Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 February 2014
Eating meat appeals, but the cost is measured in millions of slaughtered animals. This has convinced many that vegetarianism is morally superior to a carnivorous diet. Increasingly, those who take pleasure in consuming animals find it a guilty pleasure. Are they correct? That depends on the magnitude of harm done to food animals but also on what sort of a good, if any, meat eating affords people. This essay aims to estimate both variables and concludes that standard arguments for moral vegetarianism are significantly misplaced. That is because the contribution of meat eating to lives of excellence is underestimated and overall harms to animals consequent on practices of meat eating are overestimated. The answer to the question posed in the title is, therefore, “No.”
Versions of this essay were presented to numerous audiences, including audiences at the University of Arizona, Australian National University, University of Connecticut, National University of Singapore. Each occasion afforded me vigorous discussion and meaty ideas—pardon the expression—to chew on. An anonymous (vegetarian) referee for this journal provided me a report that was a full-fledged response article in its own right. Here I have been able only to touch lightly on some of the points raised therein; I hope eventually to see that report in print so I can respond with the full attention it merits. Among the dozens, if not hundreds, of people who have talked with me about the ethics of eating meat, I owe special debts to Nicole Bailey, Rob Bass, Linda Gosnell, and David Schmidtz. [Editors' note: Michael Gill, who is the author of the accompanying response piece, was the reviewer to whom Lomasky refers here.]
1 The original spur to writing this essay was provided by two students—I'm sorry, but I cannot recall your names—who on separate occasions, told me “I know it's wrong for me to eat meat, but I like it too much to give it up.” Is this something I should have known? Not unless it is true. What follows is an investigation of that proposition.
2 Descartes notoriously denies that nonhuman animals possess states of conscious awareness, including pleasure and pain sensations. Contemporary meat eaters would not do well to base the propriety of their culinary practices on this improbable piece of Cartesian metaphysics.
3 People who hear me sing inquire on occasion, “Have you been tone deaf all your life or is this a recent affliction?” A deficient ability to reap experiential riches from music does not, however, render one unable to appreciate the fact that there are such riches to be drawn. Those who for whatever reason cannot be much bothered with food ought similarly to be able to understand that their condition constitutes a genuine disability, not an epistemically authoritative peak from which to pronounce judgment.
4 In fairness to primitive human beings, to them belongs credit for the single greatest leap forward in the practice of eating: learning to cook their food. Wrangham, Richard in Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human (New York: Basic Books, 2010)Google Scholar argues that cooking afforded homo sapiens an enormous evolutionary advantage over their primate kin. That it also afforded them an enormous culinary advantage may be only an accidental add-on. If so, it is a truly serendipitous one.
5 Turkey is the star performer at most American Thanksgiving dinners and enjoys celebrity status at many English Christmas dinners. Almost never is it prepared with complete success. That has less to do with deficiencies on the part of the cook than the nature of the bird. A roasting regimen adequate to cook the dark meat thoroughly will leave the white meat dry and unappealing. If all that mattered were culinary excellence, then the bird would be cut up and its disparate parts roasted separately. But eating well is not reducible to the sense of taste, and the turkey's mass and solidity convey to the assembled diners a celebration-appropriate sense of security and good fortune. The symbolism helps explain why tradition decrees that non-detached-turkey-parts are brought from the oven to be admired, carved, and then presented to diners.
Vegetarians advocate as substitution for the traditional bird a non-animal-based soy-and-wheat product dubbed tofurkey. On the one hand, it cooks more evenly than does turkey. On the other hand, once cooked it is only marginally worth eating and even less successful as a symbol of plenty.
6 St. Augustine, Confessions, Bk X.
7 On one definition, a carnivore is a creature that subsists entirely or primarily on animals. Strictly speaking, human beings are more precisely characterized as omnivores. But because it would be tedious to speak of “the meat-eating component of an omnivorous human diet,” I shall take the term to refer to all acts of eating animals.
8 “On a question which is the best worth having of two pleasures, or which of two modes of existence is the most grateful to the feelings, apart from its moral attributes and from its consequences, the judgment of those who are qualified by knowledge of both, or, if they differ, that of the majority among them, must be admitted as final.” J.S. Mill, Utilitarianism, Bk 2.
9 See Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics I.4.
10 See, for example, Rosegrant, Market al, “2020 Global Food Outlook: Trends, Alternatives, Choices,” (Washington, DC: International Food Policy Research Institute, 2001) at http://www.ifpri.org/sites/default/files/pubs/pubs/fpr/fpr30.pdfGoogle Scholar. See also, Nierenberg, Danielle, “Meat Production and Consumption Continues to Grow,” (Washington, DC: Worldwatch Institute, 2009) at http://vitalsigns.worldwatch.org/vs-trend/meat-production-and-consumption-continues-growGoogle Scholar.
11 Nor does pro-vegetable mean anti-meat. That is why it is semantically deplorable that so many recent books conveying instructions for the preparation of vegetable dishes contain the word “vegetarian” in their titles. Do these authors really want to convey the idea that the recipes offered are suitable only for those who have voluntarily taken a vow of culinary abnegation?
12 I have, in another context, spoken of the reluctance to envisage the process of meat production as the veal of ignorance.
13 If the God of the New Testament does not exist, does it follow that Augustine's Christian commitment is erroneous? In one respect, certainly yes; it rests on false beliefs. Presumably that falsity casts shadows on correlative practices such as celibacy. Whether a mode of life that crucially rests on subscription to a falsehood is thereby fatally tarnished is a further question. Don Quixote's impossible dream proves, indeed, to be impossible, but does that disvalue all his efforts on its behalf? Perhaps if he had believed more accurately he would have performed less well. And even if Augustine's theological and philosophical arguments are judged to be unsound, don't they possess an intellectual heft that validates his chosen mode of life? These questions about the relationship between truth and value stand in need of further investigation.
14 Of course Augustine's tolerance does not extend to the choice between Christianity and Manichaeism!
15 Singer, Peter's Animal Liberation (NY: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2009)Google Scholar remains the best known and, I believe, most eloquent statement of this case. A hefty bibliography would be required to list the many screeds that have been published over the preceding three decades on behalf of moral vegetarianism. It is beyond the scope of this essay to respond specifically to the various strands of the argument for the moral wrongness of killing animals for food, but if the argument of this section is correct, most are disarmed.
16 A similar comparative appraisal can be conducted with regard to human lives (although presumably it does not include a strong likelihood of being eaten!). Nearly all of us will say that we are net beneficiaries from the circumstance of being born. An ingenious and challenging argument to the contrary is offered by Benatar, David, Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming Into Existence (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008)Google Scholar.
17 For the record, I locate myself among the archaic.
18 Another basis for popularity is one-time gains to current tenants and to the politicians they reward with their votes.
19 The literature on these policies is enormous. Useful and accessible introductions are Finkelstein, Amy, “Static and Dynamic Effects of Health Policy: Evidence from the Vaccine Industry,” The Quarterly Journal of Economics 119, no. 2 (2004): 527–64. Available at http://qje.oxfordjournals.org/content/119/2/527.full.pdfCrossRefGoogle Scholar; Pucella, Ricardo and Weissman, Vicky, “Reasoning about Dynamic Policies” in Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Foundations of Software Science and Computational Structure, ed. Walukiewicz, Igor (Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer, 2004), 453–67. Available at http://www.cs.cornell.edu/people/vickyw/papers-talks/FOSSACS04/fossacs118.pdfCrossRefGoogle Scholar.
20 Many people, including the anonymous referee for this journal, have expressed to me their great repugnance toward factory-farming while being more or less accepting of traditional farming practices. The term seems to be used for any practice of capital-intensive, economically efficient, high-quantity production of agricultural products. The specific techniques of so-called factory-farming for chickens are significantly different from those for pork, for lamb, veal, and so on. Is some factory-farming unduly brutal and morally corrupt? Undoubtedly. Is much consistent with good-on-balance animal lives. In a word, yes. Why then, do so many people categorically reject ill-defined factory-farming? I can think of two explanations. First, one may imaginatively put oneself in the position of the cooped-up bird or the steer waiting to be stunned and slaughtered and respond with a shudder. Such emotional responses are understandable, but I do not believe that they carry much epistemic weight. Second, disturbing videos of meat-packing operations are typically secreted out and made public by groups that are stridently anti-meat. It can, I believe, be safely assumed that the items they release for general viewing are those that most strongly support their own agenda and are not representative of the full range of industry practices.
21 Hedonistic utilitarians are sometimes confronted with the following kind of objection: “Suppose that hundreds of sadists are afforded great pleasure by watching a person being hideously tortured, and the sum of the pleasures of the many outweighs the pain to the one. Would recreational torture not be the right thing to do on your utilitarian account?” Even if the hedonistic utilitarian can wriggle out of this particular objection, it does underscore the normative promiscuity of the position.
22 It should be kept in mind that the alternative for male calves to being raised for veal is usually immediate slaughter.
23 For an argument to the contrary see Lomasky, Loren, Persons, Rights, and the Moral Community (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987)Google Scholar.
24 I say “tend to” because the effect of one person's choice on the production of food animals is minuscule. The argument works for act utilitarians, but it is more compelling within a rule utilitarian context.
25 I discuss this at greater length in “Liberalism Beyond Borders,” Social Philosophy and Policy 24, no. 1 (2007): 206–233Google Scholar.
26 Every so often one sees on television an interview with a grinning centenarian from some obscure Central Asian country who attributes his longevity to daily work in the fields and a diet of nothing richer than goat milk. It is the sort of encomium that leads one to question the value of an extended old age.
