I can't be a vegetarian in moderation.

The Thanksgiving-through-Christmas season finds me reminding my friends and family that I'm vegetarian more often than usual. This year, for some reason, I've also been fending off an odd number of “everything in moderation” arguments to eat a little dead animal once in a while. The moderation comments would be totally fine if I were only avoiding meat for my health, or for larger concerns about the environment, but it's a pretty outrageous idea to be “moderate” in one's ethics.


So, I wanted to take a stab at writing out why I'm a vegetarian, with some comments on the ethical side of it. Nothing here is a particularly new or unique insight, but if you're not a vegetarian (or even if you are) you may not have seen the reasons laid out quite like this.


I'm not a vegetarian for health reasons, although that's a nice side-effect, nor to save the planet, although I think we should all spend some more effort doing so. I don't think meat, the substance, is gross—venison tenderloin and really good sushi loom particularly large in my memory. And, while I like animals, I'm not terribly sentimental about them in general.


I stopped eating meat after really thinking about the ethics of it. If you want to understand why I and others like me are so firm about the issue, you have to understand that it's not a practical or optional choice; it's a purely ethical one, like not murdering, or keeping your promises.


The logic goes like this.
-I shouldn't harm others without good reason, and animals are a kind of other.
-Eating animals harms them.
-I don't need to eat them to live, or even to live a healthy life, so I don't have a good reason to harm them for food purposes.
-Therefore, don't eat them.


Okay, let's expand that a little.
-I shouldn't harm others without good reason. This is one of the cornerstones of all ethical behavior; if you don't agree with this, there's really no reason to try to discuss ethics at all. There is, however, a lot of room for discussion & definition here: what constitutes “harm”, what counts as “others”, and what we might agree are “good reasons”. For the purpose of this discussion, I'll limit “harm” to “death and/or significant suffering”. “Good reasons” have to be weighed against the harm done to others, so they have to be pretty significant to justify killing/suffering.


And, very importantly, “others” means any entity worth treating as an end in itself.  That means we think it has rights of its own. Animals fall in this category, at least most of the kinds of animals we eat. Think of cows, pigs, or chickens—we'll ignore whether or not clams are ends in themselves for right now.

Most people believe that animals are ends in themselves, although you may have to poke them a little to get them to admit it.

Here's the test: is it wrong to kill or torture an animal just for the heck of it? Not to eat it, or use it, or to put it out of its misery, or anything like that. And we'll assume that killing it doesn't have any bad effects for people—it wasn't someone else's property, no one was depending on it for anything, nobody will see you kill it and be emotionally disturbed by it. So, can you kill it? Insert whatever animal you want here—kittens or puppies are my choice, but they may have an unfair emotional advantage.

So, is it okay to kill it, just because you feel like it? I think no, and I think most people would agree. The reason is because animals deserve consideration in and of themselves, as some kind of individual. There's nothing inherently wrong with smashing an inanimate object, or in killing a plant. But with animals, we quite intuitively object to killing or hurting them without good reason.


Animals are “others”. There is a being there that deserves some kind of respect, that shouldn't be killed or tortured for no reason. We could lay out a big complex theory of animal rights here, presumably granting more to orangutans and less for shrimp, but all we need is that basic level. We need a good word for “living beings that have person-ness, with rights and moral consideration, but aren't necessarily human”, but I'm not going to try to make one on the spot.


-Eating animals harms them.
Obviously, most of our food animals live pretty wretched, painful lives, mostly due to the way we raise them in huge numbers. Actually, unfortunately, it's not obvious—we'd probably see a lot more vegetarianism if people were routinely shown the condition of our food animals.


Even when their lives are pretty okay, though, we kill them, which is a pretty straightforward harm. It's kind of debatable which side of this is worse—depending on how much you value the individual life of an animal, you might think killing it painlessly is ethically neutral, and it's just the pain & fear it experiences while alive that are evil. That's an interesting argument, but I think we could equally well say that there is something it's like to be a cow, that they have some kind of life—maybe without the same kind of language, abstract thought, dreams or sense of self that most functional human adults have, but some kind of life, a lived experience, and, other things being equal, it's wrong to take that away by killing it.

-I don't need to eat them to live, or even to live a healthy life.
I won't get into this too much, let me just say: science agrees. Yes, humans evolved with some meat in our diet. But no, we don't have to eat it to live, or to be healthy. Before you say anything about protein, look up “vegan bodybuilders” or “vegan athletes”. If you really have to eat meat for some kind of health reason—iron, for example—well, I'm always a little skeptical, but maybe you do! In that case, that's a good reason. Most people probably don't fall into this category.

So, under most circumstances, it's not true that we “need” to eat animals to live healthy lives. We eat them for some combination of cultural convenience and pleasure. I don't think cultural convenience and pleasure constitute “good reasons” to cause suffering and death.


-Therefore, don't eat them.
Make sense now?


The shorter, not-as-friendly, but totally legit version of this argument is:


“Don't kill for pleasure.”

That's what the vast majority of meat consumption is. Yes, it's part of our culture, but most people have no problem ducking out on some parts of their culture they're not crazy about.


The line of reasoning above looks solid to me. If you take issue with it, it seems like it's got to be at two points: the idea that animals are others, or the idea that we don't need to eat meat to be healthy.


For the latter point, I refer you to: science, the more-predominantly-vegetarian cultures of the world, and the physical example of vegetarian/vegan athletes. Going veg isn't a magic health bullet, and I'm not denying that reasonable amounts of good meat in the diet can be great from a health perspective. But that's beside the moral point: you can live very well without eating meat, so it's an option, not a need. Switching to a vegetarian diet is very likely to be healthier for you, given the insane amount and low quality of meat in the American diet, but, again, that's beside the point. All we need to proceed is the minimal argument that you don't need meat to be healthy, for which there is abundant evidence. So, whatever you're weighing against animal suffering and death, it can't be nutritional need.


(By the way, you may have heard some kind of “we evolved to eat meat/it's natural” argument; those don't work. We call that the “fallacious appeal to nature”, among other things. Humans evolved with plenty of rape and cannibalism going around, and, if you want to talk unnatural, let's talk about antibiotics and iPhones. Just because we did it in the past, or see it in nature, doesn't mean we should do it; nor are things unethical because they're “un-natural”, if that word even makes sense. Nature and our history are completely different categories from what's ethically right.)


So, if you're critiquing the argument, you're probably going to have to fixate on the question of whether animals deserve moral consideration. This is a big, vexatious question, with lots of complexities, but I think the basic answer is very clear, and that answer is that they do. If you disagree, then you are bound to agree that it is fine to buy up pets or livestock, only to torture or kill them for your own pleasure.


Most people probably find that repulsive. But, again, since we don't have a nutritional need to eat animals, when we eat them we are creating a lot of suffering, and then killing them for our pleasure. The fact that we also use their remains is beside the moral point. If we kill a human but then do something worthwhile with the remains (donate the money in their pockets to charity, cook them up in nutritious recipes, make jewelry out of their teeth), does that in any way lessen or justify the original murder? It's beside the point.


We humans are born ignorant, tend to be weak-willed, and are really good at double-thinking our way out of doing what we know is the right or smart thing. That said, I really do think people try to do the good thing, we do what's best by our reasoning. When I got my head wrapped around ethical vegetarianism, that was the issue settled for me, and, while there are lots of potential reasons to go veg, I find the ethical logic the most persuasive, and it's what I prefer to use to explain my stance, in the hope that others will find it compelling.


You might stop eating meat just because you find it very unappealing. You might stop because you want to improve your health: eliminating or really limiting meat intake is almost certainly a move in the healthy direction, at least in our society. Assuming an otherwise-healthy diet, it's also probably one of the best diet changes to assist with weight loss, which is frequently what people mean when they say “better health” anyway. And you might stop eating meat for environmental or social reasons: our current meat industry is pretty devastating to the environment on a few different levels.


Any reason to stop eating meat is cool with me, but none of these reasons are what I would call compelling. They're circumstantial, or they're a “practical” good. Other things being equal, if your preferences changed, or if you could figure out a healthy meat-inclusive diet, you'd go back to it. I find environmental concerns very important, but not really compelling: the issues are too big and too complex to make our choices black and white and, again, other things being equal, we can imagine things being different. If cows weren't destroying the atmosphere as fast or faster than cars are, then we could eat them again. Cows, not cars.


Likewise, I don't like the use of appeals to emotion (just ask my exes), although the emotional “reasons” for becoming vegetarian share a common thread with the form I find compelling: a concern for others. I don't like to use the “look at these poor cows/pigs/chickens, doesn't that make you sad” argument, because it's not an argument. People have no duty to feel anything, and maybe you just don't feel strongly about chickens. That's not a moral failing. However, people do have a duty to follow ethical codes, regardless of how they feel about them.

That last sentence sneaks in all kinds of assumptions about what ethics/morals are and how they work, but I'm going to run with it. Immanuel Kant, an 18^th century philosopher, puts it kind of like this: one way to tell if something is ethically correct is to decide if you would do it, or at least think you should do it, even if you really didn't want to, and ignoring any effects from doing it.


(Apologies to Kant and my undergrad philosophy professors for errors here.)

That's one way to define duty, to define morality. If you don't believe in something like this—things being right or wrong regardless of how you feel about them, regardless of whether you get punished/rewarded for doing them—then I don't think you can really talk about “morality”, just utility and punishment/reward schemes. That's fine in a lot of contexts, but I'm going to go ahead and assume you're a little more advanced, morally, than that.

All of which is to say: if vegetarianism is really ethical, and it seems to be, then we can't really do much compromising or moderation on that account. We wouldn't want people to be compromise on the “don't murder” rule, and you could probably get into some trouble by suggesting we should practice moderation where fidelity and promise-keeping are concerned.

It took me a long time to see the logic here, and my diet change was a gradual one, facilitated by various people in my life. So, while I don't believe in compromise or moderation on the issue, and I do think there's a clear-cut ethical question and answer here, I have a lot of patience for meat-eaters. There is a massive cultural obstacle to even thinking about this issue clearly, and massive cultural obstacles are no joke. On top of that, one's food is a very intimate thing. It's your body, really. It's wrapped up in your financial reality, in your culture, in the way you run your life day to day—changes to diet aren't easy or insignificant, so I don't get mad when my veg-proselytizing doesn't have instant effect.

And yet: this is about what's right. And you can do it. And it's pretty delicious, actually.