Do We Have an Obligation to Eat Animals? No.
The history of human thinking about animal ethics is littered with a great many examples of smart people engaging in reasoning that is anything but smart in order to justify continuing to exploit animals. Indeed, animal ethics provides what might be the greatest example of how self-interest — in particular gustatory self-interest — can deaden even the keenest intellectual faculties. A recent example of this tragic phenomenon is found in an Aeon essay, “Why You Should Eat Meat,” by Nick Zangwill. (The Aeon essay is a shorter version of the argument that Zangwill made in “Our Moral Duty to Eat Animals,” published in the Journal of the American Philosophical Association.) Zangwill is a respected philosopher who claims that if we care about animals, we have a moral obligation to eat them. But just as Zangwill thinks we have a duty to eat animals, I think I have a duty to point out that Zangwill’s arguments in support of animal use are just plain bad. In this essay, I will focus primarily on Zangwill’s Aeon essay.
Zangwill maintains not just that it is permissible to eat animals; he says that, if we care about animals, we are obligated to breed, raise, kill, and eat animals. His argument for this involves an appeal to history: “Breeding and eating animals is a very long-standing cultural institution that is a mutually beneficial relationship between human beings and…
