Interview - Vegetarian Showdown Part 1

I have never met Michael Keenan but he is one of Phil's oldest friends.  A few years ago he decided to become a vegetarian, and has been kind enough to provide me with some information about his thinking around this choice.  This post contains the email titled 'Vegetarian Showdown' that he sent his friends at the very beginning, asking them to give him some justification for meat eating that he could agree with.  Will they answer him?  Will he become vegetarian 4 life?  Answers to follow in a few days.

I keep encountering people I respect who have made an ethical decision to be vegetarian or vegan. These include old friends, like Mal and Nicola, and new people I have come to respect very quickly, like Bridget Sprouls, and people on the internet, like Steve Pavlina ( stevepavlina.com) and Tynan (betterthanyourboyfriend.com). When I was in Peru a couple of months ago, I ate a local Peruvian delicacy, a roasted guinea pig. I mentioned that to a vegetarian friend and she was shocked. It occurred to me that that was a pretty reasonable reaction. I didn't need to eat a guinea pig. It's more fun for me to watch a guinea pig run around and see how cute it is than to eat it, and I expect that the guinea pig would have felt the same way. I'm kind of a bad person.

That was twenty-four days ago. It occurred to me that the burden of proof that eating meat is ok is on the meat-eaters, and I don't have that proof. I stopped eating meat, pending an actual really consistent moral justification. And I want that justification, I want it very badly, because animals are delicious. Meat-eaters, this email is an appeal to you to please change my mind. Vegetarians, this is an invitation to check my reasoning and clear up some moral gray areas described later.

In sixteenth-century Paris, a popular form of entertainment was cat-burning, in which a cat was hoisted in a sling on a stage and slowly lowered into a fire. According to historian Norman Davies, "[T]he spectators, including kings and queens, shrieked with laughter as the animals, howling with pain, were singed, roasted, and finally carbonized." - http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/pinker07/pinker07_index.html

Today, we properly recognize that cat-burning is totally f*cked up. It's really bad for the cat, and it provides only a mild benefit (sadistic pleasure) to humans. The difference between cat-burning, which almost everyone would say is immoral, and eating animals, which society is generally ok with, is not very clear. The benefit to humans in eating meat - the pleasure of tasting meat - is trivial and replacable, not significantly more noble (as I see it) than the benefit in watching a cat burn.

As for the harm to the animal, battery farming is probably a worse harm than live roasting. But even if we had an ideal animal life - a happy cow grazing in pastures and humping its cow girlfriend - do we really have the right to interrupt all that and kill it for meat? It's not clear to me that we do have that right. It's not especially clear that we *don't* have that right, but given that all that's at stake here is the deliciousness of steak, I have to concede that, absent a clear moral go-ahead, I ought to become vegetarian, pending a real decision.

I suspect that that's where I'll be for the rest of my life - an interim vegetarian, waiting to figure out whether cows's lives are human property. If someone could tip me one way or the other, I'd appreciate it.

I still have questions about gray areas: very stupid animals; and veganism. I hope that someone who has thought about it more, or just has a different perspective, can offer some ideas.

Suppose we assume that it's wrong to eat cows and chickens, because they have lives that are important to them, they feel pain, and they're reasonably smart. They differ from, for example, broccoli, in those ways. What about *really* dumb animals? I think there might be a useful moral line to be drawn between cow-level animals, and animals that are about as robotic as bacteria - little mindless robots. I'm unconcerned by the death of a mosquito. Mosquitoes have no friends and maybe are not really aware they're alive. What about fish? Their behavior is somewhat robotic. Computers can model fish behavior very convincingly. Shrimps are just big, delicious mosquitoes, right? So it's ok to kill shrimps? We might care about collateral damage from some fishing methods (like catching dolphins in nets) but shrimps are farmed. For the moment, I'm not eating shrimps, but that's very precautionary.

The next question is veganism: assuming I don't have the right to take a cow's life, can I take its milk? One might say that it is right to let a cow run free in its natural environment, but thousands of years of selective breeding have changed domestic cows into creatures that *need* to be milked, otherwise they get uncomfortable (if I have my facts right). A farm is their new natural environment. And sheep get too hot in summer if they don't get their wool shaved off. And chickens are going to lay unfertilized eggs anyway, whether we eat them or not, so we might as well eat them. I don't see much of an ethical obligation to be a vegan, but I'm willing to be convinced.

One final thing: the problem is that killing animals might be wrong, not that eating animals is wrong. As I see it, once an animal is dead, you might as well eat it. If I were economically illiterate, it would be easy to say that I'll just only buy the meat of already-dead animals, but it's obvious that creating demand for meat kills animals, so I can't do that. The exception is that if there's meat that would go to waste, like it's leftover from some heartless meat-eater's meal, then I could eat that. Or if - as happened a couple of weeks ago - a meat-eater bought food for me, not knowing I was now a vegetarian, then it would be fine to eat that rather than throw it away. Does anyone disagree, finding that not only is killing animals wrong, but also eating meat is wrong in itself?