Written by David Modiano   

A Guide to Ethical Vegetarianism
Why nothing you say can ever justify eating meat

Vegetarianism is, in my experience, one of those rare topics in which otherwise intelligent people seem to hold false, contradictory, or nonsensical beliefs –with total confidence. For some reason, when it comes to discussing vegetarianism, a vast majority of intelligent humans seem to spout an almost unbelievable amount of meaningless and irrational statements. For us (ethical) vegetarians, it makes arguing our case almost too easy, as we are never presented with any argument that’s remotely difficult to refute, but, as you would expect from what we all know about the stubbornness of human stupidity, also incredibly frustrating.

The simple fact that eating meat is wrong is so obvious that when arguing about it with meat-eaters, we actually hardly need to make any arguments. Since almost everyone already agrees with the statement - at least in its most general terms- “murdering animals for pleasure is wrong”, the discussion generally consists of the meat-eater listing points that appear to support the case for eating meat and the vegetarian negating them. We have no active claims but only counter-arguments, because our conclusion is so evident that it doesn’t just follow from a premise, it is the premise: killing animals for pleasure is wrong. Here I list all of the pro-meat arguments I’ve heard since I became vegetarian and why they are illogical and/or immoral.

If you find serious flaws in one or more of these points, or if you come up with good arguments I haven’t considered, then please let me know in the comments and we can discuss it. If not, however, then I’m afraid you are already on my side; you will have proved to yourself beyond any doubt that you already agree that a non-vegetarian diet is wrong, even if perhaps you have never realised it or admitted it to yourself. In this case, instead of continuing to live in this bizarre state of shameless contradiction between your beliefs and your behaviour, just stop eating meat. Or at least feel guilty when you do.

1. “Eating meat is natural”

It appears to be quite likely that humans are omnivores; we are designed to eat meat. However, even though it is blatantly obvious to me how much of a non-argument this is, the number of people who use it as a justification for eating meat is shocking. For some reason, when people provide the senseless excuse “But eating meat is natural!” their thought process seems to simply come to a halt. They consistently fail to make the infinitesimal leap of logic that would lead to the general implication of their statement, which is, of course, the absurd idea that if something is natural then it is also ethical.

At the risk of sounding condescending for stating something so obvious, the “naturalness” of an act is entirely independent of its morality. Examples of natural behaviour include war, murder, men literally killing each other over who gets to have sex with all the women. Racism, sexism and in fact any type of discrimination is natural. A quick glance at human anatomy establishes without a doubt that one gender was designed to have the ability to sexually impose itself on the other – this allows for more effective transmission of genes, which is the driving force of evolution. The whole point of morality is to deny our violent nature. When we talk about doing the right thing, we are not talking about doing the natural thing. So it is irrational to bring nature into an argument about ethics.
And no, I don’t judge a lion for killing an antelope. It would be patronizing for me to explain why.

2. “I just don’t care about animals enough; I don’t respect them”

Not caring about or respecting any particular being does not justify murder. This argument is in theory a legitimate reason for refraining from actively helping animals and doing what you can to make their lives happier – it is not a reason to do them any harm. It also seems to provide ethical validation for cruelty and murder directed at any human who doesn’t have your respect (“I just don’t care about this particular human enough, I don’t respect him, so it’s ok to kill him”), and this is obviously immoral so the argument does not stand.
We should probably also consider what the statement is begging to have discussed: its total subjectivity. It is not a fundamental moral principle and cannot be derived by any logic - it is purely a matter of the speaker’s own personal feelings. Therefore if you use this statement as a validation for animal murder, you can make no comment on any cruelty done to any animal under any circumstance. What right do you have to criticise, for instance, a psychopathic teenager who entertains himself by putting a cat in a bin and throwing lit fireworks in the bin to watch the cat die? After all, fundamentally what he is doing is simply maximising his own pleasure at the expense of an animal’s life, which is exactly what you are doing when you order a burger. Why is your lack of respect for cows more acceptable than his lack of respect for cats? Or your food-based pleasure more acceptable than his fun-based pleasure? You would even have trouble arguing against the point that the cat in this situation suffers immensely less than the cow! So while this argument is not inherently illogical, the only way to use it rationally is by 1) deciding that you believe killing and torturing humans who you do not respect is acceptable and 2) deciding that all cruelty directed at animals is acceptable. As you can see it is therefore quite impossible for this defence to be successfully implemented by anyone who is not a psychopath.

3. “You can’t be completely healthy without meat. What about protein?”

It is actually not only possible but extremely easy to achieve the same (in fact most likely, better) health from a vegetarian diet as one can achieve from an omnivorous one. Little research is required to find out all the details of this. If you don’t feel comfortable taking my word for this then let me know and I can send you a series of sources.
It is probably still worth making a note on the crucial vitamin B-12, which is almost exclusive to animal products. Firstly, large quantities of the vitamin are found in dairy, so that solves the problem for vegetarians. For vegans, supplements of it are required (although there are some vegan foods that contain large amounts of it, such as nutritional yeast).

4. “It’s already dead when you eat it”

When you buy meat or order meat at a restaurant, you are creating demand, which creates supply. You have not killed the animal that’s on your plate, but you are effectively ordering the death of the next one. There is no fundamental moral distinction between killing an animal and actively choosing to pursue a diet which you know causes animals to be killed (in fact it seems to me that if anything the former is the more dignified choice, if the animal is then eaten).

5. “That’s what the animals are bred for; that’s their purpose”

I think it is fairly evident that forcing cows to breed does not give you ownership rights on their offspring. The specific cause of an animal’s (or, for that matter, a human’s) birth – in this case the forced breeding of its parents - has no effect on its right to not be enslaved and then murdered.
Also, like almost every argument on this list, this point makes no theoretical distinction between animals and humans, and would therefore justify breeding, farming, killing, and eating humans that are kept in cages: “But that’s what the humans are bred for!” [if this idea somehow doesn’t convince you, check out my brother’s very interesting essay entirely on this point: Would You Eat a Retard?]
It might be worth noting further that this point on its own does not allow for eating anything that hasn’t been specifically bred for the purpose of eating. A justification for eating animals that have been privately hunted, or indeed most fish, would therefore still be required.

6. “If we all suddenly stopped eating meat, all the livestock in the world would die/would escape their enclosures and bother us”

Undoubtedly if all the livestock in the world died as a result of all humans becoming vegetarians in the same moment, then that would be not be ideal for the livestock. However, in the long term it would bring only advantages. Firstly, those particular animals would have died later anyway (violently), and secondly, billions of future animals being born into torture and dying in misery shortly thereafter would be avoided. But perhaps most importantly, everyone knows that if the entire human species ever stops eating meat, it will not be sudden but gradual, so this is idea is completely inconsequential.

7. “If we feel guilty about eating meat, then we should feel guilty about pretty much everything. All our beauty products get tested on animals, a lot of the clothes we buy were made by child labour, the paper we use cost an orangutan its home, some diamonds were mined by slaves, etc.”

This argument is probably the hardest to counter, not really because it’s more logically sound than the others but because it involves subjectivity, unknowns, and grey areas.
Firstly however, we should acknowledge that the entire point can be negated by the following self-evident statement: if something is unethical then it is unethical – listing other unethical things doesn’t make it any better. So even if this argument was successful, it wouldn’t confirm that meat-eating is an acceptable act, it would simply force us to question the morality of other actions.

The argument can be refuted by other means as well. It turns out that cruelty-free products are actually fairly easy to find and buy, and they are getting increasingly cheaper, easier to find, and of better quality. For instance shampoo that hasn’t been tested on animals is available – and cheap - at any major supermarket; most paper comes from sustainable “tree farms” in Scandinavia (incidentally, most deforestation comes from needing space for livestock and the crops used to feed them); fake leather, along with veggie burgers, dairy substitutes, etc. are all getting almost frighteningly close to the “real thing”. Searching hard enough, it is even relatively simple to find huge ranges of clothes that are guaranteed to have been produced ethically. So to eliminate the problem of feeling guilty over what you consume, really all you need to do is put some effort into it (and yes, sometimes an extra penny or two).
If we do decide to buy certain products without considering ethics, there are still a few things we need to think about when comparing them to eating meat. (If at this point into this paragraph you have already been convinced that I’ve refuted the argument, feel free to skip to the summarising paragraph at the end of this section and then on to the next argument. The rest of this paragraph is a potentially unnecessary and definitely incomplete analysis of the ethical considerations required in distinguishing eating meat from buying other “unethical” products, specifically, clothes produced via child labour).

I will use the specific example of clothes produced from child labour, but similar arguments can be made for most other “unethical” products.
First of all, we must remember that no matter how miserable a child’s life is, the decision to work is almost always voluntary (either on the part of the child or the parents). This doesn’t absolve the company of its treatment of the child, nor does it absolve us consumers for buying the products, nor, more philosophically, does it absolve humanity for building a society in which so many children need to accept these tragic working conditions in order to survive. But it does highlight the important difference between voluntary labour and slavery, which is the case with livestock.
Next, we can think about the uncertainty involved: when you buy an average piece of clothing, it is quite improbable that a child has lost his or her life for it, whereas when you buy any turkey, there is little doubt that a turkey has been killed. If you buy a pair of trainers from Nike, the likelihood of a child having suffered is significantly higher. However, we can make an (admittedly, very vague) attempt at the very difficult task of estimating the relative amounts of these types of pain. An average person single-handedly eats roughly 7000 animals in his or her lifetime. I do not think that it is a very big leap then to declare that even one hundred lifetimes worth of buying clothes, some of which may or may not have caused some children to suffer can be compared to the concrete, cold fact that each person who eats meat has effectively murdered seven thousand thinking, feeling creatures; and contributed to crafting the most miserable of lives imaginable for about 6300 of them (about 90% of meat in Europe comes from factory farms – 99% if you live in the USA, so 6930 out of your 7000).
I should at this point probably point out that I am making no attempt to underestimate the importance of trying to buy ethically produced clothing in order to reduce the suffering of children. I am simply trying to refute the idea that we should feel equally guilty about this sort of consumption as we should about eating meat – the conclusion is inevitably that our guilt should be outstandingly greater for the latter.

So in summary, this argument is refuted because 1) you can relatively easily abstain from doing most of the actions you can come up with that have potentially harmful consequences for other people/animals, 2) even if you couldn’t, that doesn’t excuse eating meat, it simply “un-excuses” all the other actions, 3) in almost all of these situations it is impossible or difficult to know if any harm has actually been done; on the other hand when you eat meat, you know with absolute certainty that an animal has been killed, and you can say with fairly high confidence that it has also been treated violently for its short life, and most importantly, 4) the quantity and intensity of suffering and death caused by eating an average amount of meat is vastly superior to that caused by all other routine human activity.

8. “You’re not the one who kills it”

Clearly idiotic, but I have considered it here nonetheless because I have once actually been presented with it in person by a meat-eater during a discussion about vegetarianism. Not being the person who physically slits an animal’s throat doesn’t absolve you of responsibility. If someone hires someone else to perform any given immoral action, the employer must obviously still be held accountable. In fact I would argue that the employer holds more, if not all, the responsibility in this situation: a particular worker is simply doing a job that would be done anyway, as long as people like you require it. I cannot consider you to be ethically sane if you can be the direct cause of unlimited violence and immorality and yet still somehow feel you have a clean conscience just because you didn’t physically perform the action. Also, does this not suggest that all farmers and slaughterhouse workers are evil? They are the ones who killed it.

9. “I just love meat too much”

Mostly used at least half-jokingly, but so often that it still merits a brief response. Pleasure is not a license to do whatever you want. Pleasure is what you sacrifice when you decide you want to be a good person.
Adding a personal aspect, until about four years ago I ate more than an average amount of meat, and I loved it. But once you dedicate any decent amount of thought to a morally questionable practice, it is actually fairly easy to give up on it when you realise how undeniably wrong it is.

10. “I respect your decision to be vegetarian, so why can’t you respect my decision to eat meat?”

Because if I respected the decision to eat meat, I would eat it. The entire point of being a vegetarian is that I don’t respect the decision to eat meat. It’s not a preference, it’s abstinence from cruelty. “I respect your decision to not murder people, so why can’t you respect my decision to assassinate my fellow humans?” – a raging lunatic killer justifying himself according to your logic.

As a final note, if you eat meat, never say you love animals. Never feel empathy for them, never root for one when witnessing it struggle, never feel happy when they are happy, never feel angry or sad when someone is cruel to them, never feel anger when you hear about teenagers shooting fireworks at cats. You gladly and apparently without any guilt contribute to the torture and death of several different species of animals and their babies, animals that are often intelligent and that always want to avoid suffering and death, just as much as you do. You do this on a daily basis. You do this with no objective other than for your own personal pleasure. If you have any feeling towards any animal other than violent hatred, then you have some thinking to do. Because I can barely imagine doing the things you do to animals to something that I passionately hate, let alone to something I love. You have lost the right to love animals.