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A Work of Moral Philosophy

On the Ethics of Killing: The Moral Math of Eating

Blake Binford

From the Manuscript

We live behind a glass wall that provides a distorted view of the natural world. We observe nature through windshields, through living room windows, through the high-definition lenses of nature documentaries. We project a moral order onto the landscape that exists only in our minds. We tell ourselves that we have evolved past the brutality of the food chain, that we are observers of the wild rather than participants in it.

This is a delusion.

The delusion is not that we love nature; it is that we believe we can exist outside of it. Life is expensive. And the currency is death.

On The Ethics of Killing
The Moral Math of Eating Blake Binford

We have mistaken distance for virtue.

"The question is not whether something dies so you can live. It always does. The question is whether you know it, and what you do with that knowledge."
From Chapter One
I.

Eating requires death. No exceptions.

Every calorie is borrowed from a living system. The question is never whether death occurred, only how much, and who is accountable for it.

II.

Modern life hides this behind distance.

The combine harvester, the processing plant, the shrink-wrapped package. Outsourced killing is invisible. Invisible does not mean absent.

III.

Moral responsibility follows the act, not the proximity.

The non-hunter does not harm nothing. The non-hunter outsources the violence. Distance is a logistical fact, not an ethical one.

IV.

The honest question is how, not whether.

Given that eating kills, the only defensible ethics is one that accounts for it honestly and asks how to do it with the least suffering and the most accountability.

Not a polemic. A reckoning.

Hunters and Outdoorsmen

You already do what this book defends, but you have never had a philosophical vocabulary for why. You will after this.

Serious Omnivores

You have felt the unease without the framework. This book names what you have already sensed and gives you something to do with it.

Philosophical Readers

Structured like Dawkins, grounded in ecology. Ten chapters, one argument, no intellectual shortcuts.

Three phases. One argument.

Phase I: The Definition — Chapters 1 through 3

Defining the delusion of modern innocence.

Chapter 1

The Glass Wall

Chapter 2

The Thermodynamics of Guilt

Chapter 3

The Voyeur and the Participant

Phase II: The Accounting — Chapters 4 through 7

Doing the math honestly.

Chapter 4

The Honest Exchange

Chapter 5

What the Vegetarian Gets Right

Chapter 6

The Scale Problem

Chapter 7

The Paradox of the Gun

Phase III: The Resolution — Chapters 8 through 10

How to live honestly with this.

Chapter 8

The Available Honest Options

Chapter 9

The Edges of the Argument

Chapter 10

The Honest Eater

B

Blake Binford

Writer · Hunter · Texan

Grew up on a cattle ranch. Still pays attention.

Blake Binford is a writer and hunter based in League City, Texas. He grew up on a cattle ranch, and has spent a lifetime in the marshes and Piney Woods of the Gulf Coast, places where the relationship between life, death, and eating is impossible to ignore.

On the Ethics of Killing is his first book. It is not a polemic against veganism, nor a defense of hunting. It is a philosophical examination of a question most people work very hard not to ask: what does it actually cost to keep you alive, and are you honest about that?

For readers of Steven Rinella, Michael Pollan, and Tovar Cerulli.

blakebinford.com
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