Philosophy Bites latest edition features features Jeff McMahan on vegetarianism. He forcefully makes the point that if you 
really confront the moral arguments against eating meat, there really is no contest. One point I had never considered before for instance, is that as well as having to weigh up the difference between the pleasure you get from consuming meat, against the pleasure a slaughtered animal would have experienced if given the chance to live out the rest of it’s life. Crucially you also have to in this calculation take account of the difference in pleasure you experience between eating a meal that includes meat, and a meal that is just derived from plants etc. So if you really think that this small difference is worth the suffering and premature death of another mammal then go ahead and eat meat. Otherwise you really have to ask yourself some questions.
Jeff McMahan’s closing argument is to liken meat eaters in the developed Western world to Southern slave owners in the America of the 19th century. Seemingly good people look around themselves and a see other seemingly good people doing the same thing and fail to realise the collective error in their ways. In this sense vegetarianism is a sort of consciousness raising enterprise.
Personally I’m not sure how much longer I can continue to be a hypocrite, in this area of my life anyway. Over the last six months I have grown accustomed to eating it very rarely. But I still find myself attacking vegetarians for fun. I’ll routinely point to the rich tradition and culture of eating meat, and to the gastronomic superiority and flavour of dishes that include it. I’ll happily point out that none of the world’s top restaurants are vegetarian and top food critics and chefs have nothing but contempt for those that forgo meat in their diets. But really this is a fairly pathetic argument from hedonism and a form of nihilism.
I am now beginning to think seriously that I can live without it completely, or at least, maintain my, (admittedly somewhat enforced) current policy. I still eat fish after all. They are different; they’re less ‘neurologically advanced’ than mammals, or so runs the argument. And I’ll still eat dairy; who could live without cheese?
Previously when this discussion has arisen I have resolved to just eat meat that is ‘ethically sourced’, to at least take some steps in the right direction. You want some sort of guarantee that the animal you’re eating has at least had a good quality of life, while it lasted. But in reality this policy is very difficult to maintain. My main weakness is for pork based products and sausages especially. Sadly I think the ethically sourced kind are expensive and difficult to come by. What we need is a whole new approach to food labeling on the back of a real cultural shift in attitudes to meat. I’m not sure that the food revolution that has occurred in the UK in the last fifteen years or so has really contributed much of use to this debate.
But now it’s barbecue season and everybody hates a killjoy vegetarian at a barbecue. Even so, I think from now on it’s scampi fries for me and no more pork scratchings.
Speaking of rules by which to live ones life by, I really enjoyed this extract from Christopher Hitchens’ new memoirs on Slate. It includes his rules to drinking and information about his daily intake. Also on Hitchens, did any one see read this funny interview from the Guardian the other week?