The Pleasure Argument

At Feministe, Jill makes the pleasure argument for eating meat:

"A lot of people also (and this is my personal reason) view food as a fundamental pleasure, and see it as something to be experimented with and shared and tried and tasted in all of its forms. The idea of removing a major source of food from the list of options isn’t going to fly if you believe that food is for something more than just to fill you up. But that pleasure-centered view of food — that it’s not just fuel, but also something that should nourish your body well and should be variable and exciting..." (emphasis mine)

The defense of a behavior based on its pleasure only works if it is a harmless behavior. If your pleasure causes no harm, then it is very easy to defend it. But if the behavior you take pleasure in does cause harm, then it is extremely difficult to defend that behavior on the grounds of pleasure itself. For example, if I were to argue that I view kicking elderly people in the shins as a fundamental pleasure, and see it as something to be experimented with and shared and tried in all of its forms, you would rightly recognize that regardless of how much pleasure I might get from kicking elderly people in the shins, I would be wrong to do it because of the harm it causes.

So to defend eating meat on the grounds that food is supposed to be pleasurable is to implicitly claim that your individual pleasure is more important than the life and suffering of an animal.