Is Eating Meat Unethical?

Summary-Response Paper #1 Is eating meat unethical? In “Food For Thought”, edited by Steve F. Sapontzis, he addresses differing views concerning the consumption of flesh in the Editor’s Introduction. “Food For Thought” was published in 2004 by Prometheus Books and has many essays about the debate of eating meat. Sapontzis was a former professor of philosophy at California State University and author of many articles and books on animal welfare and ethics. He is also the president of Hayword Friends of Animals Humane Society (Sapontzis 382). Steve F. Sapontzis begins his introduction by identifying the purpose of his writing, to help readers understand the primary issues of debate about eating meat and the motivations behind them (Sapontzis 10). He then moves on to offer a baseline of understanding by defining vegetarianism as the act of not eating meat, and meat as the flesh of animals, including fish …show more content…
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