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 doesn't mean it is necessary, just or compassionate. Consider the many horrible practices humanity has engaged in throughout the centuries. We might be able to justify many of these practices as natural, but that is another question as to whether they should be perpetuated. Ethical progress requires us to question our natural instincts and sometimes nature itself. Life in a state of nature is complex and does not express itself only through violence, as some seem to believe. Empathy and kindness are quieter but still powerful forces in evolution, especially the evolution of social species like humans. Each of us contains many possibilities from our evolutionary inheritance and we can choose which parts we wish to perpetuate. In thinking about a better future for our species a reverence for the natural world is vital, but so too is a reverence for our highest inner selves, as expressed through our philosophies and ethics.
Discussion
How much can we look to the natural world as our ethical guide?
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. We wanted 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 naturalistic fallacy
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 we shouldn't apply it to murdering other species. As vegans, we don’t think our part in causing suffering is absolved by the fact that other people do it, whether now or in the past. Causing unnecessary suffering 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 cases involved pigs, bulls, cows, horses, donkeys and mules. The trials took the same course as they would for human defendants, even to the extent of the animals being given legal representation. 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. For some reason wild animals were never put on trial, but insects and rats were for damaging crops. If found guilty, they would 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. To assert dominance an deter future rebellion, the keepers ensured the other elephants in the circus watched as well.
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 that underpins 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, early nature documentaries have a lot to answer for their focus on lions, or more usually groups of lionesses, hunting. Lions, unlike humans, 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 can about where to get nutrients. Another behaviour that lions have evolved is infanticide. When a lion defeats another lion and takes over a pride, they will often immediately kill all of the unweaned cubs. This forces the lionesses in the pride to become more fertil, so that the lion can start propagating his own genetic material immediately. If someone believes that lions eating meat provides justification for the same behaviour by humans, how would they feel about someone justifying infanticide using the same logic? Human moral agency is key to why that makes little sense. 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. 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 important, 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 use the word 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. Well over nine-tenths of land-based animal mass is composed of humanity and the livestock we have bred. The majority of birds by mass in the world are composed of industrially farmed chickens. Again, to appeal to nature in justifying this system is to render the term "nature" meaningless.
Beyond the food chain
The food chain, two 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 canine best friends nibble and gnaw their way through many more. Again, the long history of human 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, bigger fish eating smaller fish, has persisted for so long in our consciousness is a pointer to how much people prefer simple ideas over comprehending 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 becoming the great caretaker species of our world. There are so many positive ways humans could 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, so long as we remember that we do not possess the omnipotence of our imagined gods. Our philosophies should be built on a reverence for the evolutionary systems of life, instead of using nature as an excuse for limiting our circle of compassion.
Nature
Nature is incredibly complex and there are no simply answers as to when we should use it as a guide or otherwise. There are times when it is appropriate to appeal to nature, and other times when it makes little sense. We might, for example, say we prefer to buy products, particulary ones we put in or on our body, that are "natural". Natural in this sense means something akin to harmony with evolution; it is shorthand for the fact that these products have a long lineage of interacting within ourselves or our ecosystems. Because they have been widely used, we would 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. The things humans create interact with the 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 with respect to 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 nature and the evolved properties of sentience: the ability for sentient beings to have positive and negative physical and emotional experiences of existence. However, they then transcend the purely physical universe, extending into the immaterial realm of ideas. They dwell and take their final form in our intellectual and philosophical selves. An example of the relationship between nature and our intellectual selves is 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 concepts partly in thought, such as human dignity.
It takes levels of intellectual abstraction to draw a line from the workings of the natural world to concepts like animal or human rights. Utilitarian calculations of pleasure and pain can get us some part of the way, but eventually such calculations lead us to places that feel morally repugnant. Take the Ursula K. Le Guin story, in which a single child's suffering is required for the rest of the society to enjoy a high 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 some people would be better off as slaves. 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, are behind the the words spoken before the American War of Independence: "Give me liberty, or give me death". Before advanced human information processing, the concept of liberty was an instinct that most animals shared. We have taken that natural impulse and added many layers and nuances to it.
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 universe had divinely embedded ethical laws that could not be overridden by humans. Starting from an almost universal belief in a divinely 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 limits on our ability to imagine 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. We cannot get lost in a realm of pure thought disconnected from reality. The world, that which exists outside of ourselves, is the focal point that anchors our ideas, around which our ability to communicate coherently depends. Nature is a guide, not, as previous thinkers believed, either god's creation or god itself.
Conclusion
To say something is natural is not the end of a discussion; though it is often 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 something we should accept and model ourselves on, 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 should recognise ourselves as powerful actors. The choice we have before us in using that power is what will the parts of reality that our actions can and do touch be like. What will the legacy of our passing through time and space be 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 and an 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 part of a new conception of humanity’s potential within our complex evolutionary world.