[philosophy section]
Wild Business: A Philosopher Goes Hunting By Lawrence Cahoone
I was invited to lunch at an upscale Boston restaurant. My hosts, academic gourmands, ordered a sampler of unusual meats, wedges of tripe, pork brains, etc. I was not used to this, but as a guest I enjoyed the novelty. Since quail, pheasant, and duck were on the menu, I asked whether other game meats were served, and offered that my only effort in this direction was a venison liver paté I had made. Intrigued, one of my hosts asked where I had gotten the liver. I told him it was from a deer I shot. He grimaced and looked away. In urban and suburban America, and among the educated classes, hunting is often viewed as immoral and uncivilized, and in a decreasingly rural America, the rise of animal rights and animal welfare philosophies has supplemented a cultural turn away from hunting. We are in an odd position. We probably kill more animals than any society in human history—we are eating more meat than most cultures have been able to supply—and our incessant construction of buildings, roads, airports, and the like take away animal living spaces. But we simultaneously find the actual killing of animals abhorrent. There is a great disconnect between our indignation and the way we eat, drive, and build. Evidently,
decent, sensitive, socially conscious people do not shoot and butcher animals; they pay minimum-wage workers to do it for them. We even apply this indignation outside our species, sending our children to movies like Shark Tales, where nasty carnivores are taught to be nice herbivores—then after the movie we stop for burgers. The philosopher has to ask the straightforward question: is hunting immoral? Recent theories of animal rights ascribe to some non-human animals entitlements not to be harmed, while utilitarian theories of animal welfare count animal goods and harms as comparable to human goods and harms. Both conclude that we have moral obligations to avoid harm to animals; doing so needs a justification and can be permitted only if the harm is small enough and/or the human good that comes from it is great enough. In practice, this means animal experimentation, fur-wearing, and meat-eating are generally unjustifiable. Thus, from this perspective, if contemporary hunting is killing animals for sport—in effect, for fun—then it would seem to be, as Joseph Wood Krutch once called it, “pure evil.”
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