On the ethics of meat eating

[archerships]

Bryan Caplan's debate with Mike Huemer over the ethics of meat eating prompted these thoughts.

I think we have whatever moral intuitions increase the likelihood of surviving and reproducing (aka fitness). Eating animals increases fitness, so most humans don't have many taboos against meat eating. Humans aren't off the menu either, though I think most humans avoid cannibalism unless in extremis.

My theory is that humans avoid cannibalism because we're especially social, long-lived, and have long memories. Eat your neighbor's baby, and you will face hostility from them for the rest of your life. You will almost always benefit more by keeping them as a friend and collaborator over a lifetime than the short term calorie boost that eating their baby would provide.

We have empathy because it helps us better model how others will behave. Knowing and caring about how others feel helps us to collaborate better over time. Animals have much less capacity to collaborate, so we don't have as much incentive to care about how they feel, though we have some for especially social/useful animals like dogs, horses, cattle, etc.

There's probably also spillover empathy, empathy that does us no good--Mother Nature is a sloppy cook. This probably explains why many of us don't like seeing even inanimate objects being "tormented".

Mother Nature also doesn't care about logical consistency. She just throws a bunch of heuristics together and sees what sticks. Fitness is the only filter.

If we want people to switch to vegetarianism, haranguing them about the immorality of meat-eating is likely to continue to fall on deaf ears. Making tasty meat alternatives available at a much lower cost than meat will likely work much better. Humans will then stop eating meat voluntarily, for selfish economic reasons.