SK

I'm working on another long piece similar to the Uber essay, this time on the ethics of eating meat and our evolving attitudes on the subject. It's something that I often try to not think about too hard, which is maybe the same attitude that society in general takes on. If you think too hard about anything, really, you can ruin it for yourself. All the more so when the subject in question is the taking of lives of animals so in order to eat their bodies.

In thinking about all this, I was reminded of an episode of Philosophy Bites that was released almost exactly five years ago. Philosophy Bites is a cool little podcast featuring interviews with top philosophers about their work and the big ideas that they grapple with. The episode in question featured Jeff McMahan, currently the White's Professor of Moral Philosophy at Oxford, but back then he was at Rutgers. I had encountered his work before in some of my courses and found his writing quite compelling, but the essays that I had read were mostly about abortion and other bioethical issues. Now, he was being questioned about his views on Vegetarianism.

He laid out his argument for not eating meat like this:

The suffering of animals is morally significant.
The pleasure of animals is morally significant.
Whatever goods we derive from eating meat are negligible compared to the harms caused to the animals from which the meat is derived.
We shouldn't eat meat.

A few things should be noted. First, the fact that animal suffering matters is obvious and clearly makes factory farming and the conditions that go with it morally reprehensible. Second, this is not an absolute argument against eating meat. If eating meat is necessary, really necessary, to your survival, then the balance of harms and benefits would shift and you could justify killing an animal. Likewise, if you accidentally hit a deer with your car, rather than wasting the meat you could eat it with a clear conscience.

I found McMahan's argument convincing when I first heard it. So convincing, in fact, that I became a vegan... For a week. After that, I tried to reason my way out of it. "My meat consumption doesn't make a difference," was the main mode of argument. "The meat in the grocery store is going to go to waste if I don't buy it. It'll be thrown out." Probably not true. And though I'm just one person, the collective effect of many people going meatless would be noticed, and to get people to convert you have to do it yourself. But more importantly, I also decided that the pleasure of animals probably really wasn't all that important. I started eating meat again, and I stopped worrying about it.

Recently, I've started to become more food conscious again. I'm turned off by the idea of factory farms, and I don't buy meat products from stores likely to be supplied by them. Sad meat tastes bad. And now I'm left with that other side of the argument. How important are the good experiences that animals have? Even if the meat you eat doesn't come from an animal that led a pained existence, is it ok to kill them? Or do the future good experiences that that animal could have outweigh your right to a meat based meal? It seems chauvinistic to assume that the fleeting pleasure of eating meat can be more valuable than a few good years of life on the farm.

It seems like more and more of my friends are becoming either vegetarians or vegans. I've started to flirt with the idea again, but a part of me is still not entirely convinced. That being said, as time goes on, I can see my meat consumption very gradually falling. Maybe one day I'll get there, or perhaps there's a happy middle ground to be found, like eating weird offcuts and things that would otherwise be thrown out. I do love a good blood cake.