01/05/2023
What’s your beef? An ethicist’s guide to giving up meat
"The case for giving up meat should be easy to win. Eating meat is clearly inconsiderate to animals: slaughtering billions of sentient beings each year seems gratuitously cruel when our nutritional needs can easily be met in other ways. It’s demonstrably unfair to our fellow humans and the environment, too.
Meat-eating – especially consuming beef, which is the most wasteful and environmentally damaging kind – is responsible for most of the carbon emissions the food industry produces.
When considering the significance of your own individual actions it’s useful to borrow an idea from Immanuel Kant, an 18th-century philosopher. He devised a simple principle for doing the right thing: 'the categorical imperative'
According to this principle, you should do things only if it would be fine if everyone did so. If scaling up your actions would be untenable, those actions are probably immoral.
Eating anything other than a very modest amount of meat is, in essence, a declaration that you think you’re entitled to more than your share of the world’s resources.
Whether or not you agree with Kant’s reasoning, putting your needs ahead of others’ is a dangerous habit, for yourself and for the planet. One way or another we’re going to have to change the way we live if we want the planet to sustain us."
- Arianne Shahvisi in her 2021 article 'What’s your beef? An ethicist’s guide to giving up meat' for The Economist
