From Brian Jones
I was intrigued by Ben Haller’s letter about your “Animals and us” section (25 June, p 26). The more I read it, the less it made sense. He rescues trapped craneflies yet implicitly condones the exploitation (which I presume means killing and eating, etc.) of animals, and then goes on to say that he sees no justification to characterise this attitude as “moral schizophrenia”. Why should a cranefly be worthy of compassion but not a pig or a cow? Well, of course, it’s more inconvenient to be compassionate towards a cow – you might be rather partial to hamburgers.
He goes on say that “many other animals on the planet are quite comfortable with killing for a living” – this implies that these animals have the capacity for conscious self-examination, a system of ethics and are omnivorous. While the first two implications are possibly debatable, the fact that some animals are carnivorous and have no choice about what they need to eat to survive is quite well documented.
And one could logically ask how Haller knows that they are comfortable with it? This is the old “it is natural to eat meat” or “morality from nature” argument, to which we shall return shortly. Haller’s rebuttal of Gary Francione’s point that “it is not ‘necessary’ in any sense to eat meat” is worthy of a politician – no rebuttal at all, merely a different statement – “It is not ‘necessary’ that humanity exist at all.” Both statements are true; one does not invalidate the other.
In the next paragraph Haller states, “The simple fact that we have evolved to be omnivores implies it is moral to be thus.” Why does it imply it is moral to be thus? This is the “morality from nature” argument explicitly stated. If it is morally acceptable to do whatever evolution has equipped us for then murder, infanticide, cannibalism, rape and war would seem to have be included within “morally acceptable” behaviour.
Advertisement
Finally we get the “how do you know plants don’t feel pain?” argument. Well, I think it’s something to do with never having evolved a central nervous system, but I’ll bow to the botanists on that one. I eat meat, I wear leather shoes, I even rescue craneflies, woodlice and so on, but I am under no illusions as to how morally consistent or compassionate this is.
Ruislip, Middlesex, UK
