Tuesday
A Brave New Post
Natalie Angier argues in the NY Times that omnivores should not “cede the entire moral penthouse” to vegetarians and vegans. As someone who wrote a humor article proposing creating a “Better than Vegans” movement while in High School (permissible foods for those in the movement were salt and twinkies), let me say that she is very, very confused. For instance, neither the words ‘consciousness’ nor ‘pain’ appear in her article. Instead, she lists various ways that plants respond to stimuli which indicate that they react to threats and try to stay alive. These are interesting, but have literally nothing to do with whether it's wrong to kill them in order to eat them. Standard arguments for vegeterianism note that animals, like humans, can feel pain and struggle to avoid it, and/or that whichever features of humans make it wrong to kill us are features we share with many, many animals, and that it's therefore wrong to kill them. But this means that the article doesn't deal with the reasons anyone has for holding their view, so it's not clear who she thinks she's arguing with.
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