The Future of Morality

With statues coming down around the country and a wholesale reexamination of the figures of our nation's past, I wonder what is next. When I was a child which, despite my worldview was not actually that long ago, Thomas Jefferson was a fairly unimpeachable national hero. Now, he is thought of somewhere on a spectrum between problematic and disgrace. The bronze statue of him on my alma mater's campus, which I have sat next to, reflected under and been photographed by, has a coin flip's chance of still being there if and when Rocky and Effie matriculate there (it's when, not if). Thomas Jefferson has not changed, having died 200 years ago, but our perception of him certainly has. This is good; context is an all-important part of history and I've written before that making any human figure an unimpeachable national figure is a recipe for disappointment. It will not bother me if ol' bronze Tom is removed from the University of Missouri in the coming weeks, months or years but I wonder if there are things we do now that will seem as abhorrent to history 200 years on as slavery does to us today. 

To be perfectly clear, slavery is wrong today, it was wrong 150 years ago when this country practiced it, it was wrong 3000 years ago when the Greeks did it. It's possible that its practitioners have always known this. Jefferson himself has called it "moral depravity." George Washington saw fit to free the enslaved on his property upon his death but neither had the strength to abolish it from their lives (or governments) during their days. Others, no doubt, made their moral peace with the institution, citing history, science or religion as justifications. Many, I'm sure, said to hell with justifications and slept like babies making money while owning other people. Furthermore, slavery is still with us today. In fact, more people are enslaved as I write this than were ever seized from Africa in the 400 years of the Atlantic slave trade. And, they're getting cheaper. In 1850, it would have cost you the equivalent of $40,000 to buy a slave. Today, the going rate is $90 worldwide. It costs twice as much for a descendent of African slaves to trace her roots through genetic testing than it is for her to buy her own person. Surely, the people practicing these atrocities know that it's wrong and are basely profiteering. And the difference, of course, is that Jefferson, Washington et al were breaking no laws—no laws of man, anyway—and while they share the shame of a shameful system, they have some contemporary cover by living in a less free time. We don't really blame our grandparents for smoking though common sense suggests that putting tar in your lungs is bad for you far sooner than the FDA did. Is there something our grandchildren and their children will look at us about that fills them with horror?

I am a meat eater. I like pork in particular but enjoy quite a bit of beef, chicken, venison, sea food and any number of things that were once alive that are now fried. My teeth and digestive system make this possible and my religion specifically gives me the right to do this, members of my immediate family are cattle farmers and their livelihoods depend on people eating  meat and, besides, there are 6.8 billion other people like me. However, none of those justifications, while nice to have, are why I eat meat. The bottom line is, I eat meat because I like it and I can, which may seem like a reasonable assertion but if you replace the words "eat meat" with "do heroin" or "own people" it becomes a much different sentence. Of course, the latter two examples are established as being bad but my guess is that eating meat will soon enough find itself in that category. Not in my lifetime, I'm sure, but if there is ever a statue erected in my honor, perhaps for being the world's most long-winded newsletter writer, it will eventually be in danger of being torn down because of the first two sentences of this paragraph. 

I have no philosophical justification for eating meat that isn't selfish. There is clear evidence that animals feel pain and, in some cases, other emotions as well. This includes fish, long believed to feel no pain and therefore designated literally kosher to eat. Humans can survive without meat and eat quite nicely. The peanut, an item I love so much that I will eat them raw, boiled or thrown into a ice cold bottle of Coke, are high in protein and while not a total meat replacement (meat protein is more complete because nuts don't have amino acids) could easily be at the corner of a more balanced diet. The scale in which we eat meat is bad for the environment. Beef cattle are one of the largest producers of methane gas and considering that 4000 McDonald's hamburgers, a whole cow's worth, are eaten every minute, it requires a lot of animals to keep up with that demand. I know all of this. I keep eating meat anyway. Australian philosopher Peter Singer, an ardent animal rights activists, says that people's desire to eat meant "overpowers their reasoning capacities and empathy for other sentient beings" and he's completely correct. The arguments against eating meat are quite strong and yet "but ribs" is always a heavier hand on the scale. 

I'm not trying to shame anyone into vegetarianism because I am not going that route anytime soon. I also won't go as far as calling my fellow diners at the steakhouse the equivalent of slavers but there's a non-zero chance our descendants will, especially with the quickening pace of the emergence of engineered imitation meat. Nor am I advocating to take it easy on the founders to contextualize their slaveholding as a product of their era. Eating meat seems and is a far cry from owning members of our own species—it is a false equivalence—but when I reflect that my response to the question "will you stop eating meat?" is no stronger than "I don't want to," I must admit that that is effectively Washington and Jefferson's reaction to the same question about personal abolition. It's impossible to know what future generations will think of our practices today, meat eating will fall somewhere between blood-letting and slavery (and most likely will just continue on as it has for thousands of years) but it's important to think about our actions and question their morality, even if they taste too damn good to give up.