In Defense of Consuming Animal Products : How Human Suffering Can Justify the Consumption of Animal Products in Developed Countries

Abstract: Within the area of animal ethics, there has been ongoing discussion around whether people in developed countries are justified in consuming animal based products or not, some argue that we are, and some argue that we aren't. In this paper I present a kind of middle-way position in response to the ongoing discussion, in which I argue that a decent chunk of a population in developed countries are justified in consuming certain animal products, but only so far as the exclusion of these animal based products would cause harm to the boycotter. Many of the arguments that are raised in order to defend the consumption of animal products, often rely on controversial assumptions or stances in order to make their claim. In this paper I attempt to distance myself from these types of arguments, by giving an argument that only relies on already commonly held moral beliefs that we all already take to be true, and the argument I make is therefore just an extension of a moral belief that we already have, which is that it is morally justifiable to consume animal products in order to avoid a personal harm. The claim very simply put is the following: We already believe that a person is morally justified to consume animal products from animals that yield relatively low amounts of food in order to survive, if we take this to be true, then we should also believe that a person is morally justified to consume animal products from animals that have a much greater yield of food, but where the food is used not to survive, but to avoid personal harms that stem from boycotting animal products. To give a more precise description on why the former (to survive) entails the latter (to avoid harms from boycotting) is because firstly, the amount of harm that's being done to the animal to avoid both cases is the same, and secondly, the level of harm that's being prevented by consuming the products that come from that animal are also the same. I conclude therefore, that if we want to remain morally consistent, we should accept the latter case to also be justified, which is that we are justified in consuming animal products in order to reduce a personal harm, but only so far as those harms would be prevalent if the person where to exclude animal based products from their diet.