Consideration of Interest

I must be a callous, insensitive, cold-hearted and immoral person. I finished reading Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma the other night. The book has received a lot of attention since it came out last year, so I won't attempt a review. Suffice it to say that I enjoyed it tremendously. One of the reasons it made such a splash, though, is that it is supposed to have caused more than a few readers to stop and question the morality of eating meat. The book is not a polemic that advocates vegetarianism – far from it – but it does, supposedly, make some persuasive arguments about why eating meat vs. becoming vegetarians should be a thoroughly contemplated, conscious moral choice on the part of every human being. The problem is that I failed to be persuaded. To be sure, the arguments are thought-provoking. Understandably so – Pollan mostly digests Peter Singer's Animal Liberation – a book that most of probably would not think of picking up on a whim. They are also multi-faceted, multi-layered, and have a strong connection to formal philosophy. What I think Pollan, an excellent writer, intended, though, is not only to make us think, but to make us feel that we are not behaving in a moral fashion unless we think about these arguments. And that is what it failed to do for me. A central concept underlying these arguments is consideration of interest. As humans, we offer a consideration of interest to other humans, i.e. we think whether another person's interest will be furthered or diminished by our actions before we act, and that is what makes us moral beings. So far so good. Singer, channelled by Pollan, suggests that we ought to do the same for animals, and eating them does not further their interest. Fine (Pollan later offers a pretty convincing refutation of this idea, but I digress). Why is it immoral to thwart an animal's interest, though? Because as humans, not offering a consideration of interest to another human for one's own gain, is immoral. Puh-lease! How naïve can one be to believe that? People advance their own interests against those of others around them all the time! Business competition? Professional advancement? Politics? Is he suggesting that all these activities are by definition immoral? Actually, Singer would probably say yes. But god knows we've been there before.

P.S.: Vegetarianism is the focus of only one chapter in the book. The rest deals with other, far more significant, topics.