section_path: Cultural aspects/Ethical issues
section_name: Ethical issues
paragraph_text: Ethical issues
  
  Ethical issues regarding the consumption of meat include objecting to the act of killing animals or to the agricultural practices used in meat production. Reasons for objecting to killing animals for consumption may include animal rights, environmental ethics, or an aversion to inflicting pain or harm on sentient animals. Some people, while not vegetarians, refuse to eat the flesh of certain animals for cultural or religious reasons.
  
  The founders of Western philosophy disagreed about the ethics of eating meat. Plato 's Republic has Socrates describe the ideal state as vegetarian. Pythagoras believed that humans and animals were equal and therefore disapproved of meat consumption, as did Plutarch, whereas Zeno and Epicurus were vegetarian but allowed meat-eating in their philosophy. Conversely, Aristotle 's Politics assert that animals, as inferior beings, exist to serve humans, including as food. Augustine drew on Aristotle to argue that the universe's natural hierarchy allows humans to eat animals, and animals to eat plants. Enlightenment philosophers were likewise divided. Descartes wrote that animals were merely animated machines, while Kant considered them inferior beings for lack of discernment: means rather than ends. But Voltaire and Rousseau disagreed; Rousseau argued that meat-eating is a social rather than a natural act, because children are not interested in meat.
  
  Later philosophers examined the changing practices of eating meat in the modern age as part of a process of detachment from animals as living beings. Norbert Elias, for instance, noted that in medieval times cooked animals were brought to the table whole, but that since the Renaissance only the edible parts are served, which are no longer recognizably part of an animal. Modern eaters, according to Noëlie Vialles, demand an " ellipsis " between meat and dead animals; for instance, calves' eyes are no longer considered a delicacy as in the Middle Ages, but provoke disgust. Fernand Braudel wrote that since the European diet of the 15th and 16th century was particularly heavy in meat, European colonialism helped export meat-eating across the globe, as colonized peoples took up the culinary habits of their colonizers, which they associated with wealth and power.