It’s getting harder for me to justify eating meat
The moral arguments against eating meat are becoming overwhelming.
My favourite meal of all time is a roast dinner. It is tradition in my family to have it each Sunday, and it’s the perfect end to the week: delicious crispy potatoes, creamy broccoli cheese, fluffy Yorkshire puddings, and of course a mouth-wateringly succulent piece of roasted meat.
However, the more I look into the impacts of my diet, the less delicious my roast meal looks. On average, most western nations eat too much meat: eating more than 70g of red and processed meat a day increases the risk of heart disease and bowel cancer.
As is being increasingly reported, this over-consumption is harming our planet too. The increase in demand is unsustainable, with 26% of the earth’s total land area now being used for raising livestock, and 1kg of steak requiring 25kg of grain and 15,000 litres of water. In fact, we could feed an extra 3.5 billion people with the crops we grow to feed livestock.
According to WWF, cattle farming is the leading cause of the deforestation of the Amazon Rainforest, removing a vital carbon dioxide store and placing many critically endangered species under threat. The methane and nitrous oxide emitted by the meat industry is also responsible for 15% of global greenhouse gas emissions, the same amount as the world’s transport.
This alone is enough to make me uncomfortable about eating meat, but reading philosopher Peter Singer’s book, Animal Liberation, confronted me with some arguments on the ethics of eating meat I find difficult to reject.
Singer’s essential argument is that our current treatment of animals is ‘speciest’. When it comes to moral decisions about the treatment of a being, Singer argues that the only things that should matter are the being’s interests and the pleasure or pain it will experience. As long as it has preferences and can experience pleasure and pain, it does not matter what species it is, our moral decisions should be to maximise both. Therefore, it would be wrong to kill animals and cause them significant pain and reject their preference to continue living, just for the fleeting pleasure and nutrition of eating their flesh.
One may argue that animals are not as rational or intelligent as humans — they are unable to have developed interests like us, or experience happiness in the way we can. Surely, therefore, killing an animal is not as wrong as killing humans?
Yet this argument has some serious shortcomings. First of all, intelligence and rationality are not morally relevant characteristics. As Jeremy Bentham wrote:
The question is not, “Can they reason?” nor, “Can they talk?” but rather, “Can they suffer?”
Whether something can work out the area of a triangle should be of no relevance when deciding whether to harm them or not, because they would still feel a great amount of pain. Therefore, it seems ridiculous that just because animals are less intelligent than humans, it is acceptable to kill them.
This becomes even more illogical when we consider that many small infants have just as much intelligence as many animals, yet we wouldn’t dream of killing them. This is another example of what Peter Singer calls speciesism: despite both having interests not to be killed and killing them would cause a huge amount of pain, we treat these two cases differently, simply because they are different species.
I used to think this was fine though; surely eating meat is acceptable because it is natural. Our species has evolved to eat meat, and natural selection has put humans at the top of the food chain. Other carnivorous animals eat meat, and if they didn’t, there would be nothing controlling the populations, causing the ecosystem to become unbalanced. So, what is wrong with humans doing it?
Yet Peter Singer had quite a compelling answer to my question: just because something is natural, that does not make it moral. For example, wearing clothes and living in houses are unnatural, does that mean we should stop doing them? And further to this, the population control argument would only be relevant if we got our food from the wild and hunted it for ourselves, which isn’t the case.
So, I am really stuck. The evidence for not eating meat is becoming overwhelming — the only reason I still eat it is because it tastes so good — but this is hardly a persuasive moral argument. If I am to be logical with my moral decisions, then it seems wrong to continue eating meat.
Perhaps it is time humanity moves into a meat-free age: our eating habits have become deeply unsustainable for the planet, and if we don’t start changing them now, climate change could create an economic crisis further down the line for farmers too.
To keep up with the increase in demand for cheap meat, humanity is also heading for a moral crisis with more meat being produced in factory farms where animals are reared in horrific conditions. Action needs to be taken to reverse these worrying trends and safeguard the planet’s health in the future, which we all rely on to keep society thriving.
So, is it time for me to pick a new favourite meal?
What do you think, can we continue to eat meat? Is there a moral difference between factory farm and organic meat? Is going vegetarian enough, or do we need to go vegan? I would love to know your thoughts in the comments below.
