What are good arguments against the moral case for vegetarianism?

Question

There is a strong utilitarian case for a pragmatic type of vegetarianism, based on the idea that eating meat usually causes suffering and that it is wrong to needlessly make something suffer. See this article (Singer, Utilitarianism and Vegetarianism, 1980) for a discussion.

The argument is based on a type of pragmatic consequentialism: we are interested in concrete decision making (should I eat meat or vegetables for dinner?) and choose among different possible actions based on their consequences.

What are good critiques of this moral justification of vegetarianism that stays in the framework of pragmatic consequentialism?

Some starting points:

1. This critique asks many interesting questions such as "what does the vegetarian feeds his/her dog?" and "Is being vegetarian really the most effective way to reduce animal suffering?"

2. This university blog article sparked my question and is, in my opinion, not a good critique.

Answer 1

I'm a vegetarian, but I guess these are the main reasons I think people who eat meat justify it:

1. It tastes really good. I can't deny that. A lot of people get so much enjoyment out of it, it's hard for them to imagine a life without it. They feel they'd be giving up too much enjoyment to stop.

2. People think animals are not worthy of protection - ie they either do not have interests, or they pale in comparison to a human's interest in eating meat. Some people doubt animal minds even exist, or deny that they can legitimately suffer.

3. People might decide to get free range meat, "ethically sourced", as they believe that that means the chicken/pig etc had a great life before being killed in an instant without suffering. They might feel that the deal an animal gets is fair - without the farmer, those animals would live a terrible life in the wild with predators preying on them all the time. The farmer can offer them guaranteed safety for a certain length of time, and then, when the time comes, stun them and kill them without them even realizing.

I'm not saying any of these arguments are true - they obviously don't convince me - but it's the kind of thing you hear. Most people also bring up some version of " it's natural, therefore there's nothing wrong with it" which is obviously fallacious.

Answer 2

One argument could plausibly be based around the fact that a single person's decision to not eat meat has almost no measurable consequences on the animals.

The animal whose meat you buy in the supermarket is already dead, and the suffering has already occurred. From that point on, whether you eat the meat or not, the animal (from a materialists' point of view) can't possibly be affected by it.

Further, you, as a single person, has no effect on animal meat production. Just because you decide to become a vegetarian doesn't mean that any company is going to change how much meat (and thus how much animal suffering) they want to produce, so again, your decision has no real consequence.

This is an argument based purely on consequentalism, but of course vegetarianism is very hard to argue against from certain deontological perspectives.