Peter Singer, author of Animal Liberation, summed it up nicely. “Equality is a moral idea”. We at Loma Linda University pride ourselves on being enlightended around the issues of equity and justice. Loosely translated, everyone’s opinions should receive equal consideration independent of their inherent intellectual abilities or other factors such as academic degree, age, height, weight, race, or religion. Extending the idea further, we don’t consider ourselves better than those that may have been born with or acquired mental or physical disabilities. I believe most of my colleagues and students would buy into this argument.

“If possessing a higher degree of intelligence does not entitle one human to use another to use for his or her own ends, how can it entitle humans to exploit non-humans for the same purpose” queries Singer. Ouch. Author Michael Pollan expands on this idea : “…if humans no longer need to eat meat to survive, then what exactly are we putting on the human side of the scale to outweigh the interests of animals?”

I am disturbed by these questions. If meat consumption is simply a choice, what is the justification for a so called enlightened person (me) to perpetuate the suffering of animals confined in miserable living conditons?

Tomorrow: More thoughts on the ethical dilemma

This entry was posted on Friday, January 25th, 2008 at 7:52 pm and is filed under Vegetarian Challenge. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.