MEET YOUR MEAT, THE MEATRIX, AND PETER SINGER

Imagine if we treated humans the way we treat (some species of) animals? Imagine you heard of a society that cages, tortures, and ultimately slaughters humans and then turns their dead bodies into meat for their sandwiches? The question arises: Are we any better than they are, since we do the same to cows, pigs and chickens? What if they didn't eat humans, just dogs and cats. Why is ok to us to eat pigs, but no dogs?

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In 1975, Australian philosopher Peter Singer posed these questions in his seminal work Animal Liberation and it in many ways launched the modern vegetarian movement. 

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And yet, that movement only really took steam when PETA (People For the Ethical Treatment of Animals) began to circulate a movie documenting the horrific reality of conditions inside a factory farm. Perhaps this drastic difference in influence is owing to the fact that a wider segment of the population watches videos than reads philosophy.  But I think there's more to it, and says something both about the intersection of philosophy and film and about the intersection of what philosophers would traditionally refer to as reason (logos) and emotion (pathos) -- perhaps, in the end, we're just more likely to be moved into action by an emotionally packed sensory experience than a calm, cool, rational argument like Singer presents. I know I've been showing this movie and presenting this chapter to hundreds of students throughout my years as a philosophy professor and I've rarely found a student change their diet as a result of Singer's arguments, yet I've seen many do so after watching this short PETA movie.