The Last Word

100. There must be something wrong with a philosophy that has so many objections to it.

The validity and quality of objections are the significant fac-tors. Without those, quantity has little merit.

Professor Emeritus Michael Allen Fox records that ‘the greatest philosophies of the past have been those that have sparked the greatest controversy. St. Thomas Aquinas alone spent much of his life writing Summa Theologiae, which contained hundreds of objections to Christian thought and his replies. René Descartes published a whole book of objections and replies to his Meditations on First Philosophy probably, with Plato’s Republic, the most widely read and studied text in Western philosophy.’*

There’s more merit in objections to vegetarians than to vegetarianism. We often fail in our standards and fail to adequately support and defend the unfortunate species that need protection. Who are more deserving of condemnation: those who are well aware of cruelty in the animal industries and refrain from consuming animal products but do little else to ease animal suffering, or those who eat meat but are unaware of the suffering they’re causing?

There’s something wrong with the philosophers, not the philosophy.

* Deep Vegetarianism