Year: 2026
Type: dissertation
Abstract: Many of us occasionally experience some moral discomfort in reconciling a love for animals and an attachment to meat. Nevertheless, most people hold an intuition, or even a considered judgment, that eating meat is morally permissible. Typically, philosophers interested in animal ethics examine these intuitions and judgments by asking first-order moral questions, e.g., is it permissible to eat animals in normal circumstances? This paper takes a different approach. My focus is on the social epistemology underlying people's moral intuitions, and more broadly, moral judgments about meat-eating. In particular, I ask: are the ordinary person's intuitions about the morality of eating meat trustworthy? By trustworthy, I mean produced by processes or methods that are epistemically reliable or truth-conducive. Drawing on Elizabeth Anderson's social epistemology of morality, I argue that we have good reasons to believe the answer is no—ordinary intuitions are prone to be distorted and unreliable. Although ordinary intuitions about eating animals may seem self-evident to those who hold them, they are likely to be shaped by a dearth of crucial information as well as by motivated reasoning, in particular, moral disengagement and rationalization. Moreover, we have some evidence that when the distorting factors I identify are diffused, we give animals substantially more moral consideration, as our intuitions and beliefs about what we owe to companion animals indicate. If intuitions in this domain are unreliable, then philosophical methods that depend on them—such as reflective equilibrium and ascent to the a priori—are of limited use for evaluating the morality of meat-eating. As an alternative, I explore pragmatist strategies for improving our moral judgments, including bias correction via contentious politics and experiments in living, which aim to shed light on new perspectives and test alternative social norms in practice.
Source: VTechWorks (Virginia Tech)
Author: Lavrova, Paulina
Language: English
Topic: Animal Law and Welfare
Subfield: Law
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7161104897