Animal Rights and Vegan Ethics
Written by Eugene Khutoryansky
Animal Rights and Vegan EthicsAnimal Rights and Vegan Ethics -- Replies to: Don’t animals eat each other? Doesn’t the Bible give us Dominion? Don’t only humans have souls? What about killing plants? And many other questions.
Posted by Eugene Khutoryansky on Saturday, May 9, 2020
The purpose of this web page is to answer the most commonly
asked questions about animal rights. In particular, it is
designed to address questions such as
What about killing
plants?
What about how other animals kill and eat each other?
Would you
rather save your child or your dog?
Don't humans have dominion
over the animals?
And a long list of other
questions of this nature.
Before I begin, I believe that it is important to put the topic
of animal rights into historical perceptive. Sixty years ago,
racial segregation was considered acceptable in the United
States. Two hundred years ago, slavery was considered morally
acceptable by the vast majority of the world. Two thousand years
ago, it was considered acceptable to feed innocent
people to lions for public entertainment.
In each case, morality progressed because a small number of people looked at the ethics of their society, and concluded that it needed to be improved. Now is no better a time to think that we have it all figured out than were any of these other points in history. Simply put, truth is not democratic. The Earth does not become flat just because the majority of the population thinks that it is. Nor does an activity become morally justified just because it has been going on for a long time. Slavery, genocide, rape, and torture are all activities which have been going on since long before the dawn of recorded human history.
In this web page, I am going to present logical arguments for claims which, at present, most people do not agree with. For example, I am going to be arguing that it is immoral to kill animals for food or clothing. Many people today view such claims as extreme. However, if a person several thousand years ago had argued for the abolition of slavery, or the abolition of gladiatorial combat, he would have received the same reaction.
Note: Even many of the people who view such claims as extreme still believe that we are morally required to eat a vegan diet today due to the way in which farm animals are currently raised for food by modern agriculture.