From Animal To Meat

The public debate about meat April 23, 2012

I didn’t win the New York Times essay contest on why it’s ethical to eat meat. My ego heaves a great big sigh. I’m not going to post the essay I submitted, but for interested readers, my argument in favor of eating animal products basically expands upon point one of the article I wrote for Simple, Good, and Tasty here.

The six finalists whose essays were published by the Times last week had a lot in common. Some of them had either been vegetarian for many years or still were; some of them were farmers who had personal experience with killing animals for food. Their arguments had a lot in common too. Maybe half of them justified killing animals for food because animal manure is needed to fertilize the soil for growing crops. This implies that even if you want to be a vegetarian or vegan, domestic livestock are necessary to producing your food. So you may as well eat them, too.

I think this is quite a good argument, although it doesn’t defend the virtues of meat-eating as directly as I would like. Eating meat becomes, not something morally acceptable in its own right, but a necessary evil, part of the system. The bigger logical problem with the argument, though, is that someone who doesn’t accept killing animals for food could simply say that insofar as they’re needed for fertilizer (and we do have synthetic fertilizer, so they’re arguably not needed) we should keep small herds for that purpose and allow them to live out their days on the land, letting them die of old age. As crazily impractical as that sounds, it’s certainly possible. Farmers would build the cost of keeping animals into the prices they charged for their grains, veggies, and fruits, just as they now build the cost of their own labor and the costs of their tractors and combines into it. The notion that animals are needed to raise plants doesn’t really end up justifying killing the animals.

I voted for the essay “For What Shall We Be Blamed – And Why?” although I disagree mightily with it. The author makes a philosophically interesting distinction between what is unethical and what is blameworthy. I agree with him/her that there are some things we do that are unethical, but for which we cannot reasonably be blamed. One is experimenting on animals to develop medical treatments. I disagree, though, that eating meat qualifies as one of these unethical but blameless activities. It’s just too easy not to do, as millions of vegetarians prove. Still, it’s a proposal worth considering.