Re: is eating meat in our nature?

[kw503@york.ac.uk]

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When considering questions of morality, it is important to place them in a 
context of a particular moral framework that determines what is considered 
to be 'right' or 'wrong'. These terms can mean very different things to 
different people, and you can end up getting different answers to each 
question depending upon what you think morality really stands for.

One framework that might be useful in discussing the morality of 
vegetarianism is evolutionary ethics, which goes something like this:

1. Altruism lies at the root of all moral behaviour.

2. Human beings and other animals have evolved to be altruistic because 
this furthers the survival of the community or group.

3. Furthering the survival of the community or group is therefore the aim 
of all moral behaviour.

According to this (rather controversial) analysis, what we mean by 'good' 
is something that is conducive to the long-term welfare of society. 
Similarly anything 'bad' is considered harmful to long-term survival and 
well-being. So far, evolutionary ethics sounds a bit like utilitarianism, 
but there is an interesting twist when you consider what is meant by 
'community or group'.

A naive understanding of this concept might suggest that we should only 
look after the interests of our immediate family and social grouping. 
However, as our understanding of genetics improves, we find that the 
survival of the fittest operates at the level of individual genes (Richard 
Dawkin's 'selfish gene' theory), and not individuals or whole populations, 
and so we can extend the concept of community to include all other human 
beings, with whom we share the majority of our genetic makeup. Similarly, 
we share a large proportion of our genes with other animals (99.5% with 
chimpanzees!) and even plants and bacteria, and so these too form part of 
our moral community whose well-being we have a responsibility to promote.

If survival of our genes is what motivates morality then, by implication, 
we have a moral responsibility towards not only all other humans, but all 
animals and forms of life with which we share the planet. Indeed, you could 
argue that as self-aware beings we have a responsibility to balance the 
well-being of plants and animals with our own survival. Given the fact that 
we share so much in common with them by virtue of our shared ancestry, 
eating animals may be considered 'wrong' in the same way that eating 
another human being is generally considered to be immoral (although not 
exclusively so). This is backed up by the fact that many people would 
refuse to eat monkeys on the grounds that they are too similar to us, 
although this also depends on cultural preferences and habits.

I like this approach because it emphases that our notion of morality is 
itself evolving, and so what might hold for a chimpanzee or pre-human 
society does not necessarily hold for humans in the 21st century. It also 
encompasses aspects of utilitarianism, Kantian rationalism and virtue 
ethics, and gives an essentially empirical account of morality, which makes 
it amenable to scientific study. Perhaps as our understanding of morality 
and survival improves, we will come to realise that eating animals is wrong 
because it promotes an unhealthy attitude towards the natural world, i.e 
that it is there for our benefit, rather than being something that we have 
a responsibility to look after, and to which our own survival is 
inextricably bound.

I have skipped through the argument rather rapidly, and no doubt much of 
this is open to dispute, but I'd be interested to know what other people 
think of this approach and its implications for the vegetarianism debate.

As a slight aside: surely killing an animal for your own personal 
consumption and potentially survival is ethically distinct from raising 
animals for the express purpose of killing them for food?

- Keith (currently transitioning to vegetarianism as a result of ethical 
reflection!)


kw503@york.ac.uk
http://homepage.mac.com/keith.wilson



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