Cognitive dissonance is a social issue.
While we’re talking about dissonance and eating dogs and whatnot …
This arbitrariness, this apparent lack of coherence in our attitudes and behavior toward animals, perhaps reflects a fundamental conflict of interests. Viewing animals as unconscious, Cartesian automata places them in the same morally neutral space as objects or inanimate entities that can be used or abused with virtual impunity. But if we regard animals as unfeeling and uncaring objects, then their apparent interest in us—their affection and companionship—must be just an illusion, an epiphenomenon that has no real social or emotional value. Conversely, if we truly regard animals as equivalent to friends and family, we cannot expect to be able to exploit them harmfully without experiencing moral anxiety in the process.
We are, in effect, trapped between the proverbial rock and a hard place. If we place animals beyond the pale of moral consideration, we can harvest their economic and instrumental benefits with a clear conscience, but we cannot simultaneously claim that these animals are members of our families, the subjects of profound emotional attachments, or sentient and cognitively sophisticated beings worthy of special treatment and protection. So, our solution to this dilemma seems to be to compartmentalize—to allocate our moral obligations to some animals but not others—and to invent elaborate belief systems and “just-so stories” to explain why animals do not actually matter even when our gut instincts, our moral intuitions, tell us that they do. These are, of course, precisely the same techniques that people have used throughout history to justify the abuse and persecution of other humans (Bandura, 1999), and that, more then anything else, is why animals are a social issue.
J A Serpell, “Having our dogs and eating them too: Why animals are a social issue,” Journal of Social Issues 65, no. 3 (2009): 633-644. can also be found here.
