Not only was I inspired by a few of the arguments against eating meat but some of the arguments made for eating meat infuriated me (although they were generally cast in a negative light due to the author’s bias). The viewpoints presented challenging the ethics of vegetarianism sparked in me a fire of opposition in that their grounds were unethical and seemingly illogical. A statement from Sapontizis’s introduction, “perhaps because rights are the products of social and legal agreements in which only those who agree to respect the rights of others are entitled to have their rights respected by those others” (Sapontzis 15), does not account for young children and the mentally inept who certainly have rights although they are incapable of agreeing to respect the rights of others. The work raised many questions I had never before encountered or thought of about whether animals do have rights, the weight of pain versus pleasure, and what makes life
Not only was I inspired by a few of the arguments against eating meat but some of the arguments made for eating meat infuriated me (although they were generally cast in a negative light due to the author’s bias). The viewpoints presented challenging the ethics of vegetarianism sparked in me a fire of opposition in that their grounds were unethical and seemingly illogical. A statement from Sapontizis’s introduction, “perhaps because rights are the products of social and legal agreements in which only those who agree to respect the rights of others are entitled to have their rights respected by those others” (Sapontzis 15), does not account for young children and the mentally inept who certainly have rights although they are incapable of agreeing to respect the rights of others. The work raised many questions I had never before encountered or thought of about whether animals do have rights, the weight of pain versus pleasure, and what makes life