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In this paper I wish to examine the ethical tenability of the following assumption: it is morally certain that it is wrong to kill and eat other animals for food. This certainty is subsumed under the term ‘veganism’ as discussed in animal ethics. Although there are reasons to refrain from eating meat by some precautionary principles—that it is not certain that eating meat is morally wrong but it is neither certain that eating meat is morally permissible (Cojocaru 2018)—, and recent publications in animal ethics doubt the universal wrongness of eating meat (Fischer 2020), there are arguments that veganism is not based on a free choice made by the agent. Rather, veganism is due to a transformation process of what animals are in the agent, a shift from edible to non-edible, and by this it becomes impossible to eat other animals (Panizza 2020). Following this latter thought, veganism seems to be morally certain. Wittgensteinian moral philosophy explores moral certainties. Pleasants, for example, states that the “badness of death”, the “wrongness of killing”, and the “wrongness of unwarranted infliction of pain and other forms of suffering” (2015: 199-200) are basic moral certainties when it comes to human beings. These certainties lie at the bottom of every moral thought and action, and hence they structure how people think and act. Thus, basic moral certainties are “immune to justification, challenge and doubt, and hence cannot be objects of first-personal knowledge” (Pleasants 2015: 197). Someone who doubts that valuing life is not morally certain, can be perceived as someone who is outside the moral community (Hermann 2015: 95). Can these basic moral certainties be extended to other animals? I will argue that the basic moral certainty of the “wrongness of unwarranted infliction of pain and other forms of suffering” applies to the animal sphere as well, while Pleasants’ other two certainties are not applicable. What is morally certain “is something which nothing imaginable would speak against” (Johnson 2019: 213), and while it seems beyond imagination to eat fellow human beings (Diamond 1978), people engage in concepts of ‘happy meat’ and ‘animal friendly animal husbandry’ that still result in killing and eating other animals. And although there is philosophical and empirical evidence that animals have a concept of death (Monsó & Osuna- Mascaró 2020), it is still disputed whether death is bad for an animal, or at least for certain kinds of animals (e.g. Solis 2020). Nevertheless, I will conclude that the basic moral certainty of the “wrongness of unwarranted infliction of pain and other forms of suffering” suffices to render veganism a moral ought, and that the burden of proof is on the side of those who wish to criticize veganism and its implications. Konstantin Deininger et. al.(School of Philosophy, Munich University) Comments are closed.
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