Eating Meat and Eating People

Citation

Diamond, C. (1978). Eating meat and eating people. Philosophy, 53(206), 465–479. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0031819100026334

Chapter Summary

Context and Argument

This is a fifteen-page journal article, not a book, and it is the shortest item on the course's animal-ethics list. Diamond writes in response to a certain sort of argument defending the rights of animals, the kind found in Peter Singer's and Tom Regan's classic arguments for vegetarianism. Her objection is to the way those arguments are built: they treat the moral relation between people and animals as if it could be derived from properties such as capacities, interests or suffering, and in doing so they misdescribe both our relations to other people and our relations to animals. The article has three numbered parts, which she announces herself.

Part I: Background and the argument to be rejected

The first part briefly explains the background and the sort of argument Diamond wants to reject. It sets out the case that Singer and Regan make: that the line between human and nonhuman animals is not a morally relevant one, that favouring one's own species is comparable to racism or sexism, and that the right response is to extend to animals the consideration we give to humans.

Part II: What is wrong with those arguments

The second part characterises these arguments and tries to show that they contain fundamental confusions about moral relations between people and people and between people and animals. Diamond's leading examples are everyday facts about eating. We do not eat our dead, and we do not eat our pets even when they have died naturally. If the objection to eating animals were only that it causes suffering or violates rights, it is not clear why these cases should feel different. She argues that this reveals something the rights-and-interests vocabulary cannot capture: the idea of a human being is not simply a biological classification but part of how we live with each other, and our practices around animals are shaped by similar concepts.

Part III: What can still be said on the animals' side

The third part indicates what Diamond thinks can still be said for animals. Here she introduces the idea of animals as "fellow creatures": that to see an animal this way is to stand in a certain relation to it, to be moved by it and to be answerable to it, and that this can ground concern without any claim that animals have the same rights as humans. She draws on examples from everyday life and from literature, which she treats as places where this kind of concern is expressed and shaped.

Key Concepts

Part I

• Speciesism: the term used by Singer and others for discrimination on the basis of species membership, analogous to racism and sexism.
• Argument from capacities and interests: the style of reasoning that ties moral standing to features such as suffering or rationality.

Part II

• Not eating our dead: a practice that rights-and-interests accounts do not explain, and which Diamond uses to question their method.
• Conceptual (not only biological) idea of a human being: membership of the human community is partly a matter of how we respond to each other.
• Moral confusion about relations: her charge that the arguments misdescribe both human and human–animal relations.

Part III

• Fellow creature: a way of regarding animals as sharing a life with us, which gives rise to a different sort of moral claim from that of rights.
• Role of literature and imagination: the use of poems, stories and everyday cases to show how such regard works.

Critical Analysis

Strengths

• A different kind of objection. Most critics of Singer or Regan disagree about premises. Diamond questions the framework itself, so the article shows a mode of moral philosophy that begins from the concepts in our lives and not from a theory.
• Concise. The article makes its case in three parts and can be read in an afternoon.
• Sympathetic to the animals' side. The third part makes clear that the target is a style of argument, not concern for animals, which keeps the article from being read as a defence of the status quo.
• Good for discussion. The Diversity Reading List rates it as intermediate in difficulty, notes that it gives a useful overview of Regan's and Singer's classic arguments for vegetarianism, and recommends it as a supplement to a unit on vegetarianism, speciesism or animal rights.

Limitations

• The alternative is only indicated. Part III is described by Diamond herself as an indication of what can still be said, so readers should not expect a complete positive ethic of animals.
• It targets arguments of the 1970s. The article responds to Singer's and Regan's early work; Regan's later book-length rights theory, and the interest-based rights position in Cochrane, are not addressed because they came later.
• It assumes familiarity with the target arguments. The background in Part I is brief, so readers new to the debate should read Singer and Regan first.
• Some readers will want more guidance on practice. Because the argument is about concepts, it leaves open what follows for diet, law and policy.

Where It Fits in the Course

Read this after Singer's Animal Liberation, which is the main target, and after Regan's Empty Cages if you want to see the rights-based position she criticises in its later and more accessible form. It is the shortest critical response in the course. Cochrane's Animal Rights Without Liberation and Diamond's article are both responses to Singer and Regan, but they work differently: Cochrane builds a new rights theory on interests, while Diamond questions whether this sort of theory is the right tool. Carol Adams's Neither Man nor Beast also criticises the Singer–Regan framework, from feminist theory and with more attention to institutions and language, and Kimmerer's Braiding Sweetgrass is a non-philosophical illustration of a relational approach.

Singer's essay "All Animals Are Equal", reprinted in the anthology Applied Ethics, is the quickest statement of the position Diamond has in view.

How to Use This Book

This is a single paper and best used as a companion to the longer books in the course. Read it carefully twice: once to follow the structure, and once to look at how the examples are used. Make a note of each example of eating that she mentions and ask which of the rival theories can explain it.

A good exercise is to write a reply to her on behalf of Singer or Regan, then write her answer. Another is to compare the idea of a fellow creature with the interests-based analysis in Cochrane and with the relational approach in Adams. The article does not require advanced philosophical training, but a first acquaintance with utilitarian and rights-based ethics will help.