Can Eating Animal Flesh Ever Be Ethical?

William Quan Judge · Down to Earth Series · 13 pages

The position taken is more demanding than the title suggests, and it cuts against the easy answer in both directions. Living the life prescribed by Theosophy, the file argues, entails much more than simply abstaining from meat and wine: it requires wholly unselfish thoughts and deeds, untiring devotion to the welfare of humanity, and unutterable aspiration to the Divine Self within. Diet alone settles nothing.

Within that frame the harder questions are put rather than dodged. Whether the epicure who tickles his palate with meats not needed for sustenance is in the same league as the woman who wears birds' feathers. How and where a student is to find the Path, and know it when he does, if many lives are required to test the doctrines. And whether a purely vegetable diet is indispensable to a high and serious life at all — to which the answer given is that the kingdom of heaven is not gained by abstaining from meat on Fridays or any other day. Blake's Little lamb, who made thee? stands as the epigraph, which sets the tone: the file is a caution against mistaking a rule for a virtue, not an argument for eating animals.

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