Latest Book: Dialogues on Ethical Vegetarianism
My latest book is out: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1138328294/! This one is much cheaper than my earlier ones, only $19.95. If you like my work, please consider buying this. And if you like the book, and you teach classes, consider using it in classes. :)
An alternate cover that was considered
Cover
An Abstract
Factory farms cause great suffering for farm animals, about 74 billion of whom are killed for food, worldwide, each year. This is the source of almost all the meat that people buy. Given the level of suffering and the numbers of sufferers, it's plausible that this industry has caused a greater amount of suffering than all the human suffering in history. It seems that pain and suffering are bad. So this seems like a (extremely strong) reason to boycott this industry.
I have two fictional students debate this issue in a series of four dialogues. They cover all the standard arguments and objections that one commonly hears ("humans are smarter than animals", "eating meat is natural", etc.) I also have some original thoughts about such things as why moral arguments often fail to change behavior and how vegans should interact with non-vegans.
Why I Wrote It
There are many excellent discussions of ethical vegetarianism already. I wrote this one because I wanted there to be one that was as accessible as possible -- hence, everything is in the form of a fast-paced dialogue.
Peter Singer has said that when people ask him why he is a vegetarian, he will henceforth refer them to this book! (This is amazingly great because Singer is the biggest figure in the animal welfare movement, author of the seminal work Animal Liberation.)
What's New
An earlier version of the dialogues appeared in the journal Between the Species, after a lot of discussion on my Facebook page, which helped to improve the text in many ways -- thanks, FB friends! This new, book version has: a revised version of the text with many miscellaneous improvements, a preface by me, a foreword by Peter Singer, and an annotated bibliography of books and articles on the subject.
Topics for Further Discussion
If the book gets very popular, maybe there would be a second edition. If so, here is some stuff I would add:
In the dialogues, I didn't discuss nutrition issues. People sometimes say that we have to eat meat to get adequate nutrients. After reading about this some online, it appears to me that this is not the case; however, it is true that vegans are at risk of getting insufficient amounts of some particular nutrients. So if you were convinced by my book, I recommend getting some vitamin supplements (you can, e.g., go to Amazon and search for vegan vitamins). Vitamin B12 is particularly hard to get from plants. You can either get a separate B12 supplement, or get it from clams, which have a lot of it. (Clams have no brains, and therefore cannot suffer, so it is ethical to eat them.)
I would add some nice vegan recipes. I suspect some people think they don't like vegan food because, well, they just haven't been exposed to good, creative vegan meals. If you go to a vegetarian restaurant, though, you'll generally find lots of thoughtfully designed, delicious plant-based meals.
I would probably add a discussion of lab-grown meat. Sometimes people ask me what I think about lab-grown meat. Extremely easy question. Lab-grown meat doesn't have a brain, so it can't suffer, so there is no ethical problem. My guess is that lab-grown meat will replace traditional, factory-farmed meat in the next few generations. It will probably be cheaper, more healthy, and maybe even tastier. But this won't happen immediately; many billions more animals will suffer before this product is ready to replace factory farming. Also, even once the product is ready, I guarantee that some humans will still insist on buying cruelty-based meat products, because lab-grown meat is "weird", or some BS like that.
