In strict philosophical format, the argument goes:
1.
All natural behaviors are morally justified.
2.
Eating meat is a natural behavior.
3.
Therefore, eating meat is morally justified.
This argument is, quite frankly, a terrible argument. I mean
it’s really, really bad. It doesn’t take a philosophy major to see that the
argument from nature is seriously flawed. Yet somehow it has persuaded enough
people for it to merit a response from me, so here it goes.
First, it’s important to establish what exactly is meant by
the word “natural.” By one definition, “nature” refers to the entire universe
and everything in it. Presumably this is not the definition used by proponents
of the argument, since it would imply that all behaviors are morally justified.
“Natural” can also mean “not of human design” i.e. the opposite of
“artificial.” Note that this definition does not render all human behaviors
unnatural since we did not design our own instincts and anatomy. Having sex,
for example, would be considered a natural human behavior, although wearing a
condom would be unnatural, since contraception is a human invention. Proponents
of the argument maintain that eating meat is natural because it is observed in
other species, which we did not design, and also because humans are
well-equipped with the proper biological features to digest meat, and obviously
we did not design ourselves.
There is some debate over the second point-that is, whether we
really are well-equipped to digest meat. It’s true that humans and our
ancestors have been consuming meat for at least 2 million years, although how
much meat they ate is in dispute. Even if ancient hominids were big meat
eaters, it’s still possible that they simply chose to do something that their
bodies were not ideal for. It’s not like cavemen were experts in nutrition. In
fact, certain aspects of our anatomy seem to suggest that we were not “designed”
to eat meat. For example, human canines are small and blunt compared to those
of meat eating species. Additionally, our small intestines are around 10-11
times the length of our bodies, which is typical of herbivores. I think this website
makes a compelling case against premise 2-that eating meat is not a natural
behavior, at least not for humans.
But maybe my vegetarian bias is showing. Perhaps that website
is misleading or only cites fringe researchers. I don’t want to be like those
pseudoscientific creationists who point to a handful of “experts” who doubt
evolution and insist on “teaching the controversy.” It’s not difficult to find someone with a fancy degree that will
argue any position, no matter how ridiculous. So it would be unfair for me not
to concede that there are qualified people who completely disagree. I haven’t
reviewed the scientific literature in depth, but I’ll admit that from what I
have read I’ve gotten the impression that the more mainstream view is that
eating meat is natural for humans.
Indeed, there is even evidence supporting the theory that eating meat
enabled the evolution of our large brains.
So the truth is I don’t know. But even if I were
definitively persuaded one way or the other, it would have zero effect on my
support for vegetarianism. It’s not difficult to find internet forums of angry commenters
debating this point as if the answer will deliver the final verdict on
vegetarianism. This is what frustrates me the most-that people think it
matters. Now, it may be a fascinating scientific question, but if we’re talking
about the ethics of meat eating, it’s
completely irrelevant. You can debate premise 2 all you want, but the major
flaw in the argument from nature is premise 1. So what if eating meat is natural?
How does that make it morally justified? I’m not the first to notice this
fallacy. British philosopher Julian Baggini explains: “Even if we can agree
that some things are natural and some are not, what follows from this? The
answer is: nothing. There is no factual reason to suppose that what is natural
is good (or at least better) and what is unnatural is bad (or at least worse).”
Indeed, some natural phenomena are terrible things. Natural
disasters even have the word in their name. Short lifespans are natural since
medicine and technology (i.e. human intervention) have increased life
expectancy. Still, the argument specifically refers to natural behaviors, and those are not behaviors.
So, if there are any examples of natural behaviors that are not morally
justified, then premise 1 is false and the argument is unsound. Given the ease
of finding such examples, it’s pathetic that people still take the argument
from nature seriously.
One counterintuitive example is infanticide, which has been
ubiquitous throughout history and across the globe. “Until recently, between 10
and 15 percent of all babies were killed shortly after they were born, and in
some societies the rate has been as high as 50 percent.”1 This seems
to defy evolutionary logic since the most successful organisms produce as many
offspring as possible. But there is in fact a good reason why natural selection
encourages infanticide. Raising children is a burden to parents, especially
mothers, because they must invest an enormous amount of resources to keep their
kids alive and healthy. If the baby has deformities, or if conditions are
currently unfavorable (perhaps food is scarce), then it’s not worth it to waste
resources raising a child that will likely die before reaching maturity anyways.
From a strictly evolutionary standpoint, it’s better to cut your losses and
save up for when conditions improve, or at least favor only the healthiest in
the litter. It has even been proposed that postpartum depression, during which
mothers “often feel emotionally detached from their newborns and may harbor intrusive
thoughts of harming them”1, serves the evolutionary purpose of a
decision period for mothers to evaluate their circumstances and determine if
infanticide is the best option. Indeed, the physician Larry Milner notes, “…the
answer which has emerged from my research indicates that one of the most ‘natural’
things a human being can do is voluntarily kill its own offspring when faced with
a variety of stressful situations.”1
The term “natural” applies beyond infanticide to violence
generally. Anyone who has studied the history of the human species knows that
few things come more naturally to us than violence. Human beings have a long
legacy of killing and cruelty so horrific that it’s almost painful just to
think about it. The remains of millennia-old corpses, such as the famous case
of Otzi the Iceman, frequently show signs of brutal deaths at the hands of
other warriors. And given our close kinship with the notoriously violent
chimpanzees, it’s likely that our lineage has been violent for even longer.
Still, many people deny the violent aspect of human nature on the grounds that
it is perpetrated by just a few bad apples. It’s true that the vast majority of
people I know are largely peaceful, but that does not negate the fact that
humans are inherently violent. One piece of evidence for this is the Rage
circuit, a network of regions in the brain which, when stimulated with an
electrical current, triggers aggressive behavior. Research has also shown that
the most violent stage of life is the “terrible twos,” and it’s only later when
we grow up that we learn to control our violent impulses. But the impulse is
still there. Psychologists have surveyed college students-a demographic group known
to have low rates of violence-to find out how many of them have homicidal
fantasies. “Between 70 and 90 percent of the men, and between 50 and 80 percent
of the women, admitted to having at least one homicidal fantasy in the
preceding year.”2
This leads to the ultimate point of this essay. Sometimes
the most moral thing to do is to overcome
what we are naturally inclined to do. Indeed, sometimes nature is the very
antithesis of morality. It shouldn’t be a mystery why this is the case. Nature doesn’t
care about right and wrong. How could it? Nature simply selects for those
behaviors that maximize an organism’s fitness. It is completely indifferent to
the effects those behaviors have on the well-being of conscious creatures. I’d
like to reinforce this point with one final example. As a white man, it is likely
that nature has endowed me with a brain that has an instinctive negative
reaction towards black people. This phenomenon has been shown in experiments that
measure “how quickly people associate white and black faces with words like good and bad, and neuroimaging experiments that monitor activity in the amygdala.”3
But here is the crucial point: I have chosen
to ignore this aspect of my nature because I realize that everyone will be
better off in a society where people of different races can cooperate
peacefully. Similarly, I have chosen to resist the urge to eat meat because I
realize that it causes an immense amount of animal suffering.
We have therefore established that natural behaviors are not
necessarily morally justified. But
might there be some other justification for eating meat? I mean, animals
sometimes eat each other, right? And if they eat each other, then why shouldn’t
we be allowed to eat them? Aren’t vegetarians being inconsistent by not trying
to prevent lions from hunting gazelles? The meat apologist can modify the
argument from nature like this*:
1.
If animals treat each other in a particular way,
then humans are morally justified in treating animals that same way.
2.
Animals eat each other.
3.
Therefore, it is morally justified for humans to
eat animals.
There are people who actually make this absurd argument, which
is an obvious case of post hoc rationalization. Rather than thinking through
the issue and then coming to a conclusion, sometimes people will start with the
conclusion and then bend over backwards to come up with reasons to justify it.
No sane person would ever suggest that we should mimic the behavior we observe
in the Animal Kingdom-unless they are trying to justify eating meat.
There are multiple problems with this argument. First,
carnivorous species such as lions need meat
to survive. Granted, there is such a thing as vegan cat food, but it is
intentionally fortified with the appropriate nutrients that the cat’s diet
requires. A lion living in the wild simply could not obtain the nutrients it
needed without eating animal flesh. It is a widely accepted ethical principle
that beings in different circumstances ought to be held to different ethical
standards, so premise 1 is simply a non-sequitur. We would never expect a poor
man to donate as much to charity as a billionaire. If humans were in the same
circumstance as lions-that is, if we also required
meat to survive, then the case for eating meat would be much stronger. But
the evidence suggests that humans can survive and be healthy on a completely
vegan diet.
Another problem with the argument has to do with moral
responsibility. Philosophers distinguish between what they call moral agents
and moral patients. Moral agents are beings who are capable of understanding
the difference between right and wrong and therefore are obligated to act
ethically. Moral patients, on the other hand, have no sense of morality and
therefore cannot be held responsible for their actions. Children, animals, and
the mentally ill are all examples of moral patients. Ethical vegetarians don’t
blame lions for hunting gazelles for the same reason we wouldn’t blame an evil
robot, although we might blame the creator of the robot (yeah, I’m talking about
you, Yahweh). It’s silly to hold lions to any
ethical standard at all. Lions simply act according to instinct, and it’s
not their fault. No matter how hard I try to reason with a lion, I will never
be able to persuade it to stop hunting gazelles. I can (and have), however,
persuaded sane, adult human beings to stop eating meat.
When put in other contexts, getting our morality from animal
behavior leads to conclusions so ridiculous even a meat eater would admit it. This
becomes especially obvious when it is applied to animals we are more familiar
with. Nobody would ever argue that because cats tear mice to pieces, we are
therefore justified in tearing cats to pieces. Anybody who did so would
rightfully be accused of animal cruelty.
Now let’s suppose that you disagree with everything I’ve
written so far. Perhaps you are still convinced that eating meat is natural,
and being natural really is of moral significance. There is still one last
argument I’ve got left. Much like the “sex with a condom” point I mentioned
earlier, even if we agree that it is natural for humans to eat meat, the way in which we’re doing it is not
natural at all. Anybody who is familiar with factory farming knows that there
is hardly anything natural about it. What exactly is natural about breeding
chickens to grow three times as fast as they did in the 1950s while consuming
one-third as much feed? Factory-farmed turkeys have been bred to have such a
large breast that they can no longer mate naturally. (Seriously, there are
people whose job it is to ejaculate male turkeys and insert the semen into the
hens.) Cattle are fed corn kernels, a diet so unnatural for them it would be
like a human trying to survive on only candy bars. They must be given antibiotics
daily just to prevent them from dropping dead before slaughter. Dairy cows are
injected with the artificial growth hormone bovine somatotrophin, which
increases milk production by about 10 percent, but also increases the risk of
mastitis, a painful udder infection. And while we’re on the topic of dairy,
what exactly is natural about drinking the milk of another species? If being
natural is really what you care about, don’t buy your meat from a supermarket.
Go hunt it yourself. That’s the way our ancestors did it before humans invented
agriculture. But don’t use a gun of course. That would be unnatural. You’ll
have to use a spear, a technology developed not by humans, but by Homo
heidelbergensis about 500,000 years ago. **
This essay does not end the debate on vegetarianism of
course. Believe it or not, but even I, a hardcore vegetarian (and almost entirely vegan), at least take
seriously the idea that eating meat can be morally justified. It would require
that the animals are treated humanely throughout life and killed
painlessly. In reality, very few farms operate this way, and the result is that
literally billions of conscious beings are horribly abused. I think humane
farming is a huge improvement over the current system, and though I may not
entirely agree with those who buy meat from such farms, I recognize that there
is a legitimate debate to be had on the issue. So, while there may be some good
arguments for meat, I hope I have demonstrated that this argument, the argument from nature, is a bad one. Even if you
are a meat defender, I hope you will abandon the argument from nature and
criticize it whenever it comes up. I personally find it immensely frustrating
when people make bad arguments for a position I hold dearly. It is only with
clear reasoning and an open mind that we will ever be able to converge on the
truth.
*I think it’s useful to challenge your opponents to phrase
their arguments in a logical format like this because often, as in this case,
the flaw becomes embarrassingly obvious.
**Other evidence suggests that spears are much older,
perhaps as much as 5 million years.
1.
Pinker,
Steven. The Better Angels of Our Nature. New York: Penguin Group, 2011. 415-418.
Print.
Print.
2.
Pinker,
Steven. The Better Angels of Our Nature. New York: Penguin Group, 2011. 484. Print.
3.
Pinker,
Steven. The Better Angels of Our Nature. New York: Penguin Group, 2011. 645. Print.
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