Question
Eating meat is natural
Alternatives
Killing and death are part of nature. What about the food chain? Lions eat meat.
Summary
Whether something has been done for a long time does not define whether it is necessary, just or compassionate. Consider all of the violent practices humanity has engaged in throughout the centuries. We might call many of these practices natural, but that is another question as to whether they should be perpetuated. Ethical progress will, on some occasions, require us to question our natural instincts and even nature itself. Nature, however, is complex and does not express itself only through violence, as some seem to believe. Empathy and kindness have been quieter but still powerful forces in evolution, especially the evolution of social species like humans. Each of us contains the possibilities of our evolutionary inheritance; we can make choices about what parts of our nature to perpetuate. A reverence for the natural world is vital in pondering the way forward for our species, but so too is a reverence for our highest selves, as they are expressed through philosophies and ethics. It is not in the preferencing of either our natural or our philosophical selves that the mutual flourishing of humans and the natural world will lie, but rather in their reconciliation.
Discussion
As much as humans have long wished for an ordered, moral universe, one that makes sense, the laws that govern the universe are mathematical and amoral. Good things happen to bad people; bad things happen to good people. Our fate is in some part governed by the elegant but soulless laws of physics. Humanity made up things like karma, heaven and hell to give us the impression of a just universe to shield ourselves from the uncomfortable truth that the control we have over our lives is limited. Hard work, intelligence and diligence are all potent factors in deciding what sort of life we will have, but fate often comes in and overrules them all. It would be nice if the universe had some sort of innate justice, but it does not.
The amoral universe
Science and philosophy have long known that what happens in nature is not necessarily right or just, and hence philosophy has a concept called the “naturalistic fallacy”. To say something is natural and consider this a moral or intellectual defence of it is not enough. Massive outbreaks of deadly diseases used to be common; to intervene with modern medicine is not necessarily natural, but it is surely the most moral action available. Cannibalism, slavery, warfare, patriarchy, oppression and all manner of atrocities have long and fairly universal histories in all larger human societies. Studies on human cannibalism show we have been eating each other almost as long as we have been eating other species. Our ancestors were practising cannibalism over a million years ago, well before we evolved into homo sapiens. Is claiming cannibalism as natural a valid ethical defence of it? What about murder? Should a murderer be able to use the fact that people have always murdered each other as a defence in a court of law? If the "natural" defence doesn’t apply to murdering humans, then why should it apply to us murdering other species? As vegans, we don’t think our part in causing suffering is absolved by the fact that other people do it now or have done it in the past. Causing unnecessary suffering to sentient creatures requires a higher ethical justification than appealing to conformity or habit.
What about lions?
A common refrain here might be, "But lions eat meat!" Confusing the ethical nature of human and non-human animals has a long history. For hundreds of years, various regions in Europe put animals on trial for crimes ranging from murder to property damage. Most trials involved farm animals, and there are cases involving pigs, bulls, cows, horses, donkeys and mules. The trials took the same course as they would for human defendants, and if found guilty, the animal would be publicly executed. In one alleged case depicted in 1457, a mother sow and her piglets were put on trial for killing a child. While the piglets were acquitted, the mother was found guilty and executed. Wild animals that killed people were not put on trial, but insects and rats could be for damaging crops. If found guilty, they would then be exiled, or the church would be asked to intervene through exorcisms or incantations. Though not the subject of a trial, in the US case from 1916, an elephant lashed out at her trainer after he hit her with a hook, and crushed the man. A crowd of two thousand people turned out shortly afterwards to watch Mary the elephant be hanged from chains suspended on a crane.
The reason we no longer put animals on trial in the modern world is that we have a greater understanding of the fact that animals lack moral agency. As complex as the inner worlds of many animals are, often displaying empathy and compassion, they lack the higher abstract reasoning, rationality and communication skills necessary for a human-style moral framework. Of course, as acknowledged by our courts of law, not all humans have the capacity for full moral agency either, such as young children and the legally insane.
Returning to the fact that people often bring up lions among the countless predatory animals they have to choose from, our early nature documentaries have a lot to answer for their focus on lions, or more usually groups of lionesses, hunting. Lions have evolved to be obligate carnivores. Even if lions did have the moral agency to question their diet, they would be unable to make the same sorts of choices omnivores like humans are able to make about where to get nutrients. Another behaviour that lions have evolved is infanticide. When a lion defeats another lion and takes over their pride, they will often immediately kill all of the unweaned cubs in the pride. This forces the lionesses to become more fertile and allows the lion to immediately start propagating his own genetic material. If someone believes that lions eating meat somehow justifies the same behaviour for humans, how would they feel about someone justifying infanticide using the same logic? Moral agency is the key to our understanding here. The complex morality humans are capable of is one of the aspects of the human species that is to be most celebrated.
Modernity and nature
If there is a higher meaning in the story of our species, it probably lies somewhere in our collective ethical and intellectual progress. Humanity has made significant, though patchy, progress in many areas, including law, justice, democracy, medicine and philosophy. We did not guide this progress by appeals to what is natural, but by questioning what is good and just. The ethics of our relationship with non-human animals should be a fundamental part of our conversation about human progress. The fact that we have treated animals badly for so long is no excuse for perpetuating that status quo. Continuing to participate in the oppression of animals, especially farmed animals, is not an unchangeable part of our nature, but rather a choice we make.
A respect for nature is obviously a good and important thing, especially given the limits of our knowledge and our poor history of intervening in natural systems. Even if eating animals is natural, to call the modern diet "natural" or the factory farming system "natural" is to render the word meaningless. It is almost a cold joke to call it natural when one of the primary drivers of the destruction of the natural world is the modern animal farming system. People who hunt wild animals with their own hands or with tools they made themselves might be able to make the claim that they are doing something natural, but that sort of system is no longer universalisable. Hunting in natural ecosystems is never going to feed billions of people meat multiple times a day or week. How we eat meat requires an unnatural system. We have long ago turned our backs on the wild, breaking the natural food chain and jettisoning our place in any sort of cycle consistent with the evolutionary system. The unnatural, oppressive animal confinement system of barbed wire, cages, and slaughterhouses; the controlled breeding of species; the pasture, which is the primary cause of deforestation; and the third of crops grown for animal feed- these are unnecessary and primary things we need to transcend if our species wants to reclaim any sort of positive, compatible relationship with the natural world. Due to the modern industrial farming system, the majority of birds by mass in the world is composed of chickens. Well over nine-tenths of land-based animal mass is composed of humans and their livestock. Again, to appeal to nature in justifying this system is to render the term "nature" meaningless.
Beyond the food chain
The food chain, some simple words that lead people so deeply astray. People imagine this simple structure with humans at the top, and everything else in a chain beneath it. If we think this is a natural order of things, what do we do with the knowledge that, before humans started using spears, tigers probably ate more humans than the other way around? Tigers, lions and other big cats may eat hundreds of people each year. Sharks, crocodiles, bears, wolves, leopards, Komodo dragons, anacondas, hyenas, and even our doggy best friends nibble and gnaw on quite a few more. Again, the long human history of cannibalism also makes things more complicated. Then we have the mites, mosquitoes, ticks, fleas, lice, leeches and flies that regularly prey on humans. After we die, our corpses would naturally be picked apart by scavengers, microbes, bugs and so on. We probably started burning and burying our bodies because we were uncomfortable with this process, and maybe we didn't want animals getting a taste for our flesh. There are also tiny beings that live in places like our eyebrows, and bacteria that inhabit our bodies. Indeed, there are so many microscopic organisms living in and on our bodies that it is believed that anywhere up to half of our total cell count is microbial cells. Where does all this place humans in the mythical food chain? A food web might be more accurate, but this probably also undersells the full complexity of how countless species interact with each other. The fact that an idea like there being a food chain, big fish eat little fish, has persisted for so long in our consciousness is a pointer to how much people prefer simple ideas over understanding the complexity of reality.
We can reimagine the human role in the natural world and the meaning of our individual lives in relation to it. Human higher consciousness hands us unearned power and, therefore, potential responsibility. Killing, death, disease, whatever evils there are in nature, as human beings, we are able to reflect on them and even potentially intervene in them. Imagine humanity as the great caretaker species of our world. There are more positive ways humans could generally interact with the non-human world. We could bring healing to other species, lessen the impacts of disease and disaster, and make this planet a kinder place for more beings to exist. For other animals, we could try to be like the benevolent gods we have always imagined, while always being careful that we do not possess the imagined omnipotence of gods. We can build our philosophies on a reverence for the evolutionary systems of life, instead of using them as an excuse for limiting our circle of compassion.
The naturalistic fallacy
Nature can be beautiful and awe-inspiring, but just as easily be cruel and arbitrary. This is because the mechanisms that govern material reality, the laws of physics, are amoral. The cosmos, being as a whole unconscious, cares not for good or bad. Amid all the hopes and dreams of humanity to live in a universe that makes sense, that is fundamentally good and cares about them, a void stares back into us, blank and impassive. The evolutionary system that created what we call nature is unfathomably intricate. The endless forms most beautiful around us are for many of us a great part of the happiness of our lives. Being amoral, though, this system is just as capable of causing intense brutality, suffering and ugliness.
There are times when it is appropriate to appeal to nature, and other times when it makes little sense. We might say we prefer what is "natural" in some product we use. Natural in this sense means something akin to harmony with evolution; shorthand for the fact that these products have a long lineage of interacting within our ecosystems. We would therefore assume them to be less likely to have undiscovered properties and side effects. Appealing to what is natural in this respect is a practical claim, because the things humans create interact with and become part of natural systems that are vital to the health of all life; systems that are vulnerable to disruption and generally beyond our complete understanding. Appealing to what is natural about ethics is a very different claim. Ethics are an emergent property of consciousness, rather than an inherent structural element within nature. They are grounded in and enabled by evolved properties of sentience, the ability for sentient beings to have positive and negative physical and emotional experiences of existence, but they then transcend the physical universe.
Ethics extends into the immaterial realm of ideas. They are products of our intellectual and philosophical selves. An example of this might be the concept that a human being should not be subjected to cruel and unusual punishment. Although rooted in evolved mechanisms like pain, this claim extends into the concept of common human dignity. It takes levels of intellectual abstraction to draw a line from the workings of the natural world to concepts like universal human rights. Utilitarian calculations of pleasure and pain can get us some part of the way towards human rights, but eventually such calculations lead us to places that feel morally repugnant. Take the Ursula K. Le Guin story, where a single child's suffering is required for the rest of the society to enjoy a better standard of living. Adding up the pleasure and pain of this society and deciding that this was a positive outcome is a conclusion that only psychopaths and perhaps some economists would agree with. The concept of slavery is another area where an economist might make a utilitarian calculation that weighs costs and benefits, and find that most poor people would be better off as slaves to rich people. People who have experienced slavery, even in its less harsh forms, would generally come to a different conclusion. The partly intangible concept of freedom, of personal autonomy, would often see them echoing the words spoken before the American War of Independence: "Give me liberty, or give me death".
Interestingly, what we now call human rights were previously called natural rights or natural laws. The use of the word natural here was meant to embody the idea that the divine universe had embedded in it ethical laws that could not be overridden by power. Starting from an almost invariable cultural context of belief in a created universe, thinkers mistook evolved human traits like sociability, fairness, mirror neurons and empathy as the fingerprints of an ethical creator. The very need for the concept of human rights, however, comes about because our ethics are neither clearly apparent in nor enforced by nature; if there are fingerprints, they are faint and obscure indeed. Even our theologies must in some ways reckon with the world as it is, for there are limitations on our ability to ponder our existence from outside of its walls. Neither the atheist nor the theist can ignore the philosophical ramifications of the fact that pain, bad, and evil are highly correlated words. The natural world, that which exists outside of ourselves, is the focal point that anchors our ideas, around which our ability to communicate coherently depends. It is not, as those previous thinkers believed, either god's creation nor god itself.
To say something is natural is not the end of a discussion; it is just an important fact within that discussion. Many of us have positive connotations of the word nature, but in its amoral totality, it is not something to be universally celebrated. The brutality in nature has no inherent meaning or positivity, even if that brutality might lead to what seem like positive outcomes. The majesty and beauty of a carnivore in full flight, the structural niche they have made for themselves in productive ecosystems, cannot be easily disentangled from the horror and pain they cause. Instead of being our leader, brutality in nature is in some ways our greatest intellectual and ethical challenge. We have both the ability to perceive the injustices and cruelties in nature and the power to intervene to make nature less brutal. We must recognise that we are powerful actors. The choice we have before us is what the parts of reality that our actions can and do touch will be like. What will be the legacy of our passing through time and space on the ocean of sentient experience? To act, to do nothing, to be or not to be, every choice and non-choice has ethical consequences, some of them profound. The universe can be kinder and more just, including for other animals, if we make positive choices. Living an ethical life asks more of us intellectually than conformity to nature, of unquestioning obedience to the world we were born into. Progress happens when we rethink the way things are, as far as we can from first principles, and imagine better ways things can be.
A more ethical universe is a lofty goal, a heroic challenge for humanity that requires the flourishing of the best within us. To transcend our limitations, to outgrow our myopic selfishness and embrace the complexity of the interconnected reality of life, is a worthy challenge of our higher consciousness. Such lofty goals begin by taking pragmatic, powerful actions in our daily lives. By changing how we consume, especially what we eat, we can vote to balance and heal the natural world. Our full individual and collective ethical potential shall only start to be realised when we acknowledge our interdependence on, and our place within, the grand family of life. Veganism is a jumping-off point for a new conception of humanity’s role within our complex evolutionary world.