Opinion

GOD SQUAD: In vegetarian vs. meat-eating debate, there’s no one-way-or-the highway position

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My recent column on vegetarianism touched a vein (oops) among many readers. Most who responded to the column focused on the obvious selfishness and immorality of causing suffering and death to a sentient being just so we can have a burger for lunch when a salad would be both morally and nutritionally preferable.

To these readers, I say again that I believe they tread the higher road, but it’s not the only path. For many people, a burger is preferable and such folks are clearly not moral monsters.

When it comes to ethics, we must rely upon commonly accepted moral intuitions to make our arguments. For example, some people still believe in owning slaves, but the common human moral intuition today is that slavery is a moral abomination.

Eating meat is not like owning slaves. It is and always has been a common and morally unobjectionable practice of the vast majority of human beings. As much as vegetarians might wish that all people would share their moral choices, they do not, and vegetarian vituperation — like chanting, “Meat is murder” — doesn’t make for helpful dialogue. If this was a question of arithmetic, it would not matter how many people thought that 2 plus 2 equals 5. All of them would be wrong.

However, in ethics, moral intuition matters, and it’s clearly a moral intuition of the majority of people that eating meat is acceptable. Those who object to the practice have the high moral ground — but they don’t hold all the ground. Most vegetarians know this and we can see it in what I call “vegetarian ambivalence.”

Non-vegan vegetarians see no moral problem in eating dairy products from factory farms, wearing leather that’s a byproduct of slaughterhouses, or using drugs (not just cosmetics) or medical protocols that are tested on animals. Some vegetarians (piscaterians) even eat fish and still call themselves vegetarians.

I’m not here to judge such people as hypocrites, but merely to point out that even within the vegetarian community there exists a moral intuition that some human use of products that cause animal suffering is ethically acceptable. My carnivorous readers have just made a broader compromise.

Certainly, some moral judgments are clear. It’s always wrong to murder an innocent human being. Some moral judgments are impossibly difficult (“Who do we save when we cannot save everyone?”) Most moral judgments, like whether it’s right to eat meat, fall in between. In ethics and in religion, there are usually many levels of how to do good.

Through revelation, God has shown us higher and less high ways to serve God. Maimonides identified many moral levels of charity. All of them are good, but some of them are better. God wants us to give on the highest moral level possible, while also remembering that lower ways are also blessed.

I think of this as my Christian brothers and sisters are sacrificing something in their daily life for Lent. My Muslim friends did that during Ramadan, and I’m about to do that for Passover. We all must sacrifice something, but we all could sacrifice more than we do.

The same is true in the realm of secular ethics. It’s just wrong to imagine that there’s just one path to virtue. The natural evolution of truly good people is to begin on a minimally decent level of moral accountability and then, over time, after gaining discipline and wisdom, move higher up the moral ladder.

Animals are creations of God and they feel pain, but they don’t have the same moral or spiritual standing as human beings. This is not just speciesism — an arbitrary preference for our species — but a deep, enduring and majoritarian moral intuition.

I was especially moved by the comments of a dairy farmer from Kaukauna, Wisconsin, regarding my earlier column. He was hurt by what he felt were my unfair generalizations about the suffering of animals,

“I work for one of those large, modern farms that you deride as a ‘factory.’ We take great pride in the care and comfort of ALL the animals in our care,” he wrote. “I could throw dozens of facts and figures at you, but I’ll simply observe that it’s counter-intuitive for any conscientious farmer to treat their herd with malice.

“Those animals (in our case, cows) are our lifeblood, our bread and our butter. The happier and more comfortable they are, the more productive they are. To subject them to ‘suffering’ — or worse yet ‘terrible suffering’ — would make no sense even from the most selfish of perspectives.”

In this Lenten period of reflection, it’s important to remember that we can’t always find the right way to live a decent life. Our appetites so often intrude. That’s why we need to be led to the truth in this season, and in all seasons, by God’s strong hand and outstretched arm.

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