Why do human beings seem to constantly betray their moral commitment to treat other living beings with compassion? We embrace compassion as a moral virtue rooted in the recognition of our common humanity and interdependence with other species. Compassion extends from human species to all living beings as long as we understand them as worthy of moral consideration, i.e., as deserving our moral interest to pursue a decent quality of life. More precisely, compassion arises from the experience of vulnerability, as shared by our fellow humans and other animals, and it is associated with the concern for flourishing according to the type of dignity relevant to each species. Hence, on the basis of the interrelated and interdependent correlations between humans and animals within the Earth’s ecosystems, embracing compassion means acknowledging interspecies co-vulnerability and co-flourishing, encouraging creaturely co-habitation on long term scales.

We normally agree that we are bound to show compassion towards humans and animals in so far as we are capable to recognize suffering in other living beings and to act in order to relieve it or to avoid similar future harms as impacting one’s capacities. In considering compassion in the context of the human-animal relationship, there seem to be several degrees of compassionate response to animals’ distress. These variations can be explained with reference to the experience of the similarities and differences between human beings as embodied beings and other animals as bodily beings with different shapes and sizes. Compassion is framed, then, in territories of human-animal coexistence marked by relationships of proximity and distance, resemblance and diversity.

However, in our ordinary practices, we often show inconsistency in our relations with other living beings. In other words, we fail to do what we believe we should not in light of our moral commitments. Specifically, there are contexts in which compassion towards animals is obscured by mechanisms of inattention, exposing us to the risk of moral failures. Moral feelings ranging from passive unnoticing the circumstances of our actions directed towards animals or unmotivated lack of focus on animals’ suffering, to more active strategies of willful ignorance and self-deception, disempower the moral sense of our compassionate engagement with other living beings. Without denying the multitude of situations marked by the paradoxical tension between compassion and obliviousness, in this lecture my attention will be focused on the case of meat-eating. The moral disengagement between compassionate ideals and behavioral inconsistency in meat-consuming choices does not only touch on the issue of animal sentience and suffering. Rather, given that the production of meat requires the use of large quantities of water, in dealing with the problem of eating meat we are necessarily confronted with the problem of the overuse and depletion of water resources as having ethical, health, and environmental implications.