Within Reason

So if you haven’t been tuned in to the biotechnology buzz in the last few years, you might not know that scientists think they may be able to grow meat without growing animals in the near future. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals has even offered a reward for it. And it looks win-win, all the taste and texture of real meat (and maybe fewer health problems) without any of the animal suffering. Chris MacDonald, over at the Bioetech Ethics Blog asked if anyone had any good ethical concerns about it. Just about three days ago, I thought the biggest problem with synthetic meat was that it might be disgusting. But I may have changed my mind.

It occurred to me that if someone could synthetically produce animal meat, there really isn’t a whole lot preventing anyone from synthetically producing human muscle tissue and human meat. And, of course, there would be no human suffering involved in harvesting this meat. (For the moment, ignore any problems with the ethics of the research you’d need to do to get this far.) Would there be anything wrong with eating synthetically produced human meat?

Now, like you, I am initially repulsed by this idea. But we’re not talking about Soylent Green here. There is no suffering, no suicide, and no soul to worry about. Simply the mass-reproduction of tissues coded for in human DNA. Because humans are always pressing the boundaries, there will be some market for the stuff and someone will want to produce it. As my students constantly inform me, their overriding reason for eating meat is the taste, despite the suffering caused, and human may well taste really good. Disgust is not always a sign of a lack of proper moral repulsion. So it’s tempting to think that we should conclude that there might be forms of cannibalism that are, at least, not morally abominable.

I can’t think of any reason to think eating synthetically produced human meat is intrinsically wrong. But I still feel like it’s the kind of disgust that one shouldn’t just file in the back of one’s mind as an evolutionary holdover. The best argument that comes to mind is that people may in fact like it. If they like it as much as people like other kinds of meat, one can see the possibility that they won’t be able to overcome the weakness of the will that keeps people eating meat despite ethical concerns. If the technology for synthetically producing meat should break down, that weakness of the will could have dire effects on actual people.

All of this is pretty far-fetched and contingent on bizarre events, but perhaps it also illuminates a good reason not to start in on synthetically produced animal meat. A better (and healthier) long-term solution would be to move to an all vegetarian diet (as in eating plants, not exclusively eating vegetarians!). Synthetic meat simply patches over an ethical problem rather than solving it. There could be serious consequences to not solving it in terms of the long-term interests of avoiding animal suffering.