What the 'Meat Paradox' Reveals About Moral Decision Making

[Coventina]

According to psychologists Brock Bastian and Steve Loughnan, who do research on the topic in Australia, the “meat paradox” is the “psychological conflict between people’s dietary preference for meat and their moral response to animal suffering”. They argue that “bringing harm to others is inconsistent with a view of oneself as a moral person. As such, meat consumption leads to negative effects for meat-eaters because they are confronted with a view of themselves that is unfavourable: how can I be a good person and also eat meat?”

This moral conflict doesn’t just threaten our enjoyment of eating meat, it threatens our identity. In order to protect our identities we establish habits and social structures that make us feel better. Meat-eating is tied to social customs, so that holidays are defined as a time to feast on flesh with friends and family. Some people may also use it as a signal of masculinity, claiming that it helps define someone as a real man, or that we humans evolved as super-predators who were meant to eat meat. And despite animal products being linked to all kinds of poor health outcomes, some people tsk when we say that we want to go vegan (“How will you get enough protein?”), and friends start "forgetting" to invite us to dinner parties.

With many decisions, including the choice to eat meat, the excuses we make are largely post hoc – after we have chosen to indulge we need to justify why the behaviour was OK, and why it is OK to do it again. And we need the excuses, or else we feel like bad people.

***snip***

In addition to our own attempts to justify meat-eating, advertising and marketing can make it easier for us to do so. According to research by sociologist Liz Grauerholz on images of animals in popular culture, one way to make meat-eating seem acceptable is to dissociate it from the animal it came from. Grauerholz argues that we do this by “transforming animals, which are loved, into meats, which are eaten, so that the concepts of ‘animals’ and ‘meats’ seem distinct and unrelated”. We call it “veal” instead of baby cow, “ham” instead of pig, “game” instead of hunted wild animal. We pack our dead animals in pretty packages – physically, verbally and conceptually distancing ourselves from the real origin of our food.

https://getpocket.com/explore/item/what-the-meat-paradox-reveals-about-moral-decision-making?

[Kali]

1. starting with erroneous presumptions,

lots of psychobabble attempting to make a biased point seem "scientific"

[essme]

4. You don't need a scientific explanation

to know what goes on in slaughterhouses.

If you want to eat meat, fine- but, order it from cruelty free small farmers and ranchers. You can buy bison now that was field slaughtered.

[Kali]

6. I raise beef cattle

I know where my food comes from. I can handle the fact that a cute calf will eventually be meat. As for slaughter, it can be done wrong in small places too. Don't fool yourself. An efficient large operation can be less cruel than some dumbshit that only does a few a year.

Yes, in general, knowing the people who you buy your food from will allow you to know how it was grown, but blanket statements about methods of growth, processing and prep are going to be wrong. That goes for meat, salad, pie, ... beer too.

[Sneederbunk]

2. NEWS FLASH! Humans attempt to justify their behavior.

[GeorgeGist]

3. The real paradox seems to be omnivores ...

who argue against their nature.

[Maru Kitteh]

5. Infanticide and murder are part of human nature

Lots of things are.

[Towlie]

7. "Humans evolved as super-predators who were meant to eat meat."

Meant by whom? It's hard to reconcile an acceptance of evolution (science) with the proposition that we were "meant" to be what we are by some entity (religion).

We kill animals for a lot of other reasons beside food, and searching for moral justification is basically a waste of time. There's no satisfactory criterion that you can adopt to decide that one animal has the right to live while another one does not.

P.S. - I thought it was funny to hear that because meat processing plants couldn't process pork due to the coronavirus, many pigs had to be "euthanized."

[hunter]

8. The Bacon Cult doesn't care where their bacon comes from.

They tend to be far more militant and easily offended than the people they call "militant vegans."

In my family we've got a range of people from radical vegans to radical carnivores. We all seem to get along. Maybe it's because we are all foodies. Those of us who like to cook enjoy exploring different approaches to cooking. Trying out vegan recipes is fun, even for the carnivores.

I feel I'd be a hypocrite if I insisted on a vegan or vegetarian diet for everyone since I occasionally eat meat myself and wouldn't expect that from our dogs. (Our dogs are spayed and neutered, adopted from the animal shelter. We typically bring home dogs that are considered difficult-to-place for various reasons.)

My wife is a vegetarian approaching vegan. We keep eggs and cheese in the house. We know that egg laying chickens and dairy cows eventually end up as meat, possibly meat that ends up in the food our dogs eat. My brother's wife is vegan, but she also eats eggs from her own flock of chickens, chickens that are never eaten. When chickens stop laying eggs they continue to turn kitchen scraps and insect pests into fertilizer.

There are people in our family who hunt and fish and raise cattle. If they serve meat I'll eat it, but my wife does not. There's nobody in my family anymore who raises chickens or ducks to kill for dinner. As a little kid I used to watch in fascination as my great grandmas cut up freshly killed chicken, fish, etc. for dinner, their knives moving faster than I could follow. (My great grandmas were all Wild West, they hunted, they fished, and were skilled with knives and guns.)

My own approach to diet is to minimize my environmental footprint and to minimize my consumption of cruel "factory farm" meat. I did eat some range-fed beef yesterday, and put an overly expensive "organic free range" chicken egg in the pancake batter this morning, but most days I don't eat any meat, eggs, or dairy products.

Nobody is going to starve if there's no cheap factory farm meat and dairy products in the supermarkets. I don't want to eat bacon made from pigs raised in hellish conditions. The jobs in those industries are some of the worst in the U.S.A. as well, which is why they are often done by undocumented immigrants who are underpaid and abused. Our nation would be a better place without those jobs.

I'm quite hostile toward the factory farm dairy industry. Their advertising shows cows grazing on green hillsides but the dairy farms of California's Central Valley are nothing like that. Dairy industry advertising convinces parents that their children should be drinking milk. That's a lie too. If I was raising my children all over again I would have skipped the gallon jugs of milk in the refrigerator. As it turned out our children in their early teens began to prefer the soy milk their mom drinks so I quit buying cows milk.

[Beringia]

9. I think it has a lot to do with social norms

Veganism definitely is not a social norm yet.