Analysis Of Singer's Argument On The Consumption Of Animal Products
However does morality only pull with the “slenderest of threads”? There is a small population of people that steer clear of animal products because of morale. In an excerpt from Singer’s Animal Liberation, he discusses the human tendency to demonstrate “speciesism,” which he describes as the bias to favor the interests of one’s own kind and show no regard for the interests of other species. Which if true, then this would explain why most people consume meat, and why today’s meat industry is violent and merciless to cattle and other animals, causing them to suffer a great deal. However it doesn’t explain how people like Singer can resist this tendency. Singer points to Jeremy Bentham who wrote that “the capacity for suffering [is] the vital
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After reading Singer’s argument on the matter Johnson acknowledged the consumption of meat to be morally wrong and was “left with the conclusion that vegans were right. Oddly, however, that didn’t make [him] think twice about laying sliced turkey on [his] sandwich the next day. [He] was convinced on a rational level, but not in an embodied, visceral way” (898). Just because he was convinced on a rational level, doesn’t mean Johnson made the decision to change. The fact that he is so accustomed to putting turkey on his sandwiches in the physical world, made it difficult for him to allow his good intentions to actually provoke change. Because in the end there is no dire need for meat and dairy products in our diets, scientific studies have proved this multiple times. Like Singer states, meat and dairy consumption caters to nothing more than “pleasures of taste,” and the “practice of rearing and killing other animals in order to eat them,” but that doesn’t mean that we don’t have “a moral obligation to cease supporting [the] practice” (272). Society’s moral obligation to stop killing animals and condemning them to pain should be the motivation needed to make changes to their everyday food choices and switch to a plant based
After reading Singer’s argument on the matter Johnson acknowledged the consumption of meat to be morally wrong and was “left with the conclusion that vegans were right. Oddly, however, that didn’t make [him] think twice about laying sliced turkey on [his] sandwich the next day. [He] was convinced on a rational level, but not in an embodied, visceral way” (898). Just because he was convinced on a rational level, doesn’t mean Johnson made the decision to change. The fact that he is so accustomed to putting turkey on his sandwiches in the physical world, made it difficult for him to allow his good intentions to actually provoke change. Because in the end there is no dire need for meat and dairy products in our diets, scientific studies have proved this multiple times. Like Singer states, meat and dairy consumption caters to nothing more than “pleasures of taste,” and the “practice of rearing and killing other animals in order to eat them,” but that doesn’t mean that we don’t have “a moral obligation to cease supporting [the] practice” (272). Society’s moral obligation to stop killing animals and condemning them to pain should be the motivation needed to make changes to their everyday food choices and switch to a plant based