Roger Scruton's Conservative Defense of Meat Eating
What it is
Roger Scruton (1944–2020), the British conservative philosopher, offered one of the most philosophically serious and culturally distinct defenses of meat eating in recent decades — not a dismissal of animal welfare concerns but a substantive alternative to both the animal rights framework and the industrial indifference that characterizes conventional meat production. Scruton's position, developed in his book Animal Rights and Wrongs (2000) and numerous essays, argues that we have genuine obligations to the animals we eat, but that these obligations are best understood through the framework of virtue and stewardship rather than through the framework of rights.
Cultural significance
Scruton's position is important because it provides a philosophically serious framework for the rejection of factory farming that does not require accepting the full animal rights or utilitarian animal liberation position. It allows someone to say: I believe we have real obligations to the animals we eat, I believe industrial farming violates those obligations, and I therefore seek out and pay for humanely raised animal products — without concluding that the killing of animals for food is categorically wrong.
This is, broadly, the position of Michael Pollan, of many advocates of artisan and small-farm meat, and of the "good meat" movement. Scruton gives it explicit philosophical grounding.
The responses
Critics from the animal liberation direction argue that Scruton's position is ultimately a sophisticated rationalization for what is convenient: that we happen to like eating animals, and we construct a philosophical framework that permits it while criticizing only the most egregious forms of its production. Singer's response to Scruton might be: even on Scruton's own terms — if we genuinely care about the animal and its welfare — why should that care include ending its life for our pleasure when plant-based alternatives are available?
Ethical dimensions
Scruton's central argument rests on several claims:
1. Rights require reciprocity: Rights are claims that arise within moral communities constituted by mutual obligation. Only beings capable of bearing duties as well as rights can be genuine members of the moral community in which rights make sense. Animals cannot bear moral duties — they cannot be held responsible for their actions in the way that humans can — and therefore cannot be genuine rights-bearers. This is not a denial that animals matter; it is a denial that the concept of "rights" is the right framework for understanding how they matter.
2. The case for animal welfare from virtue: We have obligations to animals, but these obligations are grounded in human character rather than animal rights. A person of good character treats animals with kindness, does not inflict unnecessary suffering, and respects the life of the creature under their care. These are obligations of virtue — what it means to be a good person — not obligations of justice derived from the animal's rights.
3. The proper human-animal relationship: Scruton argued that the traditional relationship between farmers and their animals — the relationship of stewardship, care, and honest use — is not ethically inferior to the position of the urban vegan who has no relationship with animals at all. On Scruton's view, the farmer who raises pigs humanely, cares for them throughout their lives, and kills them quickly and without cruelty is engaged in a relationship of genuine ethical seriousness that the vegan who has simply removed himself from all contact with animal life has not achieved. The question is not whether to use animals but whether to do so with proper care and respect.
4. The critique of industrial farming: Scruton was not a defender of factory farming. He was explicit that the conditions in industrial animal agriculture violate the obligations of stewardship and care that properly govern the human-animal relationship. His defense of meat eating was specifically a defense of traditional, small-scale, husbandry-based animal farming — the kind of farming that has characterized rural life for most of human history.
The future
Scruton's framework has influenced the conservative and traditionalist wing of food ethics, and is reflected in the growing movement for heritage breed farming, small-scale husbandry, and "nose to tail" eating as ethical practices. Whether this tradition can survive the economic pressures toward industrial production — the forces that have already decimated small-scale farming in most wealthy countries — is an open question.
Reference notes
Cross-link to: Michael Pollan and Ethical Omnivory, Heritage Breed Farming, Tom Regan and Animal Rights, Peter Singer and Animal Liberation, Traditional Farming Ethics. Tags: Philosophy > Conservative, Ethics > Virtue Ethics.
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