“What are we having for dinner?” Caitlin cast an eager glance into the kitchen as she took off her coat.
I started to reply, happily stirring the contents of a saucepan: “We’re having oxtail,” I began, “it’s been simmering for hours in beef stock, chicken stock, and Guinness. It’s just about . . .” I faltered as a horrifying shadow of a recollection flitted across my mind. “You’re not vegetarian, are you? But it was too late. I already knew the answer. How could I have forgotten! Caitlin nodded apologetically; “I don’t eat red meat.”
“Oh no,” I murmured weakly. “God I am so absolutely bloody stupid.” Just as I was getting settled in to an expose of strident self reproof, another appalling thought surfaced: “Justin eats meat, right?” I begged. Caitlin’s apologetic expression deepened. “Oh no,” my voice croaked while my mind launched into a litany of self-aimed obscenities.
I have long maintained a tense relationship with the concept of vegetarianism, admiring it in theory one the one hand, while rebelling against certain aspects of its concrete implications. Do we have the right to eat animals? I often ask myself as I truss pork loin or carve a rib roast. Is it sustainable for the planet to eat meat? Is it healthy?
The answers to most of these questions are as incomplete as they are uncomfortable. Philosophers can barely agree on the essential nature of rights, let alone how they pertain to animals and our habit of eating them. Nutritionists and doctors are equally divided on the subject of health, one moment extolling the virtues of an iron-rich fillet mignon before swerving erratically to decry all flesh as diabetes on a plate. Environmentalists are a less divided crowd, and it is now generally agreed that eating meat is an inefficient, resource heavy form of nourishment.
So plagued have I been by these questions that I wrote my term paper for an ethics course on the subject. It was supposed to be a persuasive paper, so I chose to preach what I practice and wrote in favor of carnivorous rights. Unfortunately, I am not fully convinced by my own arguments and the question still niggles at the edges of my mind. I have cut down on meat, and buy mainly local, free-range, grass-fed products. But is this enough?
A thorough examination of my conscience reveals a rather unholy, pragmatic motive for my embrace of meat: it seems to be the case that a truly delicious vegetarian feast usually takes more elaborate preparation and more talent on the part of the cook.
As we sat down to dinner I shoved the beets, potatoes, and parsnip puree towards Caitlin and Justin, and with considerable embarrassment, ladled out the fragrant oxtail for the others at the table. “I’m going to make a proper, magnificent vegetarian feast one of these days,” I said firmly.
I was still absorbed in conflicting thoughts as I gently nudged the meat on my plate with a fork. Maybe I could become a vegetarian, I thought brightly. And then the meat slide from the bone in soft, feathery shards. The steam rose upwards carrying an aroma as softly layered as the petals of a flower: there was the sweet, pastured beef, the hefty Guinness and luscious wine, the high, bright red currant. There were delicate hints of thyme and contrastingly rough bursts of pepper—all this bound together by the heat and hours of cooking, so that you didn’t want to dissect the flavors but merely to enjoy the round, mellifluous fullness on your tongue. My thoughts about vegetarianism became more fuzzy and conflicted, before giving up the battle and slinking into a corner to sulk. I would deal with them later. For the moment, I was in no state for rational analysis.
Later, the thoughts returned and prompted me to dig out that old ethics essay. I have included it below as it is a good summation of my thoughts thus far on the subject of meat. Of course philosophy can only take us so far, hence those thoughts, slinking out now and then from the herbaceous corner of my conscience which they inhabit.
Meat and Man: A Carnivore’s Defense
Towards the end of May, as the days grow longer and warmer, America takes part in a long-loved tradition. All across the country barbeques are dusted off and dragged out of storage, grills are loaded with charcoal, guests arrive, beers are cracked, and the carnivorous among us indulge in a perfect orgy of the flesh. We tear sweet barbecued chicken from the bone, bite into juicy burgers, and comprehensively devour portions of animals in a bewildering variety of manifestations. The institution of the summer barbeque is perhaps most unabashed celebration of the pleasures of meat cooking and eating. And often, I have found, also a venue for heated discussions on the morality of eating meat. Here I argue a position that lies in between the blind acceptance of tradition embodied in Barbecue Man, and the misplaced moralizing of the ethical vegetarian, and I argue that it is morally justifiable for humans to eat meat as long as we uphold serious considerations for animal welfare.
First of all, it is important to note that this is not a comprehensive discussion of animal rights; such an effort would necessarily include questions not only of the morality of eating animals, but also their use in medical research and cosmetics testing. These latter debates have many variables and considerations distinct from the debate between carnivores and ethical vegetarians, so I leave them out of the argument.
From the range of views held on this subject two—primarily colloquial—extremes emerge as good poles to stake out the breadth of the debate. Only after dealing with these crude extremes can I focus in on the more philosophically sophisticated arguments.
On the one hand there is the ethical vegetarian who argues that we should not eat meat because animals are owed the same basic rights to life that humans owe each other. Who are we, so the argument goes, to rate our species above another? Does this not display a certain “speciesism?” And is that not frighteningly close to racism or sexism? Surely this is a clear matter of prejudicially favoring of one group’s preferences over that of another. And so the ethical vegetarian would have us release all the cows, chickens, and pigs back into the wild, to their apparently idyllic natural state.
This argument has fundamental flaws in that it fails to analyze a key difference between human beings and animals, but more on this later. Furthermore, it denies the relationship humans have with the rest of nature, effectively scooping our species out of the ecosystems in which we live and assuming that some imaginary purity is possible in which we do not act upon these systems. The reality is that we have a relationship with these ecosystems; it is unavoidable. Merely in virtue of walking, talking, and working on this thin layer of biosphere, we are implicated in “nature” and cannot simply remove ourselves. Of course it is not inevitable that we should eat meat; clearly we have a choice. Yet following the ethical vegetarian to her logical conclusion, we might well end up as ethical “fruitarians,” those who chose to only eat fruit that has fallen from a tree. What about fish? Are they owed the same rights as humans? And perhaps vegetables suffer. Perhaps science has not yet developed instruments keen enough to detect it, but is it not conceivable that anything that is alive can suffer in some way? After all, it is the nature of life to will its own survival. It would be humanly impossible to live on this earth and not destroy other forms of life in the process. The ethical vegetarian, then, attempts to create a sort of moral purity that is logically impossible and denies our relationship with the rest of nature, a relationship in which we act on our ecosystems and in turn they act on us.
On the other hand we have Barbecue Man—the unrepentant meat eater who argues for a carnivorous diet on a basis that is diametrically opposed to our vegetarian. He will point to his incisors and inform us that meat eating is natural: Life consumes life, and the fittest, most ingenious predator is the one who survives. Of all the arguments in favor of meat eating, this is the weakest, but seemingly the most commonly proffered. However, a cursory glance at history will remind us that arguing for the continuance of any practice on the basis of tradition is dangerous and unfounded. Before suffrage many men claimed that a woman’s “natural” place was the home, and her “natural” role confined to raising children and catering to hubby. Tradition is at best an empty argument for difficult moral questions, and at worse a horrendous justification for many forms of repression, inequality, and injustice. In effect this carnivore’s appeal to nature and the so-called natural order has the opposite effect to the vegetarian’s argument, not removing us from our necessary relationship with nature, but denying our unique humanity, denying our unique ability to reflect on our actions and uphold any moral expectations for ourselves.
Of course not all vegetarians and carnivores make such crude arguments for their habits, but these represent the extremes, and frame the wider debate. Furthermore, as I have shown, they both miss the mark on the characteristics of our relationship to our environments and ecosystems: We cannot deny the inherently messy way in which we use life to satisfy our needs, but neither can we deny our humanness by appealing to nature itself as justification for eating animals.
Returning to our ethical vegetarian, one of the primary, and at first glance compelling, arguments she makes is a defense of animal rights. In The Case for Animal Rights, Tom Regan claims that, “when it comes to the case for animal rights, then, what we need to know is whether the animals that, in our culture, are routinely eaten, hunted and used in our laboratories, are like us in being subjects of a life. And we do know this” (Regan, 847). The criteria being subjects of a life is enough for Regan to be satisfied that animals deserve rights. However, he does not analyze what a right truly is, a vital step in establishing whether the term can be applied to animals.
A right is in fact a two place predicate: we have the one who holds the right and the one who owes the right. For example, I have a right to my own hair and you have a duty to me not to come along with a pair of scissors and chop off my hair. Because of this two part nature, a right depends on a relationship, implicit or explicit, between two parties. A right may be explicit, for example, when we consciously agree with another person or representative group to something, such as an employment contract. A is employed by B, so A has a right to her wages and B has a right to A‘s labor. Other rights are implicit, such as in the case of my hair. There has been no official agreement that pony tail chopping is immoral, yet this right and corresponding duty is assumed. Now if my very young niece came along and snipped my pony tail off, I would be upset. I would scold her and explain very seriously that such behavior is not acceptable. I would appeal to her reasoning and ask whether she would like it if I came along and snipped her hair off. However, I would not blame her in a truly moral sense because she is very young and still becoming aware of—being educated about—the social contract between human beings. In fact, rights and social contract theory are inexorably linked.
Imagine that, while picnicking, a bird swoops down and flies off with Smith’s sandwich. If Smith were to yell after the bird, appealing to the violation of his rights, any rational observer would assume that Smith is a little crazy. The bird was simply doing what birds do. The incident may be annoying but it is no violation of rights. More pertinently for this argument, imagine that Smith is walking in the African bush and is attacked and eaten by a hungry lion. How to we characterize this incident? Again, no rational person would claim that Smith’s rights had been violated. We would simply lament the death as an unfortunate, if slightly stupid, accident. Because we cannot generally communicate with animals, much less form any social contract with them, they cannot be said to possess rights.
In response to this argument, Regan proffers the cases of mentally disabled people and children. These individuals may not have the full capacity of reason, yet we respect their rights. Reason, Regan claims, cannot be the criteria for granting rights (843). However, I would argue that these people do hold fewer rights. Yes, we do not snip off their hair or intentionally harm them, but mentally disabled people, depending on the severity of the disability, may be required to live in special institutions, not allowed to drive cars, and limited is various concrete ways. And the case is similar with children. We do not allow them to vote, drive, drink, travel unattended, watch pornography, work more than a certain number of hours per week, sign legal documents and so forth. Correspondingly, they are treated with more leniencies when they break the law, the assumption being that they cannot be seen as fully responsible agents. “Rights come with responsibilities,” parents remind their sixteen year-olds when handing over the car keys. Of course we do grant children and the mentally disabled many core rights, the most important being the right to life, precisely the one I am arguing that we need not grant animals that we wish to eat.
A response to this commonly cited objection is the claim that human potentiality for moral comprehension is a sufficient criterion for inclusion in the realm of rights. In a sense we include all humans in our common moral community because they have some potential of being able to, as Cohen says in re/sponse to Regan, “perform the normal moral functions.” Children generally mature and grasp moral principles while mentally disabled people have some potential (no matter how remote) of overcoming their cognitive or psychological difficulties to comprehend and follow a greater or lesser portion of moral requirements (Wood). Thus Regan’s examples are irrelevant, leading to a mistaken blurring of an essential difference between humans and other animals, and the misapplication of the term “rights.”
Yet having established that animals cannot possess rights does not free us from the responsibility of seriously considering our actions towards them: animals may not, lacking (our brand of) reason, be able to enter into a social contract with humans, but like us they do experience pleasure and pain. This capacity for pain is the pivot on which hinges the hedonistic utilitarian argument for animal “rights.” “Pain is pain wherever it is found” (843) Regan writes, and I think this resounds with most people’s intuition. Whether the suffering is human or animal, it causes us some level of discomfort, reflecting our instinctive desire to avoid pain as an evil in itself.
However, it is important to remember that animals in their natural environment are not exempt from pain. Wolves will hunt rabbits; falcons will swoop down on field mice and so on. It is completely naïve to imagine that if one their predators, Homo sapiens, suddenly decided to universally adopt vegetarianism, these animals would live in a wilderness paradise. Predators prey on the weak, the young, the diseased, and the old. Furthermore, predators often attack prey in a vicious and messy way that results in a painful and protracted death. And since it would be ridiculous to attempt to force our system of morality onto animal populations, this state of nature is an unavoidable reality. Given this reality, I believe that the reasonable course to take would be for humans to breed and eat animals only if we can do so in a way that basically replicates their lives in nature and humanely improves upon their deaths.
This is precisely the argument given by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall in his encyclopedic book on meat. Although Whittingstall is a chef and farmer rather than a philosopher, he seriously considers the implications of eating meat, concluding that it is morally acceptable under certain conditions, very similar to those I stated above. Furthermore, in discussing our unique human predation of animals, in slaughter houses, he claims that “there is something about it that perhaps should inspire a kind of admiration: the notion of an intelligent social creature using its brain and its technology in an attempt to maximize the efficiency and minimize the cruelty of its predation” (Fearnley-Whittingstall, 19). However, he also notes that we have far to go in our treatment of our “prey.” Beyond constantly working to minimize their suffering at death—by altering our system so that animals need not be shipped long distances, crammed, starved, and stressed before slaughter—we must work to make their lives as natural as possible.
Such a requirement would mean the abolishment of most modern forms of agricultural production, eliminating all sufficiently “unnatural” methods of raising and keeping animals. Factory farming, with its custom of keeping animals in uncomfortably small spaces would have to go. So too would the massive cow feeding lot, with its habit of keeping the animals in manure ridden enclosures and feeding them on a diet unsuited for their physiologies. The only animal agriculture that could remain, if we followed this moral standard—replication of the animal‘s natural habitat—would be free-range raised chickens, grass fed beef and lamb, and in general animals fed their natural diets and kept in spacious, open environments.
All this reform would cause a drastic reduction in the quantity of meat available and corresponding rise in meat prices (as it is far more space, time, and cost effective to produce factory farmed chickens, for example, than free ranges ones). Doing the morally responsible thing, in this case, would ultimately result in our diets becoming far less meat heavy.
The act of eating meat can be either immoral or moral, depending on the provenance and life history of the animal from which the meat comes. We neither exist in a moral vacuum (we are implicated in our ecosystems), nor are we homogenous with the rest of nature (we have the unique capacity to reason and make moral choices). Aristotle famously defined his own species as zoon logisticon, or rational animals. To deny either aspect of this dichotomous appellation would be to reject a significant portion of our human identity.
