Does It Matter What We Would Do on a Desert Island or in a Burning House?

Original text Luciano Carlos Cunha · Volume IV, p. 53 of the PDF edition · English translation

Scenarios involving catastrophic situations are often brought up in order to justify consuming animals. For example, it is sometimes said that, since most of us would consider it right to kill an animal if that were necessary to survive on a desert island, consuming animals is justified. At other times it is said that, since most of us would choose to save a relative rather than a nonhuman animal from a burning house, consuming animals is justified. In the view of these arguments' proponents, this would show that the criterion of species is not unjust in the way the criteria of race and gender are.

The first problem with these arguments is that they assume that what most of us would do is necessarily right. But there is no necessary connection between the one and the other. We may simply be acting wrongly. So the fact that we would act in a certain way in certain contexts does not show that acting that way is justified. Ethics is about grounding what we ought to do. It is not about what we would do. To think that what we would do grounds what we ought to do is to make an unjustified leap from a description of people's attitudes to a conclusion about which attitudes are justified. The second problem is that, even if the appeal to what most people would do were plausible, it would not support what these arguments' proponents intend (namely, that it is right to kill and eat nonhuman animals but not right to kill and eat humans), since in catastrophic situations most people would also save themselves or their loved ones rather than save other humans.

The third, and main, problem is that, whatever the right action in catastrophic situations may be, it makes no sense to extrapolate it to other, very different situations. For example, suppose someone said that if we are justified in giving priority to saving a loved one over a stranger in a burning house, or in eating human flesh if we are starving on a desert island, then we are justified in enslaving human strangers in order to eat their flesh. Faced with such a claim, it is very easy to see that the two kinds of situation are very different, and that one does not justify the other. For the same reason, what we would do on a desert island or in a burning house cannot justify the exploitation of nonhuman animals. The truth is this: we are not on a desert island or in a burning house.