Questions I Tire of Answering I

There is a series of half a dozen questions which almost all acquaintances have asked me by the time they have become my friends. These questions even tend to be asked in the same order. As the youngest member of my family, I am by now accustomed to asking a series of the same four questions in the same order twice annually, but unlike at the Seder, the answers to my personal questions are more complex, and not already known by the questioner. Although I understand that nobody who innocently poses these questions has any idea that I have already replied to exactly the same question within the past 48 hours, I am nonetheless becoming tired of answering them. Therefore, I have decided to post them permanently on my blog, if only so that somebody, somebody, among you who hasn’t already asked me these questions will settle with reading the answers online, and not need to hassle me. There are too many questions to list all in one blog post, so I have decided space out the answers over time, ordering the responses categorically. I will begin with by far the most frequent pair of questions.

Q: How long have you been a vegetarian?

JD: Approximately seven years.

Q: Why did you decide to become a vegetarian?
JD: There are many reasons. I will try to list them in approximate order of importance.

First of all, there is the element of animal rights. I believe that animals have certain rights, which are not identical to human rights. Although there is not enough room (or concurrence) for a complete listing of human rights, suffice to say that these rights involve life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. My pursuit of happiness may look very different from yours, but we are equally entitled to our respective pursuits, insofar as they do not infringe upon the rights of others. The basis for a being to have rights is not intelligence; nobody would argue that Stephen Hawking has more rights than Joe Schmoe because Stephen is more intelligent than Joe. Their rights are equal, regardless of their respective IQs.

What, then, is the basis for human rights? Why is it that depriving my fellow human being of his life for my own enjoyment is morally wrong, whereas depriving a carrot of its life for my own enjoyment is morally neutral? Carrots and human beings are equally alive. We can thus establish that it is not the very fact of being alive that entitles one to rights. Following philosopher Peter Singer, I believe that it is one’s ability to feel pain that establishes one’s rights. The reason that the carrot has no rights is because it cannot feel pain; the same is true for the rest of the plant kingdom, as well as all inanimate objects.

There are two possible objections to this statement. First, you could argue that, by this logic, I am depriving brain-damaged people who have lost the ability to feel pain (they exist) to their rights. This is a fallacy. When I speak of pain, I am describing not only the physiological phenomenon associated with stimulated c-fibers, but also emotional anguish, etc. Suppose I were to cripple an aforesaid brain-damaged human for my own sadistic pleasure: my act would be morally unjust because I would be violating my victim’s right to liberty: a cripple is less mobile and capable than a human being with a whole body, and by depriving my victim of the advantages of a whole body, I would be committing a morally unjust action. The second objection (really just a vamped-up version of the first) is that this logic condemns to euthanasia brain-dead orphans with no ties to friends or family. This, anyway, is Peter Singer’s conclusion. Although this conclusion is rational, I object to it on the basis of human uncertainty: even medical experts may condemn a case as hopeless when it is not so. For instance, Japanese novelist and Nobel laureate in literature Kenzaburō Ōe’s eldest son Hikari was diagnosed as a human vegetable, and doctors suggested that he be allowed to die. Kenzaburō and his wife remained hopeful concerning in their severely handicapped son; despite his mental and physical limitations, he has gone on to become a successful composer.

Back to vegetarianism: I maintain that the ability to feel pain entitles one to rights. The animals that we raise for food are, biologically, as capable of feeling pain as are human beings (the relevant part of the brain is identical in mammals and birds). The factory farm conditions prevalent in United States agro-business are cruelly restrictive in ways that I believe cause animals physical and mental anguish. Hens are enclosed in individual cages too small for movement, steers are stuffed full of hormones and confined to live in pools of their own shit, and the living conditions of veal calves are too infamous for me to repeat them here. By choosing not to eat meat, I am refusing to finance such a system of animal abuse: I am eating my vote, and my form of protest is withholding my dollars from abusive enterprises.

My second reason is environmental. As food writer Michael Pollan has well expressed in his book The Omnivore’s Dilemma, the American beef industry floats upon a sea of fossil fuels. A plate of meat costs twenty times as much energy to produce as a plate of vegetables; the world is facing an energy crisis, and even if you reject the anthropogenic nature of climate change, there are many reasons to avoid wasting the fossil fuels that remain, in part because many of the countries which benefit most from their sale are repressive and hostile towards democratic government. There is no good reason to encourage wastefulness and overconsumption: although our consumer economy is full of the pitfalls of planned obsolescence and waste, these business strategies, however profitable they may be for the corporations which employ them, result in the increase of pollution and the swelling of landfills. By choosing not to eat meat, and trying to eat locally, I have tried to reduce my own environmental footprint, in order that my lifestyle might be sustainable. Although there is not enough room to describe it now, my environmentalism is neither environmentalism-for-environmentalism’s sake nor environmentalism-for-natural-beauty’s sake: I hold my environmentalist beliefs because I wish for future generations to be able to enjoy the same style of life on the same planet as I do. I am an environmentalist for the same reason that I have placed my savings in a mutual fund: I do not want my children to ever know want, or hunger, or thirst, or sickness.

My third reason is religious. As an observant Jew who tries to obey the rules of Kashrut, it is far simpler to exclude meat from my diet. I never need worry about the amount of time that has elapsed since I last ate meat, I do not need to worry about the relative unavailability of kosher meat, and, when I become older, I will not need to have a kitchen with four sets of dishes.

These are the main three reasons why I choose not to eat meat. As you might have noticed, my argument is incomplete: I glossed over climate change, and have not discussed sustainable fishing. There is one point, however, that I must make before I sign off. This essay is not meant to convert any of you to my cause: it is merely my own justification for my behavior. I was never particularly attached to meat, anyway, and do not suffer from the cravings which I know some would if they were constrained to avoid meat. Eschewing meat is easier for me than others, cognizant of this, I realize that my academic treatment of the subject seems far to abstract to seem convincing. I wish only to avoid the kind of harassment I have experienced from acquaintances who treat my dietary choices with disdain and contempt.

~JD

“The Vatican ordered bishops to take an oath of loyalty to the state and agreed to the dismantling of the church’s temporal organizations… The Nazis had gained another important prop for their regimes. Almost immediately, the Nazis began to go back on the agreement, principally by harassing priests who were seen as hostile” (Roger Eatwell, Fascism: A History, 152).