Eating Meat: The Role of
Intuition in Ethical Thought
Jeff McMahan is an
I discovered this when I
called McMahan in June to discuss his recently delivered lecture,
“Might we benefit animals by eating them?” The lecture examined whether it can
be good for animals to be brought into the world even if they’re reared to be
killed and eaten. On the phone, I was confused when McMahan said that he
intuitively disagreed with his own ethical arguments in favor of eating meat.
Was he or was he not against eating animals that had been raised humanely?
He paused: “That’s what
I’m trying to figure out.”
McMahan said he’d found
some flaws in his old arguments on the subject, and was retracing his logical
steps. He hoped to find a reason to support his intuitions, but he was open to
changing his mind. “This is what a philosopher’s supposed to do, follow the
argument wherever it leads,” he said. “You’re supposed to follow it even if it
leads somewhere you don’t want to go.”
Most of us are not like
McMahan. We do not follow moral arguments if they lead to uncomfortable
conclusions. We prefer to make ethical decisions based on instinct, popular
wisdom, and whatever feels like the right response to a particular situation.
It’s a mushy process - one that moral philosophers attempt to de-mush by laying
out the myriad assumption and implications that are weaved into almost every
human action, from how we spend our money to our relationships with
family.
Why bother with moral
philosophy when common sense serves most of us perfectly well? The simple
answer is that, as history shows, commonsensical beliefs are very often wrong.
Slavery, marital rape, and bans on interracial marriage were all widely
accepted in the relatively recent past. Much like fish who,
as the proverb goes, are the last to
discover water, humans are so immersed in immorality that we can be entirely
unaware of it.
Part of a moral
philosopher’s work, then, is to question common sense and reveal our ethical
blind spots. “I do think we make moral progress in part by challenging our
intuitions,” McMahan said.
This process is not as
straightforward as using reason to override moral instincts. (When are
philosophical processes ever straightforward?) Though our intuitions are very
often wrong, they’re nevertheless necessary to give morality its meaning. If we
have no emotive response, if no one cares at all when an act of evil is
committed, then morality does not exist.
And so rational thinking
and moral instinct are in a constant state of slippery conflict. As I
discovered through my conversations with McMahan, there’s no neat solution to
this problem; no formula that reveals what’s truly moral. But his struggle to
figure out whether it’s wrong to eat meat offers a deeply personal, imperfect
blueprint of how to make an ethical decision.
More than 10 weeks after
I first spoke to McMahan, I went to visit him at his study in
“I’ve haven’t done much
on killing animals,” he said, as he poured boiling water he’d distilled himself
over tea leaves that had been sent to
He didn’t smile or acknowledge
that this was a joke, but he still managed to project a
certain awkward warmth. McMahan looked more like a corporate figure than
a typical scruffy professor, with a buttoned-up light blue shirt, navy
trousers, and grey hair cut like a Lego figure’s. At
62 (on the cusp of 63 when we met), his eyebrows were habitually lowered,
making him appear glowering except for when his face transformed, briefly and
unequivocally, into a surprisingly joyful smile.
Despite his stern manner,
McMahan seemed glad to have company. When we’d arranged a date to meet, he’d
said he was free at any time on any day - he had no conflicting meetings, only
a never-ending pile of solitary work. Though McMahan’s philosophy is
explicitly focused on practical ethics with real-world relevance (as opposed to
more abstruse topics such as meta-ethics or normative ethics), his routine is
far removed from the crowded, fast-paced reality of many people’s everyday
lives.
“A day in my life is very
boring,” he said. He wakes at 9.30 am, has a piece of fruit for breakfast, and
immediately begins to work. His only breaks are a salad for lunch and granola
from the university dining hall for dinner. Sometimes he goes to
McMahan doesn’t go on
vacation, as he’s “overcommitted, overworked.” Any hobbies?
“I listen to music and I play squash and tennis,” he said, though, “I don’t
have enough time or enough partners.” Most of his friends are philosophers and,
though he seldom has dinner out, he does go to the odd social event. “I do have
friends I meet at the pub,” he said. “I enjoy a meeting at the pub in the
evening. I can work until close to closing time.”
In many ways, McMahan
lives up to the archetypal figure of an eccentric academic. Immersed in his
work, he fulfills the professorial stereotype of someone who’s slightly removed
from the rest of humanity. Perhaps his lifestyle is unimportant. But then
again, surely we develop our moral instincts - right or wrong - through our
personal lives and relationships.
At one point in our
conversation, McMahan referred to contemporary society’s wariness of
intellectuals. “These people are really contemptuous of academics in
particular, and the whole idea that there are experts and expertise and we can
have specialized knowledge about things,” he said. He’s right, of course: Widespread
suspicion of experts is unwarranted and foolish. But on the other hand, it’s
possible that those who view academics as cloistered and out of touch may also
have a point. Perhaps wholly dedicating oneself to a life of the mind can
create idiosyncratic moral intuitions. Just as we must all interrogate how our
personal backgrounds shape our instincts, surely professors should question how
a life spent in the ivory tower might affect their decisions.
This may be why philosophers’
attempts to unravel our moral instincts often lead to bizarre, if highly
logical, academic arguments. Consider the problem of whether it can ever be
morally acceptable to eat meat. For McMahan, the answer hinges on whether
humans can offset the wrongness of killing a chicken or a cow by providing the
animals with an enjoyable life in the first place.
“Overall, the ostensible
victim is being benefitted by the practice as a whole and would never exist
were I not able to kill it at the end,” said McMahan. He referred to
19th-century philosopher Leslie Stephen, who wrote in his 1896 book Social Rights and
Duties, “The pig has a stronger interest than anyone in the demand for
bacon. If all the world were Jewish, there would be no
pigs at all.”
This argument does not
engage with the environmental impact of humanely raising animals in order to
eat them. Instead, it’s focused entirely on whether the act of killing itself
can be justified. The question still holds practical relevance, according to
McMahan, because it connects to one of the fundamental issues in moral
philosophy: The non-identity problem.
McMahan, and several
other contemporary philosophers, consider the non-identity problem to be the
greatest unanswered ethical question. It was first identified in the early
1980s by moral philosopher Derek Parfit, a close friend of McMahan’s who died on the first day of
2017.
The non-identity problem
runs as follows: Humans are capable of actions that simultaneously create an
objectively worse state of affairs, but also allow certain people (who
otherwise wouldn’t have existed) to be born. For those who exist as a direct
result of these actions, the original act is not bad for them. It’s unclear
whether the act is, in fact, bad for anyone. This problem brings
several deep moral intuitions into conflict.
For example, when it
comes to eating meat, of course animals would be happier if they were free to
roam and never killed. But humans are motivated to bring many animals into the
world in order to kill and eat them. Those animals simply would never exist in
the first place were they not to be used as food - so perhaps it’s better for
them to exist and die than never be born?
On a broader scale, if we
continue to follow the current policies on climate change, people on earth will
have far worse lives in the coming centuries. If we drastically change our
policies, then everyday behaviors and lives will be transformed as a result.
“People will meet different people, marry different people, children will be
conceived at different times,” said McMahan. “In 100 to 200 years, if we follow
the status quo policy, one set of people will exist and be badly off but still
have lives that will be worth living. If we follow other policies, a different
set of people will exist and have better lives.”
This may seem like an
easy problem to solve: Simply go for whichever act leads to the existence of more better-off people! But such a solution is known in
philosophy as “the repugnant conclusion.” It
implies that we have a moral duty to simply create as many basically happy
people - or barnyard animals - as possible.
That sounds wonderful,
right? But it’s not clear when this moral imperative stops. It suggests that we
should create the maximum total happiness possible, meaning that a massively
overcrowded world of people with barely satisfactory lives would be preferable
to a world with a much smaller population of decently happy people. In
addition, it implies we’re morally obliged to be constantly breeding.
McMahan is not certain
whether the non-identity problem will ever be solved. “People have been trying
to do that for a very long time,” he said.
The calculated logic that
dominates philosophical thinking also seems to infiltrate McMahan’s personal
life. He’s stoical in conversation, and lacks the reflexive defensiveness that
leads most people to protect their self-image. I asked whether his wife, from
whom he’s separated, would consider him moral. “Yeah,” he said, with a slight
note of uncertainty. After our meeting, he sent a follow-up email that said his
views on the subject were “largely worthless” and included his wife’s email
address so that I could ask her directly.
I wrote to his wife, who
told me she didn’t want to talk. She’s kind, but uncomfortable with the idea of
weighing in. This is perfectly understandable; many of us might be perturbed to
be asked to comment on our former partner’s morality. Though McMahan’s
suggestion seems ethical in the abstract, it lacks a certain sentimental
intuition.
McMahan showed a similar
emotional remove when I asked him to recall a time that he’d acted
immorally. After struggling to drudge up a memory, he remembered - with
great surprise - that he’d recently lost his temper at a picnic, shattering a
plastic plate filled with food. “It amazed me so much. It made me understand
how some people do things, like kill people, and they don’t mean to at all, it
just happens to them,” he said. “It didn’t seem like intentional action to me.
It was like it happened to me.”
He’s largely learned to
suppress his anger, an emotion that he considers counter-productive. Does he
suppress other feelings? “Yeah. A lot of them,” he
said. Plenty of emotions, after all, can be hurtful to others. “I’m justifiably
sad an awful lot,” said McMahan. “I don’t want to burden people with my
sadness.”
He didn’t sound self-pitying,
or even lonely, when he said this. His hyper-rationality seems to make him view
his actions and inner life with a degree of remove - as if he watches himself
from a far-off, objective perspective, as just another figure navigating the
strange moral scenarios of the world. Clearly, his feelings and relationships
are dominated by his intellectual thoughts. Does this make him better than the
rest of us, or simply different? It’s not certain whether he’s living the moral
life we should all aspire to, or one that, if adopted by everyone, would tear
apart the fabric of society.
Though McMahan’s
philosophical studies focus on clear-cut arguments, it’s impossible to shed
personal preferences. Lurking behind this formal discussion of killing
humanely-reared animals lies McMahan’s decision to go
from being a hunter in
“I remember this man
walking in such a leisurely way towards this bird that was flapping across the
ground trying to evade him,” he recalled. And so McMahan sold his gun and
stopped hunting. A little later, his “first philosophical thought” turned him
vegetarian: “I thought that if I wasn’t willing to kill these animals in order
to eat them, I shouldn’t pay other people to kill them for me,” he added.
Even when dealing with
abstract ethical scenarios, individual intuitions are unavoidable. At one point
in our conversation, McMahan said creating a world where people had incredibly
short lives filled only with the highest pleasures would be preferable to a
world where people had long but barely pleasurable lives. Neither option sounds
particularly pleasant to me: A wonderful life seems to count for very little if
it only lasts for two hours.
The scenarios up for
ethical debate tend to get very weird, very fast. In the course of our
discussion about the non-identity problem, McMahan raised, for serious
consideration, the possibility of creating genetically-modified brainless
animals; bringing children into the world on the condition that they must die
and donate their organs when required (“it’s puzzling” why this is considered
acceptable for animals but not humans, he added); and why humans definitively
have greater happiness than dogs (humans have longer lives, experience
“psychologically unified” narratives, and can access “dimensions of well-being”
such as achievement, knowledge, and great love, that dogs cannot.)
These thought experiments
sound, out of context, like the ridiculous playthings of philosophers who have
no grip on how morality affects most people. But following the logic of moral
arguments to their far-fetched conclusions also reveals their flaws, and
McMahan takes such ideas very seriously indeed. And though the conversation
takes some wild turns, this ethical argument could potentially shape our moral
understanding of eating meat, abortion, climate-change policies, procreation,
and population control. McMahan noted that it’s a mistake to assume that
philosophy stays within its ivory tower. In the US and UK, “you’ll see the
effects of the implementation of ideas about people’s rights, property rights,
particular freedoms of speech, ideas that are traceable to the works of John
Locke, John Stuart Mill,” he said. In the past 50 years, political philosopher
John Rawls’ work on what constitutes an egalitarian society changed the
contemporary conception of a just democracy; utilitarian Peter Singer convinced
thousands of the importance of animal rights. Meanwhile, The Trolley Problem - an ethical conundrum that explores the
moral competition between actively doing versus allowing harm is about to be played out on a massive
scale through self-driving cars.
And so, for someone like
McMahan, the question of whether it’s okay to eat meat isn’t just an
interesting thought exercise. Solving the non-identity problem is, quite
literally, an issue of life or death.
Philosophers tend to
believe that we can think our way to a moral answer; that logic and careful
reasoning are enough to show us the truth. But given that human values are so
tied up with our intuitions, perhaps an overly rational approach can lead us
down an unethical road.
I saw a clear-cut example
of reason’s shortcomings when I brought up a New York Times article that
McMahan co-wrote with philosopher Peter Singer on the Anna Stubblefield case.
Stubblefield, a former professor of ethics at
In 2015, Stubblefield was
found guilty of rape, on the grounds that DJ was not able to consent.
This conviction was overturned in
June, and Stubblefield is now awaiting a second trial.
In the Times op-ed,
Singer and McMahan argue that DJ’s cognitive abilities may not actually be
impaired. But they also appear to imply that nonconsensual sex with people with
cognitive disabilities is not immoral. They write: “On the assumption that [DJ]
is profoundly cognitively impaired, therefore, it seems that if Stubblefield
wronged or harmed him, it must have been in a way that he is incapable of
understanding and that affected his experience only pleasurably.”
I’m used to
controversial, unpleasant ideas in philosophy. But I told McMahan that this
conclusion seemed unsupported by a philosophical argument. McMahan said that he
“had a word limit,” so was not able to explain as fully as he’d like, and that
everything in the piece was intended to apply only to the
Stubblefield case - and not other instances of sex with those who are
cognitively impaired.
Despite the sensitivity
of the subject matter, he was truly surprised and hurt when the article
generated a fierce backlash. “No one among the people who criticized us harshly
seemed to have the least compassion for a thoroughly decent and indeed admirable
woman who was sentenced to 12 years in a
McMahan emphasized many
specific details of the Stubblefield case: That, if DJ was cognitively
impaired, he still had a mature male body capable of experiencing pleasure, and
that Stubblefield believed she was doing what he wanted rather than exploiting
him (both details that, in McMahan’s view, alter the morality of the act.) But
he also seemed to suggest that sexual assault is only traumatic if the victim
intellectually understands the concept of sexual violation.
“If you had an infant,
let’s say a two-day-old infant that can’t even recognize a human face, doesn’t
know what a human being is, much less have a concept of sexual violation or
sexual integrity or anything of the sort,” said McMahan. “Suppose that this is
an anomalous infant that can have erections and orgasms. That can be a different
case. If somebody thinks, ‘Ah, this is an infant that can have erections and
orgasms, let’s give it erections and orgasms, that must be pleasant for it,’
then I don’t think that that individual, becoming a person and having no memory
of this, is going to be affected by that.”
To me - and to many readers of the Times article - this argument makes
little sense. McMahan has no evidence that such a two-day-old infant would not
experience trauma. He seems unreasonably confident that it’s necessary to
logically understand the nature of sexual violations in order to experience
them as violations. But, as any psychologist will tell you, plenty of
experiences that we don’t understand or consciously remember have massive
effects on our psyches.
McMahan was clearly not
persuaded by my objections to his argument. Meanwhile, I realized that my
counter-argument was as much opposed to his theory’s seeming
lack of moral instincts as to its weak reasoning.
When I first spoke to
McMahan, the notion that a strong logical argument should be enough to override
moral intuitions struck me as noble. But our discussion about the Stubblefield
case made me realize that, even if presented with a perfect argument (which
McMahan did not make), I would be reluctant to abandon
the intuition that sex with someone who has the mind of an infant is always
wrong.
Though moral instincts
are personally invaluable, the strength of a philosophical argument depends,
almost entirely, on its logical structure. McMahan is still working to find
that structure when it comes to the meat-eating question. But he has already
decided its conclusion. And this certainty isn’t based on logic, but intuition.
He made his decision
after reading a Boston Review article in which a Buddhist
man describes humanely raising, then killing and eating, pigs. The descriptions
portray the pigs as social, intelligent creatures, with pleasures in their
lives and real relationships with humans. “There are these moments of insight
where he says, ‘This seems wrong to me,’” said McMahan. “And then he just
killed them.”
Though he hasn’t finished
thinking through the theoretical reasoning, one man’s description has persuaded
McMahan that rearing and killing animals is not ethically permissible. Having
started our conversation with McMahan stressing his willingness to abandon
moral intuitions, we end it with his acknowledgment that, really, you can’t do
moral philosophy without them.
“Intuitively, whatever
the arguments are, reading the article had that effect on me. I was so glad I
read it,” said McMahan. “I thought, ‘Now I know.'”
Our instincts can lead us
astray. But nothing would truly matter were it not for our deeply-felt,
potentially irrational, emotional responses. The problem that McMahan and moral
philosophy must face is how to integrate such intuitions into a solid theory.
And for those of us facing ethical decisions in everyday life, we must tackle
the same potentially unanswerable questions as McMahan, testing both our
intuitions and our logic.
No great ethical
conundrum can be answered in a way that appeases all moral philosophers - or
all people - easily. But by carefully thinking through the self-doubt, logic,
and instinct bound up in morality, it’s certain that, at the very least, the
decisions we reach won’t be shallow.
It’s difficult work, and
slow. McMahan plans to spend several days working solidly for 12 hours at a
time on the question of meat-eating, reading others’ work and writing constantly.
That’s just the beginning. “And then,” he said, “you just have to sit and think
about it for a terribly long time as hard as you can.”
Olivia Goldhill, October 15, 2017
https://qz.com/1102616/an-oxford-philosophers-moral-crisis-can-help-us-learn-to-question-our-instincts/?mc_cid=b49836677d&mc_eid=4b33166109