I think you would really enjoy a new anthology from Wiley-Blackwell--Hunting. It is written largely by and for hunters, and looks at the sort of ethical questions you raise in a way you will find hospitable.

I think hunting is extremely difficult to justify. Though once necessary to obtain necessary nutrients, clothing, etc., killing animals to obtain these things is no longer necessary. It doesn't really help justify hunting/fishing to eat what you kill, if you could have eaten something else.

Even assuming it was necessary to eat meat, it would still be problematic to engage in killing as a recreational leisure activity--which is what hunting/fishing are for most people. If the main goal of sport hunting/fishing are having fun, and food is just a byproduct, something odd is going on (as I argue here). But now getting to you question...

Hunters who are concerned about fairness at least see animals as "subjects" instead of merely as "objects." That's all to the good. Fair hunters will probably kill far fewer animals. But should they really think in terms of fairness? Hunting an animal is not a sport involving two competitors, since the animal doesn't participate voluntarily and has no idea what's going on. In a competition between two humans, fairness is mutually beneficial, but that's not necessarily so in the case of hunting and fishing. The "unfair" hunter at a hunting ranch will lure a tame animal to a hunting station, and then shoot him at close range with a powerful rifle. The "fair" hunter might chase a terrified deer for miles, and then shoot him from a distance with a bow and arrow, so the animal dies a slower death. The extra "fairness" in the second case doesn't benefit the deer, and in fact harms him!

I agree with you that all hunting is not equal, and if one is going to hunt, one should do it "the right way." But the right way, it seems to me, is just less wanton and more humane, not necessarily the way that involves concepts of fairness imported from human sport.

Many see themselves as in need of protein and or without the time to go vegetarian. They also regard their own lives as much more valuable than the lives of say chickens. Some also argue that animals eat one another and that the food chain is part of a natural process. I do not agree with this logic but that to my mind is how the reasoning goes.

I am not a vegetarian but I think I should be. I would not couch the issue in rights language but putting animals through suffering just so I can have my New York Strip Steak just seems wrong to me. Given human history, I cannot imagine what kind of arguments we humans could muster if aliens came down and proposed to us as a food source.

I suspect that at some level you do not really believe that the slaughter of animals is at quite the same level as the halocaust, though you seem to think you think that they are equivalent. There are pletny of evils in the world that we should be protesting but I 'm not sure that torturing yourself about not doing as much as you would like helps those causes.

Really good question. I think you ought and can stand up for animals in a variety of ways (by not eating them, not wearing them, not mistreating them, etc), but your effort is unlikely to ever be the one you would have made on behalf of the persecuted in Nazi Germany. That's OK, I think, for two reasons. (1) PETA had a campaign in the 1990s that invited comparison of factory farms and Nazi death camps. It's a bad analogy, I think, and so does "the father of the animal rights movement," Peter Singer. (I discuss this issue in my recent book Animalkind, if you'll pardon the book plug.) (2) Living in Nazi Germany, you could have completely separated yourself from Nazi persecution of Jews and taken a firm and effective stand against it. You cannot do exactly the same thing, where animal mistreatment is concerned. The low status of animals is just too ubiquitous and too deeply woven into life.

If you want to do more than you're doing, there are lots of avenues, many that wouldn't involve breaking the law or alienating your family. It's doubtful that the most incendiary activities are effective anyway. You can do great good by getting involved with a group like the Humane Society. You might not want to engage in their most radical activities, like undercover investigations, but you can support them financially. There are lots of ways to do more, even if you don't turn yourself into an Oskar Schindler for animals.

An important ethical principle advanced by Kant was 'ought implies can.' So long as you are doing what you can to carry out your moral convictions, you have no reason to feel guilty (though perhaps, you still have reason to feel sorrow). It is legitimate to try to persuade others to embrace your view within reason, but remember that damaging your relationships with your family over this issue or getting yourself thrown into jail would only introduce another evil into the universe. So, perhaps you should do more than you currently are, but I don't think you ought to 'beat yourself up' over things that are outside of your control.

Great question. Off hand, it seems that this would not make a difference. Presumably, it would be just as wrong to have a human child in order to harvest his organs whether or not the child had been engineered to want this fate. Sometimes wanting or consenting does make a substantial moral difference. Robbery, rape, and the like, crucially depend on a person not consenting to an act; if I want you to take something I own then (in a general sense) I am more or less giving it to you and a robbery (in the straight forward sense) has not taken place. But in the case you present, we do not think the cows are exercising their freedom; it appears they have no choice but to want to be eaten. In this case (unlike the robbery case) it seems their wanting this fate does not make a moral difference. If we assume (for the sake of argument) some form of moral vegetarianism (it is morally wrong to kill cows to eat them), then the presence of the 'want' would not seem to make a moral difference.

However, let us assume there are no compelling moral reasons for being a vegetarian and you have a choice between killing and eating a cow that has been bred to want this fate versus a cow that does not want to be killed and eaten. Although this is a bit of bizarre thought experiment, I suggest that it would be less worse to kill and eat the first, because you would not be directly violating a creature's preference (even if it had been bred to have that preference). Still, we might raise a different question: if cows are so advanced that they can have wants, maybe we should not want to kill and eat any of them.

Great question. A huge amount of thought is being devoted to the assessment of the mental life of nonhuman animal. Some (but I don't think a majority) philosophers still deny that we can rightly recognize (morally relevant) pain in beings without language, but I think it is quite reasonable to think that cows feel pain (given what appears to be pain-avoidance behavior, their brains and nervous system) even in the absence of language. So, let us grant that a human being and a cow can be hurt, they both can feel pain, and then ask whether if the hurt causes equal pain, then hurting the human and cow is equally wrong. There is some reason to think that we cannot draw that conclusion, because of factors that go beyond pain. Imagine a cow feels the same intensity of pain, you feel when someone slaps you (hard). The pain felt by the cow and you may be equal, but there could be more serious harms going on in your case (you have just been insulted or been betrayed by a friend or ..) that is not undergone by the cow. Being insulted or betrayed can be painful, but we often think of such harms in terms of suffering rather than, say, painful sensations. Similarly, compare another case in which harm has been done to a human and cow, there is equal pain, but not equal wrongness: imagine a human being robs someone and a policeman harms the wrong-doer in apprehending him (pain level L) and a cow experiences the same level of pain (L) through some accident (the cow receives a shock from an electric fens). In this case we might think that the pain inflicted on the robber was not morally wrong at all owing to the circumstances, but that the pain the cow experiences was worse (let's say the farmer should have used less voltage).

I agree that all other things being equal, carnivorous diets are morally inferior to vegetarian diets. Those who defend carnivorous diets, however, would cite qualifying conditions of the sort you're asking about such as the following: (a) the limited cognitive capacities of those eaten and/or their limited capacities to engage in the sort of "projects" that indicate moral standing; (b) the absence of suitable alternatives to meat; © conditions that render your second premise (that eating animals causes great suffering) false or at least weak. To elaborate: while animals like cattle and birds may have highly developed capacities to experience pain, the case is less clear with, say, oysters and squid, perhaps other fish; even plants exhibit "distress" when harvested. In short, the line is difficult to draw with regard to the experience of pain, let alone pain itself. Here empirical science is likely to improve our understanding of pain and the experience of pain. Nevertheless, the ability to suffer is likely to present a continuum and even a multiplicity of variable dimensions to consider. In any case, even those animals that have robust capacities to suffer arguably don't seem capable of engaging in projects such as law, art, science, religion, politics, etc. that some would argue are necessary conditions, perhaps in conjunction with the capacity to suffer, for moral consideration. On the other hand, for myself, I think that the social lives of many animals seem rich enough to count on this score--though, again the lives of fish, mollusks, and insects seem perhaps not to meet this condition. Moreover, in some circumstances of human habitation (high mountains and desert, for example) protein is not available in other forms in sufficient quantities. So, for some that, in conjunction with the preceding points, justifies those people's carnivorous practices. Finally, some have argued for practices of "humane slaughter" that will inflict minimal suffering on food animals. Defenders of this view argue that techniques exist that neutralize or at least weaken your second premise sufficiently so that it doesn't trump other considerations.

I think there is a difference between saying that all that matters is pleasure and pain, and thinking that pleasure and pain is a good place to start when looking at such issues. If it is an open question whether ants feel pain, then we should not kill them, if that might hurt them, it seems to me. As has been suggested, perhaps there are other reasons not to kill them also, and these should be investigated, but there is something very clear about the pain issue which is not present in the other approaches to the topic.

I remember growing strawberries once and each strawberry had bites in it, from slugs and birds, and I thought at the time that this was OK. The slug had had a bit, the bird had had a bit, and I could, after a bit of paring, have a bit also. This would not work for a commercial strawberry grower, of course, but I do not feed my family through my skill as an agriculturist, fortunately, so why kill animals who might suffer in order to have perfect strawberries? This strikes me as the first question to ask, and the more sophisticated considerations that arise here are significant but lack the perspicacity of the pain issue.