Do We Have an Obligation to Eat Animals? No.

If only they could talk, they would say, “thank you for discharging your duty to kill and eat us.” (By Watershed Post — Meat hanging in the first cooler room of the processing facility, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=18597099)

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…