Dr. Christina Van Dyke
Calvin College

Friday, November 30, 2007; 4:10 p.m. in Hoyt Hall, Room 215
Title: Ethical Vegetarianism: Feminist Obligation or Patriarchal Burden?

Brief Abstract: In this paper, I examine the two most prominent feminist responses to ethical vegetarianism, and I argue that Aristotle's doctrine of the mean can offer a solution to the difficulties that both those responses face.  On the one hand, Carol Adams and others argue that meat eating is inherently a symbol of male domination over women and animals, and that adopting a strict vegan lifestyle is necessary for resisting against and overcoming patriarchy.  On the other hand, Kathryn Paxton George claims that making vegetarianism a moral requirement places an unfair burden on precisely those 'nutritionally vulnerable' people who already possess the least power in contemporary society: women, children, the elderly, and the vast majority of people in poor and/or developing countries and cultures.  Ethical vegetarianism, she claims, assumes the 'male physiological ideal' of an adult male, 20-50, in an industrialized country with access to health care, education, and technology; in so doing, it reduces everyone unable to safely adopt such a lifestyle to second-class moral citizens.  For this reason, George argues for 'feminist aesthetic semivegetarianism' and against the idea that the decision of whether or not to eat meat constitutes a moral choice.  In response to both these positions, I claim that an Aristotelian-style doctrine of the mean can offer a workable moral framework on which--although vegetarianism will not be required of everyone--our choices about whether or when to eat meat are, indeed, moral choices.

Sponsored by the Department of Philosophy