The Ethics of Eating Octopus and Rationalization
My thinking on the ethics of eating animals has changed a lot over the years. It’s difficult to come to consistent ethical standards regarding how we treat animals. However, one thing that’s always been clear to me is that it was wrong to kill highly intelligent animals such as great apes, whales, dolphins, and porpoises, elephants, crows, and octopuses. For that reason I’ve never been comfortable eating octopus and I’ve dissuaded my friends from eating them as well.
However, when I wrote about the curious phenomenon of octopuses starving themselves to death after giving birth, I was reminded of the fact that octopuses are cannibalistic. This made me think, if octopuses eat themselves, why should I be so against eating them?
This made me think of a passage in the Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin. If you’ve studied Benjamin Franklin, you’re probably aware that in his youth he became a vegetarian. However, you might not know that he eventually resumed an omnivorous diet. He described his return to meat-eating in this way:
I believe I have omitted mentioning that, in my first voyage from Boston, being becalm’d off Block Island, our people set about catching cod, and hauled up a great many. Hitherto I had stuck to my resolution of not eating animal food, and on this occasion I consider’d, with my master Tryon, the taking every fish as a kind of unprovoked murder, since none of them had, or ever could do us any injury that might justify the slaughter. All this seemed very reasonable. But I had formerly been a great lover of fish, and, when this came hot out of the frying-pan, it smelt admirably well. I balanc’d some time between principle and inclination, till I recollected that, when the fish were opened, I saw smaller fish taken out of their stomachs; then thought I, “If you eat one another, I don’t see why we mayn’t eat you.” So I din’d upon cod very heartily, and continued to eat with other people, returning only now and then occasionally to a vegetable diet. So convenient a thing is it to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find or make a reason for everything one has a mind to do.
This is a clever observation of human nature and how it can be tempting to do what you know (or at least think) is wrong by coming up with some rationalization. You can come up with a rational sounding argument for just about anything, whether or not it really is rational upon further scrutiny. Knowing this can be humbling.
Regarding eating octopus, even if octopuses eat each other, does that justify eating them? After all, humans do terrible things to each other and one would hardly say that justifies doing terrible things to them. But in the case of humans that’s because these are crimes committed by individual humans (or groups of individual humans) against others, and an individual human doing something terrible should not indict the entire species. To say it does is to use the same logic as any bigot who thinks a crime or atrocity done by one member of a group justifies terrible treatment of the entire group. However, can this framework of individual rights and responsibilities really be applied to octopuses, or any other species for that matter? As intelligent as they are, octopuses don’t show the same level of individuality as humans do. But is that just how it appears because of our own cognitive biases?
I don’t have the answers to these questions, but I’m interested in your thoughts. Until then, I’ll play it safe and continue to refrain from eating octopus.
