Thoughts on vegetarianism

A good friend of mine and the former president of my university's social club for physics students (which I occasionally served on the committee of) has more recently become president of my university's social club for vegetarian and vegan students. Vegetarianism is not something I have honestly given extensive consideration to in my life. I wrote the movement off very early as being based on emotionally-driven anthropomorphism of animals with little rational backing behind it and never thought of it again. In fact, I've probably enjoyed eating meat more than most people in my life so far. But recent debates on the issue with my friend - proper, academic (though admittedly still casual) debates, with groundings in logic in science - have caused me to at least consider devoting a bit more thought to the issue of what it is and is not ethical to eat. I hope to condense all of my various thoughts into something like a single cohesive document at some stage, but in the interim I thought I'd outline what I consider a particular important realisation here:

The more thought I give the issue of vegetarianism, the more I am struck by the irrationality of the all-or-nothing stance that society takes on this issue. With few exceptions, one is either a vegetarian, eating no meat products, or one is not, eating any and all meat products. Of course there are people who do not count themselves as vegetarian who may avoid particular meat products as a simple matter of taste, but from a moral perspective it seems that a middle ground is unheard of. Someone who self-identifies as a vegetarian, but only avoids certain meat products, is likely to be viewed unfavourably by the vegetarian mainstream as "hypocritical" or "uncommitted". I question whether or not this extreme dichotomy follows logically from any of the common arguments for vegeterianism.

If we are going to be entirely rational about eating ethically, the only acceptable procedure is one logically equivalent to the following: we define a criteria for whether or not a particular animal is ethical to eat, on the basis our particular concerns (which may be about animal cruelty, environmental impact, human health or any or all of the above). We then apply this criteria to each individual animal independently and decide whether or not we are happy to eat it. To be mathematical about it, we need to define a function which maps every animal on Earth to either the concept of "can eat" or that of "cannot eat". This function then partitions the set of animals into ethically edible and ethically inedile, and we are bound by our concerns to eat only animals in one set of this partition. To decide which animals we eat by any other means would be irrational, which is what we are trying to avoid.

Thus we have to ask: what criteria could possibly map every single animal to "cannot eat"? If we are concerned about animal cruelty - how "happy" a life an animal leads before it is slaughtered, how much it suffers during slaughtering, etc., which seems to be the most prevalent concern leading the vegetarianism - we have to ask: does it make sense to treat chimpanzees and dolphins as equivalent to invertebrate prawns and beetles? This seems sketchy at best, and possibly absurd, considering the huge differences in the amount of intelligence and perceptual ability that we can reasonably assume (based on differences in their nervous system structure) each of these animals possesses - yet treating them equivalently is exactly what the present all-or-nothing nature of vegetarianism requires of a rational eater.

A possible loop-hole in our rationalist scheme arises if we consider that we may choose a criteria for ethical edibility which is not readily mesaurable. If our reluctance to eat some animals is driven by concerns about animal cruelty, our criteria may (in fact, probably does) involve the internal mental state of animals in someway. This is not directly measurable, and so we must adopt a stance of "default edibility" or "default inedibility" to guide us in these cases where our criteria cannot be properly applied. A difficult or impossible to apply criteria combined with a stance of default inedibility might lead to the current all-or-nothing nature of vegetarianism. But we should question the sensibility of this combination. The benefit the default inedibility stance presumably arises from a "better safe than sorry" perspective. Yet if our criteria is so very hard to apply in practice, how strong a conviction can we really have about the possibility of ever being "sorry"?

I am becomming increasingly convinced that a truly rational ethical eater would bear little resemblence to most present day vegetarians. Their animal cruelty concerns would cause them to avoid eating dolphins but happily eat prawns. Their environmental sustainability concerns would enable them to happily eat animals grown in small "old fashioned" and sustainable farms instead of huge industrial meat facilities, and when meat pepared in this way was not available it would seem entirely forgivable simply to distribute one's meat consumption over the range of available meats in proportion to environmental impact. I think it a shame that apparently no such "rational eating" movement seems to exist - it certainly should.