Let me first start off by saying how much I love eating meat. If I could only eat steak, bacon, goat and salmon for the rest of my life I would die a happy man, although I guess I’d probably die a lot sooner if I committed to that diet. For breakfast today I had three eggs, five strips of bacon with some toast and last night all I had for dinner had two salmon steaks, nothing else. Meat is tasty, meat makes me happy, meat smells good and sadly, I think eating meat is immoral. I’ve been chewing on this idea for a while now, (huur huur, get it?) so earlier this week I decided to shared my thoughts on the topic with Facebook and it turned into an interesting debate, and I’d like to address some of the points people made after I clarify my position.
My basic argument is that to knowingly causing harm to beings that can perceive harm is not morally permissible if it can be avoided. I’m not trying to argue that morality is completely based on personal perception of harm or even that my argument above can be universally applied in all matters of morality, but it in simple day to day life I think one ought to cause as little harm as possible. Under this logic its still ok to eat meat if you’re starving and have nothing else to eat, its still ok to kill someone who’s going to kill you, its still ok to run over animals on the road if they get in your way and you can’t swerve to avoid them but its not ok to eat cows if you could eat something else instead and be just as healthy.
If I could rephrase something I heard in a podcast I think I might be better able to make my point here. Most people don’t feel bad for kicking a stone while walking down the street, the rock doesn’t feel any pain and moving it doesn’t rob it of its rights or its interests. You can do whatever you want to a rock and feel ok about it because a rock isn't alive in any measurable way. Now, consider how people treat insects. If you’re walking along the street you’ll eventually come across some type of insect in search of food. Some people might step on the bug out of an overzealous sense of self protection but I think most people would try to avoid the bug if it were easy enough to do so. If someone was to crush a bug by accident the event would most likely not cause them too much distress because most of us don’t grant insects a very high moral status apart from what they do as a collective at the base level of our ecosystem. (Meaning swatting a mosquito on your arm is ok, spraying DDT in a swap to annihilate the local mosquito population is not ok) Generally speaking though, killing an insect in its own habitat doesn’t cause us much distress because we don’t think of them as beings with autonomy or moral status- we think of them as mindless lower beings driven purely my instinct without awareness of their own personal interests.
Now compare all this to how we treat dogs. Most people agree kicking a rock is fine, stepping on an ant is fine too but think of the things most people would do to avoid hurting a dog while walking on the street. Most of us recognize that dogs have some moral status and personal interests. If you accept that dogs have interests (eating, smelling dog buts, not being harmed, not being afraid,) then you’ll probably do what you can reasonably do to protect the interests of a dog, in this case this mans not stepping on them as you walk along the street. In many societies we’ve even granted some animals legal rights.
My biggest problem is that the way we (as humans) treat animals is very inconsistent. We have selectively bread some to be cute and fluffy and we’ve selectively bread others to become obese parodies of their natural selves. While all of this was 100% necessary in the past, (I could never argue that humans could have become what we are now without the use of animals,) I feel like its time we start to week our selves off our dependance on the consumption of meat. The way we arbitrarily say “you can eat this animal, but you can’t harm this one” makes very little sense to me. Dogs have interests that we protect but so do cows and pigs and to me there is no moral difference between eating a dog and eating a pig.
But Matthew! Won’t that logic lead you into an infinite regression? Sure animals are conscious on some level and are interested in self preservation, but you could also argue that plans unknowingly are interested in self preservation because some plants are toxic and have thorns.
Well, no, I don’t think so at least. Plants evolved fruits because it was beneficial for them to have their seeds spread out over longer distances via the poop-chute express. Eating things with seeds in them was how the plant became so popular in the first place, so case closed on infinite regression.
Early humans were able to evolve larger brains because of the meat that they were able to scavenge from other animals kills. Not eating meat is un-natural.
I feel like my logic still prevails here. If you’re starving an all you have to eat is meat then thats morally acceptable, but even if I was to accept this argument I’d be giving my self license to club some douche-bag in the head with a buffalo bone and rape his girlfriend. Simply because we survived in the past in a certain way doesn’t mean its acceptable to live that way now.
If we could synthesize meat in a lab with stem cells people could ethically eat meat.
I agree. Growing meat in a lab looks very promising to me, I’d be first in line to try that out.
This next comment was cut and pasted directly from the comments to my Facebook post
"Since when was utilizing natural power hierarchies to satisfy biological needs immoral? I'm not saying we should water-board our beef, but this growing human guilt for causing death in abundant animal species is childish innocence. Vegetarianism is not globally sustainable, it introduces unnecessary complexity into nutrition and it fails to consider the collateral effects on animal populations caused by human civilization (ie Vegetarianism doesn't stop roadkill, habitat destruction). Vegetarianism based on moral premises is just a comfort blanket for the guilty-privileged."
I think it became immoral when we had the effective means to sustain ourselves by other means and I don’t think its childish to avoid death if it can be easily avoided. I would argue that vegetarianism is vastly more sustainable too, consider how much food a cow is fed before its brought to market, sure we don’t want to eat grass and corn all day but the land that’s used to graise those animals could be used in other forms of food production and then fed directly to people. Furthermore, asserting that its our right to eat animals simply because it is natural for us to do so seems again to be very inconsistent. It is ‘natural’ to grow beards, never cut our hair, have vast quantities of un protected sex, smell like ass and die by the times we’re 30-40 years old but we’ve evolved past these things. We suppress many parts of our inborn nature because its inconvenient in modern society, so why not extend or self written modern nature to protect animals as well?
But then, theres this.
I feel you have greatly overlooked your argument on infinite regression. I see the logic in fruiting plants spreading their seed through feces, but this doesn't apply to humans in a modern sense with our waste systems. It also fails to consider other plant life. This argument doesn't apply to root vegetables or the utilization of plants as a building resource. I assume your moral structure doesn't just cover what we eat, and is really looking at how we treat other forms of life.
ReplyDeleteI also think that this moral perspective doesn't consider the life that we give these domesticated animals. We have used our superior position in the food chain to protect animals like cows, pigs and chickens from the ever present danger of the lurking predator. We've removed the uncertainty of their next meal by providing them with healthy, nourishing food. It is in our best interest after all. We give them a life that is considerably easier than anything they would face in the natural world and all we ask of them is to do what all life eventually does. Die. Sure we choose when they die, but I can guarantee that its well before disease and old age sets in. We give them a privileged life, to turn to vegetarianism as a species would not only put these domesticated companions out into the cold, it would almost certainly spell the end of the individual species.
I can concede that there is a lack of uniformity in the way that animals are treated in agriculture. I know that some suffer in humane deaths and some are treated poorly throughout their life. This isn't supporting the argument that we should raise them for food, it just supports the argument that we need better oversight and that we need to create a culture of compassion around the animals that we eat.