How do we get people including environmental activists to stop eating meat?
Karen Davis: Over the years, three main arguments have been brought against a meat-based diet in favor of a plant-based, or vegan diet. They are Health/food-safety, Ethics, and the Environment. Some people argue that we should emphasize health, food-safety, and environmental issues over the ethical treatment of animals, because people are basically selfish. Health and environmental quality affect people’s lives directly, they say, whereas the ethical treatment of animal does not. The philosopher Michael Allen Fox, in his article “Environmental Ethics and the Ideology of Meat Eating” (Between the Species, 1993), lamented that for many or most people, “animal suffering and death in colossal quantities does not matter morally,” or if it does matter, the ethical import is blunted by people’s greater satisfaction in consuming animal products and their belief that jobs and the economy will suffer if people stop eating meat. Others, like Erik Marcus in his book Meat Market (2005), argue that
