[Thanks to Jessica and Prof. Mark Dery.]
Apparently, I have some kind of beef with chicken. Ideally speaking, there would be a reason for the animosity I feel toward this innocent-looking fowl. It should stem from, for instance, an unfortunate encounter with a particularly ruthless member of the species, which at a traumatic moment in my formative years sought to strengthen its beak muscles by using my nose as resistance. That would be a good reason for me to exert a solid dose of vengeance upon henkind in general, a collective punishment of sorts. Violence begets violence, as they say.
Unfortunately, I never had such an experience. Truth be told, I don’t think I’ve ever met a chicken in person. Yet nearly every day, I become an accomplice to the untimely and unnatural departure of at least one such bird. If that’s not proof of my undying hatred toward this homeliest of poultry, the chicken that I expect to offer up its life for the pleasure of my palate – quite apart from the fact that it has most likely grown up in what Wikipedia describes as a coop consisting “of several nesting boxes just large enough for the chickens to sit in while laying their eggs” – has been artificially brought into being, explicitly for the sake of being decapitated by its creator and devoured by me. So how do I justify such behavior, absent a vindictive motivation? Why, by way of continental philosophy, of course.
Any discussion of whether the eating of animals can be ethically defended must begin with the question of whether the examiner is a pessimist or an optimist, i.e, whether she thinks birth is the worst thing that can happen to a sentient creature. If the carnivore believes, like Arthur Schopenhauer, that Being is a major bummer because there is no such thing as pleasure, merely absence of pain, it would be more excusable to go out in the woods and hunt dinner for yourself than to partake in the industrial meat economy. The optimist will, like the philosophical poster-boy of the animal rights movement, Peter Singer, focus on the life conditions of the animal, insisting that the hatchet must fall as a complete surprise and that suffering during the animal’s brief life should be minimized, if not eliminated.
Assuming that the winged creature gracing my plate in the form of a filet fried to perfection, accompanied by a side of spaghetti, and drowned in a Chablis-and-cream sauce, was treated cordially while still cackling, the question arises: What makes it acceptable to sacrifice one life for the sustenance of another, especially in light of the fact that we can easily survive on a balanced diet of seaweeds, carrots, and tofu? As far as I can tell, there are three defensive strategies to choose from when faced with the vegan inquisition, though each has its own distasteful implications.
The most popular stance will be to claim that humans occupy a privileged position on earth because of our ability to exercise reason. According to the French phenomenologist Emmanuel Lévinas, this talent is the result of the face to face encounter between individuals who can’t read each other’s minds, and must therefore employ language. This, he claims, is the transcendent foundation of rationality, and proof of humans’ inviolability. Animals don’t speak, so straight to the frying pan they go. If we look closer at his argument, however, we notice that it is executed in precisely language, employing reason. Using reason to privilege reason? Sounds a lot like saying that because I like myself so much, I must be pretty great.
The second justification runs along religious lines. God made Adam and Eve, not Lady and the Tramp, so all animals should be subservient to human needs. Atheists and other followers of one of the many contemporary heretic institutions, however, must find a slightly different route to evoke the divine justification. To the rescue comes Martin Heidegger, the most hatefully admired thinker of the last century. For him, there is a kind of being that is strictly reserved for the human subject, which he calls “Dasein.” This translates literally, from the original German, as “There-Being,” meaning not only that “there” is where you are, but also what you are. The subject is its world, upon which it projects itself in the form of its possibilities for the future, and as the sum of all subjects in the world, this kind of Being is the mutual condition for Being-in-General, Heidegger’s quasi-religious fall-back after Catholicism failed to stand up to his scrutiny. Animals, for him, do not project themselves onto the world, and you may therefore kill them with a clean conscience.
Unfortunately, Heidegger was more than willing to tweak his argument to encompass Jews, homosexuals and mental patients, so bringing him up at a typical New York gathering does carry a certain social risk.
Finally, we have the Nietzschean appeal to power, the only solution I can swallow: I kill and eat the animal because I can. The stronger and healthier lifeforms must prevail, and if one has to eradicate weaker beings along the way, it’s not only justified, but serving the larger purpose of evolution. Morality is an artificial construct anyway, so pleas for mercy will be heeded at the discretion of the eater. Technically speaking, Nietzsche would probably demand that you kill the animal yourself, in a weaponless fist fight, and that you accept being eaten yourself, in the event of defeat. But since we’re speaking of chickens, I think I’m up to the task.
So bring it on, Beaked One, I’ll supply the marinade.
Works Consulted
Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. 1926
Nietzsche, Friedrich. Beyond Good and Evil – Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future. 1886
Levinas, Emmanuel. Totality and infinity; an essay on exteriority. 1961
Singer, Peter. Untitled essay in Gutman, Amy (ed.) The Lives of Animals. 1999
Schopenhauer, Arthur. On the Suffering of the World. 1850
