In his book The Omnivore’s Dilemma,
Michael Pollan discusses why Jeremy Bentham, the great nineteenth-century English
philosopher, and Peter Singer, a prominent philosopher of the late twentieth century,
questioned the practice of eating animals.
On page 308 of
the first hardcover edition of Pollan’s book, Pollan notes that Singer quotes Bentham
when trying to explain his own thinking on this matter. Bentham had wondered why animals
should not have the same rights as humans. If we try to argue that they should lack
those rights because they cannot reason as humans can, then (Bentham asks), should we
argue that a human infant should have fewer rights than an adult horse or dog, since an
adult horse or dog can reason better than a baby can? Similarly, a full-grown dog or
horse can communicate more effectively than a baby can; does this mean that adult dogs
and horses should have more rights than human
babies?
Bentham argues, instead, that the reason animals
deserve rights is simply because they can suffer. The more an
animal can suffer pain, the more (according to this argument) it deserves rights that
approximate the rights of humans.
Interestingly, Pollan
later notes that Bentham did in fact justify eating meat. Pollan reports that
in
a passage
seldom quoted by animal rightists Bentham defended meat eating on the grounds that “we
are the better for it, and they [the animals] are never the worse. . . . The death they
suffer in our hands commonly is, and always may be, a speedier and, by that means a less
painful one, than that which would await them in the inevitable course of nature.” (p.
328)
Pollan immediately
notes, however, that the suffering inflicted on animals in modern industrial farming is
enormous and is far worse than anything most of them would encounter during most of
their lives in nature. Pollan, then, succeeds in raising very serious questions and in
making us aware that satisfying answers to such questions are also often very difficult
to come by.
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