This is my entry for the contest at http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/25/magazine/tell-us-why-its-ethical-to-eat-meat-a-contest.html
Distance
As much as we'd like to define objective, strict moral guidelines to judge our actions and decisions, we must admit that the subjective, emotional distance between ourselves and the other determines our feelings and behavior. If somebody close to us -whatever that means- is suffering, in pain, dying … we show compassion, and try to help where we can. However, we feel much less sorry for someone more distant, and sometimes even indifferent to people we don't know at all.
Distance is a highly subjective emotional measurement which can vary widely between people or contexts, but it is a key determinant in our ethical behavior. It might seem heartless, but we can't empathize with the whole world. People are suffering and dying all the time without really affecting our feelings.
Some other factors have an influence on empathy as well. When, for example, suffering is clearly unfair, or it occurs in a sudden or exceptional way, it can touch us much more than we might expect based on mere subjective distance.
Along this notion of distance, we cross different ethical boundaries. It's immoral not to help a person in need, but that's only really the case when we have some relationship with the other person. More distant people, have somehow less moral appeal, which influences our behavior towards them. We become less forgiving, insensitive, sometimes even exploiting or mistreating.
As the distance to the other person, animal, living creature, thing … increases, we cross more moral borders. In some cultural and historical context it is normal, ethically right, to treat certain others -humans as well as animals- as slaves (i.e. they have no rights, no autonomy).
At a certain distance it even becomes justified to decide about the life and death of the other. For most of us, luckily, this boundary lies way outside of mankind. But it exists nevertheless. Every vegetarian has been asked: 'you do kill mosquito's, don't you?' (some do, others don’t).
One step further we cross the boundary where it becomes accepted to kill in order to eat. Cannibalism seems worse than just murder, but in some weird twist, people often have less moral objections to eating animals than killing them, even though the first one pretty much implies the second.
The most common view in our current western society is that this boundary lies somewhere between in the different kinds of animals. Some might think it’s fine to eat whatever animal, but we mostly draw the line behind apes and pets like dogs and cats. Other species like horses and dolphins are also mainly off-limits. Pigs, cows, chicken, fish,… however, are somehow more distant from us than the subjective ‘kill to eat’ boundary.
As we’ve seen that other factors besides the emotional distance also influence our moral decisions, lots of people morally oppose to the routinely killing of severely abused animals in factory farms, when confronted with these situations.
But the chickens in my backyard (especially the useless, non egg-producing rooster), the few dozen pigs, sheep, or cows from a local small-scale farmer, are the ones that really confront us with the question whether it’s right, from an ethical point of view, to eat them.
Sure it is!
