The timing could not be worse. Halfway through my quest to gain fifteen pounds, I've come to the conclusion that eating meat is wrong. Here's why:
Many animals feel pain. More importantly, the animals we eat feel pain. Vertebrates have central nervous systems that allow for the transmission and processing of pain via neurotransmitters and the cerebral cortex. Some animals even possess the ability to emotionally respond to suffering, a requirement that animal rights critics contend is necessary to truly appreciate pain in the way humans do. So there is strong evidence to suggest humans are not unique in their ability to suffer.
The question then becomes, "Is the pain inflicted on animals justified by the marginal utility gained by humans?" The answer seems to be “no.” Would torturing an animal be morally permissible, given that the torturer derives great joy from doing so? If not, what distinguishes this case from eating meat? It's difficult to draw a relevant distinction between the desire to have a meaty taste in one's mouth and the desire to assert one's dominance over other creatures. But in both cases, animals suffer far more than humans gain in pleasure. Robert Nozick draws the analogy of someone who enjoys swinging a bat: it would be unacceptable for a man to swing a bat if the only place to do it were in front of a cow, even if he really, really enjoyed it. So in terms of utility trade-offs, eating meat doesn't seem to outweigh the suffering inflicted in obtaining that meat.
One might construe this analysis to assume that equal weight should be given to the preferences of humans and animals (a position of many philosophers, notably Peter Singer). Yet even if humans have greater inherent value than animals, the case against eating meat is still strong. First, the analogies mentioned still hold, so consistency requires that meat eating and bat swinging (at a cow) both be morally permissible or both be morally impermissible. Since my intuitions against swinging a bat at a cow are much stronger than my intuitions in favor of eating meat, I tend to think both actions are unethical, rather than ethical. Second, our alleged right to eat animals cannot derive merely from relative comparisons of value (from humans simply having greater value than other animals). Let me explain. If higher-intelligence aliens were to come to earth, would they be morally justified in eating us, assuming that we taste good? That most people would say “no” demonstrates that regardless of how intelligent aliens might be, their intelligence does nothing to depreciate the inherent value of humans that gives rise to our right not to be eaten. Therefore a more coherent understanding of the relationship between humans and animals is required.
Some people try to draw a relevant distinction at rationality: humans are rational, animals are not, and only rationality confers rights; hence humans have rights and animals do not. But this position is too simplistic: do the mentally retarded, comatose, or infantile have rights? To be more precise, do they have natural rights that inhere in their very existence, despite their lack of rationality? If so, rationality cannot be the sole standard for determining who can be eaten. A more reasonable approach (one consistent with the arguments in the previous paragraph) is to stay that different factors can contribute to one’s overall value, which in turn determines what rights one has. These factors include sentience, self-awareness, rationality, being alive, existing in reality, etc. Being real and alive are prerequisite, though perhaps not sufficient in themselves, to grant rights. (Still, would snapping one’s fingers to destroy a far-off planet blossoming with exotic plant life be, in a sense, wrong?) Sentience and the ability to feel pain add further value, enough to require that others have warrant before inflicting pain on creatures with these attributes. This explains why slamming a bat into a cow’s head would be immoral.
Rationality indeed adds further value, distinguishing humans from other animals. Nonetheless, it is not apparent why this additional value conferred on humans should depreciate the preexisting value of other animals gained from their sentience, or elevate the importance of trivial human pleasures like taste. Cannot animals also taste and experience the same wonderful sensations we do? Rationality does nothing to meaningfully distinguish our taste from animals’ tastes. From this perspective, if we accept that the value of our taste sensation roughly equals that of other animals, and that the total value of an animal is greater than the value of its taste sensation, then we must conclude (by transitivity) that an animal’s life is more important than the pleasures of human taste. Essentially, the framework I am proposing argues this: living beings have differing degrees of value and hence differing degrees of rights; yet in order to preserve respect for an animal’s inherent value (derived from its sentience or some other attribute), humans should treat animals with the same respect that we afford ourselves in areas that humans and animals are identical. Therefore, since human taste is worth no more than animal taste, human taste is worth no more than animal life. Killing animals for self-preservation, however, is always justified because the total value of a human life is greater than the value of an animal’s life. And we can still prefer the suffering of animals to an equal (or somewhat smaller) degree of human suffering, because a fixed degree of physical pain would arguably generate more harm to humans than it would to other animals. For example, a blow to the head might cause a severe mental handicap for both a baby and a chimp, but the baby has much more to lose since its potential is so much greater. Similar arguments can be made for virtually any other instance in which equal pain is inflicted on a human and a nonhuman animal. My point in mentioning these instances of self-preservation and minimization of harm to humans is to illustrate that this framework of understanding is a reasonable one; it produces answers that conform to our strongest intuitions.
I should mention one objection that often arises. Some people argue that one person's refraining from meat eating will have no impact on the number of animals killed for food; thus eating meat is permissible under a utilitarian framework. But my argument was deontological, not utilitarian. And complicity in a moral harm is still immoral under a deontological understanding of ethics, even if that complicity has no consequential impact. If I assist in a murder, I am morally culpable regardless of whether or not that murder would have been committed without my help. So while my eating meat might not directly contribute to more suffering, my complicity in that suffering is still unethical.
I hope I've made a convincing case for why eating animals, or at least those that people eat most, is wrong. I myself have been convinced by people who have written in favor of animal rights. But as a lover of meat, I am now forced to ask myself, “What should I do?” and this is where I’m caught in a syllogism: morality itself is an attempt to answer the question of what people should do. So insofar as my question is, “What should I do?" the answer necessarily is, “That which is moral.” As a result, I think I’m stuck being a vegetarian. With any luck, one of you might convince me that I’m wrong. Please try, because I start Monday.
