Edibility and In Vitro Meat: Ethical Considerations 1793614660, 9781793614667

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Edibility and In Vitro Meat

Edibility and In Vitro Meat Ethical Considerations Rachel Robison-Greene

LEXINGTON BOOKS

Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www​.rowman​.com 86-90 Paul Street, London EC2A 4NE Copyright © 2023 by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Robison-Greene, Rachel, 1983- author.   Title: Edibility and in vitro meat : ethical considerations / Rachel     Robison-Greene.   Description: Lanham : Lexington Books, [2023] | Includes bibliographical     references and index. | Summary: "This book considers the arguments for     and against the implementation of in vitro meat technology. Rachel     Robison-Greene argues that in light of emerging technology, we should     rethink the ethical dimensions of what makes something "edible.""--     Provided by publisher.   Identifiers: LCCN 2022037092 (print) | LCCN 2022037093 (ebook) | ISBN     9781793614667 (cloth) | ISBN 9781793614674 (epub)   Subjects: LCSH: Cultured meat--Moral and ethical aspects. | Meat--Moral and     ethical aspects. | Meat--Social aspects.  Classification: LCC GT2868.55 .R63 2023  (print) | LCC GT2868.55  (ebook) |     DDC 664/.9--dc23/eng/20220928  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022037092 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022037093   ​​​​​​​The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

​​​​​​​To my husband, Richard Greene, whose support and encouragement I can always count on.

Contents

Acknowledgments ix Chapter 1: In Vitro Meat: A Moral Revolution?



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Chapter 2: Can They Suffer?: Utilitarian Considerations Chapter 3: Why Not In Vitro Meat?





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Chapter 4: Subjects of Lives and Inherent Value Chapter 5: Non-Ideal Theory and Paradigm Shifts



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Chapter 6: The “Yuck” Factor, Aesthetics, and Cognitive Bias Chapter 7: Edibility and Eating Others Chapter 8: Beings and Bodies

Index

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Chapter 9: Pandemics, Animal Exploitation, and In Vitro Meat Bibliography

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About the Author

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Acknowledgments

I am deeply indebted to The Culture and Animals Foundation, which awarded me the inaugural Tom Regan Fellowship that allowed me to spend the summer in the Tom Regan Animal Rights Archive at North Carolina State in 2019. I’d like to thank Gary Comstock and Martin Rowe, in particular, for their support and encouragement. Similarly, I would like to thank North Carolina State Library and Gwyneth Thayer for use of the archive and help navigating it. It was a wonderful, enriching experience. I’d also like to thank the philosophy department at University of Massachusetts, Amherst, for inviting me to present some of this research at their homecoming conference in fall, 2019. I’d like to express appreciation to Weber State University for inviting me to clarify my thoughts on these issues by speaking at Ethics Days events. I’d like to thank my department, the Department of Communication Studies and Philosophy for supporting me through this project. Finally, I’d like to thank my son Henry and my husband Richard for all of their predictable encouragement. To Richard, I couldn’t have completed this project without you, especially during a pandemic.

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Chapter 1

In Vitro Meat A Moral Revolution?

Fifty years hence, we shall escape the absurdity of growing a whole chicken in order to eat the breast or wing by growing these parts separately under a suitable medium. —Winston Churchill

In 2013, food scientist Mark Post, founder of Mosa Meats, presented the first cell-cultured hamburger to a group of taste-testers in front of a room full of reporters (BBC.com 2013). The scene, which took place in London, resembled an episode of a program on Food Network. The burger was prepared by a chef on a kitchen set while a panelist of judges waited to share their impressions. In this taste-test there was much more at stake than prize money or professional pride. This was a proof-of-concept for a product that could revolutionize the way that human beings eat. This pure-beef hamburger, unlike all of the other hamburgers that came before it, did not require the slaughter of a cow. Though garnishes and a bun were placed on the plates for visual effect, the judges consumed the burger plain. In fact, one of the judges, food critic Hanni Ruetzler, complained that she “missed salt and pepper.” The product was presented in this way in order to gauge just how much the hamburger, and the hamburger alone, resembled meat produced in the traditional way. The feedback was promising. The entire panel of judges reported that the in vitro burger resembled an ordinary burger in both taste and texture. They also all pointed out that it tasted extremely lean. This was unsurprising because fat was totally absent from the product. Fats are produced in flesh in a way that requires more architecture than a petri dish provides.

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Nevertheless, the results were what Post had hoped they would be—they demonstrated that a hamburger can be produced in vitro that exhibits a taste profile that strongly resembles hamburgers produced as a result of the slaughter of cows. The technology shows such promise that billionaires like Bill Gates and Richard Branson have invested in it. In fact, Gates made headlines in early 2021 for suggesting that wealthier nations should switch over to 100 percent synthetic meat in order to prevent climate change (Temple 2021). Synthetic meat is made in a lab, so the change that Gates suggests could come in the form of realistic plant-based meat substitutes or in the form of cultured meat. Gates has invested in both. In December 2020, Singapore became the first country in the world to provide regulatory approval for the sale of in vitro meat (Waltz 2021). The product that they approved is a chicken nugget and was created by US start-up Eat Just. In late 2020, Eat Just partnered with 1880, a group dedicated to starting important global conversations, to put on a dining event in Singapore. The menu included a four-course in vitro chicken meal. The diners included a group of young people, some as young as eleven years old, who are dedicated to making the world a better place. They were all thrilled by the product and excited for the more humane future that it represents. The product will continue to be sold at the Singapore restaurant throughout 2021 at the cost of a premium chicken dish (Business Wire 2020). The next step for Eat Just is to apply for permits allowing it to sell fillets. Approving in vitro chicken was a wise move for Singapore. The country is small and it currently imports most of its food. They simply do not have the space to dedicate to agriculture. In vitro technology presents Singapore with the chance to become food secure. In the event of an emergency such as a natural disaster or a pandemic, citizens of the country will not need to be concerned about whether they will go hungry if their relationships with food sources are compromised, or at least this will be the case when if and when in vitro products can be produced to scale. To many, this new way of producing meat seems ideal. Indeed, in an essay called “50 Years Hence” written in December of 1931, Winston Churchill predicted that we would produce meat in this very way. He could not have known the exact mechanism by which this would happen, but he did predict that we would change our method of food production without giving up much or anything by way of gustatory delight. In describing the food of the future, he said, “The new foods will from the outset be practically indistinguishable from the natural products, and any changes will be so gradual as to escape observation.” Churchill was not the only thinker or writer to anticipate this new technology. Some writers, like Margaret Atwood in Oryx and Crake, describe this potential food future in more dystopian ways. Atwood, too, imagines chicken

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products produced without the chicken, as it were. In this world of her creation in which nothing is produced naturally; chicken breasts are grown in a lab. This is how she describes the scene: “This is the latest,” said Crake. What they were looking at was a large bulblike object that seemed to be covered with stippled whitish-yellow skin. Out of it came twenty thick fleshy tubes, and at the end of each tube another bulb was growing. “What the hell is it?” said Jimmy. “Those are chickens,” said Crake. “Chicken parts. Just the breasts, on this one. They’ve got ones that specialize in drumsticks too, twelve to a growth unit.” (Atwood 2004, 202)

What Atwood describes is hardly appetizing. Nevertheless, later in the story, characters eagerly consume the product without much concern for how it was produced. At a certain point, all that matters is that it is edible, safe, nutritious, and flavorful. Atwood also anticipates the benefits of such a method of production, “You get chicken breasts in two weeks—that’s a three-week improvement on the most efficient low-light, high-density chicken farming operation so far devised. And the animal-welfare freaks won’t be able to say a word, because this thing feels no pain” (Atwood 2004, 202). Atwood’s take on these products produced in her imagined “NeoAgricultural” department is consistent with the response that many have when they hear that the meat of the future could be produced in a lab rather than cultivated in more traditional ways. One might also be reminded of Huxley’s “pan-glandular biscuits and vitaminized beef-surrogate” from Brave New World (Huxley 2007). When presented with the possibility, many people are inclined to say, “that’s disgusting.” As my husband puts it “some people don’t want science fiction in their food.” Yet the fact remains that when we use expressions such as “traditional ways of producing meat,” we are speaking euphemistically. Our “traditional” methods of meat production involve facilities all over the world in which thousands of animals occupy close quarters and wallow in one another’s blood and feces under circumstances that are ideal for the spread of both inter and intra species diseases. In response to the in vitro meat proposal, some people bemoan the loss of naturalness. They are concerned that we are entering a new phase of human development in which humans do not live off of the abundance of the planet, but, rather, they construct nature. Of course, industrial animal agriculture is itself hardly natural, so it is important to reflect on what exactly it is that we are trying to preserve when we say that we have reverence for all things natural. In a state of nature, animals wouldn’t be contained and treated as products in these ways.

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THE CELL CULTURING PROCESS Since the 2013 proof-of-concept, many companies have entered the cell cultured meat market. Memphis Meats was formed in 2015 and has recently changed its name to Upside Foods. In 2021, the company announced that the first product it would bring to market would be cell cultured fried chicken. If it receives regulatory approval from the FDA, the product will go on sale later this year. Future Meat Technologies, a company that creates products that are a hybrid of cell cultured chicken and plant-based product, announced in May of 2021 that they were able to reduce the price of production to $4 for 110 ounces. The CEO of the company anticipates that that cost will drop to $2 in the next eighteen months at which time they will, pending approval, bring the product to market in the United States. He anticipates that it will achieve price parity with traditional poultry in eight years. Outside of the chicken market, Aleph Farms, a Tel Aviv based company, has overcome some of the industry’s early texture challenges to produce the world’s first in vitro tube steaks. Recognizing the need to prevent the overfishing of our oceans, Finless Foods and BlueNalu have set out to produce in vitro fish products. All of these products make use of the same technology. The first step is to obtain a tissue sample from an animal. This is done through a biopsy process. This procedure need not cause the animal any pain, as they will be issued a local anesthetic in advance of the procedure. After the tissue is harvested, the animal can go about its life—it is not doomed for the slaughterhouse.1 In the next stage, stem cells are isolated. These cells are then fed with a nutrient-dense serum and then proteins allow the cells to differentiate. The plates are placed in a bioreactor and new cells—which provide the substance of the resultant meat product—are generated. Mark Post has pointed out that this process need not occur in a lab. As the technology develops further, it may be possible to purchase cell culturing kits in order to culture meat in one’s own home. Plant tissue culturing already occurs in homes, and there is no reason why animal tissue culture can’t also be grown in this way. When this technology is fully developed, people may be able to grow hamburgers in their own homes with now cows in sight. The industry faces a series of challenges. The main moral challenge is the serum used in the process. Traditionally, cell-culturing is completed using fetal bovine serum—a growth serum that uses the plasma from a fetal cow to stimulate the growth of cells. The slaughterhouse plays a prominent role in the production of fetal bovine serum. A pregnant dairy cow is slaughtered, and the fetus is treated as just one more of the consumable byproducts of her death. The fetus is harvested and heart cells are collected through the process

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of cardiac puncture whereby a needle is injected into the heart. Cells are collected in this way from one to two million fetuses annually. In order to be viable sources, the calves need to be at least three months old. If they are younger than that, the heart is too small for the process of cardiac puncture to work. One of the most significant concerns about this procedure is that the fetuses are not anesthetized and there is a chance that, if they have not died due to lack of oxygen, they feel pain during the procedure. One of the main motivating forces behind the development of in vitro meat is, of course, animal welfare. If the process of culturing cells in vitro relies on the very system of animal agriculture to which so many people object, in vitro meat will not count as a viable ethical market alternative to meat produced on a factory farm. Indeed, for many, the process by which fetal bovine serum is harvested highlights the cruelest aspects of our meat production practices—animal agriculture often involves keeping cows perpetually pregnant. No respect is ever paid to the bonds between a cow and her calf, and no consideration is given to the relationship that would develop between mother and calf in the fullness of time were things to proceed naturally. When the determination is made that it is time for the mother to be slaughtered, she is killed without hesitation, whether she is pregnant or not. Her body is chopped up and each of her parts are harvested in a way that maximizes profits. Even the fetus she never had a chance to know is viewed as an object for consumption. A protein source that makes use of this serum is no more ethical than a flank steak. Fortunately, some companies, such as Mosa Meats and Meatable, have found ways to produce their products without the use of fetal bovine serum (Mosa Meat n.d.). A second challenge, this one practical, has to do with the texture of the meat. In order for there to be any chance that consumers will embrace this product, it must be the case that the texture of the meat is indistinguishable from meat harvested from slaughtered animals. At this point, this is fairly easy to achieve when dealing with ground products, like burger. Steak is the gold standard—it is very difficult to produce meat that is the consistency of steak in a cultured environment. Aleph Farms has come close. A related challenge is integrating fats into the product. Unlike meat produced in the body, fat cells and other cells are produced independently in vitro. Companies struggle to find a way to weave fats into the product in a way that resembles a more traditional product. Some companies are using 3-D printing to produce meat with the desired textural architecture. A third challenge is the cost. At this point, in vitro meat is very expensive to produce. That initial in vitro hamburger cost $330,000 to create (of course, most of this was research and development costs). This might also mean that it will sell at the grocery store and in restaurants at a higher price. There is a good chance that consumers will not accept it as a viable market

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alternative unless it is less expensive than traditional meat, especially given the common incredulity regarding the source. Many people who view the general idea favorably are not optimistic that it will live up to its aspirations as a scalable, economically feasible alternative to meat produced in factory farms. That said, these obstacles are not insurmountable and the benefits of the technology seem well worth the effort to iron out the wrinkles and perfect the process. ROADMAP The attempt to produce meat in vitro is an attempt to solve what has heretofore been an intractable set of problems. The approach involves the recognition that if we wait on large portions of the population to change their behavior, we’ll be waiting for a very long time, perhaps forever. This solution to so many of our problems shouldn’t simply be treated as an entertaining tech gimmick that produces stimulating conversation at cocktail parties; it should be treated as the promising non-ideal approach that it is. I was lucky to spend a summer in the Tom Regan Animal Rights Archive where I came across some original correspondence between suffragette and animal welfare advocate Sarah J. Eddy and physician and social reformer Albert Leffingwell. In their letters, Eddy and Leffingwell stress the importance of dissemination of information about animal welfare issues, which in their time often came in the form of the proliferation of pamphlets. They were optimistic that if the facts were accessible to the public, the force of reason would prevail. It didn’t. Until the very end of the nineteenth century, there were no animal welfare laws that restricted the practices of those operating in laboratories and slaughterhouses. Stunningly, that situation remains largely unchanged today. Abuse of animals has always been big business. Many people stand to gain from it. When there is money to be made, people can’t be bothered to be concerned about whether their products have thoughts and feelings. Sadly, our historical record demonstrates that this motivation can sometimes win out even when humans are the “products.” That we are subject to errors of this magnitude should cause us to reflect on practices that are more commonplace, but that nevertheless involve suffering. In a letter to Eddy, Leffingwell laments the perils of powerful interests, When we began the special agitation on the subject of vivisection a few years ago, it was—on my part—, with a very strong hope that the Medical Profession generally would meet us “half-way”—as the saying is, and concede some degree of supervision and controls. I was very sure that as a class, the physicians

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of this country did not approve of unlimited experimentation, and our investigations of five years ago embodied in the report proved that I was correct. But experience has demonstrated that I was altogether too hopeful. The older men, who disapproved of unrestricted vivisection have been passing away, and their places are not filled. The men who were engaged in vivisection as a means of gaining their daily bread realized their danger and united in a common defense. It is not merely that they control the medical newspaper press throughout the country, and that they have the confidence of a majority of those concerned with learning–with this they were not satisfied and have stooped to unworthy methods in defense of vivisection. Five years ago, I could not have believed that members of the American Medical Association would have sunk so low as to employ falsehoods as a method of argumentation. (Sarah J. Eddy and Albert Leffingwell Correspondence, June 1898–1905)

The letters between Eddy and Leffingwell tell the story of a sustained fight for animal welfare that lasted decades. Though they, along with others deeply committed to the cause, succeeded in putting together a society of diligent advocates, little changed when it came to the actual treatment of non-human animals or with regard to legislating any significant protections. Leffingwell complains, If I could feel that little by little, we are undermining the confidence so wrongly given, and that one day the falsifiers will be utterly discredited, and (as Wendell Phillips used to say,)—“the Truth get a hearing” and be accepted generally, I should feel greatly encouraged. It does seem certain that in the long run, falsehood cannot overcome truth. But how long must we wait? (Sarah J. Eddy and Albert Leffingwell Correspondence, June 1898–1905)

Sadly, it turns out that the answer to this question remains unclear—we’re still waiting. Special interest groups like the meat industry are more powerful than ever. The value of the use of animals for human purposes in our culture has become like an article of faith. We’re propelled blindly forward, unreflective about what the cost of our pursuit actually is. It looks like it might be time for a new strategy. Though to many the successful implementation of in vitro meat seems like a long shot, this technology could, and there are good reasons to think should, become our primary method of meat production. As such, the issue deserves thorough discussion. It will be my goal in this book to address a wide range of ethical questions that arise in response to this new technology. In chapter two, I look at cultured meat from a broadly consequentialist perspective. I provide the main consequence-based reasons to implement the technology. In chapter three, I discuss some of the consequences that speak against it. In that chapter I will address the set of considerations that typically arise from what is commonly

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understood as the “animal welfare” approach to animal ethics. I consider some common objections to abandoning large scale industrial agriculture; I discuss the common “logic of the larder” considerations, along with concerns about what might happen to farm animals if we no longer raise and use them for food. In chapter four, I discuss the issue from an animal rights perspective. This framework is often abolitionist in nature, maintaining that we should give up using animals and animal secretions altogether because animals are the subjects of lives and not the kinds of things that we should think of as either tools or food. In that chapter, I will consider and evaluate arguments related to consent and exploitation. In chapter five, I will discuss the distinction between ideal and non-ideal theory. I will provide an overview of people’s attitudes toward a host of issues related to meat production such as concern for animal welfare, attitudes about the threats posed by climate change, thoughts about meat eating, and perspectives on vegetarian and vegan diets. I will argue that it is unlikely that respect for ideal theory will be sufficient to motivate significant changes in behavior. I will maintain that a non-ideal approach is the best that we can do. In chapter six, I will explore issues related to motivation. I’ll discuss the “yuck factor” and offer ideas about how best to deal with it. I will survey roadblocks that the animal agricultural lobby has put in the way of marketing and defining “meat.” In doing so, I will briefly discuss the metaphysics of meat. Finally, I will talk about the challenges posed by using market alternatives to change minds. In chapter seven, I argue that emerging food technologies, and in vitro meat in particular, fundamentally change what it is for something or someone to be edible. For most of human history, the word “edible” has carried with it an inextricable moral component. I will argue that in vitro meat technology changes all of that. All of this gives rise to questions about the nature of the relationship between a being and their body. In chapter eight, I offer some thoughts about that relationship. Finally, in chapter nine I stress the importance of an increasingly salient global problem—the occurrence of pandemics. I will argue that the COVID-19 pandemic made the urgency of changing the ways that we interact with non-human animals perfectly clear. At the conclusion of the book, I hope to have made a strong case for in vitro meat as replacement for meat produced as a result of the slaughter of animals.

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NOTE 1. This is true in principle. Unfortunately, many practices involving animals result in killing the animals when they are no longer deemed useful. For in vitro meat to constitute progress, we’ll want to be sure that the same thing is not happening after cells are harvested.

Chapter 2

Can They Suffer? Utilitarian Considerations

The day may come, when the rest of the animal creation may acquire those rights which never could have been withholden from them but by the hand of tyranny. The French have already discovered that the blackness of skin is no reason why a human being should be abandoned without redress to the caprice of a tormentor. It may come one day to be recognized, that the number of legs, the villosity of the skin, or the termination of the os sacrum, are reasons equally insufficient for abandoning a sensitive being to the same fate. What else is it that should trace the insuperable line? Is it the faculty of reason, or perhaps, the faculty for discourse? . . . the question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer? —Jeremy Bentham (2007)

Changing our methods of food production would be a significant adjustment, to put it mildly. The most pressing question, then, is “what would the consequences be”? What reasons speak in favor of making the switch? What reasons speak against it? In this chapter, I will explore those questions. Here we will be primarily concerned with consequences experienced by sentient beings. Our discussions will be guided by the idea, common in dialogue on the topic of animal welfare, that a being is morally considerable when that being is capable of experiencing pleasure and pain. The ability to have these kinds of experiences carries with it the capacity to have interests that should be taken seriously in our deliberations. To fail to take non-human animal interests into consideration simply because they do not belong to the human species is speciesist.1 The species to which an animal belongs, so long as that animal has interests, is an arbitrary and irrelevant fact about that animal. Since this chapter concerns consequences for sentient beings, we’ll temporarily set aside the arguments made by those who think that all life, 11

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sentient or not, is deserving of moral consideration (e.g., arguments made by biocentrists like Albert Schweitzer). We’ll also set aside the arguments made by those that think that ecosystems are intrinsically valuable and deserving of moral consideration (e.g., arguments made by ecocentrists like Aldo Leopold). These positions offer additional reasons to be environmentally responsible and, as a result, additional reasons in favor of the production of in vitro meat. WHY IN VITRO MEAT? As mentioned in the previous chapter, to many, the in vitro method of producing meat seems too unnatural to be acceptable. Why go to such effort to produce meat in a lab when we can do things in the ways that we have always done them? There is a wide range of reasons to think that our current system of industrial animal agriculture poses some of the most significant moral problems that we have ever faced. In vitro meat has the potential to solve these problems in a revolutionary and seemingly permanent way. In what follows, I’ll outline some of the main arguments against industrial animal agriculture that provide the justification for radically changing our practices. Animal Welfare Arguably the primary objection to industrial animal agriculture is the most straightforward one—concern for animal welfare. Every day, three billion animals from land and sea are killed for food (Zampa 2018). In the United States, 99 percent of the meat that we consume is produced on factory farms (Anthis, n.d.). According to the Sentience Institute, “70.4 percent of cows, 98.3 percent of pigs, 99.8 percent of turkeys, 98.2 percent of chickens raised for eggs, and over 99.9 percent of chickens raised for meat are living in factory farms” (Anthis, n.d.). Globally, that number drops only very slightly, to 90 percent (Anthis, n.d.). Factory farms, or Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs), are not places that are conducive to the well-being of animals. Operations are only designated as CAFOS if they house a significant number of animals and/or produce a certain amount of waste that becomes a threat for local water. According to the USDA, “A CAFO is an AFO with more than 1000 animal units (an animal unit is defined as an animal equivalent of 1,000 pounds live weight and equates to 1,000 head of beef cattle, 700 dairy cows, 2,500 swine weighing more than 55 pounds, 125 thousand broiler chickens, or 82 thousand laying hens or pullets) confined on site for more than 45 days during the year” (United States Department of Agriculture, n.d.).

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Given the sheer magnitude of animals raised and killed regularly in the United States for use by humans, it might be tempting to assume that the industry is highly regulated. Indeed, many people believe humane treatment must be the norm and cruel treatment the exception. Surely there must be federal legislation that prohibits cruelty toward farm animals? Three federal laws are worthy of note here. First is the Animal Welfare Act, passed in 1966. The Act nominally provides for the humane treatment of animals, and its mere existence may make citizens feel at ease with the protections afforded. The Act does ensure that animals in certain contexts, are provided with “adequate housing, sanitation, nutrition, water and veterinary care.” They must also be protected against extreme temperatures. Crucially, however the Act, does not cover every type of animal used in every type of activity. The following animals are not covered: farm animals used for food or fiber (fur, hide, and so on); coldblooded species (amphibians and reptiles); horses not used for research purposes; fish; invertebrates (crustaceans, insects, and so on); or birds, rats of the genus Rattus, and mice of the genus Mus that are bred for use in research. Society is quick to provide protections for cats and dogs—animals that are likely to be companions—but not for the animals most commonly used for research or those that are slaughtered and killed for food. The second piece of federal legislation of note is The Humane Methods of Slaughter Act, passed in 1958 and revised in 1978. On its face, this Act seems to ensure the humane treatment of animals killed for food.2 There are troubling features of this Act as well. First, it does not apply to birds of any type; the most commonly farmed animals receive no protection from this piece of federal legislation. What’s more, the protections provided by The Humane Methods of Slaughter Act are limited to ensuring that animals don’t experience pain at the moment they are slaughtered. Animals must be “rendered insensible to pain by a single blow or gunshot or an electrical, chemical or other means that is rapid and effective, before being shackled, hoisted, thrown, cast, or cut.” The Act contains exemptions for religious slaughter. Notably absent are any protections for how animals must be treated while being raised for food. The third piece of legislation is more recent. On October 22nd, 2019, Congress unanimously passed the “Preventing Animal Cruelty and Torture Act.” The law makes certain acts of cruelty against animals federal crimes. Before the federal law was passed, legislation protecting animals was largely a matter reserved for state legislatures. The law was met with praise from both private citizens and animal welfare organizations like the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA). The scope of the law is one of its most noteworthy positive features. Many animal welfare laws arbitrarily restrict protections to only certain species of animals—often companion animals or animals that human beings tend to find

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cute or pleasant. Bucking that trend, this bill includes, “non-human mammals, birds, reptiles or amphibians.” Specifically, the law prohibits the “crushing” of animals, where “crushing” is defined as “conduct in which one or more living non-human mammal, bird, reptile, or amphibian is purposely crushed, burned, drowned, suffocated, impaled, or otherwise subjected to serious bodily injury.” While the law is laudable when it comes to the range of animals it protects, it is arbitrary in other ways. The protection the law provides is subject to noteworthy exemptions. The following conduct is exempt from protection: conduct that is, “a customary and normal veterinary, agricultural, husbandry, or other animal management practice,” “the slaughter of animals for food,” “hunting, trapping, fishing, a sporting activity not otherwise prohibited by Federal law, predator control, or pest control,” action taken for the purpose of “medical or scientific research,” conduct that is “necessary to protect the life or property of a person,” and conduct “performed as part of euthanizing an animal.” In the end, this Act only protects certain animals from being killed in particular kinds of inhumane ways. It does not prohibit cruelty full stop. Despite the pleasant sounding name of the “Preventing Animal Cruelty and Torture Act,” the Act fails to provide protections where animals need them the most. It’s unfortunate that sometimes psychopaths and future serial killers kill animals for kicks, and that should certainly be against the law. At the end of the day, though, the real problems that we face have to do with our attitudes about animals and with the institutions that we’re willing to go to great lengths to protect. The gaps in federal legislation when it comes to the humane treatment of farm animals make such matters, as a matter of law, up to the states. As you might imagine, many states have not done much to provide protections. In most CAFOs, animals have only very limited room to move around. Consider the case of birds and of chickens in particular. The United States raises more chickens to produce food than any other animal—according to the ASPCA, 9 billion chickens are raised and killed for meat every year and an additional 300 million are used in the production of eggs (American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, n.d.). Though birds are the most widely used animals, as we have seen above, they are also the most sparsely protected. Federal legislation excludes chickens on CAFOs as deserving of protection at all. The use of battery cages for broiler chickens and egg-laying hens is cause for concern.3 Battery cages are commercial wire cages that are usually quite small, a few feet long and about fifteen inches high. Between four and ten chickens occupy the cage together. They each have space that is about the size of a sheet of paper to move around in. This space doesn’t give the chickens

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enough room to spread their wings. In most cases, the floors of the cages are also made of wire so that waste can fall through and the cages do not need to be routinely cleaned. This means that the chickens are never standing on solid ground. When chickens live in the wild, they engage in practices like dust bathing regularly. This practice controls parasites, but it also has a social element. Under natural conditions, chickens will dust bathe one another in a way that aligns with the social hierarchies of the group. This obviously can’t happen in a wire cage. Chickens also have instincts that motivate them to peck at the ground to forage for food. They will engage in this behavior even when they have ample food which suggests that there is a psychological, possibly self-soothing component to it. There is a social component as well. Chickens can’t peck at the ground in a wire cage. Being held under these conditions leads, unsurprisingly, to a sense of anxiety and distress in the birds. This leads them to exhibit behaviors that they wouldn’t engage in in more natural conditions. Factory farmers call these behaviors “vices.” Chickens will engage in “feather pecking”—plucking the feathers off other birds in the cage and then sometimes eating the feathers. They will also engage in cannibalism under these conditions. Those who make money from CAFOs have an interest, in this particular case, in producing as many eggs or as much meat as possible. So, rather than increasing the amount of space the chickens have to move around, farmers respond to the problems by “de-beaking” the chickens—cutting off enough of their beaks that they can’t do real damage to one another. This is typically done without anesthetic. Then there is the way that factory farmed chickens are slaughtered in the United States. The current most common way ostensibly involves a “stun” process meant to ensure that the birds do not suffer when they are killed. This is required for compliance with The Humane Methods of Slaughter Act. The chickens are hanged upside down by their feet. They are then stunned in one of two common ways: either by electrical stunning or controlled atmospheric stunning. Electrical stunning happens as the conveyor line of chickens passes through an electrified bath. When this happens, if all goes according to plan, an electrical current is produced which stuns the bird so that it can’t feel its throat being cut as the line of chickens is pressed against a metal blade. Research suggests that, even when the currents affect the birds, they do not always induce the seizures that are required in order for the stunning to take effect (Raj and Shields 2010). Other birds miss the current altogether. The result is that many of the chickens slaughtered in these ways experience significant pain and distress during the process. To make matters worse, the blades sometimes seriously injure but do not kill the chickens. Even if this sequence of events is rare, when one considers that this process happens to 9 billion chickens a year, even if only a small percentage of chickens aren’t

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stunned successfully, that’s still a large number of chickens being tortured. A small percentage of a very large number is itself a very large number. The treatment of other farm animals is just as poor. Pregnant sows are held in “gestation crates.” There is no room for the sow to move around and she gets no exercise. The primary rationale for the use of the crates is to prevent pigs from fighting with one another and being aggressive, which could otherwise be a product of the overpopulated CAFOs. The argument is that workers at the CAFO are in a better position to care for pregnant sows if they are in gestation crates. But confined in this way, sows experience stress, anxiety, depression, and pain due to conditions like infections and lesions. The waste removal system typically operates in a similar way to the disposal system in battery cages for chickens—there are slats in the floor that the waste falls through. Because a large animal is in a small space, the waste does not always evacuate properly and the animals are covered in their own filth, which can lead to infection. Pigs who are not pregnant are also kept in poor conditions on CAFOs. They are held in close quarters in sheds with no windows. They are unable to do the things that pigs regularly do when they live in natural settings and are largely unconstrained. Pigs in the wild are intelligent animals who exhibit a rich and rewarding set of social behaviors. Like chickens, pigs also engage in cannibalistic behaviors when stressed and packed together closely; they will attempt to eat one another’s tails. To prevent them from doing this, farmers clip off their tails, more often than not without anesthetic—a process called “tail docking.” Animals are often kept in extremely close quarters to control the texture and flavor of the meat they will eventually produce when slaughtered. One infamous case is veal—the flesh of a calf. Calves who are raised for veal exist in the first place because of the dairy industry. In order for cows to produce milk, they must be kept routinely pregnant. Their (usually male) offspring are then shipped off to be raised for veal. Veal calves are intentionally kept in very tight pens where they cannot walk around. If they don’t get exercise, their muscles don’t develop properly and their flesh is tender when consumed. They are also fed diets that are low in iron so that their flesh is light in color. These conditions are not good for the overall health of the animals, so they are prone to disease. Nevertheless, this flesh is highly sought after and sells for a pretty penny in fine restaurants. Many thinkers have written at length about the treatment of animals in CAFOs. We won’t discuss every abuse here. The key point for the purposes of this argument is that animal agriculture, and industrial animal agriculture in particular, treats sentient beings as objects. Their interests are not considered; their capacity to experience pleasure and pain is willfully ignored. Cell cultured meat has the potential to change this. There is a pathway forward

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for us to focus on empathy with the experiences of animals. If we change our production of meat to in vitro, animals will be viewed as more than products on a disassembly line. They will not be born only to suffer during their brief lives before dying of disease bred in close quarters or being slaughtered for food. The animals that are born can live higher quality lives. There are quantity as well as quality considerations at play. If we produce meat in vitro, there will no longer be any reason to produce as many animals as possible. Advocates of industrial animal agriculture often argue that they have an obligation to feed the world and that the only way to do that on anywhere near the right kind of scale is to maximize yield by raising as many animals as possible in a space. This was always a disingenuous argument; feeding the world’s population with meat is terribly energy inefficient (Alexander, Arneth, Brown, Finnigan, Moran, and Rousevell 2017). We could provide food much more economically if we fed the world with plants. However, if we accept the premise that, for whatever reason, the world must be fed with meat, in vitro meat can satisfy that goal using significantly fewer animals. If in vitro meat is produced ethically, the animals involved will be allowed to flourish in the ways that are appropriate for members of their species. Chickens can peck at the earth and give one another dust baths. In many cases, animal families can stay together and experience the social interactions natural for their kind. Pigs would engage in play with their fellows and sleep in communal nests. Our current system of food production results in a deplorable set of bad consequences for the animals involved. Preventing those consequences and instead making lives filled with happiness available to the animals that we raise is a compelling reason to switch to in vitro meat. Environmental Considerations Another compelling argument grounded in consequences concerns impacts of industrial animal agriculture on the environment. These impacts have negative consequences for nearly all of the sentient beings on the planet. The industrial revolution fundamentally changed the nature of human experience. The relationship between humans and the natural world changed along with it. Throughout the course of most of the human narrative, humans had short lifespans, interacted in reasonably small groups, and their actions had mostly modest consequences. Humans stood in awe and often in fear of the creative and destructive forces of the natural world. They were largely powerless and insignificant against those forces. Much ink has been spilled over the centuries and throughout the course of philosophical thought on the topic of what many take to be the distinctive

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feature of human beings—our capacity to reason. Aristotle, for example, set up a natural hierarchy of living things—plants are at the bottom, non-human animals are superior to plants, and humans, guiding the whole enterprise with the reigns of reason, preside over all of creation (Aristotle 2009). In the seventeenth century, philosopher Rene Descartes argued that human beings are fundamentally different from all other living things in light of our capacity for reason. For Descartes, non-human animals were “mere machines,” unable to form beliefs and to express those beliefs through the use of language (Descartes 1998). Childhood stories also focus on reason as a mysterious, precious, and dangerous feature of human experience. Consider Mowgli from The Jungle Book. Mowgli is raised by wolves, but when it becomes clear that he can make tools and manipulate fire through use of reason, two other things also become clear—first, that Mowgli belongs in a community with other reasoners and second, that his capacity to use reason to make tools makes him very dangerous to those against whom those tools might be used. The story of Tarzan tells a similar tale. So here we are in the twenty-first century. We’ve used our capacity to reason to bring us to places early humans never imagined possible. We’ve dramatically extended the range of our social encounters. We can now interact with people from radically different places and cultures. Under ordinary conditions, we can hop on a plane and visit a person from another country whenever we can afford it and the urge strikes us. In many places, using technology, humans produce food in abundance, often in so much abundance that there is significant waste. We drive to jobs and to visit family members. We can predict the weather and respond to it before it happens. We cool our houses in the summer and warm them in the winter. In developed countries, many people are almost never in a position to feel even a moment’s hardship as a result of weather. We’ve made some miraculous progress. The impressive degree to which human beings are creative forces is matched only by the degree to which we are often the sources of horrifying acts of destruction. We’ve produced so much non-biodegradable garbage that we created the Great Pacific Garbage Patch stretching from the West Coast of North America to Japan. It covers 1.6 million square kilometers and is twice the size of Texas. We’ve released horrifying amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, causing temperatures to rise, melting glaciers and ice caps, and causing ocean acidification that has bleached our coral—essentially killing our reefs. Discussion on the topic of the environmental havoc our species has wreaked on this planet tends to focus on the burning of fossil fuels, usually primarily as a result of transportation. We talk a lot about plastics. What we talk about less often, likely because people are reluctant to change their

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customs and dietary habits, is the environmental harm caused by our system of animal agriculture. Our food systems play a very large and often unacknowledged role in all of this. We can’t tell the story of human life on this planet without one of its most central components—agriculture, and we’re in a dark chapter for that part of the story. Our current system of agriculture is unsustainable. It requires use of the planet’s resources that are not reproduced without limit, and certainly not at the speed they would need to be to satisfy the rate of demand. People in the west, and people who live in the United States in particular, consume a significant amount of meat. The United States Department of Agriculture estimated that each person living in the United States consumed on average 222.2 pounds of meat and poultry in 2018 (Haley, Jones, and Melton 2018). Demand for meat and animal products is growing in developing nations. As incomes rise in these nations, there is greater demand for meat in those locations as well. In many cases, these countries are much more densely populated, so we can anticipate that demand for meat will only continue to grow. What impacts will this demand for meat have for the environment? How will the quest to satisfy the pallet of the planet impact the sentient creatures that experience life on it? In what follows, consider the example of the environmental impacts of cattle in particular. People that live in rural areas are quite accustomed to seeing cattle grazing in vast pastures. In this setting, if you ignore the tags on their ears, they seem wild and undomesticated. Their living arrangements appear to be peaceful— they have lots of room to move around, abundant fresh water to drink, and all the grass they can eat. They have the autonomy to socialize with peers or to venture out on their own. They also seem insignificant in the scheme of things. No one would think that the lifespan of a cow, or even a collection of cows could change the course of history. Because we have so much experience observing cows in these serene pastoral settings, many people do not know the life trajectory of most cows, whether they are destined to produce dairy or their flesh will end up on a plate as someone’s dinner. Though we may regularly see cows out on the pasture on our evening walks, we may not notice that they are not the same cows from year to year. Many cows do spend some portion of their lives grazing freely, but when they are roughly one year old, they are sold and shipped to CAFOs. Even before they get to this point, cows make quite the impact. When land is set aside for grazing, it often becomes quite degraded. Overgrazing diminishes the nutrients in soil. Cow manure is also high in salt and causes high salinity levels in soil. Grazing cattle cause soil compaction, which makes it more difficult for water to penetrate. Ultimately, cattle grazing leads to desertification—the soil becomes dry and infertile. Desertification leads to loss in biodiversity. The problem intensifies when tropical rainforests are chopped down to make

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room for grazing. It becomes difficult if not impossible to recapture what was lost. Preserving the quality of our soil is itself a compelling reason to switch to in vitro meat. If we did not raise cattle in such large numbers, we could protect soil—a critical component in any functioning ecosystem. The process of cell harvesting requires fewer animals by a significant margin. The environmental impact of cattle ranching increases when they are moved to CAFOs. Modern cattle traverse many more miles than their ancestors did prior to the introduction of industrial animal agriculture, but they do so in trucks. When data is reported on the topic of contribution to greenhouse gas emissions, transportation emissions are frequently reported as entirely distinct from the emissions caused by animal agriculture. This fails to take into account the fact that many greenhouse gas emissions caused by transportation are attributable to transporting billions of animals from local farms to CAFOs and then from CAFOs to slaughterhouses. We’ve seen that CAFOs are problematic because of the animal cruelty that takes place in them. They are also the source of a great deal of pollution. The government has zoning regulations for them because of the harm that they cause. We discussed the circumstances under which an animal feeding operation is designated as a CAFO above, but let’s take a look at it again with an eye toward the pollution aspects of the definition. According to the United States Department of Agriculture, A CAFO is an AFO with more than 1000 animal units (an animal unit is defined as an animal equivalent of 1000 pounds live weight and equates to 1000 head of beef cattle, 700 dairy cows, 2500 swine weighing more than 55 lbs, 125 thousand broiler chickens, or 82 thousand laying hens or pullets) confined on site for more than 45 days during the year. Any size AFO that discharges manure or wastewater into a natural or man-made ditch, stream or other waterway is defined as a CAFO, regardless of size. (United States Department of Agriculture, n.d.)

CAFOs were designed by humans to commodify animal bodies in order to maximize profits. Astonishing numbers of animals are kept in these spaces and they produce a lot of waste. Members of human communities understand that human waste can potentially make us sick, so over the years we have created and continue to improve upon sewage systems and waste treatment facilities. Animal waste created by CAFOs is not treated as the same magnitude of health threat. Animal manure from CAFOs frequently ends up in both surface and groundwater and makes other living beings in the area, including humans, quite sick. These facilities are often located near poor communities and communities of color, raising concerns about environmental racism.

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Industrial animal agriculture also requires an unsustainable amount of water. Almost a third of the world’s water use is dedicated to animal agriculture. The water footprint of an animal is determined by three key features. The first is the water that the animal consumes indirectly in the form of water that is used to produce feed. The second is the direct use by the animal in the form of drinking water. The third is the water that is used in the service of the animal. These services include washing the animal, cleaning animal enclosures, and other services involved with preserving the setting in which the animal is kept. As we have seen, most meat and dairy products are not produced on traditional farms. Unsurprisingly, water use in traditional farming settings is more sustainable because it involves a greater amount of green water consumption—that is, consumption of rainwater. Traditional farming cannot satisfy the rising demand for meat and dairy products. Overwhelmingly and increasingly, these products are being produced in industrial settings such as CAFOs that not only use far more water, but use water in more environmentally destructive ways. In addition, a large amount of freshwater is required to disperse pollutants endemic to this system of agriculture. ‌‌‌The system of industrial animal agriculture also contributes to climate change in two significant ways. The first is that it produces lots of greenhouse gases. The Humane Society, drawing on work from The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, reports that industrial animal agriculture is responsible for Nine percent of human-induced emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2), 37 percent of emissions of methane (CH4), which has more than 20 times the global warming potential (GWP) of CO2, and 65 percent of emissions of nitrous oxide (N2O), which has nearly 300 times the GWP of CO2. (The Humane Society, n.d.)

CAFOs burn lots of fossil fuels for the purposes of heating, cooling, and ventilating facilities as well as to run farming equipment used in the production of feed for the animals. As manure decomposes, it releases methane, and it stands to reason that facilities that house lots of animals are going to produce a lot of methane. Methane is also produced during the digestion processes of ruminant animals such as cows and goats. Ruminants have multiple stomach chambers that allow them to digest in such a way that they can consume tough grains and plants. Fermentation processes occur in the stomach chambers which produce methane that these animals release into the air. Raising lots of animals that produce methane poses grave environmental concerns because methane is a more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. It stays in the atmosphere for a shorter period of time, but because it is so efficient

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at trapping radiation, the EPA reports that pound for pound the impact of methane on climate is 25 times the impact of carbon dioxide (United States Environmental Protection Agency, n.d. (B)). The second way that our system of animal agriculture contributes to climate change is the role that it plays in deforestation; it contributes to global warming while also demolishing our planet’s natural defenses. Healthy forests are critical for clean air—during photosynthesis trees and other plants take in carbon dioxide and produce oxygen. Human beings are eliminating forests at an alarming and expanding rate and animal agriculture is one of the primary causes. This adds to the amount of carbon in the air because the trees don’t exist to do their job in the ecosystem. Though it is hard to know for certain, a fair estimate of the number of trees cut down every year is between 3.5 and 7 billion (The Understory 2017). Trees that are cut down for the purposes of animal agriculture constitute 30 percent of that number. This form of agriculture requires a lot of space. Cows, for instance, require lots of room to graze. They are also very large animals who require lots of food to survive. As a result, we cut down trees to create free grazing land for cattle. Because this land is being cleared for the express purpose of making additional room, it is unlikely that the trees will be replaced. There is no incentive for this industry to participate in reforestation. In addition to producing grazing land, we also cut down trees to grow the soy that we use to feed the billions of animals that we kill every year. This food helps grow “farm” animals into the beings that they will become. When we consume their bodies, we only consume certain parts. As a result, food is converted into energy to grow parts of the animal that we ultimately treat as waste. The entire process is tremendously energy inefficient. There are simple alternatives, the most straightforward of which is that we could consume the plants directly ourselves. That way, instead of providing food for eighty billion farm animals, parts of which will be converted into food for us, we can feed plants to 7.8 billion people instead. This would require much less land. In vitro meat is also a viable alternative. There are also concerns about a loss of biodiversity and the deaths of sentient creatures across the species. When humans clear forests in order to make room for livestock and food for livestock to eat, they also destroy the ecosystems in which native animals make their homes. Healthy ecosystems require biodiversity—all life has a role to play. When humans breed and raise farm animals, we create a higher net number of animals on the planet. Some might view this as a good thing—the more animals the better, right? Well, not exactly. According to a 2018 study on the biomass of the earth, sixty percent of the mammals on earth are livestock. Thirty-six percent of the mammals are human, leaving only four percent of the population of mammals in the category of wild animals (Phillips, Milo,

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and Yinon M. 2018). Though there may be a lot of them, farm animals are not contributing to biodiversity or to the healthy functioning of ecosystems. In fact, the practices implemented by industrial animal agriculture make environments less hospitable to other life, including many other species of sentient creatures. A useful analogy is the case of palm oil trees, the growth of which is another significant source of deforestation. Our rainforests are being destroyed and, in many cases, vast expanses of palm oil trees are being planted where they once were. Palm oil is an ingredient in many prepared foods and in all sorts of cosmetics and household products. It may be the case that when we cut down rainforests to plant palm oil trees, the result is a similar number of trees as we had before (possible but not likely). But simply having the same overall number is not sufficient. That’s not how ecosystems work, we need the diversity. Living creatures don’t make their homes in palm oil trees. We have replaced an ecosystem that is conducive to biodiversity with an artificial system that was designed, in a short-sighted way, to maximize not diversity of life on the planet, but short-term profits. Similarly, we can simply replace the animal species we have lost with equal numbers of farm animals, but this contributes nothing of real value to the planet. Jaguars and Black Spider Monkeys, Lemurs and Black Shelled Tortoises, Orangutans, and Mountain Gorillas to name just a small few, are all endangered, in part, because of deforestation.

​​​​​​​Impact on Humans and Human Health

We’ve discussed the impacts of animal agriculture on the environment and how those impacts affect the sentient creatures that inhabit our planet. This form of agriculture is destructive to human health as well. First, human beings also suffer as a result of environmental degradation. Destruction of ecosystems creates climate change refugees in the form of both human and non-human animals. In a world that can be cruel and inhospitable to refugees seeking a safe place to call home, we don’t want to add to the numbers. Industrial animal agriculture contributes to climate change, and this is bad for human health. As the planet gets hotter, species migration occurs. What this means is that animals and insects inhabit spaces that they have never inhabited before, at least while we’ve been around to observe their practices. When species move, so too do infectious diseases that can lead to pandemics. We’ll discuss this in more detail in a subsequent chapter specifically on the topic of pandemics. Human health can also be affected by the natural disasters caused by climate change. Extreme weather events like hurricanes, flooding, and drought all have an impact on human lives and livelihoods (United States Environmental

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Protection Agency, n.d. (A)). Increased temperatures also contribute to the severity of asthma, respiratory disease, and allergies, increases the likelihood that waterborne disease will spread, and increases the likelihood of developing cancer (National Institute of Environmental Health Services, n.d.). There are dangers to human health posed by the way that animals are raised in CAFOs. The sheer number of animals being held in these facilities, taken together with the fact that they are being held in conditions that are likely to affect their immune systems leaves those that run these establishments with a choice—either farm differently or pump the animals full of antibiotics. They choose the latter. This can lead to antibiotic resistant strains of bacteria that get passed along to humans. Farmers also inject their animals with growth hormones to grow their product larger and faster. This can lead to all sorts of health problems in humans. There is no reason for scientists producing in vitro meat to engage in any of these practices. The meat they produce will be safer. There is evidence that red meat is a carcinogen (Cancer Council, n.d.). It also contributes to the development of type-two diabetes and to cardiovascular disease (Bernstein, Hu, Manson, Pan, Schulze, Stampfer, Sun, and Willett 2012). So it isn’t just the way that the meat is produced that is problematic to human health, it is also the product itself. This might seem like an argument against consumption of red meat in any form, including meat produced in vitro. This may be true, at least for red meat. That said, scientists can engineer the meat to be healthier. In vitro technology has the potential to deliver the same tasting product, minus the health threats. CONCLUSION We have seen that there are significant reasons to switch away from our current system of industrial animal agriculture. In vitro meat has the potential to solve some of these problems, or, at the very least, to improve things quite a bit. Nevertheless, consequentialist arguments do not all speak in favor of in vitro meat. In the next chapter, we’ll turn to consequentialist arguments against the production of the product. NOTES 1. This idea is given its most popular articulation by Peter Singer in his book Animal Liberation (Singer 1990). 2. Of course, to many this will sound like an oxymoron.

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3. As of this writing, 13 states in the United States have passed legislation prohibiting or phasing out battery cages: Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Kentucky, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Ohio, Oregon, Rhode Island, Utah, and Washington. An EU ban on battery cages went into effect in 2012.

Chapter 3

Why Not In Vitro Meat?

As we have seen, there appear to be strong consequence-based arguments that speak in favor of transitioning to meat produced in vitro. There are also consequence-based reasons against it. Some are concerned that the economy will be too hard hit by a massive change to our agricultural system. Others, though sympathetic to the general mission of reducing animal suffering, think that there are other ways to go about it. Still others argue that the fact that fewer animals will exist if we switch to in vitro meat provides us with good reason to abandon the strategy. In this chapter, I will explore and respond to these arguments. THE ECONOMY In response to calls to end the practice of industrial animal agriculture and to replace it with in vitro meat, some have argued that the toll that such a move would take on the economy is just too great. Such people might even agree that the suffering that animals face is regrettable but might maintain that there is simply no alternative now. Not only is there no alternative to a food system in which animal flesh plays a starring role, there is also no alternative to a system of mass factory farming. Smaller farms might create niche markets for people who want their meat to be more humanely sourced, but they aren’t a viable alternative across the board. First, CAFOs produce more meat more efficiently, and the practices of small family farms will simply get beat out every time, just like the small local bookstore will be pushed out by the likes of Amazon. Second, even if CAFOs didn’t exist, the increasing global demand for meat could not be satisfied by small farms implementing humane practices (if, indeed, there is such a thing as a “humane” way of killing living beings for food). If this is the case, many argue, industrialized animal agriculture isn’t going anywhere. It simply can’t. It is so ingrained in our culture that our economy would collapse without it. 27

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To evaluate these arguments, we’ll need to ask two broad categories of questions. The first question is an empirical one: is it really true that bringing down industrial animal agriculture would destroy our economy? This is hard to answer. We can point to the evolution of our practices from the past, but we never know what small differences between practices might make a big difference. We do know that we have made major shifts to our economy before, and though things might have been rocky, they evened out as market forces took the wheel. As we’ll discuss in a later chapter, the whaling industry was supplanted by the fossil fuel industry. It looks like electric cars will soon replace cars with combustion engines. We abolished slavery. Our economy can and does fundamentally change. The second question we need to ask ourselves is whether appeals to the stability of the economy are sufficient to justify any conceivable practice. It might seem as if we are weighing deontological concerns like respect for dignity against consequentialist concerns, but this discussion can take place purely within a consequentialist framework (though of course violations of autonomy, dignity and humanity are important too). People frequently made the argument, during the age of slavery, that even if slavery is regrettable, there was no turning back, because the economy of the United States was built on it and the whole thing would come toppling down if we abandoned the practice. The suffering and indignity experienced by enslaved people significantly outweighed the benefits that slavery provided for the economy. In addition, the violence done by slavery was destructive to everyone involved. There’s some chance that we’ll never fully escape its ugly legacy. The same may well be true of industrial animal agriculture. Perhaps the day will come when this practice is a relic of the past—a relic with countless billions of victims. This method of food production not only harmed and killed animals, it also warped the worldview of generations of people in such a way that encouraged them to think of sentient beings, beings that are more similar to humans than they are different—as mere objects of consumption. This will likely have reverberations into the future that we cannot even anticipate. The economy will adjust, human attitudes about animals might take longer.

AMELIORATING ANIMAL SUFFERING: IS DISENHANCEMENT A BETTER OPTION? In vitro meat as a solution to animal suffering is what some writers have called a “Build Up” approach (Thompson 2022). The strategy is “build up”

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because it involves building small collections of cellular material into larger collections of matter that can be used as food. There is another approach that arguably solves the problem of animal suffering equally well: disenhancement, which Paul Thompson refers to as a “dumb down” approach. It involves genetically engineering farm and research animals to experience little to no suffering. The process is referred to as “dumb down” because it takes the genetic code for an entire organism and modifies it. The resultant being will be a whole developed creature whose genetic structure has been altered. In response to calls to replace our current system of food production with in vitro meat alternatives, one argument is that such engineered animals could solve the problem of suffering without upending the whole system. Recent research on pain suggests that it is registered in the brain in two places. The first is in the primary or somatosensory cortex, which establishes the nature of the pain (burning, throbbing, and so on). The second involves the affective dimension which happens in the anterior cingulate cortex. This area controls not the pain itself, but how much the sentient creature minds the pain. Either area could be genetically engineered to reduce the discomfort experienced by the animal (Devolder and Eggel 2019). Bernard Rollins has argued that for genetic modification of animals to be ethical, it needs to be conducted in keeping with what he calls the “Principle of Welfare Conservation.” Principle of Welfare Conservation: technologically modified animals should not have worse welfare (susceptibility to disease and experience of pain or frustration) than unmodified animals of the same species or breed. (Rollin 1995)

Disenhancement does not violate this principle. Since animals are engineered in such a way that they don’t experience pain or frustration in significant ways (in theory), they cannot be worse off than their counterparts who do. Like advocates of in vitro meat, those who argue for disenhancement often acknowledge that it would be best if we simply stopped exploiting animals and using them as objects for human purposes. They also recognize, however, that animal advocates have been shouting their messages from the rooftops for decades, even centuries in some parts of the world. To the extent that these messages are being heard, they are also largely being dismissed. If we are going to continue to use animals for food and research, at least we could do so in a way that minimizes pain. This may not realize what true justice demands, but it may represent incremental change toward that ideal state of affairs. Opponents of disenhancement make several different kinds of arguments. The first is consequential in nature; they argue that disenhancement leaves animals vulnerable. The ability to experience and to care about pain is an evolutionary mechanism that helps creatures to avoid danger. If there is no

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longer any fear of pain because disenhanced animals do not feel it, then animals could die from otherwise avoidable risk. In response, the unfortunate truth is that these animals aren’t going to be venturing out into the wide world in which they might make bad decisions. Their fate is certain—they are destined to live lives during which they are imprisoned and used and then discarded. If this is the case, why not do what we can to make their existence less unpleasant? A second response challenges whether the death of a non-human animal is bad for that animal. The ability to experience suffering may be useful in order to avoid death. If death is not bad for a being, then it might not be something to be avoided. We’ll consider these kinds of arguments and some responses in the next section. Opponents of disenhancement argue further that our willingness to do this to non-human animals highlights the extent of our speciesism—our tendency to direct our moral concern only to members of certain species on the basis of species membership alone. Imagine that a scientist wanted to create a group of people to enslave and abuse. The scientist doesn’t want to cause the resultant humans any pain, so he creates them without the ability to experience it. It is reasonable to suppose that many people would object to this experiment. If we react negatively to this thought experiment, but not to dis-enhancing animals, what could explain our reaction other than speciesism? After all, when we look at the individual creatures involved, they don’t have the capacity to experience the kinds of harms or humiliations to which we might object. Like objections to in vitro meat, objections to disenhancement tend to focus on respect and dignity rather than on suffering. When it comes to farm and research animals who have been “disenhanced,” we are still dealing with sentient creatures that have experiences of their world. They may lack the ability to feel or to care about feeling their own pain, but they still have a set of dispositions to behave in certain ways and have the ability to develop preferences. This makes them different from robots or disembodied chicken breasts. They are aware of their own experiences. Some opponents argue that respect for the lived experiences of sentient creatures demands that researchers refrain from playing Frankenstein with their bodies in ways that have serious consequences. Some argue that we demonstrate a lack of respect for the telos of a species and for species dignity when we engage in disenhancement. Respect for a species requires respect for their capacities and their ability to perform the kinds of functions that they would be able to perform if they were allowed to exist and thrive in their respective environments unmolested. Another objection to disenhancement comes from the perspective of environmental virtue ethics. Are we oriented virtuously toward the natural world and the living creatures in it if we respond to the crises that we face with

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disenhancement? Consider the following parallel case. One way of responding to climate change is to engage in geoengineering, to modify the planet in one way or another to protect against the environmental problems that we have caused. One form that this can take is changing the chemical constitution of our atmosphere in such a way as to roll back or lessen the effects of global warming. Opponents of geoengineering point out that when a child messes up their room, the right thing to do is get them to clean it and teach them how to keep it clean rather than searching for ways to mess it up even further without consequences. By analogy, we should limit our greenhouse gas emissions and try to clean up the mess we’ve made rather than pursuing geoengineering strategies that threaten to produce ever more mess. Critics of disenhancement argue that we should adopt the same standard of responsibility when it comes to cruelty to animals. Instead of finding ways to engage in cruel behavior without causing pain, we should simply stop engaging in cruel behavior. Treating animals in the way that we do is an exhibition of vicious character. Even if it has little effect on the animals because they have been disenhanced and don’t feel pain, the philosopher Immanuel Kant’s (1785) observations may be useful here. He says that we “must practice kindness towards animals, for he who is cruel to animals becomes hard also in his dealings with men. We can judge the heart of a man by his treatment of animals.” If we behave callously toward disenhanced sentient animals because they don’t experience pain, the consequence may be that we are increasingly callous and cruel toward the beings that do. What should we make of all of this? Would disenhancement be a better solution to the problems we’ve discussed? I think the answer is no. If the only question we need to concern ourselves with is the question of animal suffering, the answer might be a little more challenging. Disenhancement will not help with the other consequences of industrial animal agriculture. The environmental problems will still exist, and they might even be amplified; people are unlikely to have any qualms about mass producing animals who can’t suffer on a larger and larger scale. Dumb down strategies are the subject of criticism that I think is less likely to land against build up strategies. The idea that there is some element of hubris in modifying genetic code to create animal zombies to be used for food is compelling. Production of in vitro meat does not involve creating new species—the products produced by the method will never be sentient (if they ever are, something has gone seriously wrong). Animals used for cell extraction can, at least in theory, be treated kindly and allowed to flourish. They can engage in the kinds of behaviors that members of their species regularly enjoy and can participate in the kinds of social experiments with members of their kind and with members of other species that might require the ability to experience pain (behaviors that ward off predators and the like). Adopting

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the strategy of in vitro meat allows us to be pluralists about ethical theory, or agnostic about the adequacy of any one theory, if you’d rather. I will argue in the next chapter that in vitro meat production does not violate the rights of sentient creatures, so if approaches based on rights are ultimately correct, in vitro meat should not be problematic. THE LOGIC OF THE LARDER AND THE REPLACEABILITY ARGUMENT Most of the common counterarguments to vegetarianism and veganism or to other forms of animal friendly consumption changes focus on dietary preferences, causal inefficacy, claims of impracticality, and so on. However, there are some arguments that, on their face, appear to be focused on the experiences of animals. If these arguments are successful against vegetarianism and veganism, they are also successful as arguments against producing meat in vitro. Two of these arguments, The Logic of the Larder and The Replaceability Argument share features in common and are frequently understood as roughly the same argument. Though these arguments have similarities, I think it is inaccurate to present them as one and the same. I will argue later in this chapter that the interpretation of the Replaceability Argument and The Logic of the Larder as one and the same argument only works if The Logic of the Larder can only be generated using utilitarian reasoning. I don’t think that this is the case. In his 1914 book The Humanities of Diet, vegetarian thinker Henry S. Salt ‌‌‌‌‌‌presents and responds to The Logic of the Larder at length, introducing it with a common idiom at the time: “Blessed is the Pig, for the Philosopher is fond of bacon.” A larder is a storage space for food, traditionally a place for preparing and containing meat. My formulation of the Logic of the Larder Argument is as follows: The Logic of the Larder Argument P1: When sentient beings live lives that are worth living, it is better for those beings to come into existence than not to come into existence. P2: Farm animals raised for food live lives that are worth living. P3: Therefore, it is better for farm animals to come into existence than not to come into existence.

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P4: If it is better for farm animals to come into existence than not to come into existence, then it is good for producers of food to bring those farm animals into existence, even if the animals are ultimately destined for slaughter. P5: Therefore, it is good for producers of food to bring farm animals into existence, even if the animals are ultimately destined for slaughter.

This is the reasoning behind the Logic of the Larder relevant to the issues of Salt’s day. We can add an additional premise to see the implications for plantbased and cell-cultured meats. P6: If it is good to bring farm animals into existence, then it would be bad to create products that would result in bringing fewer of those animals into existence (e.g., in vitro and plant-based foods). C: Therefore, it would be bad to create products that would result in bringing fewer of those animals into existence (e.g., in vitro and plant-based foods).

Since humans breed billions of animals every year for use as food, if bringing sentient beings into existence is a good thing, then humans are doing billions of these good things every year. If we pursued strategies that greatly reduced or even eliminated the number of birthed animals, we would be preventing a tremendous amount of good. One reading of this argument is straightforwardly utilitarian. More specifically, this way of understanding the argument is consistent with classical utilitarianism, according to which the only thing with intrinsic value is happiness and the only thing with intrinsic disvalue is pain. If farm animals live lives that are worth living, that is, if their lives are full of more pleasurable experiences than painful experiences, then we contribute to the overall amount of goodness in the world when we bring them into existence. If what matters is the overall aggregate of happiness in the world, then, all things being equal, the more of these happy beings that exist, the better. If we bring fewer of these beings into existence or if we stop bringing them into existence altogether, there will be a lower overall amount of aggregate happiness and we will have made the world into a worse place. Specifically in response to an argument in favor of in vitro meat, some argue that we make the world worse off than it might otherwise have been when we bring fewer animals into existence because we have created meat using cellular material instead. Millions of cows, for instance, could have had lives worth living, but instead we raised only a small handful and extracted cells to create meat grown in a lab. One common response to The Logic of the Larder is to challenge premise two—the claim that animals raised for food live lives that are worth living. Under current conditions, for reasons we have discussed in earlier chapters,

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animals produced for use as food in factory farms do not live lives that are worth living. They are treated as things and not as subjects of lives with desires and interests of their own. They are physically tortured, prevented from having meaningful interactions with their fellows, and are killed prematurely. However, if this is the only objection we’re justified in raising against The Logic of the Larder, animal agriculture could respond by simply making life more bearable for the animals farmed for food. Though this may be the lesser of evils, ideally the policy we should adopt would involve no longer killing animals for food at all, if that’s an option (this argument faces an objection that we’ll discuss below). Another response to the argument is to challenge premise one. When viewed from the perspective of a classical utilitarian, what it means to say that “it is better for those beings to come into existence than not to come into existence” is that bringing such beings into existence contributes to overall happiness in a way that refraining from bringing them into existence does not. This might not be true. The situation has changed substantially since Salt responded to the Logic of the Larder argument of his day. Though raising and slaughtering animals no doubt took up some space that might otherwise be occupied by other creatures, the scale on which this was happening is nowhere near what it is today. As we’ve discussed in earlier chapters, contemporary industrial animal agriculture is among the leading contributors to loss of biodiversity. So, even if it is true that we contribute some happiness to the world by bringing farm animals into existence, if we are using a classical utilitarian framework, that happiness has to be weighed against the happiness lost and the suffering caused by deforestation and depopulation of other species in previously wild spaces. Since deforestation leads to climate change, which effects all life on the planet, it is also far from obvious that bringing billions of farm animals into existence actually contributes to aggregate happiness in a positive way. A second way to critique premise one is to challenge the intuition that it is always better to bring a being into existence who will experience more pleasure than pain than not to bring that being into existence. This problem is generated because we are looking at happiness in the aggregate—the view that the reason to bring more beings into the world is to create a greater overall level of happiness. These views look at the net balance of happiness and unhappiness—the more happiness and the less unhappiness the better. What should we make of the idea that our primary concern should be happiness in the aggregate? Consider the following thought experiment motivated by recent technological development of cell culturing for a different purpose—cell culturing brains. In 2019, the New York Times reported that Yale neuroscientist Nenad Sestan and his team had successfully produced active brain cells through a process

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of culturing the inactive brain matter of deceased creatures (Shaer 2019). The cells were active for more than mere moments—some of them survived for weeks at a time. These results may lead to important discoveries about the way the brain works, and could, in the long term, be an important step to understanding and/or curing brain diseases and disorders. At this stage, it is unclear what mental states these mini brains might have.1 Imagine, for the sake of our example, that these brains come into existence and exist long enough to have exactly one positive experience. If such a thing were possible, it would be possible also to bring as many mini-brains into existence as we could to maximize the occurrence of pleasurable experiences. What would the aggregate view have to say about our moral obligations under these circumstances? Sestan could contribute to the aggregate level of happiness if he created as many one-experience mini-brains as he possibly could throughout the course of his life. This seems like a Sisyphean task. Aggregate views of morality do not accurately capture what it is that is good about positive experiences. Positive experiences have value, but only in the context of the life of sentient beings over the course of their existence. It isn’t simply pleasurable experiences that we value, but experiences situated within a life lived over an extended period of time. One of the reasons that we care about pleasure at all is that it is experienced by sentient beings. Sentient beings have beliefs, desires, and dispositions to behave in certain ways. They have interests in things progressing in one way rather than in another, even if they are not capable of understanding their interests in counterfactual terms. Future generations are likely to come into existence, and we are obligated to create living conditions that minimize the potential for suffering and maximize the potential for flourishing for those generations. We are not obligated, however, to ensure as many individual instances of positive experiences as possible. That leaves us free to focus on well-being and ill-being in the here and now. Another challenge to premise one has to do with the nature of the comparison. Can we say, of currently non-existing things, that it is better for us to bring them into existence than not to bring them into existence? Salt himself argues that it is only from the perspective of existence that one can take a position on whether existence is worth having or not. He says, The fallacy lies in the confusion of thought which attempts to compare existence with non-existence. A person who is already in existence may feel that he would rather have lived than not, but he must first have the terra firma of existence to argue from; the moment he begins to argue as if from the abyss of the non-existent, he talks nonsense, by predicating good or evil, happiness or unhappiness, of that of which we can predicate nothing. (Salt 2014)

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Nothing can go well or poorly for a non-existent thing. If a being never comes into existence at all, we can’t harm that being. We can’t harm, for instance, a cow or a chicken that never existed. Neither can we a benefit a being that does not exist. It is only once a being exists that it can take on any attitudes toward its own experiences. Salt goes on to say, When, therefore, we talk of “bringing a being,” as we vaguely express it, “into the world,” we cannot claim from that being any gratitude for our action, or drive a bargain with him, and a very shabby one, on that account; nor can our duties to him be evaded by any such quibble, in which the wish is so obviously father to the thought. (Salt 1914)

In other words, The Logic of the Larder suggests that the act of bringing someone into existence absolves the creator of all responsibility related to the conditions under which that being will have to live, so long as their life will be full of more positive experiences than negative experiences. Salt points out that the line of reasoning that concludes that it is “better to exist than not to exist” justifies breeding sentient creatures for any purposes whatsoever. If we follow this line of argument, it is better to bring a being into existence, horribly mistreat them, and show no mercy or respect for dignity, than it is to simply not bring a being into existence at all. This line of argument seems to justify bringing humans into existence for the purposes of selling them into slavery—after all, it’s better to exist than not to exist, so long as we provide the beings in question with just enough positive experiences to overwhelm their number of negative experiences. Many claims in ethics are controversial, but questions related to whether it is acceptable to keep beings as slaves or to breed them only to torture them and keep them captive tend not to be. It’s worth responding to the Logic of the Larder on its merits. That said, it is far from clear that the argument is made in good faith. There is no evidence that increasing aggregate happiness is ever the motivation for creating new farm animals. If it were, animals would be treated very differently. If aggregate happiness were the goal, farmers would, at the very least, administer anesthetic when they cut off a chicken’s beak or a pig’s tail. They would provide chickens with enough room to stretch their wings and would allow veal calves to run around and to consume nutritious diets. If the lives of animals were valued, they would be allowed to age and grow at the appropriate speed and rate; instead, they are given growth hormones to shorten the period from birth to slaughter. The motivation of farmers in industrial settings is to maximize profit. Salt makes a similar point in superb rhetorical fashion, offering the response from the perspective of the pig,

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What shall be the reply of the Pig to the Philosopher? “Revered moralist” he might plead, “if it were unseemly for me, who am today a pig, and tomorrow but ham and sausages, to dispute with a master of ethics, yet to my porcine intellect it appeareth that having first determined to kill and devour me, thou hast afterwards bestirred thee to find a moral reason. For mark, I pray thee, that in my entry into the world my own predilection was in no wise considered, nor did I purchase life on the condition of my own butchery. If, then, thou art firm set on pork, so be it, for pork I am: but though thou hast not spared my life, at least spare me thy sophistry. It is not for his sake, but for thine, that in his life the Pig is filthily housed and fed, and at the end barbarously butchered. (Salt 1914)

THE REPLACEABILITY ARGUMENT The foregoing discussion provides reasons to reject one or more of the premises of The Logic of the Larder. That said, if we were to grant that the Logic of the Larder is sound, then it would be better to bring farm animals into existence than not to do so. But even if this is the case, what should we make of the fact that the animals involved are routinely slaughtered? Doesn’t slaughtering them take out of existence all of the happiness that we’ve brought in? Well, not if we replace the animals. This is where the Replaceability argument comes in. This argument is given one of its early and most clear expressions in Peter Singer’s Practical Ethics. In that work he addresses a range of questions pertaining to the ethics of bringing about suffering and causing death. He argues that some sentient beings are persons and others are not. A being is a person when they are a rational and self-conscious (Singer 2011). The desires of a person have a temporal component. He says, “For most mature humans, these forward-looking desires are absolutely central to our lives, so to kill a normal human against his or her wishes is to thwart that person’s most significant desires” (Singer 2011). Singer makes a distinction between classical utilitarianism (or hedonistic utilitarianism, as he sometimes calls it), and the view that he defends which he calls preference utilitarianism. He argues that different forms of utilitarianism might be appropriate depending on the characteristics of the beings whose interests are being deliberated about. Classical Utilitarianism involves consideration of happiness and pain in the aggregate. Singer argues that this is the appropriate form of utilitarianism to take on when assessing the interests of non-persons. Preference utilitarianism “holds that we should do what, on balance, furthers the preferences of those affected” (Singer 2011). To further someone’s preferences is to help them to achieve what they desire. Desires are forward looking in a way that experiences of pleasure and pain are not.

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To have desires is to consider what one wants for oneself in one’s future. Singer argues that “beings that cannot see themselves as entities with a future do not have any preferences about their own future existence.” If this is the case, classical utilitarianism, rather than preference utilitarianism, is best for thinking about non-human animals. This reasoning sets the stage for the Replaceability Argument, which I’ll formalize in the following way: The Replaceability Argument P1: Some non-human animals do not have a concept of time. P2: If a non-human animal does not have a concept of time, then they cannot be concerned about their own death, which can only occur in the future. P3: Therefore, some non-human animals cannot be concerned about their own death, which can only occur in the future.‌ ‌‌‌‌ If a being cannot be concerned about their own death, which can only occur P4: in the future, then it is not bad to kill that being painlessly, so long as that being is replaced with a being that experiences the same amount of pleasure. C​​​​​​​: Therefore, it is not bad to kill some non-human animals, so long as they are replaced with beings who experience similar amounts of pleasure.

R. G. Frey provides a nice analogy to help us come to grips with this argument. He says, “Just as the level of water in a glass falls but is made up again if, after a drink, the water is replenished, so, while replacement remains possible, the loss of the amount of pleasure in the world is constantly made good; accordingly there can be nothing wrong with killing, say, chickens for food" (Frey 1983, 161). For reasons that will become clear, this argument will likely only be appealing to those who are sympathetic to utilitarianism. It will be helpful to consider the justification for each of the premises more carefully. Premise one is likely to be true of at least some non-human animals. As Singer points out, “Killing a snail does not thwart any desires of this kind, because snails are incapable of having such desires” (Singer 2011, 77). Snails are not cognitively complex enough to take on attitudes about the future. However, when we discuss farm animals, we are not talking about snails (unless one happens to be on an escargot farm). Farm animals are intelligent creatures who engage in complicated behaviors and are clearly capable of making plans. Many of them are social creatures by nature who cooperate with one another in order to accomplish shared goals. These tasks have temporal components. Animals do not think propositionally nor in a human

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language. This does not mean that they do not have future-related desires. We can conclude that premise one may be true of some animals, but not of the animals who are the most salient to the conditions with which Singer is concerned. Now for the justification for premise two. A being is alive right up until the point that they die. A person’s death never happens in the present for that person because, as Epicurus puts it, “when we are, death is not come, and when death is come, we are not.” If this is the case, for any living being death can only take place in that being’s future. If an animal doesn’t have a concept of a future, then, the argument runs, it seems that they don’t have a concept of death, or, at the very least, they don’t have the concept of their own death. This matters for our discussion of in vitro meat. As we saw above, one strategy for dealing with animal suffering in meat production is to genetically engineer them not to suffer and then to kill them painlessly. In vitro meat involves meat production without death, and I think that is a good thing, so I want to challenge arguments that for the conclusion the animal death does not matter. Animals may not be able to articulate their attitudes about death, but avoidance behavior may signal something about a being’s long-term preferences. Many animals engage in sophisticated cooperative behavior with one another in order to avoid predators. A pig may not read Camus and experience existential crisis about their own mortality, but we don’t know enough about animal cognition to allow us to conclude that animals don’t have future-related cares about their own deaths. Human beings are not, themselves, always capable of articulating their future-related fears. In fact, in many cases those fears may not be transparent. Imagine that Mark always stays in after dark. He goes out of his way to make sure he is never caught outside in a poorly lit place after the sun goes down. Those observing Mark’s behavior might rightly conclude that Mark is scared of the dark, despite the fact that Mark has never admitted this to himself—he has never mentally expressed propositions associated with this fear. Nevertheless, it seems at least reasonable to say that Mark has this fear. If behavior is a reliable indicator of future related fears, even of (or especially of) those fears that go unexpressed to the self in the case of a human, it is far from clear that the same is not true in the case of a farm animal. This seems like a place to err on the side of caution. If one’s whole argument for the permissibility of killing someone depends on the claim that the someone in question does not have future-oriented cognitions, one ought to be very confident that we know enough about the cognition of animals to draw this conclusion with certainty. After all, the stakes are as high as they can possibly get. Premise four is perhaps the most controversial, and this is likely the point that all non-utilitarians will jump ship. The rationale seems to be that one can only harm a being by either causing that being suffering or violating

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its preferences. If a farm animal is killed painlessly, neither of these harms occurs. One significant problem is that this serves as a rationale for killing both human children and the severely mentally disabled. If members of these marginalized groups, like animals, are not capable of having future-related preferences concerning life and death, then this reasoning suggests that killing is not a harm, though there may be harms caused for the community in other ways. This is a widely acknowledged problem with this general line of thinking. THE LOGIC OF THE LARDER AND THE REPLACEABILITY ARGUMENT What is the connection between The Logic of the Larder and The Replaceability Argument? I’ll argue that there is no necessary connection, but if one accepts the utilitarian rationale for both arguments, they are then linked, and I’ll connect the dots to demonstrate that link. If farm animals experience lives that are worth living, then it’s good to bring them into the world. Perhaps we are even obligated to bring them into the world! If these were the only beings that were ever going to exist, it would be bad to slaughter them for food. The reason it would be bad, according to classical utilitarianism, is that it would decrease the overall amount of happiness in the world. Because farm animals are the kinds of beings who can experience pleasure and pain, but not the kinds of beings who can have future related preferences, the only result that we need to care about is the aggregate level of happiness. This means that so long as the aggregate level of happiness either remains the same or increases, we can kill the current set of farm animals that exists and replace them with others. We can keep our larders full. In this section I want to ask two questions. First, should we accept some version of both The Logic of the Larder and the Replaceability Argument? Second, if we were to reject the utilitarian rationale, would we still have a plausible argument to contend with? Earlier in the chapter, I discussed reasons for thinking that we should reject some of the premises of both arguments. There is another, more general reason. Replacing the current population of farm animals, which we frequently do, is terrible for the planet. Industrial animal agriculture has now progressed to a point at which it is environmentally unsustainable. The argument may have had less severe consequences in Salt’s day but replacing farm animals with other farm animals no longer makes sense from a utilitarian perspective. The Logic of the Larder and the Replaceability Argument work well with one another from the standpoint of classical utilitarianism. The theoretical underpinnings for a Logic of the Larder-style argument need not be utilitarian,

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however. Salt paraphrases the argument in the following way, “It is often said, as an excuse for the slaughter of animals, that it is better for them to live and to be butchered than not to live at all.” There is a fairly straightforward reading of this that lends itself easily to utilitarianism—if an animal comes into existence, they are in a position to experience pleasure. A second interpretation is that life itself, irrespective of the amount of pleasure one experiences, is an intrinsic good. It is good for these animals to come into existence simply because it is good to be alive. If we produce meat in vitro, there will be billions of animals that never get to live, therefore we ought to continue to bring these animals into existence. The argument may be that if we value life, we recognize that all life on this planet essentially involves creation and destruction—there is no escaping it. If we value life for its own sake, however, we don’t let the destruction part get in the way of the creation part. In response, it seems monstrous to justify our current practices of industrial animal agriculture by appealing to the value of and reverence for life. As Salt says, “This logic of the larder is the very negation of a true reverence for life; for it implies that the real lover of animals is he whose larder is fullest of them” (Salt 1914, 37). When a person claims to value the life of something and then proceeds to torture and slaughter that thing, there claim becomes impossible to believe. For this reason, though the Logic of the Larder need not depend on utilitarianism in order to get off the ground, the appeal to the value of life isn’t any more successful as an argument. One general response to all of this is that if we abandoned industrial animal agriculture tomorrow, the result would not be that the billions of animals that currently exist would be free to live out the rest of their lives in peace. The ranchers would not, out of empathy and good will, decide to feed and care for farm animals as pets. Instead, the animals would be killed. Indeed, the COVID-19 pandemic made the truth of this prediction perfectly clear. As I’ll discuss at great length in an upcoming chapter, conditions in meat packing plants quickly led to mass spread of coronavirus at those facilities. As a result, CAFOs were producing animals for slaughter at a faster rate than slaughterhouses could take them in. New, young animals were being born and there was no room to put them. As a result, millions of mature animals were killed by being shot or gassed, just to free up the space (Matthews 2020). This is very unfortunate, but not unsurprising. It is worth noting that in the extremely unlikely event that the whole system of industrial agriculture comes to a screeching halt in short order, it is likely that some animals would be taken in by organizations dedicated to saving animals from factory farms. Farm Animal Sanctuary, for example, takes in abandoned or rescued farm animals (Farm Sanctuary, n.d.). That said, it is no doubt true that the remaining farm animals would be killed one way or another. Sadly, that is probably unavoidable. These animals were going to die anyway, unfortunately.

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Some people are concerned that if we stop engaging in industrial animal agriculture, then what we think of as “farm animals” will cease to exist. These animals have been domesticated and many of them stand little chance of successfully living in the wild. It stands to reason that if we value pigs, chickens, cows, and turkeys, we should continue to raise them for food. By doing so, we both preserve the species and contribute to the occurrence of billions of positive experiences that come along with individual animals living lives. Though it is true that farm animals won’t exist in the numbers they did during industrial animal agriculture, it is implausible that these species will simply die out. Many human beings have developed bonds with farm animals and enjoy having them around. Also, the in vitro companies will still require these animals as the sources of cellular material. Further, it may be too hasty to suggest that all future “farm” animals would be incapable of surviving in the wild. Life adapts to changing circumstances and there are communities of scientists that have long been in the business of guiding animals raised in captivity toward successful adaptation to lives in the wild.2

CONCLUSION Consequentialist arguments exist both for and against the production of in vitro meat. What I have hoped to demonstrate in the last two chapters is that the benefits of adopting this strategy substantially outweigh the costs. Not all objections have to do with cost benefit analysis. In the next chapter, I will turn to a challenge posed by considerations about rights and dignity. NOTES 1. As a result, there are serious ethical questions about whether it is ethical to produce brains in this way. Though at this point it seems unlikely, these brains may be capable of experiencing pain. What’s more, the humans consented to having their bodies used for science may not have consented to have new life created from them in this particular form. 2. For a discussion of these kinds of projects, see Reason For Hope: a Spiritual Journey (Goodall 1999).

Chapter 4

Subjects of Lives and Inherent Value

So far, our discussion has been about the potential consequences of replacing industrial animal agriculture with cell cultured meat. We have looked at an approach that grounds our moral obligations to other-than human animals in the fact that they are sentient beings capable of experiencing pleasure and pain. Not all approaches to animal ethics have this focus, so in this chapter we’ll turn to the question of whether the production of in vitro meat violates the rights of the beings from whom the cells are collected. Many animal rights advocates tend to be abolitionists about the use of animals and animal products for human benefit. If respect for the rights and dignity of animals entails respect for their bodily autonomy, it may always be wrong to use their bodies for food under any conditions whatsoever. It may be that beings with rights are not the kinds of things that can ethically be consumed. When we think of animals as things to be consumed, we think of them as objects or as products rather than as beings with lives of their own to lead. This has been the crux of the problem in animal agriculture and agribusiness leading up to this point, and it will continue to be a problem with meat produced in vitro. We’ll consider arguments for the rights-based position in this chapter and the conclusions it invites for the permissibility of in vitro meat. THE HISTORY OF RIGHTS-BASED APPROACHES—HUMAN RIGHTS The concept of a “right” or set of “rights” is familiar to most people. Citizens of most countries have some, albeit imperfect, understanding of the rights guaranteed to them under their constitutions. Despite this common sense understanding of what a right is, the notion is infamously philosophically mysterious. Utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham thought that natural 43

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rights are, “simple nonsense: natural and imprescriptible rights, rhetorical nonsense—nonsense upon stilts” (Bentham 1843). For our purposes here, we won’t try to adjudicate the difficult question of whether rights exist. In this chapter, we’ll assume that they do, and consider the degree to which that fact speaks against in vitro meat. Not all rights theorists are prepared to attribute rights to non-human animals. Some theories of rights maintain that all and only members of the moral community can properly be understood to have them. Beings are members of a moral community, and have rights, if and only if they possess certain traits. Candidates for this trait or set of traits include: the ability to exercise autonomy, the possession of second-order thoughts and desires, and the ability to give and respond to reasons for action. Individuals with these traits that make them members of the moral community are frequently referred to as moral agents. Individuals that don’t have these traits are moral patients. One of the most famous proponents of a deontological approach, Immanuel Kant, argued that we don’t have direct moral obligations to animals (Kant 1785). Rather, we have moral obligations related to animals. The reason I ought not to kick my dog is because if I do that, I am practicing cruelty and if I habituate that kind of behavior into my character, it might make me more likely to be cruel to other humans. Kant’s view is that human beings have rights because they are the kinds of beings that are properly treated as ends in themselves. Humans have the ability to autonomously choose their own ends. Our moral obligations arise from the recognition that setting ends is valuable in our own case, and so we must treat it as valuable in others who have that same capacity as well. Only human beings are members of the “kingdom of ends.” Non-human animals are not the kinds of creatures that can exercise autonomy in this way. Therefore, on Kant’s view, we don’t have direct moral obligations to non-human animals. More recently, thinkers like Carl Cohen have argued that the possession of rights requires a being to understand the nature of rights (Cohen and Regan 2001). In order to accurately attribute a right to a being, that being must 1) understand who holds the right, 2) understand against whom the right is held, and 3) understand to what it is a right. Consider the question of whether Talia has the right to free speech. In order for this right to be aptly attributed to Talia, she must understand that it is her right, that it is the government that she has a claim against when the right is violated, and that it is free speech that is protected. If Talia is an armadillo, she doesn’t meet any of these conditions and it wouldn’t make sense to say she has a right to free speech. Cohen uses this argument to justify the use of non-human animals for the purposes of scientific research. The story becomes trickier if Talia is an elephant or a chimpanzee or some other animal with more sophisticated cognitive architecture. It’s also trickier

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when the alleged right is not a right to free speech or to bear arms or anything else that no one is arguing that a non-human animal should be able to do. When the non-human animal has a sophisticated mental life and the alleged right is a right to life or to bodily autonomy, there is a more compelling case in favor of the animal. In recent years, The Non-Human Rights Project has argued the case in the courts for the recognition of habeas corpus rights for specific animals like Happy the elephant and Tommy the chimpanzee. Even these kinds of approaches that acknowledge the rights of animals are doing so, at least in part, on the basis of the specific traits that are commonly found in certain species. This suggests that not all non-human animals have rights, but that the smart ones do. Other positions maintain that rights arise out of social contracts to which all parties subject to the contract agree. This is a kind of view that we see in the work of thinkers such as Locke (1988), Hobbes (1968), Rousseau (2004), and Rawls (2005). Most of these views begin with a description of what human existence would have been like in a “state of nature.” This is some unspecified duration of time before human beings came together to form societies. We all had strengths and vulnerabilities and at some point, we realized that it made sense to come together to form communities of protection and development. Participants in the social contract consent to give up certain rights in exchange for certain privileges. The rights and protections in the resultant society are then grounded in the consent of the governed. Not everyone will be capable of participating in the construction of the contract. One can’t agree to the conditions of a contract if one is not capable of assessing reasons or of giving consent, for example. Moral agents can participate in the contract, but moral patients cannot. Moral patients include non-human animals, children, and severely mentally disabled persons. If these groups have rights under the contract, it cannot be because they consented to the rules, it must be because the parties that constructed the contract wrote protections in for moral patients. In most cases, participants in the contract have done just that—most cultures have built-in protections for children and the disabled. Many cultures have some protections for non-human animals written in as well, but they are usually far from robust, and no community has enacted protections that prohibit the general practice of killing non-human animals and using them for food or for other human-centered purposes. One common objection to social contract theories is that, for these reasons, such theories don’t have a mechanism that allows them to acknowledge and respect the dignity of beings who, for whatever reason, can’t sign the contract (Nussbaum 2012). One dominant and compelling objection to contractualist views of this sort is that the background stories behind social contract theories misrepresent the social conditions of participation as a signatory. As Charles Mills points out in

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The Racial Contract, the kind of contract described by such theories is “not a contract between everybody (‘we the people’), but between just the people who count, the people who really are people (‘we the white people’). So it is a Racial Contract” (Mills 2022, 3). Social Contract Theories, if they are ever more than merely imagined agreements, are never created under conditions of perfect social equality. There will be groups that have all of the capabilities to participate in reasoning, bargaining, and contract signing, but who nevertheless will be excluded from participating in the formation and signing of the contract because of power dynamics and the nature of in-group/out group dynamics which are very often conditions of oppression and subordination. Racial minorities and women are just two groups that were likely not invited to participate. If social contract theories are subject to these kinds of injustices, they may not provide the best models for thinking about the source of rights in the first place. I’ve provided an overview of these rights-based perspectives to demonstrate that not all rights theorists are going to say the same thing about animal rights. Many rights theorists outright reject the move to attribute rights to non-human animals. None of these perspectives would likely give rise to an objection to the practice of adopting cell-culturing technology to grow food. Indeed, it is not difficult to imagine one of these rights theorists being eager to endorse such a practice. Such a person might see what industrial animal agriculture is doing to the planet and might conclude that rational beings have a right to a livable environment and that we must do what we can to achieve that, and if in vitro meat can play a major role, then it should. If a rights theorist doesn’t think that it violates an animal’s rights to kill them for use in experiments or for the purposes of food, it is unlikely that they are going to think that it violates rights to collect their cells for the purposes of cell culturing. We’ll next turn to rights views that do attribute rights to non-human animals. We’ll get clear on what such views look like and then we’ll consider whether, if non-human animals have rights for the reasons advanced, those rights are violated when we harvest their cells for use as food. THE HISTORY OF RIGHTS-BASED APPROACHES—ANIMAL RIGHTS The name that comes most readily to mind in any discussion of animal rights is Tom Regan, who powerfully and methodically makes the argument for attributing rights to animals in his 1983 work, The Case for Animal Rights. He spent his career advocating for this position, both as a scholar and as an

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activist. To get a full picture of his evolving position, we’ll look not only at The Case, but also at much of his other work One delightful feature of Regan’s writing is that he doesn’t shy away from being autobiographical. This is useful, in my view, because the work of a philosopher is best understood in the context of that person’s life. In his 2004 book, Empty Cages, Regan describes a letter he wrote to his wife when he was twenty, in his early days of studying philosophy before he became the vegan and animal rights crusader that he ultimately became. He wrote: I think we must be careful to distinguish between our love for elephants and our love for persons. Martin Buber discusses the radical distinction between the I-elephant and the I-person relationships. My relationship to an elephant is an I-it relationship, an I-thing. It does not demand of me personal kindness or affection . . . nor does it demand any claim to equality, freedom, and etc. An elephant is a thing, an it, and my relationship to it will always be tempered by this . . . The relationship between one person and another, however, is an I-Thou relationship; it is an I, Tom Regan, facing a Thou, Nancy Tirk [Nancy’s maiden name]. The relationship is tempered by equality, freedom, and etc. . . . To treat people as “things” is to treat them as elephants, cucumbers, or sack dresses. To love them as “things” is, in fact, not to love them at all. (Regan 2004, 29)

In his younger years, Regan shared the view that, to have moral status, beings must have traits that make it appropriate to put them in the category of “persons.” His position shifted when the United States entered the Vietnam War, which he opposed. He thought he might be able to add something to the discourse by contributing to the philosophical literature on civil rights. He read Mahatma Gandhi’s An Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments with Truth (Gandhi 1993).1 He recognized that his attitudes about animals were inconsistent and that his relationship to them was certainly not an I-it relation. Reflection on the nature of moral obligation led him to the conclusion that the considerations that ground respect for the dignity of some actually ground respect for the dignity of all. In The Case for Animal Rights, he argues that the rights-based views we discussed above get things wrong in a crucial respect. They fail to appropriately characterize the moral responsibilities that we have to moral patients. The fact that moral patients aren’t the kinds of beings that can have moral obligations to us does not entail that we do not have moral obligations to them. And the moral obligations that we owe are direct. When we do harm to an infant, a seriously mentally disabled individual, or a non-human animal, the wrong we do cannot simply be understood in terms of how it affects other moral agents. He considers the case of cruelty to animals, and of kicking a dog specifically. He says,

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How could someone try to justify such a view? Someone might say that your dog doesn’t feel anything and so isn’t hurt by your neighbor’s kick, doesn’t care about the pain since none is felt, is as unaware of anything as is your windshield. Someone might say this, but no rational person will, since, among other considerations, such a view will commit anyone who holds it to the position that no human beings feel pain either—that human beings also don’t care about what happens to them. A second possibility is that though both humans and your dog are hurt when kicked, it is only human pain that matters. But, again, no rational person can believe this. Pain is pain wherever it occurs. If your neighbor’s causing you pain is wrong because of the pain that is caused, we cannot rationally ignore or dismiss the moral relevance of the pain that your dog feels. (Regan 1983)

The primary problem, then, with views that make membership in the moral community necessary for rights is that these views cannot explain why we have a duty to refrain from harming moral patients; that is a duty to those moral patients themselves and not simply a duty that we owe to other moral agents. It may seem as if Regan is simply advancing a view that strongly resembles the one we discussed in the last chapter—non-human animals are morally considerable because of their capacity to experience pleasure and pain. However, he argues that the utilitarian approach also misses something crucial about the inherent worth of beings. His concern is that utilitarians treat beings as mere receptacles for experiences. The value of a being’s life, according to a utilitarian, is determined by the value of the experiences that they have. Regan thinks that these views fail to acknowledge that the receptacle, itself, the vessel itself, has value. Indeed, it has value such that it shouldn’t even be thought of as a receptacle. Regardless of the nature of the experiences a being has, that being has value. Regan argues that a being has rights if that being is the “subject of a life.” He says, Individuals are subjects-of-a-life if they have beliefs and desires; perception, memory, and a sense of the future, including their own future; an emotional life together with feelings of pleasure and pain; preference and welfare interests; the ability to initiate action in pursuit of their desires and goals; a psychophysical identity over time, and an individual welfare in the sense that their experiential life fares well or ill for them, logically independently of their utility for others and logically independently of their being the object of anyone else’s interests. Those who satisfy the subject-of-a-life criterion themselves have a distinctive kind of value—inherent value—and are not to be viewed or treated as mere receptacles. (Regan 1983, 1985, 2004, 243)‌‌‌‌‌

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He argues that though moral agents and moral patients differ when it comes to some of their characteristics, they have equal inherent worth insofar as they are all subjects of lives. We are all in the world and aware of the world around us. Each subject of a life cares about what happens to them. In this respect, we are morally the same and morally equal. Sticks and rocks do not have rights because they are not the subjects of lives. Humans, birds, and pigs (just to name a few) have rights because they have experiences of and in the world.2 So far, what he’s provided us with is not a moral principle, it’s just a claim about the worth of certain kinds of entities. He then pairs his claim that all subjects of lives have inherent worth with what he calls the respect principle. The Respect Principle: We are to treat those individuals who have inherent value in ways that respect that inherent value.

We violate the respect principle when we “treat beings with inherent value as if their value depended on their utility relative to the interests of others.” In doing so, we violate their rights. Regan argues that this commitment to animal rights commits the person that holds it to complete abolition when it comes to the use of animals and animal products for human purposes. It may seem, then, that the production of in vitro meat would be entirely off of the table (so to speak). That said, in vitro meat isn’t just any old use of animals. It’s revolutionary technology that doesn’t involve diminishing the well-being of the animals on which it relies. REGAN AND IN VITRO MEAT Regan was clearly an abolitionist about the use of animals. That said, it’s not clear that his account of what grounds attitudes of respect for animals is sufficient to rule out this particular use. Unfortunately, he passed away in 2017 and there is no evidence that he developed a position on the topic of cell-culturing technology.3 It may seem that, in light of his abolitionist stance, there is no way that he would support this practice, but, there are some passages throughout his work that suggest he might take a more nuanced view. For example, in one of his early papers titled The Moral Basis of Vegetarianism, he argues that there are some conditions under which use of animals, even if it causes some pain, may be justified. He says, But there is, of course, a third type of case to be considered. This is the case where the amount of undeserved pain caused by a practice is greatly exceeded by the amount of pleasure the practice brings about. And the question we must ask is whether, under these circumstances, the practice could be morally

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justified. And here, I think a case might be made for the position that such a practice could be justified, if the undeserved pain is of a very trivial variety. Imagine, that is, that the world was such that, by inflicting a very slight, momentary, undeserved pain on animals, the human population, or large segment of it, would experience an incredible amount of long-lasting pleasure. Then, I think we must submit that, though it might be better if the world allowed us to get this incredible pleasure without causing animals the pain in question, still, the pain they experience is so slight and it lasts for such a short time that, despite the fact that it is undeserved, the amount of good that is brought about more than compensates for their very modest suffering. We might argue, in other words, that even if animals do have a right to be spared undeserved pain, their right would be justifiably overridden in a case such as this. (Regan 1975)

This is just one place in Regan’s work where he suggests that rights violations might sometimes be justified if the harm is minor enough and the amount of good is large enough. The case that he describes sounds very much like the circumstances in which we find ourselves. Many people take great delight in consuming flesh. Cell-culturing provides the possibility of doing so while causing only trivial harm, if any harm at all, to animals. This passage seems to justify the use of cell-culturing technology to produce meat. Other textual evidence that supports the idea that Regan may not have objected to in vitro meat technology comes from an unpublished paper in the archive titled, “Technology and Animal Rights.” The fact that the paper was unpublished should factor into the weight that we give it in our assessment of the role it plays in his overall philosophy. The fact that he included it in the materials that he donated to his archive suggests that it was not a work he wanted suppressed, and that should factor into the weight that we afford it as well. In this paper, he argues that we have, “a duty not to cause one another non-trivial pain, pain that is intense, prolonged, and perhaps incapacitating.” He argues that we have the same duty to non-human animals and that they have a corresponding right not to be caused non-trivial pain. He goes on to discuss how technology makes the lives of animals worse. More often than not, when technology is used in industrial animal agriculture, it is not used to make the lives of the animals better but is instead used to maximize production and profit. It involves automating the process of food production as much as possible in ways that often cause deprivation, extreme pain, and premature death. Cell culturing technology is not like this. The collection of cells for the purposes of cell culturing is an instance of trivial pain, and in some cases, no pain at all. In this same paper, he puts forward two principles that are relevant to our discussion here. Both of them have to do with the circumstances under which it might be permissible to violate the right of an individual. The first he calls the “qualified beneficence principle.”

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Qualified Beneficence Principle: We can justify overriding an innocent being’s rights in the name of maximizing the good, when (a) the possessor of the right will not be seriously harmed; (b) we can foresee (that is, it is very probable that there will be) a very great increase in the amount of good if we treat the possessor of the right in a way that is contrary to the right; and (c) there is no other realistic way open to us to bring about so vast an increase in the amount of good, or an amount nearly so vast.

Let’s assume for the sake of argument that collecting cells for the purposes of a biopsy does violate the right of an animal. Perhaps that right is a right to bodily integrity or something of that nature. The qualified beneficence principle offered by Regan seems to justify the use. Conducting the biopsy meets condition (a); the animal will not be seriously harmed. Indeed, the animal is likely to experience only very minimal pain, if any pain at all. Doing so also satisfies condition (b); there will be a very great increase in good if we treat the possessor of a right to bodily integrity in a way that is contrary to that right. This is so for all of the reasons that I articulated in the last chapter. If we can stop the process of factory farming, at least for meat products, the good we could do would be tremendous. Finally, performing the biopsy satisfies (c); there is no other realistic way for us to bring about so vast an increase in the amount of good, or an amount nearly so vast. Surely there will be those that say that there is a clear alternative—we could all simply just stop consuming meat. I think this is very unlikely, for reasons that I’ll advance in chapter five. The second principle he puts forth is perhaps even more favorable to our assessment of in vitro meat. He calls this principle “the principle of qualified non-malfeasance.” The Principle of Qualified Non-Malfeasance: We can justify overriding an innocent being’s rights in the name of minimizing evil if (a). we have very good reason to believe that a very great amount of evil will be reduced or prevented if we treat him/her in a way that is contrary to one of his/her rights; (b) the sort of evil we are talking about is the sort that is seriously injurious or harmful to the good of other beings or to their pursuit of it; (c) those other beings are themselves innocent and; (d)we have very good reason to believe that there is no other realistic way open to us to bring about so vast a reduction in the amount of evil or to prevent so vast an amount, or to reduce or prevent amounts nearly so vast, than by treating an individual in a way that is contrary to the right in question.

Again, assuming that cell culturing violates an animal’s right to bodily autonomy, violating that right appears to be justified by the conditions Regan offers here. As for condition (a), industrial animal agriculture is seriously injurious

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or harmful to the good of other beings or to their pursuit of it. These “farming” practices involve intense pain and deprivation. They also provide an insurmountable barrier to the ability animals have to pursue their own good. In many cases, they can’t even leave an exceptionally small space, let alone pursue the kinds of goods that members of their species might be ordinarily inclined to pursue. These beings are innocent; as moral patients they aren’t even the kinds of beings that could potentially be guilty. And, as before, there is no other realistic way that we can stop these atrocities. Consider further a passage from The Case for Animal Rights in which Regan discusses the use of animals in research. He says, The tired charge of being antiscientific is likely to fill the air once more. It is a moral smokescreen. The rights view is not against use of research on animals if this research does not harm animals or put them at risk of harm. It is apt to remark, however, that this objective will not be accomplished merely by ensuring that test animals are anaesthetized, or given postoperative drugs to ease their suffering, or kept in clean cages with ample food, water, and so forth. For it is not only the pain and suffering that matter—though they certainly matter—but it is the harm done to the animals, including the diminished welfare opportunities they endure as a result of the deprivations caused by the surgery, and their untimely death. (Regan 1983, 1985, 2004, 243)

Again, in vitro technology appears to meet the criteria that Regan has put forth. In principle, cell culturing does not harm animals or put them at risk of harm. Or, if it does, it harms them in only a very trivial way. There is no reason why the process of collecting in vitro meat need necessarily lead to diminished welfare opportunities, there will be no deprivations, and, critically, there is no reason why the animals involved would need to be killed. Now, in practice all of this may turn out to be quite different, and this calls for diligence on the part of consumers. Many of the producers of in vitro products have made it perfectly clear that animal welfare is one of their primary motivations for doing this work and for attempting to bring this product to market. That said, we shouldn’t be naïve about businesses—it is often the case that the primary motivation of the people running a business is to make a profit. It is conceivable that animals could be kept in inhumane conditions for the purposes of cell collection too. The fact that this is a practical concern is important—there is nothing necessary about the occurrence of animal suffering under these conditions. If these cell culturing businesses mistreat animals, there should be significant consumer pushback. Buyers are purchasing these products at least in part because of the revolutionary claims related to animal welfare. We’ll need to keep these businesses honest on this point.

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Another passage in The Case that supports the interpretation that Regan would be comfortable with in vitro meat is his “Minimize overriding principle” or “miniride” principle. He offers this position as a rights-based way of adjudicating difficult cases such as cases in which we might be required to sacrifice one to save many. These cases may be rare, but they do happen, and a well-developed moral theory shouldn’t leave us paralyzed when they do. The Miniride Principle: Special considerations aside, when we must choose between overriding the rights of many who are innocent and the rights of few who are innocent, and when each affected individual will be harmed in a prima facie comparable way, then we ought to choose to override the rights of the few in preference to overriding the rights of the many.

Producing meat in vitro satisfies the demands of the miniride principle. Let’s imagine, modestly, that one cow could, by providing its cellular material through biopsy, protect the rights of 50 other cows from being violated in all of the ways that we’ve described as associated with industrial animal agriculture. This seems like the exact kind of thing that the miniride principle is supposed to allow for. Even better, the cow whose cells are being harvested is not being treated in a prima facie comparable way to the cows on a factory farm. Presumably, this cow is being treated with respect and is free to live a good life for a cow. The cow isn’t losing their life or even being subjected to any pain worth mentioning in the biopsy process. Having some temporary and insignificant restriction on bodily autonomy may be a restriction of rights (though, I must say, I’m not convinced that it is), but this minor violation of rights is justified under the miniride principle. MORE GENERAL CONCERNS ABOUT RIGHTS One response to the above discussion might be concern about appeals to authority. I can easily imagine someone thinking, “It’s great that you could find some idiosyncratic aspects of Regan’s view that make this practice seem acceptable, but I don’t share those idiosyncrasies in common with Regan.” Even if I have established that in vitro meat is consistent with Regan’s position, some might think that it isn’t consistent with other rights-based positions. If a person holds the view that, because animals have rights, we can never use them for any purpose whatsoever, I don’t have much to say in response. It is true that in vitro meat as a solution to our problems is unlikely to be appealing to such a person. There might be others who have Regan-adjacent, neo-Kantian concerns about the use of animals for this purpose. As Christine Korsgaard emphasizes

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in her book Fellow Creatures, animals are beings that are capable of pursuing their own interests. Given that this is the case, it may be impermissible to treat them as mere things, as mere means of satisfying our own ends. From this insight, someone might reason that we don’t collect cells out of respect for the animal, we collect cells for human consumption. We are acting in our own interests, not in the interests of the animals. I’ll offer two responses to this concern. First, it is undeniable that we are using animals by taking their cells. However, though in doing so we may treat them as means, we need not be treating them as mere means to our ends. We can harvest cells from animals while also recognizing and respecting them for the kinds of beings they are—beings that have interests that they care about satisfying. We use one another all of the time in all sorts of capacities. In doing so, we do not objectify one another so long as we respect one another’s interests. The same is true in our dealings with animals. Second, there are multiple motivations for engaging in this process in the first place. To be sure, one of the motivations is to create delicious products that people want to eat. Producers of these products want people to like them. There is likely to be great pride and personal satisfaction in this. The producers also want to turn a profit; of course they do. On the other hand, much of the motivation for creating this product in the first place is to improve conditions for animals. It is simply false to say that those who collect cells do so only to serve human interests. Producers of the product are well aware, and, indeed, are inspired by the fact that the cow that is the source of the cells they are culturing could, in a close possible world, be in a factory farm. She could have been destined for pain, deprivation, and slaughter, but instead she will be respected for the kind of being that she is. An additional rights-based concern may be related to consent. I’ll have more to say about this issue in chapters six and seven, so I’ll only discuss it somewhat briefly here. The concern is this: we should not do things to animals’ bodies to which they do not consent. An animal likely either doesn’t or can’t consent to having their cells extracted, therefore we ought not to use animal bodies for this purpose. It’s worth pointing out that if respect for animal consent requires never doing anything to their body that they might not want done to their body, we violate our commitment to consent all of the time. My dog may be comfortable on the bed, but if he starts to make retching sounds, I’m going to pick him up and get him off of my comforter. I take the dog to the vet even when it is clear that he doesn’t want to go. I give him a bath and brush his teeth even though he hates water and doesn’t know or care about hygiene. Either non-human animals are capable of giving consent or they are not capable of giving consent. There are different responses available to this

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argument depending on which of these two possibilities you think is true. Let’s consider first the possibility that at least some non-human animals are incapable of giving consent. Many hold the view that in order to be capable of giving consent, a being must be capable of being appropriately informed and of being free to make the decision that they think that information justifies. If the capacity for rational deliberation is necessary for the exercise of autonomy, then non-human animals won’t be capable of choosing. If informed consent requires the ability to understand propositions, non-human animals may be incapable of that as well. That said, not all entities that are incapable of giving consent are created equal. A rock is incapable of giving consent, and as a result, I can throw it across the field, go home, and sleep perfectly well at night, guilt free. If I throw my hamster across the field, things are different. The hamster might not be able to consent or not consent to being thrown, but nevertheless I shouldn’t throw him. This is because the rock doesn’t have traits that make it morally considerable, but the hamster is a moral patient. It is the subject of a life and I can’t simply do to him whatever I would like. If a moral patient is not capable of giving consent, we are put in a situation in which we must behave paternalistically in our interactions with that patient. This will involve considering the kinds of actions that are likely to harm them, either physically or psychologically. We should care about how an animal might feel about being hurt or abandoned, about having their claws removed or other features of their body changed. When it comes to the collection of cellular material, the animal is unlikely to have any attitudes whatsoever toward it. The animal will not be harmed and they will not be put in a position to live their life any differently than they did before. On the other hand, one might think that animals can and do express both consent and lack of consent. The fact that they can’t speak a human language to express it doesn’t mean that they can’t express it in a way that is natural for members of their species. Animals can and do express enthusiasm for things that they desire and they express affection for things and beings that they care about. It is often quite easy to determine what it is that an animal wants. Similarly, animals exhibit behaviors that make it clear that they are frightened, anxious, in pain, or otherwise experiencing distress. They may cower in response to certain people or other animals; they may shake when they are nervous. Animals frequently make noises when they feel that there is cause for alarm. These are the ways in which animals communicate attitudes. This may not be the kind of free and informed consent that we value in the case of human beings, but it is the kind of affirmation or rejection that many non-human animals are capable of signaling, and such behaviors are not morally irrelevant. That said, these behaviors are not the sole determinants of

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what we ought to do, moral speaking, in any given situation either. This may be a controversial assertion, but sometimes the cat must be inconvenienced. If displays of behavior of these types count as some form of either consent or dissent, there may be occasions on which we violate the animal’s consent. Sometimes this involves surgeries or behaviors related to the body. For example, animals are spayed or neutered to protect against the undesirable proliferation of domesticated animals that might end up homeless and suffering. Animals do not consent to this procedure, but we have compelling reasons for doing it anyway. Violating the consent, either fully informed and autonomous or otherwise, of a living thing is bad for more than one reason. Some reasons may apply to some kinds of beings but not others. If I disregard lack of consent when it comes to another autonomous human being, I do them one kind of harm because what I did was not consistent with their interests. I do them another kind of harm on a meta-level because they are aware that not only did I disregard their interests, but I also disregarded their capacity to give consent. As such, I did not fully respect them as a person. They are capable of reflecting on this and experiencing additional harm. Non-human animals may experience the first set of harms but not the second. They know they didn’t get what they wanted, but they are not concerned, nor do they know about your lack of respect for the fact that they are the kind of being that wants things. Intuitively, this is a morally relevant difference when it comes to how we should feel about animal consent. I’ll have more to say about this in chapters six and seven. I still haven’t addressed the claim I mentioned at the beginning of the chapter—that we ought not to produce meat in vitro because animals should simply not be viewed as the kinds of things to be consumed. Cheryl Abbate makes this point in her paper, “Save the Meat for Cats: Why It’s Wrong to Eat Roadkill,” Viewing animals (humans and nonhumans) with respect requires that we view them as things that are not to be eaten. This explains our strong intuition that there is something morally problematic about eating human corpses. Eating human corpses is wrong precisely because such an act indicates a failure to recognize that humans, as beings with inherent value, are not things to be eaten. To consume human corpses is to express that humans are consumables or resources, and this is a failure to view humans with the respect they are due, even if this act of consumption does not cause experiential harm to a particular human. (Abbate 2019, 179)

I agree with Abbate that there are some actions that, by their very nature, demonstrate a lack of respect for the beings effected. Under ordinary

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conditions (when an animal is not suffering), killing an animal demonstrates disrespect for the animal. Preventing an animal from flourishing also demonstrates a lack of respect. The act of eating flesh, on its own, is not inherently disrespectful, especially when consumption does not involve suffering, death, or humiliation. As I will argue later in the book, the circumstances that typically surround the consumption of a creature are the features that are cause for moral concern, not the consumption itself. There are reasons that eating a human corpse might be disrespectful to others—it might violate the deeply held values of the living or cause survivors to experience much distress. Of course, while the human is alive, they are deserving of respect for their o​​​​​​​wn sake. When they are dead, their bodies no longer have properties that make them any different, morally speaking, from a rock. Presumably there are some collections of matter that are deserving of respect and others that are not. Claims to respect should be grounded in features of the thing in question. In the case of the body, claims to respect, while the human is alive, will likely be grounded in the fact that the human in question is the conscious subject of a life. When the matter that is left behind no longer has that characteristic, the reasons we have to treat it with respect are going to have to do with external considerations, such as the well-being of the survivors. Similarly, if we want to claim that collecting cells from an animal is disrespectful, it should be because we think it would get in the way of something that is important to the creature. Martha Nussbaum’s Capability Approach as applied to animals works well here (Nussbaum 2006). Nussbaum is concerned with preserving the dignity of all animals and treating them with respect. This means respecting their capabilities when it comes to the kinds of activities that allow them to flourish as the kinds of beings that they are. For instance, we should create material conditions that are conducive to their ability to live healthy lives, interact with others, play, and so on. Extracting cells does not interfere with anything that these creatures care about any more than does cutting their hair or giving them a vaccination. It is not enough to simply say that behavior toward an animal violates that animal’s dignity, one must also provide some grounding for that claim. Consider the act of stroking the head of a pet. Someone could claim that doing so violates the pet’s dignity, but if this act does not get in the way of the meaningful interests of the pet, we don’t have good reason to accept that claim. DAVINCIANS, DAMASCANS, AND MUDDLERS I shared the story about Tom Regan’s change in orientation with respect to non-human animals because in vitro meat has the potential to change the way that people think about the role of animals in their lives. Regan’s perspective

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was, admittedly, slow to change, but when it changed, it changed dramatically. Our current system of meat production causes cognitive dissonance, so people either double down on carnivorism, developing resentments against people who suggest that they should do otherwise, or avoid thinking about the issue altogether. This technology could open opportunity to consider animal rights. It is not difficult to see why early humans might have thought that the only beings to whom they had moral obligations were the other human beings in their immediate sphere of influence. Those outside that sphere might have been perceived as, and even sometimes were, threats. Through time however, we started to perceive the realm of moral obligation as broader than that, encompassing, at a very minimum, all of humanity. When people start to see that non-human animals also belong in that moral sphere, they engage in ethical extensionism—the process of understanding the moral world in broader and broader terms. This can be more difficult than it sounds, especially when our identities and cultural practices are so strongly connected to viewing the world in a more anthropocentric way. In Empty Cages, Regan describes three general types of conversion experiences when it comes to perception of our relationship with animals. The first type of person is what he calls a DaVincian, after Leonardo DaVinci, a profound lover of animals. DaVincians have a strong connection to non-human animals from a very early age. They view animals as friends and they don’t view friends as food. The second type is the Damascan; a person who undergoes a change in perception. Regan likens this experience to “the experience we have when we look at an optical illusion . . . When we first look, we see the image one way; then (how long this takes varies from person to person) a second image reveals itself. First, we see the vase; then we see the faces. Or vice versa” (Regan 2004, 24–25). The Damascans start out seeing animals as things to be consumed, but sometimes all of a sudden, they see the situation in a different way. They now see “somebodies” rather than “somethings.” Often, this happens as the result of a transformative experience of some sort. Finally, there are the Muddlers (Regan put himself in this category). Muddlers come to change their perception of animals, not in a single transformative moment in which they see something in a way that they didn’t before, but through a series of steps that slowly but surely lead them to change their perceptions and extend their moral spheres. Regan says that in his experience, most people in the animal rights world are Muddlers. I suspect he is right about that. Some people, perhaps most people, are well intentioned and perhaps could use some help extending their moral spheres to include animals other than the companion animals whom they already know and love. They may be capable of changing their perception of farm animals slowly, but so long as eating them requires slaughter, they may never

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be able to make the switch. If in vitro meat is successful, if the notion of the flesh that we can eat is severed from the notion of the flesh that comes from a slaughtered animal, the very idea of slaughtering a member of our moral sphere might start to strike a wider range of people as abhorrent. CONCLUSION In this chapter, I have argued that in vitro meat does not violate the rights of animals. Some might argue that, nevertheless, it would be better if everyone just gave up eating meat. In the next section, I’ll turn to a discussion of ideal and non-ideal theory and will provide reasons for thinking that we should adopt the latter. NOTES 1. This book was also a source of inspiration for Martin Luther King Junior. 2. There might still be those that argue, like Descartes, that non-human animals are little more than robots and do not have experiences of the world. As we’ve turned more of our attention to the study of animals over the years, I think that position becomes extremely difficult to maintain. Any reason we may have for believing that a non-human animal does not have an inner mental life is also a reason for thinking that other humans don’t have internal mental lives. It is just a form of the problem of other minds. 3. I had the pleasure of doing a fellowship in the Tom Regan Animal Rights Archive in 2019. Regan donated all of his writing and computer hard drives to the collection, and there was no sign of any work on this topic.

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One common argument against the production of cultured meat is that the technology is not necessary. If we really want to end animal exploitation, the answer is obvious—we should stop consuming animals and animal products. Since eating them is not necessary either for pleasure (there are plenty of plant-based foods that taste delicious!) or for meeting one’s daily nutritional requirements, we can just change our habits. In this chapter I’ll discuss what I take to be the impediments to this kind of approach. IDEAL VERSUS NON-IDEAL THEORY A common distinction made popular in political philosophy by John Rawls is between ideal and non-ideal theory (Rawls 2005). This is a meta-ethical distinction that is driven by considerations about what it is that our moral theories ought to be doing. Rawls himself sees ideal theory as articulating the principles of justice and non-ideal theory as laying out the steps we ought to take to achieve the ideal theory in a less than ideal world. Not everyone thinks that achieving an ideal theory is possible, and some maintain that we should limit ourselves to a non-ideal theory. Should moral theories be utopian, or should they view certain limitations as constant? When we construct moral theories, are we describing the goal we are striving to achieve, or shall we instead focus only on the possible given our embedded social circumstances? People who are inclined to believe that we should pursue abolitionist strategies rather than in vitro meat alternatives likely fall into the camp of ideal theorists—that is, they think that considerations about what we should do in an ideal world should govern what we do in the actual world we inhabit. The mechanism for change if we adopt ideal theory is to get people to see the truth of the theory and then to change their behaviors accordingly. The content of 61

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an ideal theory will depend on the theoretical framework that one adopts. So, for example, if the ideal theory is a rights theory, then what we really need to do is get people to recognize that non-human animals have rights which will then lead them to switch to a vegetarian or vegan lifestyle. To see how ideal theory differs from non-ideal theory, consider the problem of what should be done about heroin use. We can imagine an ideal theory that would maintain that abusing the drug is self-destructive and harmful to society and that, as a result, users of it should just abandon that behavior. By contrast, non-ideal theory takes the perspective that we must address the world as we find it. Leaving people to do as the ideal theory requires is what we could reasonably expect in an ideal world, but that’s not the world we live in and it is unlikely that a policy we take on pertaining to drugs will cause people to eventually stop taking drugs entirely. It is unlikely that our non-ideal approach will ever really bring us closer to the ideal. To imagine that the problem could be solved in this simple way is to misunderstand facts about addiction, social disadvantages, and the public health system (among other things). Instead, we ought to understand that heroin use will continue, and we should implement sound social policy to help people who become addicted, their loved ones, and our communities by changing our attitudes about addiction away from a “poor choices” model and toward a “health issue” model. We should provide places where addicts can find clean needles, provide methadone clinics, and generally destigmatize drug use and educate people in more progressive, less retributivist ways about it. This is how real change will occur. Drug use may never go away, we may never even approach the ideal. It could, however, be safer. It may not be the best we can imagine, but it is the best we can do. Advocates of cultured meat products are often in the non-ideal theory camp. It may be true that it would be better if everyone gave up meat entirely, but that’s not going to happen. If we want to solve the myriad of problems posed by industrial animal agriculture, we must make more realistic dramatic changes more quickly. Indeed, many advocates of in vitro meat are, themselves, vegetarian or vegan. They may not be particularly keen to try the product, but they realize that this may be the best we can reasonably expect to do. How likely is it that we’ll see a dramatic shift toward giving up meat in the immediate future? In chapter two, I discussed the problems posed by industrial animal agriculture, problems like animal welfare, deforestation, species extinction, and climate change. To gauge the potential for change, it will be useful to pursue answers to several questions about human psychology. How seriously do human beings take the issue of animal welfare? How seriously do they take the threats posed by climate change? How do they feel about vegetarian and vegan lifestyles and values? What factors have contributed to the way they feel about these issues? In what follows, I’ll present some

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evidence from empirical social psychology and draw the conclusion that it is likely naïve to think any of these problems can be solved simply by relying on people to recognize and respond to the severity of the problems that we face. If we wait around for ideal theory to motivate the changes we need to see, there will be no solutions forthcoming. ATTITUDES ABOUT MEAT CONSUMPTION AND VEGETARIANS AND VEGANS If we want to assess the likelihood that people will make different dietary choices, it’s important to understand their attitudes about food. To answer the question regarding whether people are likely to give up meat and animal products altogether, we need to dive into the complex factors that contribute to their attitudes about meat consumption. Vegetarian and vegan lifestyles are on the rise. A 2019 IPSOS poll provided evidence of a staggering increase—people living a vegan lifestyle in the United States went from 240,000 in 2004 to 9.8 million in 2019 (Ipsos, n.d.). That certainly signals progress, but since there are well over 328 million people who live in the United States, it is still the case that the vast majority of people never make the switch. People like meat. The demand for it has increased at a steady clip over the past century. People in the United States eat meat at three times the international average; meat consumption nearly doubled in the U.S. from 1909 to 2007 (Cross, Daniel, Koebnick, and Sinha 2011). So, though more people are turning to vegetarian and vegan lifestyles, the overall percentage of the population that has done so is still low and those who do eat meat are eating more of it. Eating meat is deeply rooted in culture and identity. People who eat red meat, for instance, are unlikely to give it up even in the face of evidence that suggests that consuming it is a probable cause of cancer. A 2018 study conducted by Dwan and Mills strongly suggested that participant’s willingness to accept evidence that red meat consumption causes cancer was predicted by the attitudes they expressed about red meat prior to obtaining the evidence.1 That is, the more enthusiastic attitudes a person expressed toward red meat, the less likely they were to believe new evidence that red meat causes cancer. The enthusiasm for red meat and processed meat consumption is a major public health concern because of the links such consumption has not only to cancer but also to other forms of chronic disease. It’s not uncommon in conservative areas to see anti-vegan or anti-vegetarian bumper stickers on cars. Themes like “Save a Cow, Eat a Vegetarian” or “Eat a Vegan, Save a Tree” pop up on cars in rural areas with enough frequency to

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be noteworthy. At a 2018 vegan festival, a man accompanied by a group of anti-vegan protestors showed up gnawing on a large chunk of raw meat covered in wasps wearing a t-shirt with the words “Go Vegan and Die” printed on it (Yahoo News 2018). It will not come as news to vegetarians and vegans that in many communities, there is strong sentiment, in many cases outright hatred, toward people who do not eat meat. We don’t need to rely on anecdotes. Studies conducted by empirical psychologists provide evidence of significant bias against vegetarianism and veganism, with the strongest bias directed at vegans. In a 2017 study by MacInnis and Hodson, participants were asked a series of questions about their attitudes toward vegans and vegetarians (Hodson and MacInnis 2017). It yielded several conclusions. First, participants were asked to rate how they felt about vegetarians and vegans in comparison to how they felt about other common prejudice target groups such as black people and immigrants. The results were that people felt more negatively about vegetarians and vegans than any other group. Vegans were disliked more than vegetarians and vegan men were viewed the most poorly of all, particularly by men that ate meat. Participants in the study viewed vegetarians and vegans more negatively than they viewed drug addicts. The dislike that people harbor for vegans and vegetarians also appears to have something to do with the motivations for adopting this lifestyle. The same MacInnis and Hodson study revealed that people who dislike vegans and vegetarians are more likely to report strong feelings of dislike if the motivations for the plant-based lifestyle are ethical concerns about the wellbeing of animals or the environment. The sentiments still existed but were less strong about people who adopted the diet for health reasons. Gender As Carol J. Adams points out in her book The Sexual Politics of Meat, our culture has closely linked notions of maleness and virility with meat eating (Adams 1990). Advertisers often exploit this. Ad campaigns frequently combine attitudes about consumption and attitudes about sexuality.2 Much of the marketing for meat is directed specifically at men. For instance, many will remember the famous Carl’s Junior ad campaign that sexualized the consumption of meat with scantily clad women eating large hamburgers while escaping ketchup dripped down their bodies. Other ads, like one starring Sam Neill that was released shortly after Jurassic Park came out, portrayed the desire to consume red meat as an ancient instinctual desire in human beings, but the insinuation is that it is a particularly strong instinct in men. The message across many of these ads is that meat eating is essential for strength. Because strength is tied in with common notions of masculinity,

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giving up meat is sometimes viewed as a voluntary rejection of strength as a man. During times of meat scarcity, such as during World War II, meat was reserved for male soldiers because of the perceived connection between meat and strength (Adams 1990). Maintaining masculinity may be viewed as so central to a man’s identity that other considerations are unlikely to be perceived as more important. It is no surprise, then, that men consume significantly more meat of all types than women do (Cross, Daniel, Koebnick, and Sinha 2011). Among self-reported vegetarians, only about one-third are men (Cherry 2014). Women are more likely to eat vegetables or to express interest in eating vegetables (Ruby 2012). That said, there is more than one way to think about masculinity, and there is evidence to support the idea that the ways in which men think about masculinity affect their attitudes toward meat consumption. If men identify with what is commonly known as “hegemonic masculinity,” which focuses on dominance, power, and virility, they are less likely to give up meat (De Backer, De Cort, Dhoest, Erreygers, Van Bauwel, Vandermoere, and Vrinten 2020). Some have pointed out that men that identify with their masculinity in this way, “eat not only to fuel their body, but their male identity as well” (De Backer, De Cort, Dhoest, Erreygers, Van Bauwel, Vandermoere, and Vrinten 2020). Many ad campaigns for products that contain meat exploit this conception of masculinity, insisting that “real men eat meat.” Men with different conceptions of masculinity, what some authors have called “new masculinity” are more likely to try plant-based alternatives and to transition to vegetarian or vegan lifestyles. In light of these trends on the part of those who identify with hegemonic masculinity, it is not surprising that members of this group are the most likely to dislike male vegans, since it is a hallmark of hegemonic masculinity to punish and attempt to dominate the expression of other forms of masculinity. There is also a divide among men depending on the kind of work they do for a living. A study of carpenters and engineers in Finland found that the carpenters were both more likely to value meat and to identify with hegemonic masculinity and the engineers were less likely to identify with hegemonic masculinity and were more likely to value vegetables (Roos, Koski and Prättälä 2001). Further, there is some evidence to suggest that men who are employed as manual laborers are more likely to perceive eating meat as a masculine characteristic (Lax and Mertig 2021). None of the above is intended as a value judgment. To know how to move forward with our global food systems, it’s important to understand how various aspects of people’s core practical identities intersect with their attitudes about diet. Gender identity plays an important role and is intimately connected to attitudes about meat consumption.

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Political Affiliation People who have a more right-wing political orientation are more likely to dislike vegetarians and vegans, viewing them as a symbolic threat (Hodson and MacInnis. 2017). Meat eating and cooking practices that involve meat are viewed by many, particularly people on the political right, as crucial elements of their culture. Vegans and vegetarians want to abandon those practices, and many people view that value system as an attack on their very way of life. People with right wing ideologies who routinely consumed beef were the most likely to harbor these negative attitudes. Political ideology is predictive not just of attitudes toward vegetarians and vegans, but also of levels of meat consumption. People who endorse right wing ideologies consume more meat of all types (Reinhart 2018). When conservatives give up meat, they are more likely to do so for health reasons than for reasons related to the environment and animal welfare (Hodson and Earle, 2018). Conservatives are also more likely to return to meat consumption even after an attempt at veganism or vegetarianism. This is unsurprising in light of the fact that a person is more resilient in their avoidance of meat if their motivations have to do with social justice, and these aren’t typically the motivations of conservatives when it comes to changing their diets. If the ideal theorist wants people to stop eating meat as a result of recognizing that doing so is what the ideal theory requires, that theorist will have tribalism to contend with. The issue of meat consumption has been politicized, and when this happens minds are often permanently settled. Consider, for example, the way that people responded to wearing masks during the coronavirus pandemic. Regardless of the available evidence, a person’s willingness to wear a mask was often directly related to their political affiliation. It is not common for a person to change their political ideology, and attitudes about moral issues that have been politicized tend to be settled by whether they comport with a person’s political identity rather than on the basis of the merits of arguments. Family Influence People’s attitudes about meat consumption also have much to do with the way that they were raised and the kind of food they grew up consuming in their homes. Cooking and eating together is a form of care and is a way of communicating love. Passing recipes down from one generation to the next is a way of preserving a history of care and familial identity and affection. It is common for parents to demonstrate love for their own children in the same

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way that their parents demonstrated love toward them, and this will often take the form of food; in many cases it will involve meat. Dietary changes can be much easier to make when those making them are surrounded by people who support them in those changes. If a person lives in a family of meat eaters, even if they attempt vegetarianism or veganism, those changes are less likely to stick (Hodson and Earle 2018). If they live in a conservative family that highly prizes meat consumption and has the attitudes about meat that we’ve discussed above, they might be ridiculed for the attempt, or, barring that, won’t be supported in their choice. Their family might view the change as a rejection of their core values and customs. Interactions among families that carry on traditions are also ways of preserving and transmitting cultural practices and values. The use of certain spices or preparation methods are expressions of culture. Ideal theoretical arguments against meat consumption and in favor of a global shift toward vegetarianism or veganism are likely to be viewed as coercion toward assimilation. For this reason, the food we eat is connected to those aspects of identity that are often the very most critical to who we are. The sources of love in our lives are likely to be the last things we would ever want to give up. Giving up meat could easily be viewed as a rejection of the values, culture, and loving gestures of the people we care about. Religion Religion can be either a powerful motivator to adopt a vegan or vegetarian lifestyle or it can reinforce the idea that non-human animals were created by God for our use and therefore we can do with them whatever we would like. The majority of the world’s vegetarians are Hindu. Many Jains and Buddhists do not consume meat either. Among the Abrahamic religious traditions, meat consumption is more common. There are certainly rules about the kinds of animals that can be killed for food and the ways in which they should be killed and prepared for consumption, but there is no commonly recognized outright ban on meat consumption. Among Christians, adherents interpret Genesis 1:26 in different ways. The verse reads “And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.” Meat eaters interpret this passage to mean that human beings have “dominion” over the animals. They take this to mean that animals have been put here by God for the express purpose of keeping human beings alive and thriving. For those that interpret the verse in this way, rejecting animal meat is

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rejecting a gift from God. Other Christians interpret the “dominion” language in the passage as a call toward stewardship and care for the animals and for the planet that we all occupy together. For these Christians, slaughtering animals displays disrespect for God and the gifts he’s put on this earth for us to protect and to treat as friends and companions. The main point for our discussion here is that a person’s attitudes about meat consumption are likely to be strongly influenced by their religious beliefs. Studies reveal that religiosity and church attendance were correlated with attitudes about animal welfare. This is true among evangelicals in particular. These people are likely to think of non-human animals as tools provided by God for the use and benefit of human beings. A couple of observations about this are relevant to our discussion here. First, no matter how the religion in question feels about the consumption of animal flesh, in many (but not all) cases, the person in question arrives at this position, not as a result of recognition that it follows from the ideal theory, but as a matter of faith. So, if the ideal theorist wants people to act according to the ideal theory because they recognize it is the ideal theory, that’s not happening here. Whether this would be a requirement for the ideal theory depends on what moral theory the ideal theorist adopts. Second, these identity categories are likely to overlap in all sorts of ways. Attitudes and relationships toward and about family will, in many cases, have attitudes about religion woven in. These aspects of identity often don’t exist apart from attitudes about politics and gender identity either. Disentangling these aspects of identity and determining how to motivate people to go vegan by looking at the distinct features of their identities will likely turn out to be a difficult if not impossible task. ATTITUDES ABOUT ANIMALS AND ANIMAL WELFARE One relevant psychological phenomenon is “the meat paradox”: most people (1) report having generally favorable attitudes toward non-human animals, (2) report that they care about farm animal welfare, (3) experience empathy in response to animal suffering, but also (4) consume meat. It seems that these psychological features should cause a person an unbearable amount of cognitive dissonance, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. Some studies have suggested that the way that people combat the cognitive dissonance is by compartmentalization and/or moral disengagement (Camilleri, Gill, and Jago 2020). This can be easy when what people see when they cook is not an animal who is clearly a thinking, feeling subject of

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a life, but is instead just an amorphous slab of flesh. Empathy is more likely to be aroused when we are put in a position to face the other directly. One easy way to avoid the conflict is to deny that non-human animals have minds or mental lives. Some people believe, like Descartes, that non-human animals are mere automatons—directed in their behavior by pure instinct rather than by emotions, values, or personality. A 2020 study concluded, unsurprisingly, that belief about animal minds affected people’s attitudes about whether it is acceptable to use animals in certain kinds of ways (Higgs, Bipin, and Cassaday 2020). Unfortunately, this general finding didn’t hold true when it came to the use of animals for the purposes of food; people were less likely to attribute significant characteristics of mind to animals that people in the United States typically use for food. So, for example, people were less likely to assign attributes of mind to pigs than they were to other animals of a similar size who are not commonly used for food. What’s more, though there was not a significant difference in men and women when it came to whether they expressed belief in animal minds (women’s belief in them was slightly higher), there was a statistically significant difference when it came to whether beliefs in animal minds made a difference to perception about whether farm animals should be used for food. This suggests that men might engage in compartmentalization or moral disengagement when it comes to this topic to a greater degree than women. Like attitudes about meat consumption, concern for animal welfare depends at least in part on demographic factors. Younger adults are more likely to be aware of modern farming practices and are also more likely to be concerned about them. Women are more likely than men to be concerned, and educated people are more likely to be concerned than uneducated people (Rothgerber 2021). Geographic features are also relevant both to knowledge of modern farming practices and concern about animal welfare. People in rural areas were more likely to know about modern farming practices and were less likely to be concerned about farm animal welfare (Clark, Stewart, Panzone, et al. 2016). Another study concluded that both attitudes toward farm animals and belief in animal minds decreased significantly among participants living in rural areas. Unsurprisingly, several studies suggest that the kind of exposure that a person has to non-human animals affects how people feel about animal welfare in general. People who have pets are more likely than people who do not to be concerned. Again, unsurprisingly, when a group of people’s main set of interactions with animals happened during hunting trips, that group reported being less concerned with animal welfare and less convinced that non-human animals have minds.

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Though studies reveal that more than fifty percent of sampled populations report care and concern for animal welfare, their consumer behavior does not tend to change in a way that reflects their concerns (Clark, Stewart, Panzone, et al., 2016). Products that prioritize animal welfare (such as vegetarian and vegan replacements) are available on the market, but people do not purchase them at rates that match their reported level of concern. Also, people don’t tend to know very much about modern farming practices. In one study, fifty percent of the population reported that their knowledge of farming practices was low (Billington, Ellis, McKeegan, and McNeil 2009). In another study, eighty percent of the respondents reported that they did not have much knowledge on the topic of farm animal welfare (Lu, Y. 2013). Plenty of people have an anthropocentric worldview and don’t want to know how farm animals are treated. Some view eating meat as “a human right” (Harper and Henson 2001). One way to avoid cognitive dissonance about this topic is to have no idea what is going on down on the factory farm. ATTITUDES ABOUT CLIMATE CHANGE AND THE ENVIRONMENT Since one of the reasons the ideal theorist would want people to change their diet is concern for the environment, we should also consider people’s willingness to believe that we should change our diets to prevent or lessen the effects of climate change. In order to accept this conclusion, people have to be willing to entertain: that climate change is real, that it is caused by human activity, that it is caused by industrial animal agriculture specifically, that we can do anything to stop it, and that we should do anything to stop it. What do people believe about climate change? Happily, there has been some positive momentum. A 1992 study conducted in Pennsylvania provided evidence for the conclusion that people conflated the issue of global climate change with the issue of stratospheric ozone depletion. The consequence is that if people aren’t familiar with the exact nature and cause of the problem, they won’t be in a position to do anything to stop it, either by making changes in their personal consumer decisions or in their political decision making. A 2009 study conducted by the same researchers under similar conditions supported the idea that education campaigns have been somewhat effective along these lines (Bostrom, Morgan, Read, and Reynolds 2010). The results of that study were that more people were aware that climate change is caused by the increased presence of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Unfortunately, the same study also concluded that the number of people who reported that they thought that anthropogenic climate change was “not likely” or “impossible” moved from one percent of the respondents to nine percent

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of the respondents. This suggests that a more accurate picture of what climate change is did not lead, at least among this population, to a greater tendency to believe that humans cause it. According to a 2020 Pew Poll, fifty-four percent of Americans believe that climate change should be one of our top priorities (Funk and Kennedy 2010). This is a significant improvement, but it is not the level of improvement we need to see in order to fix the environmental impacts of climate change caused by industrial animal agriculture. That is, it is not the kind of change that is sufficient to justify the conclusion that we can solve our global environmental problems by simply convincing everyone to give up eating meat and animal products. Facts about identity, ideology, and group membership highlight the Herculean nature of the task of convincing everyone to simply stop eating meat in response to the threats posed by climate change. The same Pew poll concluded that political orientation was one of the most significant predictors of beliefs regarding whether climate change is caused by human activity. As a group, Republicans were unlikely to view human activity as a cause. Among Republicans who report high science knowledge, only seventeen percent believe that human activity contributes a great deal to climate change. By contrast, among Democrats who report high science knowledge, eighty-nine percent say that human activity contributes greatly. There are also significant differences when it comes to age. People who are millennials or younger are more likely to believe that climate change is partially man-made and is currently affecting our communities. Boomers and older generations are the least likely to believe these things. Young democrats are also more supportive of actions designed to slow or stop the encroachment of climate change through policies like green energy solutions. There are also gender differences when it comes to belief in climate change and perception of the threat that it poses. Women are more likely to believe that climate change poses a significant threat that we need to construct public policy to prevent. Men are more likely to be concerned about the economic impacts of making the widespread changes that climate mitigation would require. So, when it comes to this particular gender difference, the direction of explanation is unclear. It may be the case that men are more likely to hold these views because they are more likely than women to subscribe to a conservative ideology. On the other hand, it may be the case that men have these beliefs as a result of holding common views about masculinity, and this makes them more likely to be conservative. In any event, yet again, we’ll have to tackle gender differences to tackle environmental problems.

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WHAT TO MAKE OF THIS? What should we conclude about the viability of the ideal theoretical approach in light of all of the data that we’ve just reviewed? First, it doesn’t seem as if most people come to the positions that they have through the use of reasoned argument. Instead, their motivations have more to do with their identities— their conceptions of who they are that then give meaning and direction to their lives. Moreover, many of the identities that matter here operate according to in-group and out-group dynamics. The desire to belong to the in-group of one’s choice can be almost insurmountably strong and it accounts for many of the more general social problems that we experience today and that we have experienced throughout all of human history. Second, the situation might be more manageable if we could work on the hesitancies of one target demographic at a time (such as gender, political affiliation, age, and so on). If this were possible, we could try to understand what it is about that particular demographic that makes them unlikely to be positively inclined toward a vegan or vegetarian diet and go to work on that. This is unlikely to be possible because these issues are intersectional and there will be few people that share the same set of intersections. The interplay between different intersections of identity will give rise to unique challenges. The bottom line is that, realistically, we won’t be able to convince nearly enough people to become vegetarian to make any significant difference at all when it comes to either animal welfare or the environment. The harms that are currently being done and that will continue to be done are too significant to sit around waiting for people to see the light. There is no reason why we can’t continue to convince people to adopt vegetarian or vegan lifestyles, but doing so can’t be our only or even our primary strategy. The solution that remains is to adopt a non-ideal theory. The information about demographics that I’ve presented here makes it clear that people want to persist in eating meat. The non-ideal strategy is to provide a market alternative that allows them to, so to speak, have their pig and eat it too. If, rather than abolishing meat, we change how it is produced in ways that can solve our problems, this seems like the most fruitful path forward. IN VITRO MEAT AND CONSPIRACY THEORIES A new public perception problem has arisen for advocates of in vitro meat— conspiratorial thinking. Conspiracy theories often emerge surrounding issues about which people feel they have very little control. Major advances in

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technology often signal significant changes in daily life and also often function in ways that are far from transparent to the average person. Consider, for example, conspiracy theories that maintain that the moon landing was a hoax. Space travel was too big a move and people strained to understand how it could possibly work, so some concluded that it must not have happened at all. People with a Manichean mindset who view the world as a battle between good forces and evil forces often believe that technology represents a power play on behalf of the evil forces. Unfortunately, in vitro meat is now a headliner in a cluster of conspiracy theories of this type. The most dominant theory is frequently referred to as “The Great Reset.” Fueled by resentment toward elites and unease as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, The Great Reset is the theory that narratives about the pandemic, climate change, and our current system of industrial animal agriculture are all propaganda to get citizens to support radical changes to the way that the world works. The idea is that lies about either the origin or even the very existence of the pandemic allowed governments, or, on some versions, Bill Gates, the space and time to build control into everything: to insert mind-controlling microchips into the arms of people through vaccines, to control every aspect of the weather through geoengineering, and to control the food system by replacing “traditional” animal flesh with cell cultured food created in a lab and engineered somehow for maximal social control. It’s not obvious how cell cultured meat is supposed to obtain these properties, but Marjorie Taylor Greene says that the government wants “to know if you’re eating a cheeseburger, which is very bad because Bill Gates wants you to eat his fake meat that grows in a peach tree dish. So you’ll probably get a little zap inside your body, and that says, ‘No, no, don’t eat a real cheeseburger” (Carman 2022). Of course, none of this is true. Unfortunately, increasing numbers of people believe that it is. If we want in vitro meat to be successful as an alternative, we’ll need to find a way to combat the conspiratorial thinking. It will not be possible to eradicate such thinking entirely; conspiracy theories have always existed and likely always will. This particular conspiracy theory is likely to be fairly hard to fight for a number of reasons: first, it has been tied in with the COVID-19 pandemic, an issue that divides people along political lines due to the contingent political circumstances that surrounded it. Second, the industrial animal agricultural lobby has an interest in the survival of these theories, and this lobby is very powerful. Third, the theory capitalizes on existing attitudes about power dynamics. Many people in the United States are fearful about a change in power from the hands of white men to the hands of women and minorities. This is why theories like “The Great Replacement”—the theory that the Democratic Party is intentionally encouraging illegal immigration in order to “replace” white people as the largest demographic in the

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country—are so successful. Similarly, people are concerned with the power associated with food production moving from the hands of farmers and ranchers to laboratory technicians. This fear is punctuated by the fact that farming and ranching are frequently connected in the popular mind with traditional ideas about men and masculinity. We have already seen that this is the source of real problems when it comes to what people are willing to eat. The transition from viewing meat as the kind of “product” that is developed by manual labor in a slaughterhouse to intellectual labor in a lab is likely to be viewed as a change from traditional methods to methods controlled by “the elite.” How ought we to respond to this? Since the primary purpose of this book is to discuss the ethical implications of in vitro meat, it is tempting to want to address the problem by saying something about the ethics of belief. As philosopher William Clifford famously put it in his essay, The Ethics of Belief, “It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone to believe anything on insufficient evidence” (Clifford 1999). One may not follow Clifford all the way to this conclusion, but it is plausible to maintain that a person living in a society has a basic moral obligation to have good evidence for their beliefs. After all, beliefs have consequences and beliefs serve to develop character, for good or for ill. Insofar as conspiracy theorists form their beliefs on the basis of poor or non-existent evidence, they are doing something wrong and ought to change their behavior. There may be some truth in this. Individuals may have some responsibility to change their belief forming practices, especially when, like Marjorie Taylor Greene, they play a role in public life and can be reasonably expected to influence the beliefs of other people. On the other hand, to blame individual believers for the prevalence of conspiracy theories might be both metaphysically misguided and a poor strategy. The reason it is metaphysically misguided is because it assumes the truth of belief voluntarism—the idea that we are in control of what we believe. This seems unlikely to be true. I can’t, through sheer force of will, convince myself that the sky is green. The external and psychological factors present at the time of my belief influence what it is that I am capable of believing. It may be that a person with a particular psychology in a certain environment has no real control over whether they succumb to belief in an unwarranted conspiracy theory. The solution, if there is one, may be to change the environment in which people form their beliefs. We can do this in several ways. First, if we want to dispel notions that in vitro meat has secret ingredients with mind controlling properties, meat production companies need to engage with total transparency to their customers. We should also do what we can to make sure that our current system of industrial animal agriculture is as transparent as possible. The comparison is likely to be striking and to fall hard on the side of cell cultured meat. This kind of transparency means abandoning “ag gag” laws that

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prohibit film and video inside CAFOs and slaughterhouses. If people have a right to know what they are eating, they have a right to know the conditions under which their meat is produced, one way or the other. Second, conspiratorial beliefs are often, though not always, a product of feeling marginalized. It’s empowering to have answers that no one else has, especially answers about the fundamental problems facing the planet. If a person feels otherwise disempowered and marginalized, the power that comes with being part of a group that knows the “real” answers can be intoxicating. To change this, our strategy of producing in vitro meat should be part of a more general project to improve the quality of people’s lives. In this limited sense, we should, indeed, bring about something like “The Great Reset,” but not in such a way that the world is restructured to benefit elites. Instead, we should work to ensure people have access to the material conditions that are conducive to their ability to flourish in their lives. When people feel that they don’t have real control over the direction that their lives go, they often lash out, either through taking out their feelings on a scapegoat group or through embracing conspiracies to round out their identities. We should pursue increased access to education, health care, leisure time, and other aspects of life that render that life meaningful and are respectful of dignity for all. This is an issue that calls for an interdisciplinary approach. Scientists create the product, but we also need ethicists to discuss the moral implications, sociologists to help us to understand group responses, and communication experts to help us to best convey messages in compassionate and understanding ways. One corollary of all of this is that it makes real change about critical issues dependent on the market. Markets aren’t known for ensuring just outcomes. I’ll turn to this and related questions in the next chapter. NOTES 1. Dwan and Milles 2018. 2. For many examples of this phenomenon, see the following archive that Adams has compiled: https:​//​caroljadams​.com​/examples​-of​-spom.

Chapter 6

The “Yuck” Factor, Aesthetics, and Cognitive Bias

In the last chapter I argued that an ideal theoretic approach that relies on people to abandon meat and animal products altogether is not likely to be successful. I argued that people’s connections to features of their own identities make it very difficult for them to make broad scale changes of this sort en masse. One response to that argument is that those same features of human psychology may also make it unlikely that people will switch to in vitro meat; instead, they’re likely to stick to what they know. In this chapter I will discuss challenges posed by in vitro meat and the current landscape. I will also discuss moral motivation and concerns about letting the market resolve issues as important as those we are facing. It’s not uncommon for people to be distrustful of new technologies, especially if they create products that enter a person’s body in some way. So, for example, vaccine hesitancy in general is on the rise, and when it comes to new viruses such as COVID-19, the hesitancy probably isn’t going to dissipate any time soon. On some level, this is understandable—if a person puts something toxic into their body it could kill them. On the other hand, the evidence we have before us doesn’t justify unwavering distrust of emerging technology. In previous chapters, we’ve discussed the many reasons that transitioning to meat produced in vitro would be a very good thing. Nevertheless, we face an uphill battle when it comes to public perception and endorsement. PUBLIC PERCEPTION Cell-cultured meat isn’t on most people’s radar. Other meat alternatives that don’t involve slaughter such as plant-based Impossible and Beyond Burger are gaining traction. Consumers can buy them at the grocery store and many fast-food restaurants now feature menu items that contain these plant-based 77

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alternatives. If you talk to a person on the street who may have heard of cultured meat but hasn’t looked much into it, in my experience it is likely that they will think it’s some gimmick in the general category of plant-based meat replacements. If you plan to discuss the topic with a group of friends who have not yet heard of in vitro meat, be prepared for some of them to express disgust. To many, the idea of meat produced in a lab is unappetizing, often because they perceive it to be unnatural (Phillips and Wilks 2017). Despite living in a world in a time at which much of what we eat, wear, and smear onto our skin does not spring into existence in its final form in the wild, bringing meat into the laboratory is, for many, a bridge too far. The mid-twentieth century was a time of significant development in food science. Frozen dinners, freezers, and microwaves became common household commodities. We developed increasingly ingenious ways of producing and preserving food. Food items were mass produced, not at home from scratch by kindly grandmas in kitchen aprons, but in factories through the use of automation with machines. People have idyllic attitudes about where they think, or, at the very least, where they’d like to think that their food comes from, but most of the food one can pick up in grocery stores came from a factory and, in many cases, at one point a lab. Many wellness movements have responded to this way of preparing and producing food by rejecting certain products. Some of these people refuse to eat foods containing ingredients with names that they don’t recognize. Others won’t eat a product that has one or more ingredients on its list that has more than two syllables. Now, of course, this way of determining what to eat is not supported by good reasons—whether a person has heard of an ingredient is more a matter of the information to which that particular person has been exposed than it is about the health and nutritional value of the product in question. Many common ingredients have multiple syllables—dihydrogen monoxide is the scientific name for water, and we shouldn’t give that up! If a person is attempting to make a decision about whether a particular food item is healthy, they should seek out reliable information about the nutritional value of each of the ingredients rather than adopting frugal heuristics that have nothing to do with health. The fear of scientific sounding names reflects an unease with science in general. This is unfortunate but not entirely unjustified. In 1962, Silent Spring was published as a vehicle through which Rachel Carson brought the dangerous and deadly use of pesticides by the U.S. government to the public’s attention (Carson 2002). It isn’t as if both governments and corporations have not used technology to produce and distribute products that have harmful and sometimes even lethal consequences for both humans and non-human animals. Some of these missteps have historically targeted people of color.

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Trepidation can be warranted under certain circumstances. However, there is no reason to think that we are in those circumstances. Unfortunately, as we’ve seen, minor epistemic uncertainty can sometimes explode into conspiratorial delusion. In vitro products haven’t even come to market at full force yet, but the theories are already raging. Because of his wealth and power, Bill Gates, like George Soros, is a major figure at the epicenter of a wide range of conspiracy theories. As I mentioned in the first chapter, Bill Gates has invested in cell cultured meat and many believe he has done so to control global food markets. There were meat shortages during the coronavirus pandemic. The causes of the shortages, as we’ll discuss in more detail in chapter eight, were outbreaks of coronavirus at meat packing plants across the world. Conspiracy theorists believe that the meat shortages were manufactured to clear the way for Bill Gates to replace traditional meat with in vitro meat so that he would hold the reigns on all of the world’s meat. Tyson Foods has also invested in the technology (perhaps they see which way the wind is blowing) and so conspiracy theories also contend that Tyson Foods and Bill Gates are working together to take over the world, at least when it comes to food. As the above discussion demonstrates, many of the problems that we face with the rollout of in vitro meat are epistemic problems surrounding trust. One approach we could take in response to these concerns is to try to lay out a theory about when trust in experts is warranted and when it isn’t and a theory about what the best epistemic practices are for evaluating emerging technologies. These are projects in which other philosophers are engaged, and they are valuable projects for many purposes.1 That said, in this case such an endeavor is probably not warranted. First, this would be, once again, an attempt to spell out an ideal theory, this time in the epistemic domain. Though independently valuable, it will only be useful for our purposes if the people we are trying to convince are interested in identifying and following an ideal theory. The evidence suggests that this is not the case. Second, it seems that what we really need is a discussion, not of epistemic standards, but of moral motivation. That’s what we’re really looking to engage here. There are two potential paths for a person to take if they are dubious about in vitro meat but are willing to be convinced. First, they could be convinced by the evidence and the arguments. That would be lovely. Second, they could be motivated by external factors—the taste, the price, the marketing, etc. The first would be ideal, but the second is more realistic and gets the very important job done. Not all people who say “yuck” when presented with the idea of in vitro meat are conspiracy theorists or have trust issues. Some just think it sounds gross. In these cases, I think it is helpful to unpack some of the cognitive dissonances that is likely to be going on. As I’ll discuss in chapter seven, one sense in which we can perceive something as “inedible” is that it just sounds

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too disgusting to eat. That’s what is going on here. The question is: what standards are being employed in the judgment that a product is disgusting? This may be purely subjective, but we can still inquire into whether the response to the stimuli seems apt. The idea of eating something created in vitro has an almost medical vibe—like you’re eating someone’s zygote or something (though, of course, that is not what’s happening). But if one does not think that something equally if not more distasteful is going on when it comes to a slaughtered animal, one is engaging in compartmentalization and moral disengagement, as we discussed in the last chapter. One interesting difference between the two products is that, though they are the same product insofar as they are made of the same type of cellular material, in one case the consumer is eating a corpse and in the other they are not. I’m not sure that consistent standards for “disgusting” are being employed if lab creation qualifies but eating a dead body does not. Further, as we’ve seen, animals in factory farms suffer, so in consuming flesh from an animal raised in one, the consumer is not only eating a corpse, but they are also eating a corpse that was tortured while wallowing in blood and feces until they were slaughtered. That strikes me as gross, but these things might all be subjective. Happily, the conspiracy theorists are not in the majority. A 2017 study inquired into public attitudes about in vitro meat (Phillips and Wilks 2017). The majority of the participants polled were willing to try it. When asked if they would be willing to eat in vitro meat regularly or to replace traditional meat with meat produced in vitro, only about one-third of them said yes. One source of optimism, however, is that a significant portion of them expressed that they were “unsure” about whether they would be willing to do so. It likely depends on how they feel about the product when they try it. This is a good reason not to bring the product to market too early. Unsurprisingly, the study revealed that demographics impact how people feel about in vitro meat. Men are more receptive to trying in vitro meat than women. This point alone is encouraging. If men are the least likely to convert to a vegetarian or vegan lifestyle, it would be wonderful if they responded positively to in vitro meat. The study also found that liberals are more favorable toward it than conservatives. This is less encouraging. Attitudes about traditional meat affected the responses; people who ate more traditional meat were less likely to think that in vitro meat was more ethical and were less likely to view it as more environmentally friendly. Vegetarians and vegans were the least likely to report that they would try in vitro meat, but they were the group that was most likely to view it favorably. This demographic doesn’t consume animal flesh as it is and doesn’t want to but is well aware of what is at stake and often welcomes the change as a result. Ironically, though, this means that in vitro meat was viewed the most favorably by the people who were least likely to eat it.

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All and all, this is not bad news. People are willing to give it a shot and many might be convinced to replace meat that comes from slaughter with cell cultured meat. We’ll now turn to some impediments we might face to making that happen. WHAT’S IN A NAME? MONEY IN MEAT The system of industrial animal agriculture is supported by a powerful lobby. As a result, it is common for legislation to be passed that protects the status quo. As alternatives to factory farming emerge on the market, meat companies seek to edge them out. One strategy is to control the use of the word “meat.” This effort leads to the proliferation of false information that is harmful and stalls progress. In 2018, Missouri banned the use of the word “meat” to describe products that are “not derived from harvested production livestock or poultry.” As punishment, “Violators are subject to up to one year in prison and a fine of as much as $1,000.” The law was written in response to the rise in popularity of realistic meat substitutes such as Impossible Burger and Beyond Meat and to the emerging technology of cell cultured meats. Similar laws followed in states such as Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Nebraska, and South Dakota. The same general law seems sure to pass soon in Texas (Hunzinger 2018). The concerns don’t stop with use of the term “meat.” In 2018, FDA commissioner Scott Gottlieb expressed concerns about the use of “milk” to describe products like soymilk, almond milk, and oat milk. Such terms are misleading, he claims, because “An almond doesn’t lactate” (Mole 2018). Supporters of these laws offer a range of arguments, some of which appear to be in better faith than others. The first argument is that use of terms like “meat” and “milk” to describe products that are plant rather than animal-based is misleading and perhaps even deceptive. Consumers have a right to know what they are putting in their bodies. They need to make nutritional decisions for the sake of their health, and the labeling of products like “meat” and “milk” may get in the way of their ability to make such choices effectively. We should be unconvinced by this argument for several reasons. First, this kind of figurative language has been used to describe replacement products for many years, and consumers are well aware of this. There is no reason to believe that they arrive at their grills angry and nutritionally deprived when they realize that their “veggie burger” isn’t made from a cow. Furthermore, there is no evidence that the new legislation came about because lawmakers were receiving letters or calls of complaint from confused consumers. Instead, they seem to be motivated by complaints that they hear from the animal agricultural industry—an institution that is understandably nervous

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about the rising success of meat replacement products. What’s more, these products are not packaged in such a way that would render consumers unable to tell that the “burger” they are consuming does not come from a slaughtered cow. They say “vegan” or “vegetarian” in no uncertain terms on the package. They also include a list of ingredients and nutritional information. Consumers know how to access nutritional information. There’s no plausible reason why confusion should exist. There is also no deception if there is no intent to deceive. These products do not claim, in any way, to be animal-based. What’s more, the industry of animal agriculture is not transparent with consumers about the nature of the products that they sell. The conditions under which these products are produced—in factory farms—are neither appetizing nor ethical. The packaging and marketing for many of them leaves the consumer with the impression that the animals involved wandered free along rolling fields in communion with other animals but with the free will to enjoy nature and life as an independent individual. None of this is true. Legislation restricting the use of the “meat” label also faces constitutional challenges. The American Civil Liberties Union, along with The Good Food Institute, and the Animal Legal Defense Fund filed suit on behalf of Tofurky in response to the law passed in Arkansas. The lawsuit contends that the legislation was constructed to protect the business of animal agriculture in violation of the first and fourteenth amendment rights of the producers of other kinds of food. So long as they aren’t misleading consumers, they can exercise their rights to name their product whatever they want. In vitro meat complicates the issue and it has many meat producers very concerned. Legislators are eager to ban the use of the word “meat” for this kind of product as well, but it’s harder to see the rationale. After all, cell cultured meat is meat, if what it is to be meat is to be animal flesh. Despite this fact, the Missouri law bans the use of the word “meat” for in vitro meat as well as for plant-based meat products. The takeaway seems to be this—if the product isn’t part of the corpse of a slaughtered animal, it isn’t properly designated as “meat.” The existence of this legislation, and of other proposed legislation like it, speaks to the power that animal agriculture wields in state legislatures. The fear that motivates these legislative changes may also clue us into something about the future of food. Some of the psychological dynamics that we discussed in the last chapter are no doubt in play here. We can only hope that the identity categories that discourage people from becoming vegetarian or vegan aren’t manipulated to encourage them to oppose in vitro meat. If the animal agricultural lobby is successful in convincing the male republican demographic, for instance, that the in vitro meat industry is “coming for their meat,” this may pose a serious challenge for ending or seriously reducing factory farming. If such

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a demographic can be convinced that slaughtered meat is manly and in vitro meat is not, one is left to wonder, what is really perceived as masculine, consuming meat or slaughtering innocents? THE METAPHYSICS OF MEAT What is meat? Do the representatives of industrial animal agriculture have a point? What characteristics does a product need to have to be considered “meat?” One definition, offered by most standard dictionaries is that “meat” just means “food.” The word comes from the Old English “mete,” which referred to both vegetarian and non-vegetarian forms of food. When a person consumes a meal, the “meat” of the meal is what they eat, and the “beverage” is what they drink. The distinction between “meat” and “beverage” is, in this sense, simply the distinction between edible solids and potable liquids. A different, but related definition of the word is that “meat” is the edible part of a solid food. Consider the term “nut meat.” The meat of the nut is not the shell containing it (in most cases), but is, instead, the edible part inside. The same is true with animals. For those that eat meat, the edible part of, say, a deer, is not the antlers, the hooves, or the fur—it’s the flesh. Admittedly, this use of the word “meat” is archaic. It is not entirely out of fashion, however. One word that is still in use that turns on this more general sense of “meat” is “sweetmeat,” used not to describe sweet animal flesh, but instead to describe any sweet food. Even if we take the point that this is no longer a very common way of using the word “meat,” the etymology of the word suggests that its meaning is dynamic, like nearly all words in a language. It does not mean one and only one thing. Its meaning changes as speakers and the cultural context change. If we want to speak in a way that is more in keeping with popular modern discourse, we might say that meat is the flesh of an animal. According to this definition, in vitro meat clearly qualifies. This is a causal account of meat that is dependent on the existence, at some point in time, on the body of a creature. There is more than one way to characterize the causal relationship. Here are the two that are relevant to the discussion here: ​​​​​​​Causal Definition A: A product is “meat” if and only if the cellular material of which it is comprised was, at some point, harvested from the flesh of an animal. Causal Definition B: A product is “meat” if and only if it is flesh obtained from a slaughtered animal.

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If we adopt definition A, both in vitro meat and meat that comes from slaughter count as “meat.” If we ado​​​​​​​pt definition B, only the meat that is produced as a result of slaughter qualifies as meat. I’ll offer some arguments that I think speak against definition B. First (and please forgive the morbidity of the thought experiment), picture a five-star restaurant that serves all of its entrees involving flesh as fresh as possible. They keep animals capable of quickly regenerating limbs on site, and when a customer orders a dish that calls for flesh, the chef simply slices off one of the limbs and leaves the animal to grow another one. Now imagine that a vegetarian somehow finds their way into such a restaurant. If she asks, “does this dish contain meat?” it seems like the chef is lying to her if he says no. If he tells her “No, no, this is flesh from a living animal, so it’s not meat!,” he doesn’t seem to be using the word correctly. This thought experiment speaks against definition B; it provides us a case in which an animal is not slaughtered and yet consuming its flesh is still intuitively consuming meat. Second, imagine that an omniscient and omnipotent God wants to feed a hungry people, but instead of multiplying fish, he just generates plates of perfectly crafted hamburgers. Because he’s omniscient, he knows exactly what goes into the perfect hamburger at every level. Because he’s omnipotent, he does not struggle to feed the masses in this way, and he does it ex nihilo—no death required. Does he feed them meat? It seems to me that he does. Notice that this thought experiment speaks against both definition A and definition B. Why think that an appropriate account of what “meat” is should be causal in the first place? Instead, if we must have a definition at all, the following seems acceptable: Material Definition: A substance counts as meat if it is cellularly identical to the cellular material of the edible parts of an animal.

According to the Material Definition, it doesn’t matter where the meat came from, all that matters is what kind of physical stuff it is. The question of where meat comes from matters quite a bit, but it doesn’t matter for metaphysical reasons, it matters for moral reasons. Those who want to maintain that meat must come from a slaughtered animal often have financial or psychological incentive to maintain such a view. If a person will neither eat a product nor even consider that product meat at all if animal slaughter hasn’t produced it, they are not really concerned with whether meat is involved but are instead concerned with whether death is involved. The death of animals is critical to the livelihoods of many people, so a strong strategy of compartmentalization and moral disengagement is required. In David Kaplan’s book Food Philosophy: An Introduction, he tackles the question of how we should think about “inauthentic foods,” and this is the

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category in which he places in vitro meat (Kaplan 2020). He asks, “Is laboratory grown meat real meat, or is it shmeat?” Or, less glibly, he asks “Is it meat or lab grown meat tissue?” This is begging the question; of course it is lab grown meat tissue, but the question is whether or not that precludes it from being meat. He argues against what I have presented as the material definition; he maintains that the cellular composition of a product is not what makes that product meat. Instead, he says, we should take into account a product’s social meanings. He thinks we must keep in mind the “significance in the lives of the people that eat it, not to mention the animal it comes from.” There are deep and meaningful cultural and religious traditions that are connected to meat in the way in which we have understood it in recent history, and that understanding is that meat is the product of a slaughtered animal. He points out that shifting our understanding of meat has implications for religious traditions. Jewish law prohibits eating the flesh of an animal that is still alive. This means that according to this law, practitioners of the faith could only eat in vitro meat if the animal in question was humanely slaughtered, which, of course, would undermine the whole point. By contrast, if we don’t think of in vitro meat as meat, but, rather, as some product that is not an animal, but, rather, comes from an animal, then faithful Jews could feel free to treat cultured meat just as they would treat milk or dairy. There is a similar consideration when it comes to Islamic law. In order for meat to be Halal by Islamic tradition, the animal’s jugular vein must be cut, and it must be allowed to bleed out. If in vitro meat is considered to be meat, then it would not be Halal; if it is considered some other product instead, then eating it would be treated similarly to eating vegetables. Indeed, Kaplan points out that in a recent ruling by the International Islamic Fiqh Academy “laboratory grown meat would not be considered meat from an animal, but “cultured meat,” treated as vegetative and similar to “yogurt and fermented pickles.” I’m not sure what it means for meat to be “authentic,” and I’m also not convinced that it matters. If we wanted authenticity out of our food, we probably gave that up quite some time ago when we started mass producing Cheetos and genetically modifying our plants to yield more abundant harvests. Though we might bemoan some of these changes for reasons of health and nutrition, I don’t think that the primary problem with modern food production practices is that they are inauthentic, if that is even a problem at all. Food production practices change over time and across cultures, so there may not be one set of “authentic” ways of producing food. Cell culturing technology is used to do more than produce meat. In the fullness of time, it is expected that it will be possible to generate organs for the purposes of transplant. If Aunt Beth receives a functioning cell cultured

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kidney transplant, it doesn’t seem plausible to say that she’s received a transplant of “lab grown kidney tissue.” The transplant she has received is both cellularly and functionally identical to Aunt Beth’s original kidney, the only difference is the source. Her kidney is no less authentic or real because it was cell cultured—cell culturing is simply a new way of obtaining kidneys. Clones, too, are created through a process of cell culturing. Was Daisy the sheep a collection of “lab grown sheep tissue?” Or was she a sheep like any other? Kaplan has offered a compelling practical argument for thinking of cell cultured meat as something other than meat. Members of some faith traditions will accept the technology only if the product is not conceived of as meat. I don’t think this needs to change our strategy much. As Kaplan has pointed out, religious leaders have come to their own conclusions on how to categorize this product for the purposes of religious observance, and what companies put on the package is unlikely to change that. NATURALNESS A related objection has to do with the concern that meat produced in vitro is not natural. There are a variety of things that this could mean, but the dominant argument tends to be that there is some sort of telos inherent in the natural world. Some animals eat others as part of a natural hierarchy; this will necessarily involve hunting and killing. This shouldn’t be disturbing; it is part of the natural order. What we should find disturbing, on this view, is the practice of interfering with natural processes in order to produce food in an entirely different way. Respect for nature is an environmental virtue, and such respect requires understanding and appreciating the food chain. As Albert Schweitzer points out, destruction is an inextricable part of living (Martin 2007). We can (and should) attempt to reduce the amount of destruction that we cause but believing that we can somehow sidestep that destruction altogether moves beyond naiveté to the level of hubris. We should respect our place in nature; we have survived as a species because we have relied on the flesh of other animals for food. In response to this argument, it is important to point out, as many philosophers have, that “naturalness” can mean more than one thing. Equivocation is common in discussions of what it is for a practice to be “natural.” Aristotle, for instance, distinguishes the natural from the artifactual. In her book on this topic, The Natural and the Artificial: The Implications of Deep Science and Deep Technology for Environmental Philosophy, Keekok Lee describes Aristotle’s position in the following way:

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The natural . . . refers to whatever exists which is not the result of deliberate human intervention, design, and creation in terms of its material, efficient, formal, and final causes . . . The natural comes into existence, continues to exist, and goes out of existence entirely independent of human volition . . . By contrast, “the artifactual” embodies a human intentional structure. (Lee 1999)

There is some intuitive support for the way that Aristotle draws this distinction. A tree may be a natural phenomenon, but when a person builds a house out of the wood obtained from that tree, the result is not a product of na​​​​​​​ture, but is, rather, an artifact. It is a sign of human interactions with and revisions of the natural world. Appeal to this definition of naturalness isn’t open to the person who wants to raise the “naturalness” objection to in vitro meat for a number of reasons. First, if this is the definition that they want to use, then no practices humans implement with regard to animals are natural; all of them involve “deliberate human intervention.” Second, even if one wanted to claim that ordinary hunting practices are somehow natural on this account even if they involve human interventions, our current practices of industrial animal agriculture don’t count as natural. Battery cages, gestation crates, “vice” suppression, are all, unquestionably, a result of “human volition” and reshaping of the natural world to meet a specific human purpose. Factory farms are no more natural than lab produced meat. If one wants to object a practice on the grounds of “naturalness,” these practices would stand and fall together—neither of them is “natural” in the Aristotelean sense. In On Nature, John Stuart Mill discusses the ambiguity of the word “natural” at length (Mill 1996). He notes that a practice being “unnatural” can often count as a reason for some people to be opposed to it. That said, people don’t tend to be consistent in their application of the concept. On at least one understanding of what it is to be “natural,” nothing happens on the earth that is not natural. People don’t tend to object to practices such as wearing eyeglasses or building roads—practices that involve altering the world by human means for human benefit. Because people don’t object to these modifications, it appears as if “naturalness” isn’t really at the heart of the objections after all. Finally, this objection to the production of in vitro meat commits the naturalistic fallacy; it rests on the mistaken assumption that one can derive an “ought” from an “is.” The fact that something is the case does not entail that it ought to be the case. If something happens “naturally” that fact does not give us good reason to prefer it. As Mill points out, all sorts of things happen “naturally” in this sense: hurricanes, tsunamis, tornados, and so on. We have reason to prefer that these events do not take place and, indeed, we have good reason to take action to safeguard against them, even though these events are “natural.” Natural events can be bad, and human intervention can be good.

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This is why, according to Mill, decisions about human intervention into the “natural” world should be made on the basis of considerations about utility. MORAL ARGUMENTS, MORAL MOTIVATION, AND MARKET CHANGE We’ve seen data that suggests that people are willing to try in vitro meat, but they aren’t necessarily willing to make a long-term switch. This is encouraging information—if people are willing to try it, they are in a position to potentially be convinced. How should we go about convincing them? For thousands of years, the practice of hunting whales was exceptionally common. The animals were killed for meat, and, later, for blubber that could be converted into oil—an increasingly valued commodity during the industrial revolution. While whaling provided tremendous benefits to human beings, the practice was devastating to whale populations and to individual whales. Arguments against the practice were ready at hand. A number of species, such as grays and humpbacks, were being hunted into near extinction. The reduction of the whale population led to changes in aquatic ecosystems. What’s more, the practice was cruel—whaling equipment was crude and violent. Whales under attack often died slowly and painfully and plenty of harpooned whales were seriously injured rather than killed, causing them pain and diminishing the quality of their lives. To complicate matters, whales have enormous brains and live complex social lives. There is much that we don’t know about whale cognition, but there is at least a compelling case to be made that they are very intelligent. Most countries have banned the practice of whaling, though some native tribes are allowed to continue to engage in it on a subsistence basis. One might think that we came to see the error of our ways. Surely, the true, unwavering light of reason guided us toward mercy on behalf of our Cetacean friends? After all, the case in question raises fundamental philosophical questions. In virtue of what features is a being deserving of moral consideration? How should we balance human comfort and well-being against the suffering of non-human animals harmed in its attainment? How much collateral damage is too much collateral damage? We must have adjusted our behavior by thinking long and hard about the answers to these questions and we must have concluded that we couldn’t keep treating whales in such a way! Alas, as Paul Shapiro points out in his book, Clean Meat, it was market forces rather than philosophical arguments that led to the slow decline of whaling practices. When alternative sources of energy, such as kerosene, became cheaper and more readily available than whale oil, consumers quickly changed their consumption habits. So, it was only after a viable alternative

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became available that people were finally willing to listen to the ethical arguments against the practice. A recent poll revealed that the vast majority (86 percent) of people in the United States are now opposed to whaling for ethical reasons (Naylor and Parsons 2021). Responses are different in cultures that still engage in whaling. These questions are increasingly salient. In years past, our species had the power to usher in the end of days for countless species. Indeed, technological advances have made it possible for our species to usher in the end of days for life on earth, full stop. We have created products and procedures that pollute our oceans and fundamentally change our atmosphere. What should we do in response? One might think that the severity of the problem should give rise to a paradigm shift—a move, once and for all, away from the anthropocentric worldview that put us where we are. This would involve seeing our actions and ourselves as part of a larger biosphere. Once we adopted this view, we would recognize that resources are global, and we are just a small, albeit fulminant, part of that larger system. The fact that our actions have consequences for others may also lead to a shift in the way we think about our moral spheres of influence. Rather than thinking of moral obligation as a local matter, we may start to think about the consequences that our actions have for populations in locations more impacted by climate change. We may also think about the impact our behavior has on the non-human life occupying the global ecosystem. Or . . . not. It may be that such a shift fails to take root. Admittedly, this is philosophically dissatisfying. There is something noble and admirable about living a Socratic life—about knowing oneself and living an examined life. This entails a willingness to reflect on one’s own biases, a disposition to reflect on what is good, all things considered, and to pursue that good. For change to happen in the way I’ve just described requires change to happen from within. In this case, our behavior would change by way of what Mill called an “internal sanction”—we would be motivated to do what is good out of sheer recognition that the thing in question is good (Mill 1998). In the absence of internal sanctions, however, external sanctions may be not just appropriate, but crucial. A change in market forces eventually led to conditions under which people could be convinced that whaling was a moral atrocity that needed to be outlawed. Perhaps similar market changes can make the difference with regard to crucial moral issues today. Perhaps if there are viable alternatives to the consumption of flesh, people will open their eyes to the horrors of factory farms. In vitro meat is the market change that could bring about real moral change. The problem with this approach is that important moral change becomes dependent on non-moral features of the market. The alternative options must

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be affordable, marketable, and, ultimately, popular. What’s more, though the market might be useful for transmitting values, there is nothing inherently moral about it—it can make popular corrosive, ugly change just as easily as it can promote moral progress. In the end, if the market change doesn’t stick, neither does the moral change. CONCLUSION So here we are, equipped with our non-ideal theory and faced with the uneasy proposition that the success of in vitro meat on the market is, perhaps, our best shot at real and meaningful change. Many of us picture a future in which our descendants look at the way we treated animals as unbelievably cruel and inhumane—the same way that we now view the whaling industry and other atrocities of the human past. To be successful at this, we’ll need to be realistic about what people are like and what motivates them; we’ll need to use much of what we’ve learned about human psychology and consumer behavior. Even if we find it distasteful, marketing strategies should probably keep in mind the perceived connection between meat and masculinity and find a way to employ it. The data suggests that more men than women are willing to give the product a try, which is a good sign since men are the least likely to give up traditional meat. The less politically charged the product can be, the better. It will probably be best if the product isn’t marketed as a meat replacement, but rather, simply as meat and when it comes to the supermarket, it shouldn’t be placed in the vegetarian, vegan, or specialty food sections, it should be placed in the meat department with all of the other meat. If the whaling industry provides us with a roadmap, it may be the case that once the walled off compartments in the minds of the masses collapse, once people no longer have to morally disengage to eat a hamburger because doing so no longer involves slaughter, they will be able to see clearly the harm done by industrial animal agriculture. This may seem to get things the wrong way around, but the end result is the same and it is a desirable one. NOTE 1. See, for example, Carlin 2021.‌‌‌‌

Chapter 7

Edibility and Eating Others

The existence of in vitro meat technology demonstrates that it is possible to consume meat—real meat and not just meat substitute—without killing the animal that provides the flesh. How should this change our conception of what it is for something or someone to be edible? If we accept that cultured meat is a permissible way of obtaining food, there are a host of related issues that we must deal with. If we can replicate the cells of farm animals and consume them without being guilty of any moral transgression, what else might we be able to eat? We all have a basic, working knowledge of what it is for something to be “edible”—we’re aware that if something is given this designation, it means that one can eat it. Despite our seemingly intuitive understanding of the concept, we use it in very different ways in different contexts. The notion of edibility has moral implications, so the way we use the term matters. One way we might use it is to refer to things that can be consumed safely. In keeping with this use of the word, a steaming bowl of grandma’s famous soup would be edible, while, say, ground glass or fecal matter would not be. This is the most straightforward use of the term—the designation of edibility picks out the set of things you could successfully eat without getting very sick or dying. When we say that something is inedible, we often mean something slightly different. We use the term to refer to foods that, though they wouldn’t hurt or kill anyone, would nevertheless be cuisine at which people would turn up their noses. People might believe, often with good reason, that the flavor would be unpleasant or downright gag-inducing. My son, for example, believes that the slightest amount of char on his grilled zucchini renders it inedible. In the Philippines, daring eaters can try balut—an 18-day-old fertilized duck embryo consumed right out of the shell. Many more squeamish eaters would categorize such a “delicacy” as inedible. A third use of the term has more straightforward moral connotations. This use of the term “edible” picks out the set of things that a community deems 91

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morally and socially appropriate to eat. Though something might be edible in both the first and the second senses mentioned so far that same thing might turn out to be inedible in this third sense of the term. So, for example, human flesh is, in most cultures, deemed to be inedible in this third sense. One of the reasons many people find the story of the Donner Party so horrifying is that, to survive, the members of the group had to violate our deep social taboo against consuming human flesh. On the other hand, there have been societies without this taboo. According to Bill Schutt, author of Cannibalism: A Perfectly Natural History, cannibalism is a western taboo (Schutt 2017). He points out that, in ancient China, consumption of human flesh as delicacy was not uncommon among the rich. In countries in which cannibalism is viewed as abhorrent, people tend to believe that consuming the flesh of other humans demonstrates a disregard for the dignity of the person being consumed. The being in question is not a thing and shouldn’t be treated as such. This recognition, however, has serious implications for many of our ordinary practices. If we are being sufficiently reflective on our behavior, we should spend some time thinking about whether non-human animals should be thought of as edible either. The current trend is toward treating certain kinds of animals—like cows, chickens, and pigs—as products to be mass-produced. When living beings are treated as products to be bought and sold, they are treated not as entities with interests but as objects. If we offer concerns about objectification and disrespect for basic dignity as a reason for finding cannibalism revolting, shouldn’t we feel the same way about eating meat, especially meat produced in factory farm conditions that treat animals as objects in unprecedented ways? Should we feel this way even about cell-cultured meat? In what follows I will explore a cluster of questions. Is there something inherently wrong with the consumption of flesh? Is there something wrong with the consumption of some types of flesh but not others? Does emerging technology put us in a position to rethink the moral sense of the concept of edibility? In this chapter, I’ll look at four general categories of flesh consumption that many might find disturbing, morally impermissible, or both. In each case, I’ll tease out some intuitions regarding the source of potential moral concern. Ultimately, I’ll argue that the badness of the consumption of flesh is not badness inherent to that particular action, but is, instead, reducible to other fe‌‌‌‌atures of the circumstances in question. I will argue that our understanding of edibility as a moral notion is tied to the moral features that consuming a particular thing typically has. One noteworthy feature of the in vitro meat movement is that it can sever the notion of edibility from the features that make it a moral concept. I will argue that, when flesh is grown in a lab rather

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than in an animal, it is no longer morally problematic to say that some sentient beings are edible. EATING ENDANGERED ANIMALS One common intuition is that it is wrong to eat members of endangered species. Individual members of these species are thought to be “inedible” in the moral sense. We protect them through strict legislation, and anyone who hunts them is subject to fines or other kinds of punishment. Is it wrong to consume the flesh of members of endangered species? If so, what makes it wrong? In what follows, we’ll explore some cases of eating the flesh of animals in this category and in the final sections of the chapter we will analyze what has gone wrong in each case. On May 6, 2019, Business Insider ran a story with the title, “Up to 1 million species are facing extinction, according to a UN report. Without them, we could run out of food” (Woodward 2019). The article summarizes the findings of a UN report generated by developing an aggregate of data from 150 peer-reviewed studies conducted across fifty different countries. The results indicated two things. First, as many other writers have warned, the world is going through its sixth major extinction event.1 Second, humans are primarily to blame for this event. One noteworthy feature of the article is its human-centered emphasis, with one major section dedicated to “Why having fewer species on Earth is bad news for humans.” It’s true that biodiversity is important for anthropocentric reasons. When species die out, ecosystems are affected, and changes to ecosystems are frequently devastating to the creatures that call them home—including human creatures. The major takeaway of this segment is that having fewer animals, plants, and insects on the planet means diminished food security for human beings. Despite its gloomy headline, the article is ultimately optimistic in its outlook. The problem can be partially averted if we can develop smarter ways of using the land. As we’ve seen, implementing in vitro technology might be one such solution. The article takes an anthropocentric approach to the problem of species extinction—human beings might face food shortages if there are fewer species of plants and animals on the planet. It ignores the fact that death is bad for the organisms that are threatened. When human beings bring about conditions that make organisms less likely to thrive and to survive to reproduce, those conditions cause suffering for the creatures affected. Some argue that the destruction of ecosystems is bad because ecosystems are valuable for their own sake. In A Sand County Almanac, Aldo Leopold famously argued that “A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity,

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stability, and beauty of the biotic community; it is wrong when it tends otherwise” (Leopold 1949). According to this view, when our actions lead to the extinction of species, those actions are not bad only because of the harm that they do to humans or to the animals themselves, but also because of the harm done to ecosystems. We now have several reasons for thinking that perhaps we should view the flesh of endangered animals as inedible, morally speaking. By viewing them as edible, we endanger the stability of ecosystems and we put all living beings at risk. We also cause distress to the individual animals. If all of these things are bad, it may seem to follow that the consumption of the flesh of an endangered animal is also bad. In theory, in vitro meat technology makes consumption of the flesh of any being possible, without bringing about the death of that being. Is the consumption of the flesh of an endangered animal inherently morally wrong? Reflection on some test cases may be useful here. In late 2018, six men in Vietnam were arrested for purchasing an endangered langur monkey, killing it, and then eating its flesh on a Facebook live video (Cole 2018). This strikes many of us (perhaps rightly) as horrifying. It’s worth pointing out, however, that people don’t tend to be equally horrified when they watch someone bite into a juicy hamburger in a Carl’s Junior commercial. Is the explanation for this difference in reaction simply a bias in favor or against the value of certain kinds of animals? It might be the case that we react so strongly to cases like this because the animal is endangered. Is there good reason for thinking that a pig is edible in the moral sense but a langur monkey is not? This is an extreme case to which many respond with revulsion. Are we responding with revulsion because the animals in question are endangered, or is there some other feature of the situation that elicits that response? Might there be cases involving the consumption of endangered animals to which our reactions are less strong? If this is the case, it might shed a little light on the precise nature of our objection. Traditional Medicine Pangolins are nocturnal animals that eat ants and other insects. They live in the woodlands and savannas of Southern, Central, and Eastern Africa and in various locations in Asia. One feature that makes pangolins unique is that they are the only mammals with scales. When a pangolin encounters a predator, they will roll up into a ball and their scales will provide a protective armor, rendering them virtually impenetrable to the lions, tigers, and leopards that might attempt to eat them. Another feature that makes pangolins unique is that they are the world’s most trafficked animals (Denyer 2018).2

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The scales of the pangolin have historically been used for more than just armor against predators. For thousands of years, local tribes have used the animals for medicinal purposes. An article in a 1938 volume of Nature describes this practice: The animal itself is eaten, but a greater danger arises from the belief that the scales have medicinal value. Fresh scales are never used, but dried scales are roasted, ashed, cooked in oil, butter, vinegar, boy’s urine, or roasted with earth or oyster-shells, to cure a variety of ills. Amongst these are excessive nervousness and hysterical crying in children, women possessed by devils and ogres, malarial fever and deafness.

One might think that practices have changed since 1938. In fact, however, China is taking steps to export its traditional medicinal approach, increasing the likelihood that pangolins will soon become extinct. What ought we to think about endangered species used for this purpose? Do we have less of a reaction to the use of pangolins if the people using them believe that they are saving lives? Do motivations behind the consumption of beings matter? Is the wrongness of consuming the scales and other body parts of pangolins reducible to the wrongness of reducing the overall numbers of pangolins because they are an endangered species? One might be inclined to say that the case described above is somewhat different. Unlike the men in Vietnam who ate the Langur Monkey on Facebook, the people who eat pangolins are not doing so for sensational reasons, they are doing so to solve real human problems. They may have false beliefs about what actually constitutes effective medicine, but they aren’t consuming pangolins with callous disregard for the fact that they are killing a living being. Another argument has to do with preservation of culture. Some think that we ought not to interfere with the practices of other cultures. We would be imposing, as we have so many times before, a kind of western imperialism on these cultures. After all, we use animals as part of our medicinal research programs, why should these cultures behave any differently? We’ll turn to cultural practices of other types below.

Cultural Custom There are other cases in which the flesh of endangered animals is consumed that are likely to generate different intuitions than those we have in response to the Facebook live killers. For example, there are some instances of subsistence hunting and fishing that have been designated as exempt from prohibitions. Aboriginal subsistence whaling is allowed, under certain conditions, in

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various parts of the world, such as “Denmark (Greenland), Russia (Chukotka), St. Vincent and the Grenadines (Bequia) and the United States (Alaska and also potentially a resumption of hunts previously undertaken by the Makah Tribe of Washington State)” (International Whaling Commission 2021). Though we may still have objections to the killing and consumption of these endangered animals, the motivations involved and the moral issues at play do seem to be importantly different from those involved in the Facebook live case. First, we must consider the harms done by western imperialism. The subsistence hunters and fishermen were not the parties responsible for whaling at unsustainable levels in the first place. Second, western industrialized culture comes quite far from constituting a shining example of the proper treatment of animals. As we’ve seen, 98% of the meat we consume is produced in the inhumane conditions of factory farms. Who are we, then, to force other cultures to temper their more sustainable practices? All of this is not to say that it is, all things considered, morally permissible to kill members of an endangered species. If the argument we looked at in chapters two and three are compelling, killing other beings is either rarely or never morally justified. That said, there is moral nuance involved in cases of this type that is not present in the Facebook live case. This indicates that the reasons behind the consumption of flesh, even the flesh of endangered species, might guide our assessment of the moral features of those situations.

Eating Extinct Animals On July 30, 2003, a team of scientists successfully (though temporarily) brought a species back from extinction. Celia was the last known bucardo, who died in 1989. Some of Celia’s cells were preserved and were used to create a clone (Rincon 2013). Production of meat from the cells of an extinct species would be much easier than producing a living clone. What’s more, production of meat in this manner wouldn’t involve death or physical harm to any existing being. What might the basis for an objection to this practice be? One objection might simply be that the practice seems disgusting. To many, it seems equivalent to collecting cells from a graveyard of dead beings. Who wants to eat that? This is an aesthetic objection rather than a moral objection. It is an instance of the second sense of “inedible” that we discussed at the beginning of the chapter. We turn up our noses at the practice, but this doesn’t make the practice morally wrong. A second objection has to do with the level of uncertainty inherent in this process. If a species is only recently extinct, we may have a good sense of the consequences of the consumption of that flesh. When it comes to animals

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that went extinct long ago, there is more room for doubt when it comes to whether the flesh will be harmful if consumed. Here again, however, we are dealing with a reason why the consumption of flesh would be bad for humans. Is there a reason why consumption of the flesh from extinct creatures might be bad for beings other than humans? After all, the consumption of the flesh of an extinct creature does no harm to sentient beings who are capable of experiencing pain. Extinct animals, since they do not exist, are not the subjects of lives and, as a result, their rights cannot be violated and they cannot be harmed.3 One argument might be that consumption of flesh, whatever the source, encourages the tendency to think of beings made of flesh as mere objects to be consumed. However, if it is possible to produce meat from a being without harming or killing that being, and if such a practice becomes commonplace, we may cease to think about the consumption of flesh as an instance of objectification. We may come to view the process as being about as intrusive as giving an animal a haircut or milking a cow.

EATING HUMANS If we create meat in vitro, it is conceptually possible that it won’t only be non-human animals on the menu. If the creation of a hamburger from cultured cow cells is possible, then the creation of a burger made from human cells is also possible. Would there be anything wrong with the consumption of human flesh produced in this manner?4 Cannibalism happens all of the time in the wild. For example, some Spadefoot Toad larvae routinely grow larger than others and consume fellow Spadefoot larvae pond mates (Schutt 2017). Freshwater insects called backswimmers engage in cannibalism as a matter of course. These are just two examples among many. The argument that cannibalism is wrong because it is unnatural is, then, a nonstarter for a number of reasons. First, as we saw in the previous chapter, direct appeal to what is natural to argue for something normative is a commission of the naturalistic fallacy. One can’t derive a conclusion about what ought to be the case directly from a statement of what is the case. Second, the occurrence of cannibalism across the animal kingdom simply disproves the claim that cannibalism is unnatural. One reason to think that eating human flesh is bad is that it has deleterious effects on human health. One case that made people particularly nervous about the safety of consuming human flesh was the incidence of Kuru among the indigenous Fore tribe in Papua New Guinea. Those who contracted Kuru lost control of their limbs and, later, their emotions. This is why the disease

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came to be called “the laughing death.” These poor individuals had contracted a neurodegenerative disease, one that could be spread through the consumption of the flesh of others who also had the disease. However, consumption of human flesh is not dangerous in itself, it is only dangerous if one consumes the flesh of a being with a particular disorder—just as it is not dangerous to eat a cow, but it is dangerous to eat a cow that has mad cow disease. Real cases of the consumption of human flesh are difficult to document. The case of the Fore seems to demonstrate that the practice does occur sometimes.5 The Greek historian Herodotus tells of a tribe of people who engaged in cannibalism as a death ritual: Darius, after he had got the kingdom, called into his presence certain Greeks who were at hand, and asked—“What he should pay them to eat the bodies of their fathers when they died?” To which they answered, that there was no sum that would tempt them to do such a thing. He then sent for certain Indians, of the race called Callatians, men who eat their fathers, and asked them, while the Greeks stood by, and knew by the help of an interpreter all that was said— “What he should give them to burn the bodies of their fathers at their decease?” The Indians exclaimed aloud, and bade him forbear such language. Such is men’s wont herein; and Pindar was right, in my judgment, when he said, “Law is the king o’er all.” (Herodotus 1996)

More recent examples of the consumption of human flesh have dominated news headlines in the case of plane crashes and shipwrecks. Again, we need to examine carefully what, exactly, we find objectionable about these kinds of cases. Does the wrongness reduce the consumption of flesh? Or is it something else to which we object? The Fore and the Callatians, seemed to be motivated by respect and a desire to keep the dead loved one close—to have that being genuinely become a part of oneself. Some reported cases suggest motivations of a very different sort. A number of tribes consumed the flesh of those that they vanquished in battle. This practice signified the opposite of respect—it signified conquest of the ultimate sort (Schutt 2017). Emergency circumstances sometimes give rise to cannibalism. The actions of the Donner Party constitute one such notorious case. In the winter of 1846, 60 pioneers were stranded in the Sierra Nevada Mountains on their way to California. Though the details are not entirely clear, some of these pioneers engaged in acts of cannibalism to stay alive. The same is true of an Uruguayan rugby team that found themselves on the ill-fated Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571. The plane crashed in the Andes and only 16 people

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survived. After rations on the plane ran out, the survivors were forced to eat the bodies of the dead (Read 1974). Other more recent examples of cannibalism are more disturbing, and perhaps, more complicated. Serial killers Jeffrey Dahmer and Albert Fish, among others, are notorious not only for killing their victims, but also for consuming their flesh. When we hear about crimes like this, we tend to be disturbed, not merely by the fact that the victims were killed, but also by the fact that they were consumed. These serial killers had several motivations. Dahmer reported a motivation that was not dissimilar to the motivations of those that ate their dead relatives as part of a funerary practice—he wanted those victims to be with him always. But consumption of flesh was also, like those who ate victims that they vanquished in battle, a sign of ultimate control. In the case of Albert Fish, who consumed the flesh of his child victims, it was also a sign of ultimate degradation. These crimes tend, in the final analysis, to be crimes of control. Then there are cases with even more complicated features. In 2001, a German man advertised on the Internet for a “young well-built man, who wanted to be eaten” (The Guardian 2003). Stunningly, his ad received an answer. A young man arrived at the agreed upon time and place and consented to be eaten. He took twenty sleeping tablets before allowing parts of his body to be cut off and consumed. He died in the bathtub hours later. The cases that we have reviewed so far are cases that have actually occurred. If in vitro meat technology becomes commonplace, there are other kinds of cases that might arise. The cases I’ll describe below are not scenarios that I think are likely to actually occur—I think they’re quite unlikely actually. Still, discussion of such cases allows us to get at the heart of the morality of flesh consumption. As we’ve seen, any type of meat can be produced in vitro. Consider the following case. Natalie Portman is a famous vegan. She recently narrated a vegan documentary called Eating Animals. Imagine that Portman learns of in vitro technology and sees the potential it has for the reduction of suffering for so many beings. To raise awareness for the movement, she engages (in a way that is quite out of character) in a publicity stunt—she will consent to a biopsy. Her cellular material will be cultivated, and it will be possible to order a “Portman Burger” at select restaurants that have agreed to participate in the stunt. It doesn’t seem outlandish to suppose that plenty of hard-core fans would line up to have this kind of culinary experience, especially if scientists could guarantee that they could protect against any negative health effects. Consider next a different hypothetical. Grandma goes to the hospital for a series of tests. While she is there, some of her cellular material is collected. Unbeknownst to the rest of the staff, one of the doctors is conducting in vitro

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experiments on his own time. The doctor cultivates grandma’s cells and produces a “Grandma Burger.” In a third case, imagine that a child goes to the doctor under conditions similar to those that motivate grandma to make the visit. Some of the child’s cellular material is preserved for the purposes of creating a burger. This burger is meant only for private consumption and is produced to satisfy the paraphilic, pedophilic urges of the doctor. Finally, consider the case of a seriously and permanently mentally disabled human being. This human being is incapable of giving consent to having their cellular material collected. The patient is brought to a clinic once a month and their cellular material is collected and used to produce food. The cases described above, both hypothetical and actual cases, can potentially shed some light on the moral dimensions of in vitro meat technology. It is to those moral dimensions that we turn in the next section. THE BADNESS OF CONSUMPTION All of the above cases have moral dimensions. They highlight that some cases of the consumption of flesh are, intuitively, worse than others. In this section, I’ll take a careful look at those moral dimensions. In vitro meat is revolutionary because it offers the ability to cleave the moral properties of consumption of flesh from the actual flesh itself, which allows us to really examine the ethics of edibility. What things are morally acceptable to eat and why? What is the moral connection between ethics, edibility, and flesh? My thesis is that the consumption of flesh itself is morally neutral. That is, there is nothing about the flesh that makes it morally wrong to consume. The badness lies in the attendant circumstances. Up to now, the attendant circumstances have always had a connection to the flesh that could not be severed. That is no longer true. Both the rights view and the utilitarian view tell us why eating the flesh of animals is, under normal circumstances, wrong. Sadly, these “normal” circumstances all too often include the production of meat in the inhumane conditions of the factory farm. What lessons can we take from the cases above regarding why the consumption of flesh might be bad more generally? Consent One key moral element in the cases described above is the presence or absence of consent. Consent is typically viewed as the kind of thing that can

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only be given or withheld by persons. Persons are members of the moral community. Among other features, persons are capable of reflecting on their own thoughts, of formulating moral reasons, and of acting on those moral reasons. Historically, it has been assumed that non-human animals are not persons. Many people have used this assumption as justification for treating non-human animals in a way that they would never treat humans. The more we come to know about animal minds, however, the more justified we might be in treating certain non-human animals as persons. That said, many of the endangered or extinct animals described in the above sections would not count as persons. We’ll return to a discussion of how considerations concerning consent might apply to them shortly. In some of the troubling cases described above, at least one of the problematic variables is a lack of consent. Contrast the case of Albert Fish with the case of the man who advertised on the Internet for a person who would be interested in being consumed. There are many moral dimensions of these cases. When it comes to consent, however, the Fish case is more troubling. Fish flagrantly disregarded the need to obtain consent from his victims (who surely would not have given it!). Indeed, it is likely that the thrill of the lack of consent was part of the point. In the case of the consensual transaction between persons, we may still object to the paraphilic impulses that motivated the action, but the lack of consent is not the source of our concern. Consider our hypothetical case in which Natalie Portman consensually decides to allow her cellular material to produce food. Portman is not injured and is certainly not killed in the process—we can assume that anesthetic is used during the biopsy. Only a small incision is made, which quickly heals. If we object to the use of Portman’s cellular material in this way, our objection is likely an aesthetic one. We might question the priorities of the rabid fan that would want to consume such a burger. It doesn’t seem, however, that we have done harm to Portman in any discernable way. She had complete control over what happened to and with her body. We can draw the opposite conclusion in the case of grandma. Grandma is a person, fully capable of giving and withholding consent. Her capacity to give or withhold consent was not respected in the case described above. It is not the consumption of the “Grandma Burger” that is wrong in this case, just as the consumption of the “Portman Burger” is not wrong. The feature of this case that is morally wrong is that grandma’s cellular material was taken and used without her consent. Now let’s consider the last two hypothetical cases. The case of the child and the case of the seriously and permanently mentally disabled person are similar in the respect that neither one of them is a fully developed person, in the philosophical sense, and so neither one of them is the kind of being that

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is capable of giving a truly free and informed consent. There is no one test to determine whether a developing child has achieved personhood. We can assume that they eventually will. The seriously and permanently disabled person will never reach personhood and will never be capable of giving free and informed consent. If a being is not capable of giving consent, can we simply treat them in whatever way that we would like? Presumably not. Here, it is useful to make a distinction between moral agents and moral patients. Moral agents are persons—members of the moral community who are capable of reflecting on their own thoughts, of formulating moral reasons, and of acting on those moral reasons. Moral patients, by contrast, do not have these features but are, nevertheless, beings with interests that are deserving of moral consideration. Moral patients include children, animals, and severely mentally disabled individuals. These beings are not capable of giving consent. Still, we have an obligation to consider their interests and the harms that might befall them. We may have reasons not to collect cultured meat from children or the severely mentally disabled that do not involve consent. Biopsies under anesthetic may not cause physical harm, but society at large may be deeply uncomfortable with the practice and that may be reason enough to refrain from engaging in it. The same stigma does not exist against the consumption of biopsied meat from non-human animals, and most non-human animals do not have an interest in not undergoing a biopsy. Reasons related to consent do not speak against conducting a biopsy of certain non-human animals because those beings aren’t the kinds of beings that can give consent or can care about whether consent was given.6 I’ll have more to say about the relation between these animals and their bodies in the next chapter. It may be, though, that if in vitro meat becomes commonplace, people will come to view giving cellular material in much the same way they view giving blood. We currently fetishize flesh, but there is no good reason why we ought to continue to do so. Virtuous and Vicious Characters We have seen that one reason one might object to the consumption of flesh is that the flesh was obtained and used without the consent of the being in question. I think there are other significant moral dimensions of these cases as well. Aristotle argued that a human lives life well when they live in accordance with reason. Virtuous agents use their reason to find the mean between excess and deficiency. He says,

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Virtue, then, is a state of character concerned with choice, lying in a mean, i.e., the mean relative to us, this being determined by a rational principle, and by that principle by which the man of practical wisdom would determine it. Now it is a mean between two vices, that which depends on excess and that which depends on defect; and again it is a mean because the vices respectively fall short of or exceed what is right in both passions and actions, while virtue both finds and chooses that which is intermediate. Hence in respect of its substance and the definition which states its essence virtue is a mean, with regard to what is best and right and extreme. (Aristotle 2009, Book VI)

We are all subject to passions, and it is easy for us to let those passions direct us toward one extreme or another. The virtuous person, according to Aristotle, is capable of bridling those passions and responding appropriately in any given circumstance. We have seen in the examples provided above that passions are frequently tightly bound to practices related to consumption. In fact, many of the virtues and vices that Aristotle discusses have to do with the consumption of food and drink. He says, First, then, let us consider this, that it is the nature of such things to be destroyed by defect and excess, as we see in the case of strength and of health (for to gain light on things imperceptible we must use the evidence of sensible things); both excessive and defective exercise destroys the strength, and similarly drink or food which is above or below a certain amount destroys the health, while that which is proportionate both produces and increases and preserves it. So too is it, then, in the case of temperance and courage and the other virtues. (Aristotle 2009, Book II, Section 2)

That one might be easily disposed toward excess or deficiency with respect to food and drink is fairly obvious and straightforward. Our passions related to food and drink might be so strong that they blind us to other considerations that would be more appropriate guides for our behavior. With this in mind, let’s examine what the cases described above tell us about the characters of the agents involved. The Fore and the Callatians, who consumed their relatives out of respect, come out fairly well in this analysis. Arguably, they acted virtuously in treating their dead loved ones with an appropriate level of respect. The same is true of both the Donner Party and the Uruguayan rugby team, at least so long as they were merely consuming their dead relatives rather than killing them for the purposes of consumption. These stranded, suffering, starving individuals arguably turn out to be courageous on an Aristotelian analysis—they exhibited resilience and bravery in the face of perilous circumstances.

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The characters of the Vietnamese men who consumed an endangered monkey on Facebook Live turn out less favorably in this analysis. Before they did what they did, they must have (or, at the very least, should have) weighed their desire for notoriety against other important interests. One important interest is the value of the individual life that they were taking. Another important interest is the preservation of a species that might very soon cease to exist entirely.7 The fact that they did what they did tells us that they were either careless with respect to their reflection on this issue, or that they didn’t stop to reflect at all. Either way, there seems to be a serious character failing involved. They let a strong desire for notoriety overwhelm their reason and their more sensible passions. Of course, the harshest critique is reserved for the paraphilic cannibals. These are cases in which pure sadistic passion overwhelms all other impulses. Nothing resembling moderation or temperance is involved here. It is an understatement to say that people like Dahmer and Fish have the wrong impulses in the circumstances in which they find themselves. Their characters are the most vicious imaginable. Notice that our assessment of character in these cases did not turn on the fact that flesh was being consumed. Instead, the focus was on why the flesh was consumed, and the ways in which the behavior, in the respective cases described, contributed to flourishing for both the individual and for society at large. Epistemic Virtues Some of the cases described above are cases in which there is an overlap between epistemic and moral virtue. Epistemic virtue has to do with the way in which beliefs are formed. Sometimes, when people fail to exercise epistemic virtue, the result is simply that they fail to know things, or that they believe things without good evidence. In other cases, the consequences of engaging in bad epistemic practices are far more serious. In at least some of the cases described above, the badness of flesh consumption might be at least partially reducible to the way that beliefs about the consumption were formed. Let’s return to the case of the endangered pangolin. Recall the description of the conditions under which the pangolin is consumed: The animal itself is eaten, but a greater danger arises from the belief that the scales have medicinal value. Fresh scales are never used, but dried scales are roasted, ashed, cooked in oil, butter, vinegar, boy’s urine, or roasted with earth or oyster-shells, to cure a variety of ills. Amongst these are excessive

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nervousness and hysterical crying in children, women possessed by devils and ogres, malarial fever and deafness.

One of the issues that might give us pause here is that poor epistemic practices are employed to justify this kind of use of the body parts of pangolins. There can be no good evidence for the claim that, for example, pangolin scales cooked in boy’s urine have any medicinal properties whatsoever. At least one reason we are troubled in this case, then, is that the causal connection between the scales of pangolins and the reduction of hysteria in children has not and cannot be established. We also have reason to be concerned about the disorders that these indigenous people are seeking to prevent. At least in some cases, the scales of the pangolins are being used to prevent disorders that don’t exist. Belief in the phenomenon of possession by demons or ogres is not based on no evidence whatsoever, but the evidence that is present is more consistent with other diagnoses. There is a balance to strike here. On the one hand, consumption of endangered flesh for the purposes of this traditional medicine seems, intuitively, less wrong than consuming endangered flesh for notoriety. The fact that this is a traditional practice engaged in by populations that might lack access to modern medicine is a mitigating factor. On the other hand, there does seem to be some badness here, both because these populations are contributing to the extinction of this species, and because they aren’t acting as virtuous epistemic agents—the beliefs that they form don’t come about as the result of practices that are likely to get things right. In this case, the lack of epistemic virtue is far from harmless. It can, potentially, lead to the eradication of an entire species. We are now in a position to draw some conclusions with respect to the consumption of pangolin flesh. We’ve said that consumption of flesh is bad because of the threats it poses both to individual pangolins and to the species. Elevating the badness of these two considerations is the fact that bad epistemic practices were used to justify the behavior. But, again, notice that none of these considerations have anything to do with the consumption of flesh itself. If we got our hands on a pangolin, did a cell culture, and released the pangolin back into the wild, consumption of the flesh of the pangolin, on its own, would not contribute to any of the badness described above. We would not seriously harm or kill a pangolin. We would not contribute to the likelihood that the pangolin would become extinct. Now, if we started consuming the flesh to ward away demons, the assessment might change, but it wouldn’t change because we were consuming flesh. It would change in light of the reason that we were consuming flesh. We lack good evidence of the existence

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of demons and for the conclusion that consumption of pangolin flesh would assist in our fight against them. We can say something similar as part of our diagnosis of what might be wrong with the consumption of the flesh of animals that have become extinct. If we act on the basis of insufficient evidence when we culture meat of this kind, we are not acting in an epistemically virtuous way, and it may well have very negative consequences. Again, though, it is not the consumption of the meat of extinct animals that is morally problematic, it is the lapse of epistemic virtue.

CONCLUSION There has always been a tendency on the part of society to treat certain principles and traits as good in and of themselves; that is, good regardless of what they bring about. There is the same tendency to do this with respect to traits and principles that are viewed as intrinsically bad. We have a rich history of philosophers who offer critiques of moral principles and concepts that society tends to treat as intrinsically good. These philosophers argue that, instead, the goodness or badness is reducible to something else. I’ll offer a few brief examples. In the eighteenth century, David Hume argued in An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, that the social virtues that we typically take to be intrinsically good are actually either simply the kinds of traits that are immediately agreeable to the senses or collectively viewed as agreeable by human beings because of their utility. He identifies benevolence and justice as examples. He argues further that some of the social virtues that we take to be good such as celibacy, self-denial, silence, and what he calls “the monkish virtues” are neither agreeable nor useful and as such they are pernicious—not only are they not intrinsic goods, they’re actually vices. In the nineteenth century, Friedrich Nietzsche offered an analysis with some overlapping conclusions. Again, he was offering a critique of those traits and behaviors that people tend to think of as intrinsically good. His analysis was that, at one time in history, natural human strengths were viewed as just that—strengths. Traits like courage, resourcefulness, ambition, and so forth were valued. He argued that those virtues, through time, were inverted through the sheer force of resentment and that self-denying traits came to be viewed as good, while the original master traits were viewed not just as bad, but as evil.

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Also in the nineteenth century, John Stuart Mill argued that social virtues that we typically take to be intrinsically good are not, in fact, good in and of themselves, but are instead good because of their utility, or the happiness they promote and the unhappiness that they prevent. He, like Hume, identifies social virtues such as justice. He argues, and this is why many interpret Mill as what we would now call a rule utilitarian, that all of the things that we take to be admirable about justice are really just features that, if generally practiced or adhered to, tend to promote utility. I raise the general strategies of these thinkers, not because I want to encourage endorsement of any particular one of these perspectives, by instead because I want to note the similar project and roughly similar strategy that each of them employs. They look at the commonly accepted social virtue and they ask, “Is this intrinsically good, or is there some other explanation of society’s response to it?” Emerging technology is giving us new tools for engaging in this same kind of project. Before the technological age, we took things largely as we found them—the changes we could make were nowhere near the order of magnitude that they are now. Because we were in a position to simply take things as nature offered them to us, it is likely that we fell easily into the pattern of assuming that certain behaviors or practices were good in themselves or bad in themselves—that their moral properties were “baked in” so to speak. Emerging technologies put us in a position to challenge that idea when it comes to many concepts, including the concept of edibility. In a world in which our global food systems, industrial animal agriculture, in particular, cause so much distress, the notion of edibility—what it is and what it is not as a moral notion—is more important than we might ordinarily be inclined to believe. I contend that technology provides the tools for us to see that edibility isn’t an inherently moral concept. Flesh, of any sort, is not innately inedible in a moral sense. The discussion in this chapter supports the conclusion that it is not the consumption of the flesh itself that is morally problematic. Instead, the badness lies in the reasons the flesh was consumed and what such consumption entails about the characters of those doing the consuming. NOTES 1. See, for example, Kolbert 2014. 2. Pangolins are also now infamous for their potential link to the COVID-19 pandemic.

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3. There are arguments that support the idea that a being can be harmed after death. These arguments frequently turn on whether the being had goals and desires that went unsatisfied. 4. For further discussion of this topic, see Milburn 2016. 5. Though some who have investigated this matter think that the prevalence of the practice has been exaggerated (Schutt 2017). 6. One immediate concern for this view is that it may seem to suggest that there is nothing wrong with bestiality against certain non-human animals because those animals are not capable of giving consent. I do not think this follows. There are various harms, including physical pain, to which a non-human animal might be subject that would not happen as a result of a biopsy under anesthesia. 7. There are a number of other institutional reasons why the actions taken by these men are morally problematic. Their actions were likely possible only through participation in an illegal underground market that causes harm and even death to both humans and non-humans.

Chapter 8

Beings and Bodies

In vitro meat is just one example of a technology that motivates reflection on the question: what is the relationship between a being and the parts of th‌‌‌‌eir body? Is there something we should be concerned about, in particular, when it comes to violating the sanctity of the body? In earlier chapters, I’ve argued for the position that the main historical moral frameworks provide support for, or at least shouldn’t provide impediments to the production of in vitro meat. I have argued further that even if idealized versions of those theories did speak against this new form of meat production, given what is at stake and the impediments to fundamentally changing people’s behaviors, we should pursue a non-ideal theory instead. Nevertheless, as I pursued these questions, I found myself frequently thinking: what is it that is so important about bodies? What relationship exists between a being and their body that explains the unique response that we typically have to bodily violations? In this chapter, I’ll pursue some possible answers. WHICH BEINGS? Most people have heard some version of a common urban legend. A person, we’ll call him Tom, is drugged and wakes up in a bathtub full of ice. Tom later learns that he is missing one of his kidneys. It was removed while he was unconscious and has been sold on an underground organ market. As it turns out, stories like this are not mere legends, even if this particular story turns out to be fictional. Organ trafficking does occur. Organs are taken without consent, either against a person’s will, without their knowledge, or under conditions so inherently coercive that informed consent is not possible. No reasonable person would defend such practices as morally acceptable. Nevertheless, these cases highlight a simple point: there is some sort of relation between an entity and the parts of their body that makes it prima facie 109

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wrong to take and/or use that entity’s parts. A human being is a compelling case of an entity that stands in some kind of moral relation to their own body. Are there other entities that stand in the same relation to their parts? Non-human animals also provide compelling cases. Consider the law recently passed by the New York Legislature prohibiting onychectomy—the practice of declawing cats (New York State 2019). It is somewhat common for people who keep cats in their homes as companion animals to have their cat’s claws removed to prevent scratching of humans or furniture. This isn’t a procedure equivalent to manicuring fingernails or toenails. Instead, the process involves removing parts of bones, tendons, nerves, and ligaments (Matias 2019). Declawing is cruel because it is painful. It may also turn out to be the case that declawing is wrong because it involves mutilating the body of another creature for the perceived benefit of a different individual or group. It may be that a cat stands in a certain relation to her own body such that we do something wrong when we intervene. It is worth noting that the relation in question can’t be simply a part-whole relation. That is, it can’t be the case that what is wrong with taking a person’s kidney or declawing a cat is that we are separating parts from a whole. When we take a brick from a building, it is possible that under certain conditions we do something wrong. Perhaps the building has an owner that will be bothered by what we have done. But what we have done, if it is wrong, is not wrong because of the relation that obtains between the building and its parts. This observation gives rise to two more. First, the relation we are trying to identify is a moral relation, or, at the very least, a relation involving value. Second, whatever relation exists between a being and their body, that relation gives rise to moral obligations that we owe directly to that being. It is unclear, at this point, exactly what the nature of this obligation is, and it might differ from one kind of embodied being to the next, but it will be something like a direct duty to the being in question, or an obligation not to cause harms to the being in question. Uniqueness should be an important factor in our deliberations. The examples we have considered in this section so far involve sentient beings. Some thinkers, like Albert Schweitzer and Paul Taylor have argued that all living things are deserving of moral consideration. Schweitzer claims that the following is the “fundamental principle of morality: It is good to maintain and cherish life; it is evil to destroy and check life” (Schweitzer 1923). He does not provide an account of what it is to “cherish” life, nor of what it is to “check” life. He does provide a behavioral profile of the kind of person who demonstrates “reverence” for life, A man is really ethical only when he obeys the constraint laid on him to help all life which he is able to succor, and when he goes out of his way to avoid injuring

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anything living. He does not ask how far this or that life deserves sympathy as valuable in itself, nor how far it is capable of feeling. To him life as such is sacred. He shatters no ice crystal that sparkles in the sun, tears no leaf from its tree, breaks off no flower, and is careful not to crunch any insect as he walks. If he works by lamplight on a summer evening, he prefers to keep the window shut and to breathe stifling air, rather than to see insect after insect fall on his table with singed and sinking wings.

The exact nature of the principle Schweitzer has in mind is not clear. The sentence about the ice crystal certainly doesn’t help, since ice crystals aren’t alive at all. He seems to think that we have a moral obligation to refrain from destroying or terminating life, but he also suggests that we have an obligation not to separate the parts of living things (such as, we ought not to remove flowers or leaves from plants). There is no justification provided for this idea. It is possible that life has intrinsic value, but if plucking a flower from a plant will not kill that plant, no one diminishes value by plucking the flower. What’s more, it is not clear how we could possibly do direct harm to the plant by plucking it, since the plant is not and cannot be aware that one of its parts has been removed. Even if we diminish the overall beauty in the world by plucking the flower, it is harm we do through the plant, not harm we do to the plant. Crucially for our purposes, the harm we have done, if we have done any harm at all, doesn’t have to do with the relation in which a plant stands to its parts. In Respect for Nature, Paul Taylor further develops and clarifies Schweitzer’s biocentrism (Taylor 1986). For Taylor, living beings are “teleological centers of life.” An entity need not be a conscious being to belong in this category. All that is necessary is that things can be advantageous or disadvantageous for it. He says, We can think of the good of an individual non-human organism as consisting in the full development of its biological powers. Its good is realized to the extent that it is strong and healthy. It possesses whatever capacities it needs for successfully coping with its environment and so preserving its existence throughout the various stages of the normal life cycle of its species.

We harm life, then, when we destroy it or when we inhibit it from flourishing through the life cycles of a living thing of its type. The question of whether Taylor’s biocentrism is defensible is beyond the scope of this chapter. The salient point here has to do with the relevance of sentience to the question of the moral relation between a being and its parts. If his account is correct, then the badness in play has to do with function. A plant, for example, is a flourishing member of its species if it functions through its life cycle in the

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way in which a plant of that particular species typically does. We do harm to that plant if we impede that function. Is this the relation we are looking for? Is the harm done to Tom when his kidney is removed a functional harm? Is the harm caused by declawing cats a functional harm? Yes and no. It may be that Tom’s body would function more efficiently if he was in possession of both kidneys, at least in the long term (perhaps his other kidney currently has or at some point develops problems). On the other hand, humans can live with only one kidney, and Tom may experience little to no decrease in functionality when his kidney is removed. The same may be true of the cat. There may be some things that the cat can’t do anymore after she is declawed, but she can still thrive as a cat even without her claws. Nevertheless, policies against non-consensual organ harvesting and the declawing of cats are morally required. The rationale that we provide for our laws prohibiting these actions does not stand or fall solely on the answer to the question of the extent to which organs or claws contribute to the proper functioning of the beings in question. If Taylor is right, non-sentient life may have a kind of functional good. This might be a type of good that also exists for sentient beings. That said, the moral relation between sentient beings and parts of their bodies cannot be understood in terms of function. If the only way of making sense out of the idea that a plant stands in a moral relation to its parts is to appeal to function, then it seems like plants and other forms of non-sentient life do not stand in the relation that we are concerned with here. Since they do not stand in this relation, it may be the case that the physical parts of plants shouldn’t be thought of as a “body” at all and that, when (if ever) we speak that way, we are speaking only metaphorically. RELATED, DISTINCT QUESTIONS There are a host of other questions that are related and may even seem to be identical to the question we’ve posed here. I maintain that the question I’m attempting to answer is neither identical to nor can it be satisfactorily answered by the other related questions. I’ll now introduce the related questions and explain why I think they should properly be understood as distinct from the one I’m attempting to answer. 1. The Question Should Not Be Confused with The Question of What Claims We Have Against Others

On the face of it, it may seem like, when we ask the question “what is the moral relation between a being and their body?” we are really just asking,

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“When it comes to an agent’s own body, what claims does he or she have against others?” All of the sentient beings of which we are presently aware occupy bodies. In many, and quite possibly all cases, if the body doesn’t exist, then the being doesn’t exist. So, the argument goes, when we ask about the nature of our moral obligations to other beings, we are inquiring into the nature of obligations to bodies. Or, at the very least, even if the two questions don’t turn out to be one and the same, it may be the case that the answer to the question, “When it comes to an agent’s body, what claims does he or she have against others?” will provide us with everything we need to answer the question, “what is the moral relation between a being and their body?” There are several reasons why understanding the question in this way is not instructive. First, the relation in which a person stands to their own body does not change when facts about others change. The last living sentient being in the world stands in the same relation to their body that they would if the world were still populated by sentient others. Second, to frame the debate in terms of “claims an agent has against others,” looks like it might assume an answer to a question that is still open. When we speak of “claims against others,” we are typically describing behavior that occurs within a moral community of the type that we discussed early in chapter three—a community in which participants are capable of giving and responding to reasons. When we speak in these terms, we may already be ruling out the possibility that moral patients such as animals can stand in the relation in question to their own bodies. Indeed, as we discussed in chapter three, this is the conclusion that Carl Cohen draws in his argument against animal rights. He says, “[Rights] are in every case claims, or potential claims, within a community of moral agents. Rights arise, and can be intelligibly defended, only among beings who actually do, or can, make moral claims against one another” (Cohen 1986). Beings like infants and young children, the severely mentally disabled, and other-than-human animals are not the kind of beings that can understand the nature of claims. The conclusion that follows from putting those points together is that moral patients stand in no moral relation to their own bodies. That doesn’t seem right. These considerations provide compelling reasons not to conceive of the question at issue as identical to or as one that can be answered by the question “When it comes to an agent’s body, what claims does he or she have against others?” 2. The Question Should Not Be Confused with the Question of the Features That Make a Being a Member of the Moral Community

Early in this book, we said that the relation we are trying to capture is a relation that obtains between humans and kidneys, cats and claws, but not between buildings and bricks. It might be easy to say, then, that asking about

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the nature of the relation is just a matter of asking what features a being needs to have in order to be a member of the moral community or to be deserving of moral consideration. Once we identify that feature, it should then be clear why there is a moral connection between that being and their body. If, for example, we say that the ability to make autonomous decisions is the feature of a being in virtue of which it is a member of the moral community, then the reason it is wrong to exploit a being’s body is that in doing so, we are violating her autonomy. On this view, the reason it is wrong to force a woman to carry a fetus to term is that we disrespect her capacity for autonomous choice when we do so. We may identify a different feature. We may say that a being is deserving of moral consideration when they have the capacity to suffer. The reason it is wrong to exploit a being’s body, if this view is true, is because doing so will cause suffering of various types. Many of these considerations may be apt when it comes to unified bodies, bodies beings might be said, in some sense, to “occupy” or the combination of parts that a being might identify with their “self” or their “identity. The same considerations may not be apt when it comes to disembodied parts (and I’ll argue that, at least in some cases, it matters that disembodied parts are parts of a person’s body). Some behavior might be exploitative of a being, even if that being can’t be harmed by the behavior and is no longer in a position to exercise autonomy. Second, the relation that obtains between a person and their body should be able to account for the unique nature of the relationship between entity and material. Consider the approach that maintains that what is wrong with exploiting a body is that, in doing so, you cause harm. For example, it no doubt hurts Tom when his kidney is harvested and sold on the black market. But we can imagine that it also harms Tom’s mother. We can even imagine that it hurts Tom’s mother more than it hurts Tom. We may have identified why taking Tom’s kidney is bad, but we have not identified the nature of the moral relation between Tom and his kidney. If the relation between a person and their body could simply settled by considering the features required for membership in the moral community, then it seems like, if harm is the right answer, then Tom and his mother stand in the same moral relation to the kidney because they are both harmed when it is removed. CONSIDERING OUR OPTIONS In this section, I’ll discuss some possible proposals for the moral relation that exists between a person and their parts. I introduced the question through our discussion of in vitro meat: have we done something morally wrong to the cow if we take some of her cells to use for our own gain? What we want to

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know, then, is the nature of the relation that exists even between a being and very small portions of her body. A plausible view of the nature of this relation needs to capture this fact. 1. The Identity Relation View One potential position is that the relation that exists between a person and their parts is an identity relation. There is more than one way that someone might defend such a position. I’ll consider the merits of each. The Genetic Identity Position One fact that might seem relevant about parts, even small parts, of a being’s body is that the parts share DNA in common with the larger whole, and with the other smaller parts. One might think that a person’s DNA is, essentially, a code that expresses who that person is. If we use, for our own purposes, a portion of a being, we use something that is identical with them for our own purposes. If you obtain a sufficient sample of Jane’s DNA, you are in a position to know facts about who Jane is—facts that Jane may not be comfortable revealing. A case study will be useful for highlighting why this position may seem attractive. Consider the case, frequently referred to in discussions of medical ethics, of Henrietta Lacks. Ms. Lacks was treated for cervical cancer at Johns Hopkins Hospital in the early 1950s. The hospital took a biopsy of Ms. Lacks’ tumor. They noticed that her cells had an unusual property—they grew at a remarkable rate. These cells, now known as “HeLa Cells” were kept and used by the hospital without her consent. The cells turned out to be fundamentally useful for the development of vaccines and for the treatment of quite a few deadly diseases. Nevertheless, one might think that Ms. Lacks was used unfairly in this case. The hospital benefitted greatly from Ms. Lacks’ cells. Unfortunately, she passed away at a young age as a result of her illness. Her family never benefitted at all from the contributions of their matriarch.1 The genetic identity view may seem to explain what has gone wrong in the case of Henrietta Lacks. When the hospital used cells containing Henrietta’s DNA, the hospital used Henrietta. Since the DNA expresses Henrietta’s identity, the hospital used Henrietta herself as a means to their own ends. Objections to the Genetic Identity View The Genetic Identity View expresses the wrong relation for a number of reasons. Two of these have to do with shared DNA. First, all of us share much, even most, of our DNA with other organisms. If this is the case, those shared features of DNA muddy the waters. Second, some people, like identical

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twins, have identical DNA. Consider a set of twins, Karen and Sarah. If the identity view is correct, then, if I take the genetic material of Karen for my own use (whatever that may be), then I’ve also done harm to Sarah. This is counterintuitive. It also raises challenges for whether the relation involved here is properly construed as an identity relation. After all, identity is a one-to-one relation and sameness of DNA is, in some cases (like the case of identical twins), a one-to-many relation. Even if sameness of genetic code were sufficient for identity, identity isn’t an inherently moral relation. Sameness of DNA is a relation that can obtain between trees and their parts, or between the various parts of a dismembered corpse. These things don’t stand in any moral relation to one another. The identity view is the wrong kind of answer to our question. The Identity of Bodies Position There is another identity-based position one might take with respect to the relation between a person and their parts. According to some views of personal identity, a person remains the same person through time and change if and only if they retain the same body through time and change. When we take a part of a person’s body without their consent, what we have done wrong, on this view, is that we have changed who they are. When we take Tom’s kidney, for example, we take part of what makes Tom, Tom. Objections to the Identity of Bodies Position The identity of bodies view isn’t plausible either. First, if personal identity requires sameness of body, then, once a part of the body is taken, there is no longer a subject to be harmed. If the sameness of body view is true, then, when I take Tom’s kidney, I destroy the being that Tom once was, and create a new being in his place. The being I “harmed” no longer exists. Second, it is not clear that changing a person’s identity is a bad thing. The reasons why murder is wrong are straightforward enough. It’s wrong because when we murder, we deprive a being of a future full of positive experiences, we cause pain, and so on. It’s less clear that we do something morally wrong when we replace one metaphysical entity with another simply by altering their list of parts. Finally, the sameness of body view doesn’t provide an account of the badness of using the body of another being for our own interests. The diagnosis the same body view must offer when it comes to what went wrong in the case of Henrietta Lacks is that a biopsy was done, making her a new person. That can’t be right. First, Henrietta consented to the biopsy. Second, intuitively the

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problem raised by this case study is not that a portion of Ms. Lack’s body was taken, but that it was used for purposes to which she did not agree, and she and her family did not benefit from the use of her genetic material. 2. The Ownership Relation View A second proposal is that portions of our bodies, though they may not be identical to us, nevertheless belong to us. Thus, what a person does wrong when they take a being’s genetic material for their own use is that they commit an act of theft. Unlike the identity view, the ownership view picks out a moral relation. If I own something, then, prima facie, it would be wrong for you to take it without my consent. In 2013, the United States Supreme Court published their decision with regard to the case of Maryland v. King.2 In that opinion, the majority held that state legislation that mandated the collection of DNA upon arrest of a suspect was constitutional. Many people opposed this decision, and plenty did so on fourth amendment grounds. A different form of plausible objection to the practice is that, in taking a suspect’s DNA without consent, the state is taking something that belongs to the defendant, without meeting any sort of evidentiary threshold first. Objections to the Ownership View I’ll raise several objections to the ownership view. First, it may not be true that we own all parts of our bodies at all times. If I shed a hair, or I leave behind a bit of my cellular material in places where I go, as all humans do, it’s not obvious that I have any claim to it any longer. It’s not as if shedding dead skin cells on the subway is similar to leaving my wallet behind. If you come across my wallet, you may have some reason to give it back. After all, it is my property. We don’t tend to have the same intuitions about discarded skin cells. The ownership view, at least in the form in which I have presented it here, provides no mechanism for determining which pieces of a being’s body that being owns and which pieces they do not own.3 Second, not all beings are able to meet the conditions necessary to stand in an ownership relation to something. It may be that ownership requires the ability to make autonomous choices. For a being to own something, it may be necessary that they can, for example, consent to either keep it or give it away. Moral patients of various types might be incapable of making these kinds of choices. Consider, for example, the cases of infants and young children, the severely mentally disabled, and non-human animals. Though they may not be capable of freely choosing whether to keep portions of their body or to give

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them away, these moral patients nevertheless stand in some moral relation to the parts of their bodies. 3. The Autonomy Relation View A closely related view is the autonomy view. In fact, some might be inclined to think that the autonomy view and the ownership view are one and the same. If that is correct, then the objections that I posed for the ownership view apply also to the autonomy view. I want to distinguish them for at least one reason, and that is that, on an autonomy view, I think more is at stake than whether theft has taken place. I have something like Kant’s view in mind here. Human beings are capable of making autonomous decisions and, as a result, they have inherent worth. We all must treat that capacity for autonomy as an end in itself, and never merely as a means to an end. According to a view like this, when we use the bodies of other beings for our own purposes, what we do is wrong because the person stands in an autonomous relation to their own body, they get to decide what happens with and to it. Objections to the Autonomy View The primary objection to the Autonomy Relation View is that it only applies to autonomous creatures. There are many reasons for thinking that it is morally important to respect the decisions of autonomous beings, all things being equal. That said, the Autonomy Relation View runs the risk of pushing our analysis in an anthropocentric direction. Non-human animals also stand in relation to their own bodies. When we put considerations about the ability to make choices right out in front inof our moral deliberations, it’s easy to leave the interests of other-than-human animals out. What’s more, other-than-human animals are not the only beings left out of the equation if we accept the Autonomy Relation View. Other moral patients such as infants, young children, and severely and permanently mentally disabled individuals are left out as well. Moral patients do stand in a moral relation to their own bodies if this view is correct. The Autonomy Relation View is also deficient in the respect that it doesn’t tell us anything about our relationship to our bodies in particular. If the idea of a disembodied being is coherent as some think that it is, such beings could make autonomous decisions. Our bodies are only one thing among many that we can exert autonomy over.

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THE EXISTENTIAL RELATION BETWEEN BEINGS AND BODIES My proposal is that the moral relation that exists between beings and their bodies is what I’ll call an existential relation. This approach is an attempt to identify the unique nature of violations of the body and to shine some light on why bodies play such an important role in our moral lives. Beings that stand in an existential relation to their own bodies have the features listed below. 1. A being’s body is the source of that being’s motivations.

To act and to live, we need to be motivated to do things. Our bodies provide us with that motivation. Our bodies give rise to both cognitive and conative states. One thing that distinguishes the physical stuff that is a being’s body from the stuff that is not a being’s body is that motivation arises within the body and not outside of it. Moral agents and moral patients both experience their bodies as the source of motivation for action. To be motivated, we must view some states of affairs as desirable and other states of affairs as undesirable—we must view some ends as valuable. Our bodies make subjective instances of valuing possible. Indeed, not only are subjective instances of valuing possible, they are also necessary for continued existence. 2. A being’s body is the vehicle through which that being satisfies their desires.

We use our bodies to navigate the world. When Jan is hungry, Jan walks to the pantry to obtain food. She uses hands to make a sandwich; she uses her mouth to eat it. This is true of autonomous agents, but it is also true of agents that act only purposefully. A bird uses her body to peck at the dirt in search of food, satisfying her desires through the physical stuff of which she is comprised. She does this even though she is not capable of, say, providing or evaluating reasons for action. Our bodies not only make valuing things possible; they make pursuit of things that are of value possible. Pursuit of things we conceive of as valuable is not just possible, it, too, is necessary for continued existence. 3. When our bodies are healthy, we experience the positive effects in a way that is first-personal. When our bodies are in pain, we experience that pain from the first-personal perspective.

Our sense of what is of value arises, in part, out of our ability to experience pleasure, contentment, and pain. I share in common with you the ability to

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experience these things. What I do not share with you, or with dogs or cats or children is the experience of my pain or my pleasure. You cannot share with me your pain or your pleasure. We can empathize with one another, but each individual’s pleasure and pain can only be experienced from the first-personal perspective. This feature of our relation to our own bodies helps to capture why our connection to our bodies is unique. On an ownership model of the relation between a being and their body, that body is one piece of property among many. Understanding a being’s relation to their own body as an existential relation captures why we stand in relation to our body in which we can stand to no other thing. Our bodies are the only way of experiencing our set of experiences, pleasure and pain in particular. 4. Beings have preferences regarding how they want their bodies to be treated.

Because 1–3 are true, beings treat their bodies as if they are deserving of care.4 To be clear, I have not said that because we recognize that 1–3 are true, beings treat their bodies as if they are deserving of care. The fact that a being’s body allows that being to value things, the fact that it allows that being to pursue things of value, and the fact that the being experiences the resultant pleasures and pains uniquely as an embodied set of experiences results in behaviors and dispositions that demonstrate care for the bodies that make all of this possible. This is true, not just of moral agents, but of moral patients as well. An infant child cries for a bottle when it is hungry because it feels the pain of its hunger uniquely. The infant’s behavior demonstrates a preference to be in a satisfied state rather than in a state of hunger. At any given time, all things being equal, most beings prefer not to be in pain. Beings who are capable of reflecting on their own bodies have more complicated preferences. An individual may prefer that the structural integrity of their body be maintained. It is likely that, at any particular moment, an individual does not want to lose a part of their body. Beings capable of making autonomous choices may prefer that, whenever possible, they get to exercise autonomy over when and if pieces of their body are removed or changed. Jan may choose to get a tattoo, but Jan likely prefers not to be forced to get a tattoo. Jan may decide to cut her hair but may be angry when her toddler does it for her. The kinds of preferences a being has depends on the capacities that being has. 5. A being has unique future-directed interests toward their own body.

Jan has explicit desires concerning what she would like to happen with and to her body in the future. Jan may start a diet now in the hope that she will

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be healthier in the future. She may begin a program of weightlifting with the expectation that if she consistently does so, she’ll be stronger as a result. Future-directed interests regarding one’s own body need not be explicit in this way. They may manifest in the form of dispositions to behave. When Dexter the dog waits patiently near his bowl at super time, he has a future-directed interest in satisfying his desire for food in the future. When an animal flees from a predator, the action expresses an interest in continued survival. More intelligent animals are capable of making more complicated plans for the future of their bodies, but less intelligent beings also have interests in the future states of their own bodies. As Gareth Matthews has said, “The psychology of humans is part of the psychology of animals generally” (Matthews 1978). 6. Having a body is a necessary condition for a being’s future survival.

There are two additional aspects of being embodied that make the moral relation between a person and their body existential. The first is that the being’s future existence depends on the continued existence of their body. This makes the relation that exists between a being and their body of fundamental value and importance for that being. 7. A being can’t vacate their body without dying.

The second feature of embodiment that makes the relation between a being and their body an existential relation is the inescapable nature of the being’s connection to their own body. If a being desires to continue to exist, they can’t vacate their body when times get tough. When the being experiences intense pain, for example, they are trapped with that pain. In most other circumstances, if a being finds a situation unpleasant, they can simply leave and go on to have different experiences elsewhere. This is not so with our bodies. We’re trapped. In summary, our relation to our own bodies connects us to the world of value. Our bodies make valuing things a matter of existential importance. We are all embodied beings. We all stand in the existential relation to our own bodies that I’ve described above. When we violate the body of another embodied being, we fail to respect the fact that the being in question stands in the same relation to their body that we stand in to our own. My obligation not to lie to you is not an obligation I have in light of the fact that you are embodied. If you weren’t embodied, if you were a soul or a spirit, it would remain true that, all things being equal, I shouldn’t lie to you. Similarly, my obligation to treat you fairly doesn’t depend on the fact that you are an embodied being.

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Some actions have moral implications for beings as embodied beings. A straightforward example is the practice of vivisection. When scientists grow tumors in otherwise healthy rats, they fail to respect the existential relationship that exists between the rat and its body. They fail to recognize that the rat has preferences, and that it feels pain. They fail to appreciate that, left unmolested, the rat would use its body to navigate its environment in pursuit of its desires. They fail to recognize that, by giving the rat a devastating disease, they have made its body into a prison from which it cannot escape.

MISSING PIECES As we have seen, the fact that a being stands in an existential relation to their own body can provide some insight into why violating that body might be wrong in some cases. The straightforward cases like vivisection and animal experimentation are disrespectful of all seven features of the relation between beings and their bodies that we identified. Other cases are more challenging. Cases involving small parts of a person’s body are particularly noteworthy. Consider the case of use of genetic research on indigenous populations. In 2002, the Navajo Nation placed a moratorium on genetic research within its territorial jurisdiction. Among the motivations were concerns about the misuse of data and the potential for privacy violations. Many members of the Navajo Nation were opposed to the moratorium, primarily because of the medical benefits of genetic testing. Recently, the Navajo Nation announced that they are considering lifting it. Concerns about data misuse are not misguided. The Havasupi Tribe encountered just such a situation recently. In 1989, the Tribe entered into a research arrangement with Arizona State University. The Havasupi experience higher than average rates of Type II Diabetes. The research agreement involved an investigation into a possible genetic link to the disease. The search for such a link was unsuccessful. The genetic material was then used for purposes that were never agreed to by the research participants. The samples were used to study migration, inbreeding, and schizophrenia. A lawsuit was later settled out of court. Use of genetic material for these purposes is far from innocuous. The mere engagement in these research projects, regardless of the results, has the potential to further stigmatize and exploit Native People. Migration studies can have real demonstrable effects. Native Persons have endured a long and painful history with respect to exploitation of land, and even now have reason to feel that their legal relationship to their land is more tenuous than they

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would like. Migration studies track the movement of genetic lines through time. Land arrangements are, in many cases, based on historical and cultural understandings of tribal migration. Native Persons may harbor justified concerns about what might happen if these cultural understandings are turned on their heads. This case is an example of a circumstance under which use of small section of a being’s body can demonstrate disrespect for the existential relation that exists between a being and their body. Material of this nature can only be generated by beings that stand in this kind of relation to their own bodies. To be sure, the genetic material involved is no longer attached to the body that the being occupies. But it is noteworthy that the material was once part of such a relation, and it makes sense for the person involved to continue to have preferences with respect to it. Misuse of portions of a being’s body can have direct and unique consequences for that being. It makes sense for a member of the Navajo nation to have a preference that a portion of her own body not be used in a way that causes her unique harm. Similarly, it would not have been unreasonable for Henrietta Lacks to have sustained preferences with respect to her biological material. Since she stood in a unique relation to parts of her body, if she cares about those parts, her attitudes matter. The chapter began with a discussion of using the flesh of another being for food. The practice of torturing other-than-human animals in factory farms provides an example of demonstrating disrespect for the relation in which those beings stand to their own bodies that is just as straightforward as the example of vivisection. The same thing can be said of the practice of slaughtering other-than-human animals to satisfy human preferences for the taste of flesh. If beings really do stand in the existential relation to their own bodies that I’ve described, what conclusions are we left to draw about the moral permissibility of in vitro meat? I think we can conclude that the biopsy process involved in obtaining in vitro meat does not violate the moral relation that exists between farm animals and their bodies. If animals are treated kindly and anesthetized during the process, other-than-human animals are left alone to value what they value and to pursue what they value. We respect the fact that their pain is painful for them uniquely and do not stand in the way of the satisfaction of their future-directed preferences. Unlike Henrietta Lacks or the members of the Navajo Nation, farm animals are not the kinds of creatures that have interests in how their cells might be used. The kinds of future-directed preferences that they have do not extend to what happens to discarded portions of their bodies. This also helps to explain why I don’t think that Abbate’s discussion of eating human corpses as described in chapter four is an instance of disrespect, at least under certain conditions. There is no one embodied in a corpse. No one

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stands in relation to that body any longer or has the relevant kinds of unique preferences with respect to it. CONCLUSION Across debates on the topic of animal ethics there is a tension. Utilitarians tend to treat animal bodies as things, albeit things that sometimes matter when their suffering works out right in the aggregate. Views surrounding respect for animals often leave unresolves the question of why the bodies of beings are deserving of respect. What I’ve attempted to do in this chapter is to provide an account of what a being’s relation is to their own body and the conditions under that relation is disrespected. I’ve argued that though an animal’s relation to their own body can be and very frequently is disrespected, collecting cells from an animal does not demonstrate disrespect of this type because, at least in most cases, doing so does not violate their important future-related interests. In the next chapter, I’ll turn to a reason for adopting in vitro meat that is significant enough to deserve a chapter of its own—the prevention of future pandemics. NOTES 1. In 2017, the oldest son of Henrietta Lacks initiated a lawsuit against John Hopkins Hospital and others who benefitted from the cells (McDaniels 2017). 2. Maryland v. King, 569 U.S. 435 (2013) 3. Current law doesn’t recognize that a person’s genetic material belongs to that person if any work has been done on that genetic material. Right now, in legal disputes between individuals and, say, pharmaceutical companies, the law tends to favor the pharmaceutical companies on the grounds that they have done the labor. 4. The claim that we treat our bodies with care is consistent with the claim that we do the opposite sometimes. A person may overindulge in food or drink, which may have harmful effects on the body. The fact that the person pursues sustenance at all, however demonstrates a disposition to treat one’s own body as if it is deserving of care.

Chapter 9

Pandemics, Animal Exploitation, and In Vitro Meat

A great irony of environmental problems is that sometimes they are so extensive they are difficult to see. They happen over such a great expanse of space and time that serious trauma can appear to the naked eye to just be business as usual. Sometimes, events transpire that force us to sit up and pay attention. This is what happened when the COVID-19 pandemic hit. Many of the world’s most deadly diseases are zoonotic—they jump from non-human animals to humans. COVID-19 caused tragic amounts of suffering and death, and it was likely all preventable. We can reduce the spread of further novel infectious diseases in the future, but we can’t do so if we don’t look honestly and critically at the relationship between human beings and non-human animals. Pandemics bring into focus features of society and human behavior that desperately need to change. They are, at their core, environmental problems. To prevent them, we need to appreciate our role as members of one species of living being among many who must co-exist in a biotic community. To do this, we need to stop treating animals as mere things. This will involve a fundamental change in the way that we produce food. Producing meat in vitro will not completely eradicate infectious disease, but if this new method of food production will cut back the encroachment of human beings into wild spaces, it is likely to limit transmission. In this chapter, I’ll provide arguments for the conclusion that in vitro meat can be a key component in a general strategy to help prevent pandemics. CONSPIRACY THEORIES AND WISHFUL THINKING: IN SEARCH OF A VILLAIN Despite passionate and evidence-based warnings from many experts for decades, the global community was woefully unprepared for COVID-19. 125

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The goals now, of course, are to do the very best we can in response to the new virus circulating in our communities, but also to make sure that we don’t return to the same reckless behaviors that led to it. The very same experts who warned about this pandemic also warned that we can expect more in the future. For any meaningful change to occur, it must be the case that society understands where viruses originate. This is challenging in the midst of a major crisis because fear and wishful thinking often motivate belief in conspiracy theories. The 1918 flu pandemic began as WWI was drawing to a close, and people were quick to blame the outbreak on Germany; some even claimed that the virus was a bioweapon. Many believed that germs were delivered by way of aspirin pills created by Bayer—a German pharmaceutical company. History repeats itself, especially when we’re not paying attention. Conspiracy theories about COVID-19 run rampant, and they are endorsed by players with large megaphones. One of the most commonly believed conspiracy theories is that the novel coronavirus was created in a lab in Wuhan—a reemergence of popular bioweapon theories in response to the outbreak of disease. Others believe that it was somehow released by the lab by mistake.1 As we’ve seen, a different set of conspiracy theories blame other perceived bad actors. As part of his humanitarian efforts, Bill Gates has been working on health issues for many years. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has focused much of its humanitarian efforts on global public health issues. For quite some time, Gates has been warning the public that we need to be more prepared for the global pandemic or pandemics that would in all likelihood strike in the not-so-distant future. He turned out to be right, and conspiracy theorists took that as evidence that he created the pandemic. They suggested that it couldn’t be a mere coincidence that he predicted things so accurately. Gates has long insisted that a key tool in reducing the suffering and death caused by the pandemic is tracking. This is not an unusual concept; many countries and states are already doing it. Tracking involves a device, often a cell phone, that indicates a person’s COVID-19 status. Different versions of these tracking apps flag whether a person has had COVID-19, whether they have been tested, whether they have been vaccinated, and so on. Conspiracy theorists interpreted this to mean that Gates created coronavirus for the express purpose of inserting microchips into people so that they could be tracked for the rest of their lives. Yet another conspiracy theory maintains that coronavirus is caused by 5G technology. In a textbook example of the post hoc, ergo propter hoc version of the false cause fallacy, people noticed that 5G towers went up in their communities shortly before the coronavirus started wreaking havoc. They concluded that 5G technology causes the coronavirus. They further claim

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that this was all done intentionally by governments to control citizens and to combat overpopulation. For many, conspiracy theories are attractive explanations. Tragedies of this scope draw our attention to the absurdity of the human condition, and it is understandable that many people would prefer to avoid staring into the abyss at all costs. Pandemics are senseless and they are no respecters of persons. They kill indiscriminately with no concern for justice. They don’t care about our plans, from the most mundane and trivial to the most fundamental and essential. Pandemics are an existential threat in all senses of the word. Philosopher Albert Camus understood absurdity as a conflict, even a confrontation, between the interests of a person and an indifferent universe. The universe isn’t the kind of thing that cares about what we want. He also describes different ways that one might react when the absurdity of one’s condition is laid bare. He says, “Eluding is the invariable game. The typical act of eluding, the fatal evasion . . . is hope. Hope of another life one must ‘deserve’ or trickery of those who live not for life itself, but for some great idea that will transcend it, refine it, give it a meaning, and betray it” (Camus 1955). Beliefs in conspiracies are, at least in part, a way of eluding—they are escape mechanisms. They are often ways of making sense of the senseless and reviving faith in normalcy and order. Tragedies of this magnitude might be easier to understand and process when we can identify a clear villain. Villains demonstrate intentionality; they have motives. When bad things happen, intentional actors can offer answers to the question, “Why?” When there is a villain, the problem is not systemic. It is not our behavior that needs to change. It is the villain that needs to be vanquished. These conspiracy theories, predictable though they may be, are dangerous distractions from what we really ought to be worrying about, and they prevent us from making the changes that so desperately need to be made. In Chapter Five, we discussed some of the psychological and identity-based factors that make progress on vegetarianism and veganism particularly intractable. To bring about any change at all, we need to have a sense, not just of what a rational person ought to think, but of what people actually are thinking. This is also true when it comes to pandemic conspiracy theories. It’s unlikely that these beliefs are going anywhere. In vitro meat could serve as a critical workaround (that is, if we can overcome the conspiracy theories surrounding the product itself).

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OUR FELLOW ANIMALS Before we can make much progress on this issue, we need to realize that it is, fundamentally, a problem that should be viewed through the lens of environmental ethics. It is caused by the attitude that human beings take toward the natural world; our anthropocentric worldview needs to change. We need to stop viewing the environment and other living beings as mere things to be consumed and sold as commodities by members of our species. This paradigm shift in the way we view other living things would have very beneficial consequences, not just for members of the human species, but for all living beings that can suffer from disease. Coronavirus should be understood as part of an all-too familiar category of systemic environmental problems that involve human encroachment into the ecosystems inhabited by other animals. We’ve discussed the fact that human behavior such as deforestation and habitat destruction are causing a sixth extinction. What we have not spent much time addressing is the fact that zoonotic diseases are spread by the same range of behaviors that give rise to that general trend. Agriculture, and animal agriculture in particular, is a significant driving force behind these behaviors. The appearance of coronavirus highlights the need for more humane and sustainable methods of food production. The current consensus among scientists is that coronavirus originated in horseshoe bats (Mackenzie and Smith 2020). The evidence for this conclusion is the similarity between the genetic profiles of the virus found in bats and the virus found in humans. There is now good reason to believe that there was an intermediary host—likely a pangolin—that passed the novel coronavirus from bats to humans. One conclusion we can draw from these facts is that were it not for the human tendency to move animals from one place to another, this particular coronavirus never would have spread. The dominant worldview currently maintains that we can use wildlife as products. We can take them from their natural homes for our own purposes. The purposes in question need not even be defensible—we can use animals to satisfy needs that are based on false beliefs. If we changed these attitudes, we would save both non-human animals and our own species from intense suffering. In our quest for blame, it might be tempting to focus on individual members of species that pass the coronavirus. It is not uncommon after a pandemic or even a more low-grade zoonotic disease for humans to express fear of and disdain for the non-human animals that passed the illness to our species. This is understandable but misguided. Again, this tendency is caused by our need to have someone to blame. Unlike the imaginary villains we discussed earlier, pangolins and horseshoe bats are not the kinds of beings that can form

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intentions or make plans to spread diseases to unwitting humans. Though animals obviously experience the symptoms of being ill, it is very unlikely that the animals involved have the concept of “being contagious.” In many cases, they may not even experience any symptoms or signs of the virus at all. Further, and more importantly, animals are not villains, but victims in this story. If humans did not encroach upon their spaces and treat them as resources, viruses like this one never would have spread. BLAMING WET MARKETS? It is not only conspiracy theorists who look to other parties to blame for widespread tragedies such as pandemics. If people can blame cultural practices that are dissimilar to their own, there is less of a need to adopt a sense of personal responsibility or to endorse widespread economic and policy changes to prevent further outbreaks. The best available evidence currently supports the view that coronavirus jumped from pangolins to humans at a wet market in Wuhan, China. This is a very common form of disease transmission. The 2002 SARS outbreak was linked to the sale of civet cats in the Guangdong province of China (Evans et al. 2004). That virus was also thought to have originated in horseshoe bats. The 2009 Swine Flu (H1N1) originated in the United States, where it passed from pigs to humans in factory farms (Bahl, Mackenzie, and Smith 2009). Since we know that viruses are often passed in this way, we need to take a look at the facts about the ways in which human beings are interacting with animals. In response to the current crisis, many have called for an end to wet markets. Some wet markets are more problematic than others. Some are very clean and are simply locations where a customer can go to buy fresh meat and produce. Others are unsanitary. Many do not sell exotic wildlife. Those that do, however, can be breeding grounds for viruses. The same people who call for an end to wet markets are often also people who purchase meat at grocery stores to feed their families. Odds are that the meat on their plates was produced in a factory farm. Is there a morally relevant difference between wet markets and factory farms? Does it make sense to condemn wet markets while supporting the factory farm system by purchasing and consuming meat? Let’s consider some possible arguments for the position that wet markets are more morally problematic than factory farms. First, some might argue that wet markets are worse because they sell exotic animals. For this argument to be compelling, it must be the case that exotic animals have some privileged moral status such that it is worse to imprison and kill an exotic animal than it is to do the same to a local, more common animal.

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The status of an animal as “exotic” is not morally relevant. Characterizing an animal as “exotic” is no different, from a moral point of view, from characterizing it as “cute” or “beautiful.” We have moral obligations to animals because they are beings that have experiences, interests, and preferences, not because they are attractive, unique, or unusual. What’s more, an animal’s status as “exotic” is relative in a way that we don’t tend to think that moral properties are relative. A civet, for example, might strike people living in North America as exotic, but someone in Asia might view it differently. If it is wrong to imprison and kill an exotic animal simply because it is exotic, then it would be acceptable to imprison and kill a civet in Asia, but it would be wrong to do so in North America. That doesn’t seem right. It may be that there are other moral considerations that people really have in mind when they say that it matters that an animal is “exotic.” Perhaps the real concern is that animals like pangolins are being poached from the natural environments in which they typically live and flourish. But all animals have natural environments in which they survive and thrive. It is an unfortunate fact that some animals have been oppressed for so long that we can’t imagine what it would look like for them to thrive in their natural environments. We don’t poach cows, pigs, or chickens from tropical rainforests, but we nevertheless do them the same harm that we do to pangolins when we imprison and kill them. We might view certain settings as more unusual, rare, unique, etc., but in this case, those are aesthetic descriptions rather than relevant moral features. Yet another argument might be at play when people find the sale of “exotic” animals troubling. This argument concerns environmental impact. When we remove animals or plants from their native environments there are significant risks. Invasive species can do real damage when introduced into new ecosystems. Animals also play critical roles in their native ecosystems. When they are removed, those ecosystems may struggle to find balance. These are compelling arguments against removing animals from their native environments, but, ultimately, they don’t justify treating wet markets differently from factory farms. The 2009 Swine Flu pandemic illustrates that viruses are not always spread by “exotic” animals, and they are not always spread in wet markets. Factory farms are sometimes the culprit. Ecosystem worries are good reasons for leaving animals where they are, but that is a different moral question. There are ways in which wet markets may actually be preferable to factory farms. One of these ways has to do with sustainability. Wet markets tend to be places where people bring limited quantities of fresh food to sell with the intention of feeding local populations. There are problems associated with these practices, but wet markets are more sustainable and avoid some of the other pressing concerns with mass production of food, such as environmental

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impact, energy inefficiency, waste, economic and racial injustice, and certain kinds of cruelty to animals. Animals in factory farms are also kept indoors, and this is a critical fact when it comes to the spread of disease. Animals kept in very close proximity to one another in poorly ventilated spaces are in a dangerous position for transmission and spread. The main point is that when we are considering which practices to change, we shouldn’t look exclusively at the specific conditions that gave rise to COVID-19. We are being inconsistent if we focus on bats and pangolins but not cows and pigs. We can’t really prevent future zoonotic viruses from spreading if we point the finger at wet markets but not factory farms. In vitro meat will not have the immediate effect of shutting down wet markets. This cultural practice is likely to persist well into the future. However, since much of the deforestation and habitat destruction that is occurring is happening as a result of industrial animal agriculture, poachers encroach into spaces that would have been inaccessible otherwise. If we shift our methods of meat production in a direction that does not require so much grazing room and so much land to grow soy, poachers may never come into contact with pangolins or horseshoe bats or other creatures that may be carrying diseases about which we know nothing. In vitro meat will put us in a better position to leave both farm animals and exotic animals alone.

THE DANGERS OF SLAUGHTERHOUSES It’s an analytic truth that slaughterhouses are dangerous places, but it is true for non-standard reasons when it comes to pandemics. One unexpected consequence of the outbreak of COVID-19 was that it caused meat shortages across the country. For example, nearly one in five Wendy’s restaurants ran out of beef, and at many locations other meat products such as pork and chicken became unavailable as well (Valinsky 2020). Supermarkets also faced shortages. The reason is that the conditions in slaughterhouses are particularly conducive to the spread of coronavirus. 700 employees at a Tyson factory in Perry, Iowa tested positive. At a Tyson plant in Indiana, 900 employees tested positive. As of July 2020, meat processing facilities were associated with between 236,000 and 310,000 coronavirus cases and 4,300 to 5,200 deaths (Almond, Boulos, and Taylor 2020). Slaughterhouses, also known euphemistically as meat packing plants, are the next stop for most farm animals after their time in factory farms. When mammals like pigs and cows arrive, they are put on conveyer belts, stunned, then killed. Their bodies are then sent to a series of “stations” where people carve them up for packaging and, later, consumption.

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Working in a slaughterhouse is both physically and psychologically strenuous. Carving flesh and bone requires real effort, and many employees sweat profusely while doing it. The sheer volume of animals that need to be carved up to satisfy the American appetite for meat ensures that employees work together, standing shoulder to shoulder, in spaces that are often poorly ventilated. This kind of work is not highly sought after for obvious reasons. It is unpleasant. As is so often the case in the United States, unpleasant work is done by those who struggle to find employment—often undocumented immigrants and people living in low-income communities. This complicates the problems with coronavirus spread in several ways. First, employees often do not speak English fluently, so conveying critical information about the virus is difficult. Second, it is common for members of these communities to live in large families or groups. Third, low-income communities are frequently places that are densely populated. All of these factors contribute to more rapid spread of the virus. The designation of slaughterhouses as “essential” during the coronavirus outbreak made matters even worse. It made such institutions immune from stay-at-home orders issued by governors and forced workers to go back to work, under very dangerous conditions, on pain of losing their jobs. Many plants simply didn’t have the personnel to move forward and remained closed, but a good number continued with only moderate social distancing practices in place. ‌‌‌‌Slaughterhouses exploit the vulnerable in many ways. The suffering in these places is disturbing under ordinary conditions. In a pandemic, things are even worse. At the time of this writing, slaughterhouses are not in the position to process new animals because of the employee shortage and the dangerous working conditions involved. As a result, factory farms are producing more animals than they have room to accommodate. Hundreds of thousands of older animals are being euthanized to make room for the younger animals. This is senseless and unnecessary loss of life. Some may be outraged that so many animals are being euthanized. When the animals are killed for food, at least they are being killed for some reason. When they die under these conditions, their deaths are meaningless. Really, however, since meat is not a necessary part of a human diet, this form of loss of life that is thrust center stage during a pandemic is always senseless. Finally, we know that brutal viruses that cause massive amounts of suffering in living beings can be transmitted easily in both wet markets and factory farms. Since we know this, every day that we continue to use animals in these ways, we are relying on moral luck. In his 1877 essay The Ethics of Belief, philosopher W. K. Clifford describes a ship owner who sends his ship out to sea despite the fact that he had reason to believe it might not be seaworthy.

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The ship sinks and the passengers die. What if, instead, the ship didn’t sink? What if all of the passengers survived? Would this diminish the guilt of the ship owner? Clifford answers, “Not one jot. When an action is once done, it is right or wrong forever; no accidental failure of its good or evil fruits can possibly alter that. The man would not have been innocent, he would only have been not found out.” The shipowner was the recipient of moral luck in this case—no one discovered that he did something irresponsible. This doesn’t change how we should view his decision to send the ship off to sea; whatever the consequences turned out to be, his action was reckless. ‌‌‌‌Consider the following two cases. Tom and Mary both go out to a bar and become equally intoxicated. They both make the decision to drive their respective cars home while too impaired to operate a vehicle safely. They both live roughly the same distance from the bar. On the way home, Tom encounters a pedestrian whom he hits and kills. A pedestrian does not cross Mary’s path, and she arrives home safely. The fact that a pedestrian was present in one case but not the other was a matter of moral luck—neither Tom nor Mary had any control over that. That said, they both behaved equally recklessly and that is the decision for which they are morally responsible. The same thing can be said about the operation of factory farms and meat packing plants. We know that these places can be ground zero for new diseases, and that the conditions in them can contribute to mass outbreaks of sickness and death. Nevertheless, we charge ahead with these same reckless behaviors just crossing our fingers and hoping that nothing happens. The stakes couldn’t be higher and there are better options. In vitro meat can provide a lifesaving alternative, at least when it comes to the spread of disease on factory farms and in slaughterhouses.

CONCLUSION In this chapter, I have argued that the processes by which we obtain and kill animals for food are morally wrong, but that the problems intensify when we consider the role that our meat production practices play in the spread of pandemics. I have argued that it is not nefarious human players or dangerous exotic creatures who are to blame for our present predicament, but our own quotidian practices, about which we are typically unreflective. There are valuable lessons to take from COVID-19 as it relates to animals. First, there are lessons at the intersection of ethics and epistemology. There are times in life when philosophical thinking is more important than ever. When I say “philosophical thinking” in this context, I mean reflection on one’s own beliefs. Pandemics are understandably hard to process. We need

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the intellectual humility to consider whether, at any given time in our thinking about all of this, we might be in the grip of cognitive bias that prevents us from seeing things clearly. Our long history of treating animals like objects is likely to get in the way of properly understanding the role that our treatment of them plays in this global tragedy. Second, as we move the blame away from mad scientists, monstrous animals, and scheming billionaires, we can focus it on ourselves. This doesn’t call for self-flagellation or wallowing in guilt. Instead, we can view finally taking responsibility as empowering. When we own the problem, we can take action to stop it. Finally, perhaps we’ll realize that all sentient life shares the existential burden of encountering and struggling with disease, decay, and death. We are all equally helpless in the face of various external forces and we must live until we die even in the darkest moments. If we let it, this should motivate empathy and compassion for our fellow living beings. In this book I have argued for taking a non-ideal theoretic approach to the myriad problems posed by industrial animal agriculture. I’ve pointed out the serious challenges faced by ideal theoretic approaches that call for everyone to convert to vegetarianism or veganism. I’ve offered an argument for the conclusion that, now that animals can be consumed without loss of life and limb, it is time to rethink the concept of “edibility” and abandon the idea that there are some things that are inedible innately, from a moral point of view. Crucially, I’ve argued that the problems that we face—animal welfare, climate change, deforestation, pandemics, and so on, are so serious that we cannot afford to wait any longer to fix them. In vitro meat can be a key component in our solutions. NOTE 1. Some scientists have claimed that the Wuhan Lab source stories have not been investigated thoroughly enough. When they make these claims, they are not claiming that the virus was produced in a lab, just that we need to do our due diligence in investigating it. That said, no significant evidence has been revealed supporting the idea that a lab was the source. Bioweapon theories have led to an increase in hate crimes against Asian Americans, so the suggestion that we should investigate them in the absence of evidence supporting the conclusion that they are true does not come without consequences.

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Index

1918 flu pandemic, 126 2009 Swine Flu, 129–30

Oryx and Crake, 2, 3 autonomy relation view, 118

Abbate, Cheryl, 56, 123 “Save the Meat for Cats: Why It’s Wrong to Eat Roadkill,” 56 Adams, Carol J., 64 The Sexual Politics of Meat, 64 Africa, 94 Alaska, 95 Aleph Farms, 4–5 Amazon, 27 American Civil Liberties Union, 82 American Medical Association, 7 American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA), 13–14 Andes, 98 Animal Legal Defense Fund, 82 animal welfare, 6, 8, 11–14, 52, 62, 66, 68–70, 72, 134 Animal Welfare Act, 13 Aristotle, 86–87, 102–03 Arizona, 25n3 Arizona State University, 122 Arkansas, 81, 82 Asia, 94, 130 ASPCA. See American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Atwood, Margaret, 2–3

Bayer, 126 Bentham, Jeremy, 11, 43–44 Bequia, 95 Beyond Burger, 77 Beyond Meat, 81 Branson, Richard, 2 Buber, Martin, 47 Buddhists, 67 Business Insider, 93 CAFOs. See Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations California, 25n3, 98 Callatians, 98, 103 Camus, Albert, 39, 127 cannibalism, 15, 92, 97–98 Carl’s Junior, 64, 94 Carson, Rachel, 78 Silent Spring, 78 Celia, 96 cell culturing, 4, 34, 46, 49–52, 85–86 cell extraction, 31 Cheetos, 85 China, 92, 95, 129 Christians, 67–68 Chukotka, 95 143

144

Index

Churchill, Winston, 1–2 “50 Years Hence,” 2 Clifford, William, 74, 132 The Ethics of Belief, 74, 132 climate change, 21, 24, 34, 70–71, 73, 134 Cohen, Carl, 44, 113 Colorado, 25n3 Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFO’s), 12, 14–16, 19–21, 24, 27, 41, 75 consequentialism, 7, 24, 28, 42 conspiracy theories, 72, 126–27 COVID-19, 8, 41, 73, 77, 125– 26, 131, 133 cultured meat, 7, 43, 61–62, 73, 77, 79, 81–82, 85–86, 91–92, 102 Dahmer, Jeffrey, 99, 104 Daisy the sheep, 86 Damascans, 58 Darius, 98 DaVinci, Leonardo, 58 DaVincians, 58 Deforestation, 23, 34, 62, 128, 131, 134 Democratic Party, 73 Denmark, 95 deontology, 28, 44 Descartes, Rene, 18, 59, 69 Desertification, 20 Disenhancement, 29–31 DNA, 115–17 Donner Party, 92, 98, 103 Eat Just, 2 Eating Animals, 99 ecocentrism, 12 Eddy, Sarah J., 6–7 EPA. See United States Environmental Protection Agency Epicurus, 39 European Union (EU), 25n3 EU. See European Union existential relation view, 119, 121–23

Facebook, 95–96, 103 factory farms, 12, 34, 41, 80, 82, 89, 96, 123, 129, 130–33 Farm Animal Sanctuary, 41 FDA. See United States Food and Drug Administration Finless Foods, 4 Fish, Albert, 99, 101, 104 Florida, 25n3 Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, 21 Food Network, 1 The Fore, 97–98, 103 Frankenstein, 30 Frey, R. G., 38 Future Meat Technologies, 4 Gandhi, Mahatma, 47 An Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments with Truth, 47 Gates, Bill, 2, 73, 79, 126 genetic identity position, 115 Germany, 126 God, 67, 68, 84 Good Food Institute, 82 Gottlieb, Scott, 81 Great Pacific Garbage Patch, 18 Great Replacement, 73 Great Reset, 73, 75 Greeks, 98 Greene, Marjorie Taylor, 73–74 Greenland, 95 Grenadines, 95 Guangdong Province, 129 Havasupi Tribe, 122 HeLa Cells, 115 Herodotus, 98 Hindus, 67 Hobbes, Thomas, 45 Hodson, Gordon, 64 Humane Methods of Slaughter Act, 13, 15 The Humane Society, 21

Index

Hume, David, 106 An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, 106 Huxley, Aldous, 3 Brave New World, 3 Ideal Theory, 61–63, 90 identity of bodies view, 115–16 Impossible Burger, 77, 81 in vitro burger, 1–2 in vitro chicken, 2 in vitro fish, 4 in vitro foods, 33 in vitro meat, 2, 3, 5–8, 9n1, 12, 17, 20, 24, 27–33, 39, 41–44, 46, 49–53, 56–57, 59, 61–62, 72–75, 77–80, 82–85, 87–92, 94, 97, 99, 102, 109, 114, 123–25, 127 defined, 83–84 in vitro steaks, 4 in vitro technology, 24, 52, 99 Indiana, 131 internet, 99, 101 Iowa, 131 Islamic law, 85 Jains, 67 Japan, 18 Jews, 85 Johns Hopkins Hospital, 115 The Jungle Book, 18 Jurassic Park, 64

A Sand County Almanac, 93 Locke, John, 45 Logic of the Larder, 8, 32–34, 36–37, 40–41 London, 1 Louisiana, 81 MacInnis, Cara C., 64 Maine, 25n3 Makah Tribe, 95 Maryland v. King, 117 Massachusetts, 25n3 Matthews, Gareth, 121 meat paradox, 68 Meatable, 5 Memphis Meats, 4 Michigan, 25n3 Mill, John Stuart 87–89, 106 On Nature, 87 Mills, Charles, 46 The Racial Contract, 46 minimize overriding principle. See miniride principle miniride principle, The, 53 Mississippi, 81 Missouri, 81, 82 Mosa Meats, 1–5 Mowgli, 18 muddlers, 58

Kant, Immanuel, 31, 44, 118 Kaplan, David, 84–86 Food Philosophy: An Introduction, 84 Kentucky, 25n3 Korsgaard, Christine, 53–54 Fellow Creatures, 54 Kuru, 97

Nature, 94 Navajo Nation, 122–23 Nebraska, 81 Neill, Sam, 64 New York Legislature, 110 New York Times, 34 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 106 Non-Human Rights Project, 45 Non-Ideal Theory, 61–63, 90 North America, 18, 130 Nussbaum, Martha, 45, 57

Lacks, Henreitta, 115–17, 123 Leffingwell, Albert, 6–7 Leopold, Aldo, 12, 93

Ohio, 25n3 Oregon, 25n3 ownership view, 117–18

145

146

Index

Papua New Guinea, 97 Pennsylvania, 70 Perry, 131 Philippines, 91 Portman, Natalie, 99, 101 Post, Mark, 1–2, 4 Preventing Animal Cruelty and Torture Act, 13–14 principle of qualified non– malfeasance, 51 principle of welfare conservation, 29 qualified beneficence principle, 50–51 Rawls, John, 45, 61 Regan, Nancy nee Tirk, 47 Regan, Tom, 6, 44, 46–53, 57–58 “The Moral Basis of Vegetarianism,” 49 Animal Rights Archive, 6 The Case for Animal Rights, 46–47, 52–53 Empty Cages, 47, 58 replaceability argument 32, 38, 40 respect principle, 49 Rhode Island, 25n3 Rollins, Bernard, 29 Rousseau, Jean–Jacques, 45 Ruetzler, Hanni, 1 Russia, 95 Salt, Henry S., 32–37, 40–41 The Humanities of Diet, 32 Schutt, Bill, 92 Cannibalism: A Perfectly Natural History, 92 Schweitzer, Albert, 12, 86, 110–11 Sentience Institute, 12 Sestan, Nenad, 34–35 Shapiro, Paul, 88 Clean Meat, 88 Sierra Nevada Mountains, 98 Singapore, 2 Singer, Peter, 37–39

Practical Ethics, 37 social contract theory, 46 South Dakota, 81 Spadefoot Toad, 97 speciesism, 11 St. Vincent, 95 Tarzan, 18 Taylor, Paul, 73–74, 110–12, 131 Respect for Nature, 111 Tel Aviv, 4 Texas, 18, 81 Thompson, Paul, 29 Tofurky, 82 Tommy the chimpanzee, 45 Tyson Foods, 79, 131 UN. See United Nations United Nations (UN), 93 United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), 12–13, 19–20 United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), 22, 24, 32, 34, 151 United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA), 4, 81 United States of America, 4, 12–15, 19–20, 22, 28, 47, 63, 69, 73, 89, 95, 129, 132 United States Supreme Court, 117 Upside Foods, 4 Uruguayan Air Force, 98 USDA. See United States Department of Agriculture Utah, 25n3 utilitarianism, 32, 34, 37–38, 40–41, 43, 48, 100, 106, 124 Vietnam, 47, 94–95 Vietnam War, 47 virtue ethics, 30 Washington, 25n3, 95 Wendy’s, 131 World War I, 126 World War II, 65

Index

Wuhan, 129 WWI. See World War I

Yale University, 34

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About the Author​​​​​​​

Rachel Robison-Greene is assistant professor of philosophy at Utah State University, where she regularly teaches courses in ethics, metaphysics, and logic. She earned her PhD in philosophy at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in 2017. Rachel was the 2019 Tom Regan Animal Rights Fellow and serves as a board member and secretary of the Culture and Animals Foundation. She is the author of Edibility and In Vitro Meat: Ethical Considerations and the co-author of Conspiracy Theories in the Time of Coronavirus. Her research interests include the nature of personhood and the self, animal minds and animal ethics, environmental ethics, and ethics and technology. Rachel also dedicates much of her time to public philosophy projects. She has written over 120 articles in public philosophy, including articles for the BBC, The Philosopher’s Magazine, The Prindle Post, and 1,000 Word Philosophy. She sits on both the Diversity and Rules Committees for the National Intercollegiate Ethics Bowl and has served as a case writer for the National Bioethics Bowl and the National High School Ethics Bowl. She is a co-founder of the Utah Prison Ethics Bowl Project which is a program that brings ethics education and debate into the Utah Wasatch and Timpanogos prisons. She has also conducted philosophy for children's programs in K–12 classrooms and hosts Ethics Slam events designed to help to model quality philosophical reasoning to communities all over the state of Utah. She enjoys traveling and spending time in nature.

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