Tell Me the Difference Between Bestiality and Eating Animals

One is seen as horrific, the other is seen as fine. But why?

Virtually everyone in our society eats meat. Most people will, over the course of their life, eat vast numbers of animals — most of whom were treated horrifically in factory farms.

Very few people in our society have sex with animals. Those that do are seen as weird, sick, perverted, psychopathic, and disgusting. Now, I agree that bestiality is more disgusting than eating animals — at least, to my sensibilities. But how disgusting other people find some action doesn’t have anything to do with how immoral that action is. I’d find it disgusting to watch two blobfish have sex — or any number of blobfish do anything for that matter — but blobfish having sex is clearly not immoral.

So why is bestiality immoral but eating animals fine? It’s wrong to have sex with children — but it’s also wrong to chop up children to make hamburgers; especially if you set up an industry that horrifically mistreats them. It seems that if a being matters enough for it to be wrong to have sex with it without consent, then so too would it matter enough for it to be wrong to viciously torture and murder it in a factory farm.

Indeed, eating meat is surely worse for the animals than bestiality. Animals in factory farms are constantly subject to horrific torture — animals subject to bestiality are caused to suffer only rarely. Thus, eating meat harms the victim more than bestiality. Generally, between two acts, if one harms the victim more, it’s worse. It’s bad to steal 100,000 dollars, but it’s worse to steal 500,000 dollars — because that harms the victim more, and it’s even more wrong to kill someone.

One might claim that the benefits of eating meat are greater. This is not clear. No doubt having sex with animals is very pleasurable for those that enjoy that kind of stuff. But we can avoid this argument with the following hypothetical.

Imagine that every time a person engaged in bestial acts, it stimulated their taste buds, so that their mouth tasted like meat, and they were nourished. Imagine that, for example, animal semen, consumed during sex, tasted like meat and had similar nutritional benefits. Thus, the benefits would be greater from bestiality than from eating meat. Yet bestiality still seems wrong in this case.

To accept this judgment while still holding that bestiality is worse, one would have to deny the following plausible principle.

If one action causes more harm and produces less benefits then another, it’s worse than the other action.

After all, the person who denies that eating meat and bestiality are morally equivalent would think that, in the scenario where the person consumes meaty tasting animal semen, this action is worse than eating meat, even though the animal is harmed less and the person who carries out the action is made better off than they’d have been if they’d eaten meat.

Maybe one thinks that the difference between the two is that one is natural and the other is not. But this is clearly wrong. Lots of natural things are bad, like getting smallpox and dying, and lots of unnatural things are good, like reading books — books come from stores, not trees.

Maybe the difference is the following: eating meat may cause more harm to the victim, but bestiality makes a person more immoral. Thus, bestiality is worse because of what it reflects about a person’s character — and indeed, bestiality makes a person’s character actively worse.

But this account is inadequate. For one, it leaves far too much to empirical questions. Let’s imagine we had solid empirical evidence that bestiality made a person more moral — when people were having sex with animals, they became more virtuous for some reason. Or, even if it didn’t make them better, it could be that it didn’t make them more immoral. If this was so, bestiality would still be immoral. Thus, the account that says that bestiality is worse because it has a more negative affect on the character of the person doing it is wrong.

Additionally, this is a clearly incorrect account of the badness of bestiality. Imagine that a person committed bestial acts while sleepwalking, such that they never found out about it and it didn’t affect their character. However, while they were carrying out the bestial acts, the animal was screaming in pain, as it was being sexually assaulted. Surely that would still be bad. Thus, the wrongness of bestiality doesn’t stem from its negative impacts on the person carrying out the bestial acts — a lot of it comes from the harm to the animal.

Maybe one thinks that, while bestiality isn’t wrong because it makes people morally worse, it’s instead wrong because the type of people who do it are generally bad people. Thus, bestiality’s wrongness doesn’t come from what it makes people do, but instead what it signals about the person who does it.

However, this account also does not succeed. For one, it hinges on empirical topics. Suppose that it turned out that most people who practiced bestiality were upstanding people. Would that then make bestiality permissible?

Additionally, the fact that some action is primarily taken by immoral people doesn’t make it immoral. Breathing while in prison for child rape is almost exclusively done by immoral people, but it is not itself immoral. In Harry Potter, getting a death eater tattoo isn’t itself immoral, but nearly all who do it are immoral.

Maybe the difference is that in the case of bestiality, you’re the one who harmed the animal, while, in the case of eating meat, you paid someone else to harm the animal. But this doesn’t seem right — paying someone else to have sex with your dog while you dog is trying to get away still seems immoral.

So what’s the difference? If it’s wrong to rape an animal, why would it be okay to torture and murder it?