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Cow vs. Fetus

Thursday, September 19th, 2002

So apparently, Julian Sanchez eats babies, but he doesn’t eat meat.

Fist, let me preface by saying that my picking a philosophical fight with Julian is a little like Ralph Wiggum tossing spitwads at Tony Soprano. It’s unnecessary agitation, and given our respective intellectual firepower, the outcome is a foredrawn conclusion. Still, I’m a little intrigued at how Julian might harmonize the likes of Pete Singer (the ethics Prof. at Princeton, not the folkie), Ayn Rand and PETA.

I wonder, how can Julian be “horrified” that people might acknowledge that bad things happen to animals in slaughterhouses but still eat meat because “it tastes good,” but gaze rather nonchalantly at pro-choicers who say things like “well nobody is in favor of abortion, we just favor the right for women to have one.” If you’re not “pro-abortion,” then you do at least acknowledge there’s something unseemly about the practice — it’s just that you believe the termination of a fetus is justified when weighed against the right of a woman not to endure a pregnancy/motherhood.

Seems to me that, regardless of a person’s position on abortion, it’s reasonable to assert that a fetus does at least deserve more moral consideration than a cow.

If it were a full-fledged person’s right to life versus a full-fledged person’s right to privacy/self determination, there’d be no question. The question then is how much of a “person” does a fetus need to be before its right to live becomes more compelling than a full-fledged woman’s right to privacy/self determination.

I’m not going to answer that question right now. I just want to point out that the “fetus vs. woman” question is a hell of a lot more compelling than one that posits a cow (no real rights — but perhaps a general obligation on humans to not to make it suffer needlessly) (nowhere near a “person”) against a beef eater (take your pick of rights) (full-fledged “person”)?

The only real response a Pete Singer or a Julian Sanchez can give is that a human fetus isn’t worthy of more moral consideration than a full-grown animal. I find that preposterous, and I don’t think you’re going to win many converts with that position. But Julian has argued this position in his blog-and-forth with Eve Tushnet and Sara Russo. I followed that debate for a bit. Then my head exploded.

Also, I wonder what Julian makes of this study, which suggests that not only is a vegetarian diet far from blood-free, it might actually kill more animals than an omnivorous diet. Is it better to kill animals by razing farm land for fields of grain, where the little critters are likely to be left homeless, to inevitably perish on the highway or in the cold, or is it better to eat a cow that’s raised fat and happy, but that ultimately meets the business end of electrical prod at the slaughterhouse?

If that study is accurate (and let’s pretend for the sake of argument that it is), is a moral diet then the one that causes the least amount of suffering to the least amount of animals? Could it be that “vegan” is actually barbaric, and that a bloody steak so rare it still swats flies with its tail is the real way to show our love for the animals? Is it the actual act of consuming flesh that’s immoral, or is it that we’re needlessly requiring an animal to die to satiate our hunger?

I guess I’m wondering what Julian thinks the human obligation to animals is. Is it okay to render a family of squirrels homeless so we can put it a strip mall? How about knocking out a chunk of the Everglades — and the homes of the slimy stuff that dwells there — for a South Florida resort? As a libertarian, I’m guessing Julian would find little to quarrel with there. But isn’t the total harm inflicted on the animals in these cases quite a bit more than raising a cow to slaughter?

I don’t know. But I’m not giving up meat anytime soon. And that includes veal. Especially veal. Dee-lish.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, September 19th, 2002 at 11:10 am by Radley Balko and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.