Eating meat is good, says the philosopher

The essay starts from a thought experiment about aliens raising humans as livestock and uses it to discuss longtermism, animal consumption, and whether existence can count as a benefit even when it ends in being eaten. It then turns to Nick Zangwill’s claim that eating meat is morally good because the practice sustains domesticated animals, but says that this still feels wrong.

It then pushes a darkly comic alternative that treats some animals as “evil” and therefore fit to eat, before concluding that the idea does not solve the original problem. The author ends with a more ordinary view: eat animals that live good lives, prefer older animals, and treat freedom and self-determination as morally important.

Reading notes

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• The text uses a scenario of aliens who raise humans as livestock to question whether existence can be a benefit when it ends in slaughter.
• The hypothesis relates to longtermism, because future lives count morally even when they would not exist if the system were shut down.
• The author says he is sympathetic to vegetarianism, but thinks the intuition is plausible that some animals might prefer to be born and eaten rather than not be born.
• He says he already used this argument against vegetarians and vegans in college and that it led him to keep eating meat.
• The text presents Nick Zangwill’s book, Our Moral Duty to Eat Meat, as an explicit formulation of this idea.
• Zangwill’s thesis is that the practice of eating meat benefits animals because the existence of certain domesticated animals depends on it.
• Despite having defended this argument for years, the author says he always thought there was something wrong with it.
• The text proposes, in a provocative tone, eating the animals considered “good” and eating the “bad” ones instead.
• This logic includes crabs, lobsters, shrimp, octopuses, parasites, cats, chickens and hyenas, described as violent, cannibalistic, or morally repulsive.
• The author admits that this proposal mixes is with ought, but says he considers it coherent within a kind of compatibilism.
• Even so, he concludes that eating only “evil” animals does not solve the original problem about the existence of domesticated animals.
• As a more serious application, the text suggests that this criterion would make more sense for scientific research than for eating.
• The author’s current position is simpler: eat animals that have good lives, so that their lives are preferable to not existing.
• He says that, in his ideal world, he would eat only old animals, and would pay more for that.
• In the aliens scenario, this would be equivalent to slaughtering humans at age 60, with plenty of autonomy and a good quality of life.
• Even so, he states that freedom and self-determination have moral value beyond utilitarian calculations.
• The text ends by saying that he may still prefer to consume “evil” animals while waiting for Old Steaks, Inc.