Journeyman Philosopher

The other day we focused on Peter Singer’s argument in order to understand in more clarity how I believe vegetarians don’t contradict themselves when taking life by eating veggies.

In order to conclude the argument I wish to briefly explain the self defence principle, the idea of moral consistency, and the concept of different types of suffering.

First I wish to cover the concept of the self defence principle, an idea that is an undertone to Singer’s argument. Fortunately its a very simple principle.

You can violate another beings rights if it is necessary for your survival, as you have equal rights to that being. This means that if you’re starving in the woods and a deer walks up in front of you its not immoral to kill it and eat it to survive because you are protecting your right to life.

What this means for vegetarians is that they’re allowed to take life if it is necessary for their own survival and well-being.

Next comes the importance of moral consistency and is seemingly an obvious point. It simply is a concept that is based on being consistent with your ideals, which means that if you adopt a view such as ‘the suffering I experience is bad and animals suffer like I do’, you logically follow through and consider this suffering of animals a bad thing. As such you try to avoid it just as you would avoid causing suffering to yourself.

On top of this I mentioned the importance of different types of suffering. Note that as well before I mentioned that because of being morally consistent we must consider the suffering we feel as the same as animals. This is due to the evidence presented by empirical data.

How do we know an animal is suffering? It looks sad, it runs away, it screams just as a human does. The same manner in which we determine a human is suffering we can as well incorporate to animals. As such we logically have to conclude that animals experience similar things to us.

Plants, however, although they do experience some sort of suffering do not suffer in the same manner as us. As so this puts us in a situation where due to consistency we must attempt to survive in a manner that reduces the ‘bad’ we know.

What does this all mean together? Well vegetarians are allowed to take life if it means they themselves are at risk of death (as would be one whom didn’t eat). However as they agree that suffering is bad they must attempt to avoid it. In such a light they attempt to find something they can eat and survive on that doesn’t suffer in the way which they do (enter plant life). Although plant life is living it doesn’t suffer in as similar a manner as we recognize as being bad, and can maintain our survival. In such a manner vegetarians are justified in eating it.

The reason there is no contradiction when a Vegetarians eats plant life is Vegetarians don’t say something as simple as you can’t take life. After all simply surviving is taking life of some sort. What they do say is we must reduce what we consider bad in order to be consistent.

Of course the biggest problem with this theory is as Hume’s gap has demonstrated you might not care about moral consistency, as such you may have no reason to care. However if you don’t care about moral consistency, in my view, you lack something necessary in being a whole person.

I hope this makes sense, I attempted to wrap it up rather quickly. However the argument holistically requires quite detailed explanation, please if you have any comments or questions ask :)!

On a complete sidenote: One thing that is also important to specify, is that Peter Singer himself believes you can justifiably kill an animal for food. This can be done in times of self defense, and if you make it worth the beings time (ie you raise the animal and give it a wonderful life in payment of its sacrifice). This carries onto humans, just as you could give a human $200,000 and then use his body for food after death, you could do the same to an animal. The problem is we don’t treat our animals with respect in our society, and as we shouldn’t eat meat until such a standard is reached.