Consent doesn't automatically make an act ethical

The book's title scenario imagines a pig genetically engineered to actively want to be eaten, seemingly resolving the standard vegetarian objection to eating animals by removing the element of suffering or exploitation. Yet the scenario is designed to make readers uneasy anyway, exposing the intuition that something can be wrong about an act independent of whether the affected party consents to or even desires it.

Baggini uses this to probe whether ethical judgments about actions like eating animals rest purely on consent and suffering, or whether there's a deeper discomfort about treating a being as a means to consumption regardless of its preferences. The unease many readers feel even when consent is stipulated suggests our moral reasoning runs on more than one track simultaneously.

Takeaway: consent resolves some ethical objections but not all of them — some intuitions about dignity or use persist even when the usual harms have been engineered away.