Berl Munch Tierarztl Wochenschr. 2001 Jul-Aug; 114(7-8): 283-9.

[The vegetarian appeal and killing animals. An ethical challenge]

Luy J, Hildebrandt G, von Mickwitz G.

Institut für Lebensmittelhygiene der Freien Universität Berlin.

The demand for renunciation of killing animals has already been discussed by mankind since ancient times. Many arguments for and against this demand have accumulated in the meantime. The reproaches of the vegetarians repeatedly forced the ones who eat meat to justify their diet. Today most of these historical justifications however have to be rejected because of lacking plausibility. Many of the vegetarian arguments on the other hand must be rejected for similar reasons as well. Remaining as morally convincing is the demand for doing the killing absolutely painless and without frightening the animals, which was already formulated for example by Kant and Schopenhauer. Arguments which consider this way of killing as still immoral belong in a broad sense to the "anthropocentric" animal ethics. They do not belong to what is called in Germany "pathocentric" animal ethics, because an animal that is killed without being frightened or tortured, has not suffered, for it hasn't consciously realized anything like danger or harm. We do even argue that these animals are not harmed at all, because it seems senseless to talk about harm without negative conscious phenomena. To push ahead a ban on animal slaughter for moral reasons could be itself morally wrong because it would disturb indirectly many people's conscious well-being without being justified by protecting an animal's conscious well-being. It is however possible to derive from a general duty not to make animals suffer (pathocentric animal ethics) a duty to boycott food of animal origin if these animals had to suffer during their lives.