Philosophy and Practice: Eating Meat

I'm late getting to an examination of Eric Schwitzgebel's most recent study of how philosophers and non-philosophers think and act on various moral issues. He has many blog posts discussing preliminary findings (links to all listed here). It's not a big surprise that when it comes to questions of right behavior, how people think and how they act might not align. It's fascinating, though, to learn a little about whether philosophers, with all their training and practice in logical consistency, might manage to act in ways more consistent with their beliefs than someone not so trained.

My judgment preliminary to reading/discussing Schwitzgebel's preliminary findings is to think that philosophers may well not manage such consistency. My suspicion is that logical consistency is one thing, and consistent action another. What works against our profession's emphasis on logical consistency is an equally strong ethos of thought mattering more than deed.

Knowing that anecdotal evidence is not worth its weight in gold (but maybe in something less valuable, say, corn), I would throw out an observation. Some environmental philosophers of my acquaintance have immaculate lawns, obtainable only by the application of quantities of poison. No environmental scientists of my acquaintance have immaculate lawns, and when nudged just the slightest amount will speak at length about how the height of your lawn mower blade affects competition between weeds and grass for access to sunlight and the relative rates of pesticide application on lawns compared to farms, and so on and so on.

Schwitzgebel:

The biggest divergences in moral opinion concerned our question about "regularly eating the meat of mammals such as beef and pork". 60% of ethics professor respondents rated mammal-meat consumption as morally bad, compared to 45% of non-ethicist philosophers and just 19% of non-philosophers. Opinion also divided by gender and age. Women were about 1.5 times as likely to condemn mammal-meat consumption (55% of women rated it bad vs. 37% of men). There was a similar shift of opinion with age: 55% of respondents born in 1960 or later condemned mammal-meat consumption, compared to 35% born before 1960. One might expect a compound effect for young female philosophers, and indeed it was so: Fully 81% of female philosophers born in 1960 or later said it was morally bad to regularly eat the meat of mammals. To put this degree of consensus in perspective: In last year's PhilPapers survey of philosophical opinion, only 82% of philosophers endorsed non-skeptical realism about the existence of an external world. (No word, so far, on how philosophers who deny the existence of an external world feel about seeming to consume meat.)

One thing I've noticed at philosophy department functions is that when there is food and the catering is ordered by someone outside the department, there are never enough vegetarian options. (This is also true, and consistently annoying, at lunches where sustainability is the topic.) Our philosophy department is about half "vegetarian" (that is, some degree of restraint on eating some meat), and that is higher than in the economics department (where being vegetarian is coextensive with being Hindu)--or in just about any other department. Likewise, at the meeting of the International Association of Women Philosophers last month, there were more special-ordered (vegetarian) sandwiches than regular fare. So it is not all that surprising to learn from this study that philosophers--many of them--have thought about the ethics of eating meat.

However, Schwitzgebel goes on to show data on who is actually eating meat, and it is a lot of us. Still, knowing that many other philosophers condemn meat-eating may have the effect of lowering how much meat is eaten at philosophical get-togethers.

Footprinting and Land Use

One of my students in environmental philosophy (Greg Puleo, a mathematician-to-be) constructed an Internet footprinting quiz worth visiting. The Guilt-o-Vision addresses the problem with other quizzes' hidden and baroque architecture by simplifying land use down to the numbers for crops and livestock.

While other quizzes measure a bounty of factors and crunch them down to one opaque figure (such as this one, which says that I would need 3.2 earths if everyone were to drive, eat, heat their house, pay Terrapass, and throw out their garbage the way I do), Greg's quiz just tells you how many square kilometers of land are required to grow your food. Well, not all your food, but corn, chicken, and beef.

What's astonishing about what it shows, of course, is that if you substitute corn for meat, much less land is used. However, Greg has pointed out that the variables and how they're measured incorporate many assumptions. For instance, there is a difference between corn and other vegetables, between industrial and non-industrial production methods, and between factory-raised chickens and farm-raised chickens. Not to mention that in an efficient agriculture system, animals can be raised on pasture which is too poor for growing crops. But that's not how our animals are raised, are they? They're raised on mid-Western corn.

Which Is It? GMO or Organic?

The organic community has soundly rejected the use of genetically modified crops, and current organic standards do not permit genetically modified crops to be marketed as organic, even if they are grown without harmful pesticides or artificial fertilizers.

The reasons include the fact that genetic modification can come with unknown risks to the environment and that genetic modification alters plants in ways that many people feel are more extreme or unnatural than alterations that are brought about through selective breeding. I would put this in terms of "purity," a concept like "natural" or "disgusting" which seems to relate entirely to the eye of the beholder.

In addition, genetically modified crops are tied to patents and commercialization which threatens the economic well-being and independence of subsistence farmers.

However, genetic modification also opens up opportunities which can contribute to long-term sustainable agriculture, according to the authors of Tomorrow's Table: Organic Farming, Genetics, and the Future of Food. For instance, if a variety of rice were genetically modified to make it flood tolerant, then instead of using herbicides that might have negative health consequences, farmers could flood fields to kill weeds. There might also be the possibility of genetically modifying crops so that they are tolerant of marginal growing conditions, permitting them to be grown without the use of high levels of artificial fertilizers.

My inclination is to be open-minded and even enthusiastic about the possibilities of genetic engineering, and I would argue that skepticism about the technology should be based in empirical arguments. If it provides a solution that solves a real problem, then I don't think the argument from purity is strong enough to give us reason to put on the brakes. Likewise, from a biological standpoint, genetic engineering seems to be different in kind but not degree from conventional breeding (even when genes from vastly different species are intermingled). Therefore, it extends problems that we already have without introducing new problems.

However, the gravity of those problems should not be underestimated, and neither should their nature as social and legal, rather than technical, problems. The problem is not how to physically grow enough nutrients for poor populations, but how to introduce stability and universal access into their food system. This is a problem that genetic engineering of crops will probably exacerbate rather than solve, as long as our patent system discourages creativity and as long as markets control the options of poor farmers.

Locavores are Everywhere

The LOCAVORE movement has become so popular that there is even an iPhone app to support locavores in their search for farmer's markets and in-season produce.

The reasons that people support growing and buying food locally include a desire to build strong communities, accountability, support for small and sustainable farming, reduction of dependence on fossil fuels for transportation, and aesthetic enjoyment. Some people feel that it is a way of putting down roots (so to speak) and finding what is special about the unique place where they live. It is a way of reclaiming regional flavors in a mass-market mass-media world.

It fits in well with my own life-style: my parents were some sort of urban homesteaders, with a significant-sized vegetable garden in the alley of our small-town backyard. We canned tomatoes, made dill pickles, put away plums and pears. Now, I belong to a CSA and complain about coming up with creative ways to fit a half dozen red peppers into every week's meals for months on end.

YUM!

But let's take a look at this again....
Is locavory elitist?
And are we pinning too much on a symbolic back-to-the-land movement?

The transportation of food accounts for 11% of food-related greenhouse-gas emissions. So, while all that transportation does add up, it's not the fastest route to cutting greenhouse gases.

What's faster? Cutting out meat, especially red meat. 18% of all greenhouse gases are produced by livestock, and 30% of the earth's land surface is devoted to raising livestock or the grain and grass they eat. If you replaced beef with beans one day a week, it would reduce your carbon footprint more than becoming a locavore.