A Good Deal? Thoughts on Zangwill’s argument for carnivorism

Mark Zangwill [2021, 2022] argues that we have a moral duty to eat meat where we've been in a mutually beneficial relation with the kind of animal eaten. While there may be, in principle, an ethically defensible mutualism between humans and the animals we feed on, I argue that our actual relation with even animals outside the factory farm seems exploitive, not mutualist. Castration (usually sans analgesic), maternal deprivation, and genetic contortion (if only the slow contortion of selective breeding) impose severe harms on animals. Moreover, any "deal" the farmed animals enter into is signed under duress: is signed during the Anthropocene, when animals of no use to us are being eliminated from Earth.