vegetarianism
For the past couple weeks I have practiced pescetarianism. The primary reason is environmental: meat, especially beef, is highly carbon-intensive. If you want to lessen your carbon footprint, the easiest, most effective way to do so is almost certainly to reduce your meat intake.
A secondary reason is the treatment of animals. To be honest I don't feel this aspect in my bones. The industrialization of animal farming makes evident the sorry lives of animals bred for food, but I rather doubt preindustrial farming was any more humane. On the other hand, the mass production model of animal farming has facilitated providing meat for the poor. Greater choice, easier protein, this is all good stuff. On the other hand (I have as many hands as Tevye), humans don't really need meat; we can get by easily enough with just fruits, veggies, and grain products. And we rich westerners can even go over the top with multivitamins. But my Randian upbringing basic liberalism makes me loath to suggest restricting human consumption on the basis of need.
The real issue animal cruelty presents for me is that I don't want to be caught on the wrong side of history. Meat is delicious. The preparation of meat for human consumption is rich in culture and tradition across tribes. I don't want to lose that. To me, any concept of animal rights is fraught with logical pitfalls and anti-humanistic gotchas (ultimately, the rights of animals, who can't assert their rights and are thus likely to be manipulated as the pawns of questionable advocates, are going to conflict with the rights and welfare of humans). But in the end, the progression of liberal civilization is to expand the sphere of creatures we will not arbitrarily harm. First blacks, then women, foreigners, animals, aliens ... there goes the neighborhood. Wealth and technology facilitate all of this. I'd be willing to bet the hard-inherited fortunes of my descendants that within two hundred years their contemporaries in the rich world who devour animal flesh say, daily, will be ridiculed by the majority for doing so, if it remains legal at all. And I hope it does remain legal. I'm just hedging my moral bets.
One thing I've been thinking about during this experiment is the importance of economic signaling in a utilitarian vegetarianism. Almost all the vegetarians I've known are what I would call discrete vegetarians, or sticklers. They view their vegetarian diet as some inviolable code. And that's their prerogative, but the utility of vegetarianism, of either the environmental or animal welfare variety, is continuous. For the past two years I have eaten much less meat than I did whilst growing up in Oklahoma. Say I ate a quarter as much meat. Then I have reduced my contribution to animal suffering by something like four times. My carbon footprint due to meat is a quarter what it was before. I've still made the world marginally better off. This is where economic signaling comes in: it doesn't matter what you do; it only matters what you signal the market to provide.
What I don't understand is the obsessiveness discrete vegetarians have about not eating any meat. Tonight I had a bit of lamb curry my carnivorous girlfriend had at a restaurant. She bought one dish. I had a few bites. She had leftovers to take home. The restaurant didn't register me as a customer who desired lamb. They'll buy more broccoli to blandly wok-fry, but they will not buy more lamb than otherwise. I nibbled some lamb under the radar of the Invisible Hand. Maybe at the margin of margins, there's still some signal I'm emitting as an heretical pescetarian, but I think my point that meat consumption utility is a continuous variable is valid.
Final points. One might also be a vegetarian for health reasons. I'm not sure I buy much of this, although I do think it's probably healthier to eat quite a bit less meat than the average American. I call myself a pescetarian because I still eat sushi. I don't really care about the suffering of fishes, if indeed getting fished is a worse fate than what they suffer otherwise. Wild game, likewise, seems to dodge most of my concerns.
A secondary reason is the treatment of animals. To be honest I don't feel this aspect in my bones. The industrialization of animal farming makes evident the sorry lives of animals bred for food, but I rather doubt preindustrial farming was any more humane. On the other hand, the mass production model of animal farming has facilitated providing meat for the poor. Greater choice, easier protein, this is all good stuff. On the other hand (I have as many hands as Tevye), humans don't really need meat; we can get by easily enough with just fruits, veggies, and grain products. And we rich westerners can even go over the top with multivitamins. But my Randian upbringing basic liberalism makes me loath to suggest restricting human consumption on the basis of need.
The real issue animal cruelty presents for me is that I don't want to be caught on the wrong side of history. Meat is delicious. The preparation of meat for human consumption is rich in culture and tradition across tribes. I don't want to lose that. To me, any concept of animal rights is fraught with logical pitfalls and anti-humanistic gotchas (ultimately, the rights of animals, who can't assert their rights and are thus likely to be manipulated as the pawns of questionable advocates, are going to conflict with the rights and welfare of humans). But in the end, the progression of liberal civilization is to expand the sphere of creatures we will not arbitrarily harm. First blacks, then women, foreigners, animals, aliens ... there goes the neighborhood. Wealth and technology facilitate all of this. I'd be willing to bet the hard-inherited fortunes of my descendants that within two hundred years their contemporaries in the rich world who devour animal flesh say, daily, will be ridiculed by the majority for doing so, if it remains legal at all. And I hope it does remain legal. I'm just hedging my moral bets.
One thing I've been thinking about during this experiment is the importance of economic signaling in a utilitarian vegetarianism. Almost all the vegetarians I've known are what I would call discrete vegetarians, or sticklers. They view their vegetarian diet as some inviolable code. And that's their prerogative, but the utility of vegetarianism, of either the environmental or animal welfare variety, is continuous. For the past two years I have eaten much less meat than I did whilst growing up in Oklahoma. Say I ate a quarter as much meat. Then I have reduced my contribution to animal suffering by something like four times. My carbon footprint due to meat is a quarter what it was before. I've still made the world marginally better off. This is where economic signaling comes in: it doesn't matter what you do; it only matters what you signal the market to provide.
What I don't understand is the obsessiveness discrete vegetarians have about not eating any meat. Tonight I had a bit of lamb curry my carnivorous girlfriend had at a restaurant. She bought one dish. I had a few bites. She had leftovers to take home. The restaurant didn't register me as a customer who desired lamb. They'll buy more broccoli to blandly wok-fry, but they will not buy more lamb than otherwise. I nibbled some lamb under the radar of the Invisible Hand. Maybe at the margin of margins, there's still some signal I'm emitting as an heretical pescetarian, but I think my point that meat consumption utility is a continuous variable is valid.
Final points. One might also be a vegetarian for health reasons. I'm not sure I buy much of this, although I do think it's probably healthier to eat quite a bit less meat than the average American. I call myself a pescetarian because I still eat sushi. I don't really care about the suffering of fishes, if indeed getting fished is a worse fate than what they suffer otherwise. Wild game, likewise, seems to dodge most of my concerns.