| Abstract: | The paper compares the defence of animals in two texts which promote a vegetable diet: in Plutarch’s essay from Moralia, On the Eating of Flesh, and Shelley’s essay A Vindication of Natural Diet. The paper focuses on the conceptualisation of animals and consideration of their moral status in both texts and on Shelley’s treatment of Plutarch’s ethical argument. Anthropocentric conceptions of animals and their moral status, based on the logic that all and only human beings deserve to be treated on the principles of moral consideration because all and only human beings possess reason, linguistic intelligence and self-awareness, have their roots in Aristotle and in particular in Stoic thought. The canonical Stoic position is based on the cosmological principle, by which each being has a specific place in the scheme of the cosmos, whereby this proper place is determined by the capacities of the being; the highest place belongs to those beings who are capable of rational contemplation. The implication of this position is the categorical denial of the duty of justice toward animals, and the ultimate implication is the denial of any direct duties toward animals: animals as fundamentally inferior to rational beings have only instrumental value in the cosmic scheme of things and exist only for the benefit of rational beings. Plutarch’s texts on animals in his early work (Whether Land or Sea Animals Are Cleverer, Beasts Are Rational, On the Eating of Flesh) represent the first and most spirited defence of the capacities and moral status of animals, directed against the Stoic position. In contrast to the Stoics, Plutarch argues that animals have inherent value, and ultimately calls for a justice relationship between human beings and animals on the basis of their experiental capacities. Plutarch defends the view that animals have a fundamental interest to live on the basis of recognising animal perceptual awareness. He advocates the moral equality of human and animal sentient experience and rejects the view that animals’ fundamental interest is not to suffer as inadequate. The essay A Vindication of Natural Diet by Percy B. Shelley, while primarily based on Plutarch’s treatise, comes to conclusions supporting the lifestyle argument with emerging elements of liberal individualism. Shelley’s argumentation is not built on the conception of justice like Plutarch’s, but on the conceptions of happiness, satisfaction and enjoyment of the individual. Plutarch’s ethical argument is replaced by the so-called ‘lifestyle’ argument, which is completely in accordance with the self-centred and self-oriented Romantic as a self-sufficient subject in the early 19th century. In terms of consideration of animals and their moral status, it is particularly important that Shelley in this essay does not actually argue for animals, but rather for speciesism, that is, he builds his argumentation on the hierarchisation in which humans hold the top position. |
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