Someone recently made the following inquiry of me: “Given your other predispositions, how can you consistently justify your consumption of meat?” After a few terrible moments of fluster, I had to admit that my interlocutor had taken the point; I was only Thomas Jefferson at his most vulnerable and disingenuous, inwardly holding the moral view but outwardly insisting on the immoral institution for the economy and shrugging away the objections.
But the same sinister hypocrisy haunts us all; we shrivel in horror at the grotesque cases of cruelty toward domestic animals, yet we meet their advocates in the street with disinterest and irritation. Why, yes, I'll accept a copy of your pamphlet, we respond pleasantly. Anything to placate you. Of course I care about Scruffy, but not the nameless calf hammered into velvety meatloaf with a blunt instrument; why would I ever feel differently? Why should I?
And just in case the notion that our privileged position in the biosphere seems like it might provide the seedling for a good argument, suppose there were some exotic breed of creature who stood in the same supervisory and intellectual relationship to us that we do to, say, the intelligent and sensitive barnyard pig. Would it follow that they would have ethical license to do with us what they pleased—including, perhaps, gouging out our eyes, drowning us in Armagnac and devouring us whole, as we do the Ortolan—simply for the sake of it? Of course not. We would protest desperately that we're sentient creatures and are endowed with rights against such barbarism. You can't fold us into an omelet; we have Aristotle! We have Dostoevsky! We have quantum mechanics!
And even if Papillion dogs and Lowland gorillas cannot nestle cameras inside their own blood cells, our anti-cruelty laws demonstrate that we are wont nonetheless to recognize something like their natural rights, too. We have a natural aversion to needless brutality that clearly extends beyond the scope of our species, and if we insist on housing such thoughts in our heads and housing such laws on the books, then we had better either explain why some animals do not fall under the purview of the law specifically created to protect them as a class or why there are extenuating circumstances so important that it doesn't matter.
Perhaps there actually are extenuating circumstances, like considerations about the survival of mankind. Well, perhaps there once were; vegetarians in modernity, armed with supplements and a mountain of empirical data, no longer need strive only to demonstrate the mere feasibility of their choice, but can rather convincingly—spotted a few supplements—argue its positive moral and nutritional superiority.
The fact of the matter is, no matter which way we turn or which utilitarian calculus we invoke, in the end we have only cold explanations of our behavior, not justifications for it. The flesh of animals is a culinary pleasure that tickles taste buds otherwise dormant, and if its owners need suffer a blindfold and a cigarette to provide it, that's not exactly too bad for us, is it? In the interest of full disclosure, I admit that this issue is not even particularly dear to me, but I also must recognize that it is quite dear to some, and clearly for good reason. So, I suppose all along, the sobering thesis was the following: even if we don't ourselves abstain from eating meat, we ought to take seriously the objections of those who do, and admit that either we're not civilized enough to have a coherent ethics distinct from lower mammals, or that we're just too savage to follow them.
