Your mother was wise to teach you that just because everybody's doing it, that doesn't make it right. She would have been wise to add that just because everybody thinks it, that doesn't make it right, either. On the other hand, she would not have been wise to add (and probably did not) that when everybody agrees, that is no evidence whatsoever. When nearly everybody believes something, that's a reason in its favor.
That may be a surprise. It's easy to sympathize with Ibsen that the majority is always wrong. But that was always more hyperbolic and iconoclastic than well-considered. I hope to convince you of two things: first, widespread agreement is no guarantee of correctness – so the majority is not always right, either – but still, it is something to be considered. Second, this is not just a way of sanctifying traditional opinion or prejudice and protecting widespread mistakes and oppressive ideologies from reformers. Surprisingly, the appeal to what everybody thinks can motivate radical change. I shall look at a hard case, where I claim radical change is needed, but popular opinion is against me.
I am an ethical vegetarian. Since this is an ethical issue, not just a matter of health or taste or habit, I think almost all of us ought to avoid eating meat. The animals raised on factory farms – the overwhelming majority of those we eat – are badly treated at every stage of the process that brings them to our tables. Raised in crowded, filthy facilities, they are genetically manipulated and dosed with growth hormones to rush them quickly to market and make room for their replacements. They are heavily dosed with drugs to stave off illness spawned by crowding and filth. Confined in tiny spaces, without the chance to move freely or turn around, unable to establish natural social relations among themselves, with little or no access to fresh air, sunlight or open spaces, they are crammed in with thousands of others, equally unfortunate. Then they are transported, without food or water, sometimes for hundreds of miles in extremes of heat and cold, to slaughterhouses, where their short, miserable lives end with unspeakable cruelty.
This happens to over seventeen billion land animals a year, in the United States and Europe. Moreover, we have abundant and healthy alternatives. There is no serious nutritionally or medically respectable case that we cannot get all we need for good health from a plant-centered diet. Since we don't need to contribute to all this animal suffering, we should not: We should quit voting, with our money and our choices, to keep this system of animal immiseration in existence.
But also, I think that in figuring out what to believe and what to do, we must start where we are. Our current beliefs have some initial credibility. Though not all will survive without modification, there is nowhere else to start. We must start where we are.
Part of what we currently believe is our moral lore. This is the largely shared body of beliefs about right and wrong, about what is admirable or despicable or indifferent, about how our various moral beliefs fit together, and so on. I am not tempted to suppose that this body of widely shared belief is infallible, but it is good evidence – good evidence about what is really right or wrong.
Meat-Eating and Our Moral Lore
Therein lies a problem for me, or so it appears. Most people think nothing is wrong with eating meat. Since I think that what most people think is good evidence about right and wrong, should I think there is nothing wrong with eating meat after all?
Before pursuing that, we need to address a prior question: What does our moral lore say about meat-eating? Does it really say meat-eating is perfectly acceptable? There is room for doubt. More precisely, some of the agreement on the conclusion – maybe much of it – covers disagreement about why it's true. Some people think there is no moral problem with eating meat. We're at the top of the food chain, God made animals for us to eat, and so on. But there is a very different view. Many meat-eaters think we need meat for health or survival, and that is why meat-eating is morally acceptable. They recognize something morally problematic in the ways animals are treated in turning them into food, but think the moral objections are overcome when balanced against our needs. If that is their view, their positions are not so far from mine. Were they persuaded we don't really need meat, we would be on the same side. The difference is over an empirical issue, not a moral issue. And if that is so – if the agreement is not as widespread or as deeply a part of our moral lore as it might first appear, its evidential weight is reduced.
But let us suppose that we have widespread agreement that meat-eating is morally unproblematic, and the agreement cannot be explained away as some kind of illusion. Then, should I draw the conclusion that meat-eating must be all right, since most people think so, and I think that's good evidence? Or should I conclude that our moral lore doesn't really count for so much after all? I have a better alternative:
Our moral lore is not entirely consistent or systematic, but some of its features are deeper and more basic than others. Though the legitimacy of meat-eating is part of our moral lore, it is in conflict with deeper features that we are rightly even more reluctant to part with.
There are two basic points to cover here. One is the general question why moral lore should be good evidence. The other directly addresses its bearing on meat-eating.
Moral Lore as Evidence
Is there any reason to expect our moral lore to be reliable? If we mean ‘guaranteed to be right’, then, of course not. But does it have evidential weight? Is the fact that something is a part of our moral lore a reason that counts in its favor? I think so. Our moral lore can be important evidence without being infallible.
Why should it be good evidence, though? One kind of reason comes from a general epistemological point. Whenever a view is widely held, there's probably an explanation. Convergence on a mistake is unlikely, unless there's some special explanation. If unreliable but unbiased processes are determining what opinions are accepted, there's no reason to expect convergence. What you should expect is a kind of scattering of different beliefs: some accidentally right, but others, equally accidentally, wrong.
When there's convergence, probably something else is at work. The simplest explanation is that what is at work is the truth. Opinion converges to a certain conclusion, because that conclusion is what is best supported. The next simplest explanation is that some distorting factor is driving opinion to a single conclusion, although the conclusion is not true. Obviously, this is more complicated, because it assumes both that there is at least one distorting factor and that the distorting factor is more powerful than whatever tendency there is to figure out the truth.
Sometimes there will be distorting factors, but apart from specific reasons for suspecting distortion, that's not the way to bet.
Now, is there any reason for thinking that people's moral opinions in particular, as distinct from their opinions about geography or the weather, are shaped by or sensitive to the truth? I think there is. Of course, there is also abundant reason – from moral disagreement, if nothing else – for thinking that the moral truth isn't all that moral opinions are sensitive to. That does not belie the fact that there is a great deal of moral agreement. Let me sketch a bit of it. Morality is not the discovery of philosophers or specialists. It is not like, say, quantum mechanics that the ordinary person would never have conceived had the scientists not come up with it. Rather, moral beliefs and attitudes are deeply embedded in everyday life.
Almost everyone has moral beliefs; only a few have anything approaching systematic moral theories. And we do not just have moral beliefs about particular issues, but also about how these beliefs fit together and are related to one another. We accept inferences like: If, all things considered, A ought to be done, and if A cannot be done unless B is done, then B ought to be done. There is broad agreement on a host of morally relevant issues. We are likely to agree, for example, that saving life, protecting health and promoting happiness are morally relevant features of actions and also that they count in favor of the actions. (It's not that some of us think health is a good thing, while others think it bad.) We also agree that causing death, illness or suffering are bad things, which generally count against an action. Similarly, we agree that certain other features of actions are not morally relevant, such as the time of day the action occurs or whether the action is performed by someone bald. When we engage in moral discussion, we hardly ever say we just don't see how other people's reasons matter at all. People rarely say things like ‘Yes, I understand this would involve killing innocent people, but I don't see why that matters.’ Arguments usually occur on a different level – about how much certain considerations matter compared to other things that also matter.
Beliefs like these, and much more, are part of our moral lore. Our lore is surely not infallible, but it has been shaped into its current form by a great deal of experience and reasoning, even if not by explicit moral theorizing.
It is not plausible to explain this agreement as just the coincidental outcome of a bunch of unreliable moral reasoners. It is hard to understand what is driving the convergence if its product is not, by and large, an agreement shaped by the truth.
Perhaps, this conclusion would be surprising to someone who thought of morality as something ethereal, with little connection to the day-to-day reality of our lives. But I take that to be a misunderstanding. More specifically, I take a broadly Aristotelian view. A good life is something that can typically (not infallibly!) be recognized in this life. It can normally be recognized by the person who lives it and by others. Those who have done little in the way of abstract theory are still born into a society permeated by moral lore, a body of lore communicated and shared, part of education and acculturation, part of everyone's basic cognitive and motivational equipment for social life. Certain characters are praised and singled out as models to be emulated, while others are blamed and treated as bad examples. What the society upholds as praiseworthy or blameworthy has not been worked out by explicit argument, but it is still the long-term product of observation and comparison of different people, different lives, what people do and do not find to be satisfying or worthwhile, and so on.
Even without moral theorists, we should not expect wildly wrong moral beliefs to predominate. For a simple illustration, consider this: no society treats killing another member of the same society, just because you want to, as being morally acceptable. The explanation is obvious: if ever there were any societies that couldn't figure out that restraints had to be placed on killing, they are no longer with us. In the competition over good ways to arrange a society, they have decisively lost out. That kind of selective process – though normally with subtler costs and benefits – is constantly going on and shaping what is believed morally, even if there are no moral theorists about.
Meat-Eating and Our Moral Lore, Again
Returning to where we started, part of our moral lore is that there is nothing wrong with eating meat. I agree that the presence of a consensus is evidence that it's true. How do I avoid concluding that there's really nothing wrong with eating meat? More important – why should I?
The first point to note is that it is no part of my view that our moral lore is entirely consistent. Though substantially shaped by the truth, its shaping has been largely of the unsystematic, evolutionary kind, which allows for the preservation of dead ends, sub-optimalities, and residues of earlier circumstances. That's what I think has happened with meat. We have a history in which many people have had no feasible alternative to eating meat. Perhaps, there have been times and situations in which no human being had a feasible alternative. And, without an alternative, it was not wrong for them to eat meat, so far as it was crucial to their health or survival. However, with an assist from self-interested blindness to what we were doing to other animals, that correct conclusion was over-generalized into the assumption that there's nothing wrong with eating meat, period – even when alternatives became available.
But that is not the end of the story. We do not need to seek considerations that are independent of our moral lore, for our lore has deeper and more fundamental components, as well as less deep and less fundamental components and aspects. If we are going to make sense of it, we have to judge what is less fundamental in light of what is more so, what is peripheral in light of what is central.
When it comes to that comparison, there is really no contest. Which is deeper or more fundamental in our moral lore? On one side, we recognize that suffering is bad, that it is wrong to cause suffering unnecessarily, that it is blameworthy to cruelly or insensitively cause significant suffering, that it is wrong to be cruel to animals, and much more. (Though my focus here is upon suffering, much the same can be said about unnecessary killing.) On the other, we have the idea that it is not wrong to eat meat. Given what we know about animals and the way they suffer in being made into food for us, given what we know about the safety and healthfulness of plant-centered diets, these beliefs cannot all be reconciled. Something must give. If we give up the belief in meat-eating, that may mark a (healthy) revolution in our diets, but it will not affect a great deal in our moral lore. However, if we give up thinking that pain and suffering are bad, that cruelty is wrong, that causing great suffering requires, at a minimum, justification in terms of powerful and compelling reasons, and much more, then little that is recognizable will remain to be our moral beliefs.
We hold the beliefs we do because we think they're right. Giving up a great many beliefs that we take to be true in order to preserve what is little more than a habit is hardly rational. But we must, if we wish to be consistent, give up something. The rational thing to do is to restore coherence by making a change where it will require the least overall adjustment. We should give up the belief that meat-eating is acceptable.
