Paste your essay in here…Considering both Harman and Diamond’s positions on eating animals was very interesting for me. Eating meat is a topic I had never given a lot of thought to. I just ate what was convenient and provided and didn’t really think so much of the morals behind it, even when I was presented with the realities of factory farming in middle school. I appreciated the opportunity to really think about these things in class, and I was eager to see there were more questions to be considered. The rest of this essay will reflect on the deeper questions surrounding the morality of buying and eating meat presented in the Norton.
Harman’s paper, compared with Diamond’s, was the paper that made the most sense to me when we read it. She takes on the supposed “Surprising Claim” which states that society believes it wrong to cause significant pain to an animal but doesn’t find it wrong to kill them for food. The prompt for this essay uses the word cogent to describe her argument, and I believe that word is well suited. Harman believes this strong aversion to harming animals that humans have implies that animals have a moral status and that killing anything with moral status causes it significant harm. It is a cycle that lands back at the belief that killing animals, even painlessly, is wrong.
Having established that this claim from Harman is sound and logical, we can agree that the killing of animals is wrong. That guides us to the question presented in the text regarding the purchase of animal meat. When I go to the store and buy a chicken breast, I am in no way shape or form harming the animal. By the time we consider factors such as the raising, the killing, the butchering and processing, packaging, and transportation that all go into that animal arriving on my store’s shelf I am easily 5 steps removed from the actual killing of the animal. Regardless of whether or not I bought the chicken breasts or not, the chicken would have been killed and someone else would eventually pick it up to purchase. This idea led me to think of a similar issue: what about eating meat at a restaurant or even at our very own Pit? The cooking and preparation of the meat makes the removal from the deed that caused the animal harm even more extreme. It seems I am doing nothing wrong by eating the ground beef tacos in the Pit every Tuesday. I don’t think Harman’s argument can prove this wrong. I am not doing anything directly wrong to the animal to cause it significant harm, which is the foundation on which Harman sets her argument for not eating animals. In her article, Harman proves that killing animals is wrong no matter the method of doing so, but she never touches the idea of eating meat killed by another. Her argument, in my view, simply cannot bridge the gap that the steps of removal from the act of killing create.
Diamond’s argument appeals more to the relationship we as humans feel to certain animals, mainly pets. This fellow-feeling towards some creatures makes the idea of eating them as abhorrent as the thought of eating our dead friends. Although her argument becomes more complicated when she accuses the vegetarian community of using the personification of animals as propaganda to get people to stop eating meat, the main basis of her argument lies on the relationship that can exist between animals and humans. She doesn’t seem to object to killing animals, just points out how this fellow creature relationship is possible and therefore how we shouldn’t be obscenely cruel to animals (like we often are in factory farming, for example). The steps that remove us as individuals from the killing of animals that stumped Harman’s argument also cause issues for Diamond’s argument. It is impossible to experience a fellow creature relationship with a piece of raw meat sitting on a shelf like we can to a living creature. We were not involved with this creature at all when it lived, and therefore Diamond’s argument for why we shouldn’t eat the animal is totally invalid. The grocery store or the Pit leave no room for an emotional connection to form, which is necessary to apply Diamond’s logic.
Putting both Harman and Diamond’s views aside, Norton presents the reader with the question of whether there are any “difference-making-reasons” for not buying meat at the grocery store. Will it really make a difference? The text brings in Kagan’s discussion of supply and demand, pointing out that one less chicken breast sold could cause the store to order less chicken overall the next time. Even then, will that really push the factory farming industry to slow production? In my opinion, in the grand scheme of things, this industry is too large to defeat. Even if I and 10 of my friends pledge to stop eating any meat at all, the big companies behind the meat production won’t realize at all. I do not think that means that vegetarianism in and of itself is pointless, however. The difference-making-reasons behind not eating or buying meat can be much more personal. If the choice to follow a vegetarian diet and not support that industry makes an individual feel better about themselves and the impact they’re having on our planet and on animals, that is reason enough for them to follow that lifestyle strictly. Not every decision needs to be based on the worldwide impact it could have. If it betters the life of an individual than an important difference is being made by the action.
Overall, both of these philosophers take on the controversy of eating meat from very different angles and on a large-scale global impact point of view. Though neither Harman nor Diamond successfully produce an argument that probes readers to stop purchasing meat, that does not mean there is no reason at all to not purchase meat. One must look at the individual’s mind and morals to truly understand a problem that is so personal to so many.