The Ethics Of What We Eat By Peter Singer And Jim Mason

Peter Singer and Jim Mason have written a book entitled The Ethics of What We Eat. Pages 241-248 of this book discuss the idea of whether factory farming is ethical or not. For this short reflection paper I will discuss the ideas that they brought up about the ethics of factory farming, while at the same time bringing in my views of factoring farming and the ethics behind animal treatment. The first issue that they bring up is that, “Factory farms are designed on the principle that ‘animals are machines incapable of feeling pain’ and that to support them requires ‘a willingness to avert your eyes’ from the reality that animals can feel.” This idea is basically that the owners of factory farms view the animals as machines rather than living breathing things. For an animal, which has a brain, to be viewed as an
object rather than a being, degrades the animal.
It is making the animal worthless or unimportant. Yet, all animals that are put in factory farms have a price tag placed upon their heads. If the animals could not make the farmer or owner any money than they would view the animal as worthless. In this process they are saying that the animal is the same as a computer and can be treated in the same manner. However, as the authors point out in the next issue an animal can feel pain. Because of that it is not truly ethical to treat the animal as if it does not have emotions or feelings. The next issues that our authors talk about is where or not the pain the animals feel is ethical. They relate the idea to if a baby feels pain or not. They say that a baby does not understand the feeling of pain or what it is but they still feel it, just as animals still feel pain even if they cannot make since of it. If anyone harms a baby they would go to jail automatically, especially if it was on purpose. Yet, if
someone harms an animal that we eat nothing is really ever done about it. Why is there a difference between that? The authors seem to think that it has to do with the idea that animals cannot give back to us as we give to them. Yet, they provide us meat and other products that we eat on a regular basis. It is said that nutritionists believe that humans eat more animal products than are healthy to consume. So we as humans are basically, exploiting the animals for their products and throwing them away. This is what many people did to the earth before the 20th century. They exploited the earth’s natural resources to better themselves and left the earth to ruin. At the time that this was happening people were for it and went along with it. Yet, they had some people that thought that it was wrong and stood against it. IN the 18th century those people were the Native Americans, and they were slaughtered to almost extinction. Today we have people who stand up against factory farms, based on the idea that the animals are not treated as if they are living things, if history goes on to repeat its self then we will begin to see many people killed over the issue. But, as for now we just have companies trying to buy people off so that they will leave the idea alone. So who knows what will happen, but one thing is for sure the treatment of the animals in factory farms are unethical and does more harm than good to the animal.