It’s 2095. Lab grown meat has replaced traditional meat on all shelves of all supermarkets and is significantly cheaper. Children in middle school today are handed textbooks about balanced diets and nutrition where corners of pages house “did you know?” blobs that mention that until five decades ago, humans across the world used to thoughtlessly kill animals for their meat. In class, they talk about us not very differently from way do about Nazis today, horrified at the BILLIONS of innocent lives needlessly lost everywhere, especially in places like the west where alternative lifestyles were extremely accessible and only marginally less convenient.

This future extremely conceivable to me, and increasingly seemingly everyone even tangentially familiar with progress in protein synthesis.

To preface this piece, I’d like to let it be known that I love meat. My incentives are oppositely aligned to the conclusion I’m forced to draw here. Its also the case that the primary tactics employed by vegans rely on emotional appeal and I don’t.

<strong>Arguments For Meat Consumption</strong> #

Most people don’t want to be bad. The cognitive dissonance is jarring, and so many have tried to philosophize their habit. Here are some of the most popular arguments and counter-arguments.

1. The Bonnell Take: “I only value human consciousness”. This is the claim that moral fact doesn’t exist and this preference is just as arbitrary as any other moral preference. But there is a very real difference between the axioms we need to get morality off the ground (like we ought to value net wellbeing) vs additional qualifiers you add to the list. Destiny might say his moral preference is just valuing human net wellbeing, but A. Intuitively to me it seems like this qualifier can and should be questioned further (like what’s special about human consciousness and not say the ones chimps have? Language? Intelligence? Destiny’s qualifier seems lazy here.) and B. At what point in our evolutionary line do you draw the hardstop for moral consideration? Obviously this is difficult to answer if you only believe in binary consciousness like Destiny does. If you believe in a gradation of conscious experiences, it’s probably even harder.

2. I Only Value Intelligent Life: This one is at least more direct with what it’s really valuing, but now the obvious retort - what about unintelligent or mentally retarded humans? Do they not deserve moral consideration or is it a gradation of consideration and if so, how would you ever map that onto the real world? Obviously this is not an intuition most people share anyway. But also, it requires you to have a strong understanding of the methods of measuring g and intelligence across species to make a convincing case.

3. Eating Meat Is A Core Tenant of Mammal Behaviour: This is correct. But lions don’t reason and lions can’t care, and its up to you to decide if you should.

4. I’m A Bad Person: and that doesn’t concern me, especially living in a community where I’m not socially ostracized which really means I don’t really see myself as morally gray even for eating meat second to second. Fair enough.

So what happens? #

Eventually we have lab-grown meat produced at scale that’s just as delicious and nutritious + cheaper than real meat. It’s probably going to happen sooner than most expect, and the commercial sector will take care of its widespread adoption. So that’s a pretty huge reason to be optimistic about the future of animal ethics.

What can we do today? #

At the very least, we probably want to opt for ethical, painless killings of animals in the food we consume. I don’t think government intervention is going to be the most popular method here, but activist groups that promote the consumption of ethically produced meat are probably okay options.

My personal actions #

I really like meat, but I find the moral arguments against it convincing. So the plan is to build and fund an organization that saves enough chickens and more from captivity and into the wild to offset my net number of consumed beings. Hopefully, this comes to fruition soon.

Veganism vs Vegetarianism vs Eggetarianism #

If you value net wellbeing and believe like me that eggs don’t contain conscious chicks at the time of production, then eggetarianism is the right take. If you’re concerned about animal abuse more, opt for veganism. Vegetarianism’s never made a lot of sense to me.