up, to my experience, truly shows our inconsistency. For example, let’s say we think intelligence makes us superior (this is the most common endeavor). You can literally imagine a dog that is smarter than a person, and one whom contributes more to our society than this person. Yet most would still say that the individual who is less intelligent is still of a higher status than the person. But of why? I have never been given an adequate reason. Logically if we value intelligence the dog should be of a higher status, but we don’t. The truth is we just value humans, and that’s not really fair.

What in reality makes eating meat such a bad thing? And thus what do we have to justify in order to eat it? We have to justify the suffering that it inflicts to the species we are violating, in light of the suffering it inflicts to us if we don’t eat it. Is this even possible?

Think about it, I will continue with this explanation tomorrow.