Article Review
The humanity nowadays has gone so far in terms of various behaviors that the question of what is morally permissive is getting harder and harder to answer. The topic of the meat consumption has been raised already long time ago and seems that the power of discourse continues to grow. There are a lot of various aspects that are involved in this issue such as health, energy consumption, pollution, but the most debatable here stays the moral question. Is it morally acceptable to be violent to domestic animals or to farmer ones? Is there any difference between them? In this paper we will try to discover why it is equally morally nonpermissive to mistreat any kind of an animal.
The assigned reading provides us with the horrifying story of a puppy murderer who claimed that he was not torturing the animals but saving his gustative abilities . After the reading of this case, I suppose, there would be rarely a doubt that the main character deserves a punishment for being a torturer. However, not many people who are consuming meat products would assume themselves in the same position when we speak about the farm animals such as chickens, cows or pigs. The author, on the opposite, tries to explain that the difference is that these people do it by means of farming companies . Another problem here is how we judge the animals considering their closeness to us.
There is a thin line that for different people lies in a different place. Somehow, people tend to believe that some animals are more or less acceptable to care about or eat. These levels are quite personal and sometimes even culturally determined; however, their arguments are debatable. For example, there is a statement that for some animals people have more compassion and sympathy and it is happening not on the base of rational distinguishing, but purely emotional. Another possibility to judge is the level of closeness to a person and intelligence of the animal. However, this also cannot find the support in order to be approved as in this case we should speak about different rights for the people with different mental abilities .
There are still some details that should have been spoken out but have been left out of the context. The thing that was omitted by the author is, for example, the discourse about organic farms where the raising and the killing of the animal are happening in a different way. Of course, their production is not that powerful as on factory farms, but they still kill the animals for our gustative satisfaction. Whereas this would be more ethically correct and would deserve permission?
Moreover, in my opinion, there can be another interpretation of the factory farms. There is no doubt that they are horrifying and torture animals. However, as for me, we cannot consider these animals as usual chickens, cows or pigs. Usually, their genetics and metabolism are so modified that they are growing quicker and prepared to become a food product much faster than in a usual life. It could sound cruel, but they are regarded them as products already because they could not be considered as ordinary animals and if there would be a chance to release them into a usual life – they would likely die very fast as their lives were not considered to be long. With this statement, I do not claim that I support factory farming and puppy slaughter. However, there are not only such details as animal’s interests and feelings. The people should be concerned about how far they have gone with nature already. The experiments with the food production are not simply violating the animal senses or lives in terms that they could be killed, but as well their whole lives and the way they are about to pass it inside the incubators. It is leaving even less for them than to live an animal life as we diminish them till the simple existence.
In conclusion, I support the idea that there is no moral permission either to slaughter the animals we care more about or to torture them all. Nevertheless, there is still a long path of considerations and re-thinking that about to be done by the modern society in order to overcome this problem. For now, it is not only the question of our morality, but the issue of our fairness with us and our environment. Nevertheless, there are and always would be people who are acting beyond the borders of the moral behavior and we supposed to deal with it.
Work Cited
Norcross Alastair. "PUPPIES, PIGS, AND PEOPLE: EATING MEAT AND MARGINAL CASES." Philosophical Perspectives (2004): 229-45. Web.
