The morality of eating meat

Eating meat is under attack. Countless vegetarians make potent, rational, and cogent arguments about the moral precariousness of eating meat. However, these arguments have never felt completely compelling or satisfying to me, and so I've kept on eating. At the same time, I've had a feeling that I couldn't quiet provide an appropriate response to my vegetarian friends. Now that I'm reading HFW's book, I feel that I can better articulate a moral position for meat eating, and so I'll try to do it here and in future posts.

While I am no great philosopher, I can see that encouraging the suffering of sentient, social animals for my selfish pleasure is wrong, especially as alternative sources of food abound. I can further see that consuming a product whose production is bad for the environment is morally fraught. I understand and respect the position of moral vegetarians, but I think it is too narrow.

I am just not convinced that it is inevitable that meat will be both the result of great suffering and bad for the environment. I posit that meat consumption can be moral if it complies with the following:

• the meat I (and you, perhaps) consume came to my plate without additional animal suffering, as compared a hypothetical 'wild' state.
• animal husbandry does not harm the environment any more than its absence would.
• meat consumption is total, meaning that every part of the slaughtered animal is consumed as food, fuel, leather, or other raw material, etc... and no part is wasted.
• the consumption of meat is done with full disclosure of the conditions under which the animal is raised, slaughtered, aged, and sold, so that meat consumers can understand the provenance of their meat and be responsible for their actions.

I will attempt to discuss these points individually in later posts, but before I go any further, I'll state outright that most of meat consumed in the developed world fails to meet these criteria.