Why It's OK to Eat Meat
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Why It's OK to Eat Meat
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Narrated by:
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Jonathan Beville
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By:
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Dan C. Shahar
About this listen
Vegetarians have argued at great length that meat-eating is wrong. Even so, the vast majority of people continue to eat meat, and even most vegetarians eventually give up on their diets. Does this prove these people must be morally corrupt?
In Why It's OK to Eat Meat, Dan C. Shahar argues the answer is no: It's entirely possible to be an ethical person while continuing to eat meat - and not just the "fancy" offerings from the farmers' market, but also the regular meat we find at most supermarkets and restaurants. Shahar's examination forcefully echoes vegetarians' concerns about the meat industry's impacts on animals, workers, the environment, and public health. However, he shows that the most influential ethical arguments for avoiding meat on the basis of these considerations are ultimately unpersuasive. Instead of insisting we all become vegetarians, Shahar argues each of us has broad latitude to choose which of the world's problems to tackle.
Key features include:
- First book-length defense of meat-eating written for a popular audience
- Punchy, accessible introduction to the multifaceted debate over the ethics of eating meat
- Includes pioneering new examinations of humane labeling practices
- Shows why appeals to universalized patterns of behavior can't vindicate vegetarians' claims that there's a duty to avoid meat
- Develops a novel theory of ethical activism with potential applications to a wide range of other issues
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What listeners say about Why It's OK to Eat Meat
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall4 out of 5 stars
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Performance4 out of 5 stars
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Story4 out of 5 stars
- jordan david crago
- 09-03-24
A good defence of meat-eating
Shahar's book sets out to defend the claim that meat-eating is compatible with an ethical life, but not that meat-eating is virtuous in its own right. He first makes a distinction between vegetarian arguments; those that claim meat-eating is 'in principle' wrong and those that claim meat-eating is 'in practice' wrong. He argues against the first kind by defending a multi-level view of ethics in which animals may be owed compassion, but not respect in the way that humans are. Hence, it may be ethical to raise animals for food humanely, even though the same cannot be true for humans. Unfortunately, most animals are not raised for food humanely, and so he must deal with the 'in practice' arguments. First, he defends the 'causal impotency argument' which says that in the same way a single voice makes little to no impact on a chanting crowd, a single consumer makes little to no impact on meat producers. Second, he says that in a problem-filled world full of competing moral movements, it is unreasonable for vegetarians to expect everyone to practice theirs as uniquely important. Hence, as long as one is responding to other moral demands, one can choose not to be a vegetarian and still be assured they are living an ethical life.
This last point may be true for vegetarianism -- which many meat-eaters will find demanding -- but I'm not sure it applies to less demanding diets like reducetarianism. Still, this book is a compelling philosophical resource for those of us who do not believe we and everyone else must be vegetarians and vegans.
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