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Meat and morality through time

“I know eating meat is morally indefensible, but I do it anyway.” This is a quote I’ve heard from more than one friend of mine. The morality of eating meat has been on my mind for at least a year, and after much thought I have been forced to come to the conclusion that in most cases, it is unethical. While the environmental impact of eating meat is large, to me, the biggest problem is the slaughter of farm animals. We all agree that purposefully killing a human is very, very wrong. The same reasoning should apply to all things with consciousness as well. Although these animals are less intelligent than us, most of them in adulthood are likely more intelligent than newborn humans, whom we all agree shouldn’t be killed. To make matters worse, farm animals are often held in very cramped housing, fed unnatural foods and, in general, treated immorally in their often short trips from birth to the slaughterhouse. With all this, it’s fairly clear that meat is ethically unsound.

However, this article is not simply about making an unimaginative argument for vegetarianism. In 2013, scientists in the Netherlands produced the world’s first artificial hamburger. The beef in this burger had never been inside a cow; it was grown entirely in a lab. While this burger cost over $300,000 to produce, as with all technologies, the price is bound to go down as it is further researched, produced and commercialized. In fact, the company that produced this burger plans to have it on the market in just five years.

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This means that within the next century or two, the world could make the switch entirely to artificial meat. Once we have a nearly identical alternative, people will begin to become more and more ethically repulsed by the idea of slaughtering animals for food. Within just a generation or two of this switch, slaughtering livestock will be completely banned in nearly every country in the world. Almost the entire global population, most of whom will have never tried natural meat, will consider the practice awful and deplorable. Most interestingly however, they will look back at us, humanity’s meat eaters, and wonder how members of their species were ever so morally corrupt and blind to have caged, slaughtered and consumed the flesh of another living being.

Interestingly enough, we today think many of these same things about many practices of humans in the past. How could so many societies of our fellow man have practiced slavery? How could they have discriminated against people on the basis of race, gender or religion? How could they have executed people for their sexual orientation, practiced human sacrifice or allowed infanticide? The answer is the same answer as that which allows us to eat meat without an ethical alarm going off in our head: societal pressure. We take almost all of our initial cues about what is right and wrong from what is happening around us and what we are told. Nearly all of us have been raised in societies that say infanticide is wrong but killing animals is mostly fine, and so that is what most of us believe. However, we could very well have been raised in a completely opposite culture.

In that case, changing my views and practices on infanticide would take, at first, a lot of hard and determined thought about what is right and wrong. I would be forced to unlearn decades of cultural beliefs, and after that, need the will and strength to oppose nearly all of my peers and elders, often with the implicit or explicit threat of ostracism or worse. All of this is not to say that doing bad things is morally acceptable if everyone is doing it. However, this does allow us to understand why some people in the past did the things they did.

Even if we all stop eating meat, that’s not to say that some society in the future won’t find other major moral faults with our generation. In fact, I’m completely sure that they will. What it will be, I can only guess — perhaps our execution of criminals or our performance of abortions. Given, then, that we don’t know which of the things we are doing later peoples will find to be wrong, our moral failing is not so much a problem of our immorality, bur rather of our stupidity. Put in this light, it is a little easier to understand the actions of our ancestors.

Colter Smith is a computer science major from Bronxville, N.Y. He can be reached at crsmith@princeton.edu.

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