Introduction
Eating food is necessary for our survival, but unlike various other things we need to do to survive – sleeping and breathing – eating can provide great pleasure. Maybe alone among the activities we need to do to survive, eating can bring us great joy.
Which ethical concerns does gustatory pleasure raise? There are the normal questions about pleasure: Is it a good? An intrinsic good? The only intrinsic good? Ought it be maximized? Are there any ethical concerns raised peculiarly by gustatory pleasure? Are there any ethical concerns especially well raised by gustatory pleasure?
This is hard to say. In our everyday lives, food is complicated because it functions at so many levels of experience, or as philosopher David Kaplan argues, “food is vexing.” In fact, Kaplan argues that the difficulty of analytically containing food explains a general philosophical neglect: “the subject quickly becomes...
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Trubek, A., Doggett, T. (2013). Gustatory Pleasure and Food. In: Thompson, P., Kaplan, D. (eds) Encyclopedia of Food and Agricultural Ethics. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-6167-4_19-2
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