A Note On Meat Blindness

Or, on how moral contaminants function

It is obvious, under any sustained analysis, that the consumption of industrially sourced meat is immoral. Even if it were true that meat consumption simpliciter was moral, any attempt to scale such an allowance up to include industrial meat consumption in particular would be bound to fail. Almost no one even attempts to mount a positive defence of suppressing the behavioural needs of animals through intensive confinement, or breeding broiler chickens to grow so fast that their own legs buckle under themselves. Even the circumstances that might conceivably mitigate one’s culpability in choosing to consume industrial meat, such as living in food deserts or possessing certain nutritional deficiencies, simply do not apply to the majority of its consumers, at least in the West. Yet, despite its moral untenability, the vast majority of the world population continues to purchase and consume industrially sourced meat with apparent enthusiasm. Indeed, they do this even while apparently possessing otherwise intact moral faculties. This leaves us with a rather uncomfortable question: what, exactly, is the failure mode here? Let us call this, for the sake of convenience, the problem of meat blindness.

The reason I specify that this question is uncomfortable is that the answers available to us all seem to come with distinctly unhappy consequences. We could simply bite the bullet and concede that yes, the average human is meat blind because they are essentially morally compromised; meat blindness is simply a contingent expression of this. But this answer is not as satisfactory as it would appear at first pass. This ‘pseudo-Augustinian’ account would not perform the necessary explanatory work to explain how, despite the majority of humans engaging in industrial meat consumption, there is nevertheless a non-trivial minority capable of recognising industrial meat consumption for what it is and condemning it. While such an ‘Augustinian’ account may assert that this state of essential moral compromise can manifest to different extents in different individuals, this is unparsimonious in any potential account of meat blindness, as individuals are capable of basically eliminating their degree of culpable participation in the meat industry. To assert that such individuals are also essentially compromised in the same manner that produces meat blindness is to say that meat blindness is produced by something present to some degree in both the meat blind and the non-meat blind. This makes the degree itself the relevant failure mode, and thus the question becomes not what this factor is but what influences its diverging degree of presence in different individuals. This, then, becomes functionally equivalent to a ‘pseudo-Pelagian’ account of meat blindness, in which it remains a hypothetically avoidable moral defect. This account, however, is explanatorily inert. The pseudo-Pelagian explanation, unlike the naive pseudo-Augustinian one, cannot locate the failure mode in human nature itself, precisely because the specific failure mode obtains to a consequential degree in some individuals and not in others; simply asserting the existence of such a failure mode without identifying it tells us essentially nothing beyond what was already conceded in the premise of the question.

Aside from these, we have another suite of potential explanations available to us, ones that deny that the average human is essentially morally compromised, instead attributing the ubiquity of meat blindness to structural factors that supposedly reduce the said average human’s degree of culpability for consuming industrial meat. Let us call these moral mitigants. One example of a moral mitigant might be the self-perpetuating effect of meat blindness itself: if meat blindness is culturally ubiquitous, and one’s cultural milieu is structured in such a way as to facilitate it, then it is no mystery how one, despite having an intact capacity for moral deliberation and evaluation, can still develop meat blindness. It is a product of the realities of industrial meat production being systematically occluded. Even these sorts of explanations, however, have deeply uncomfortable consequences. For one, it would seem obvious that, for a moral mitigant to mitigate culpability, it would have to meaningfully impair your capacity to act otherwise; yet this does not obtain for these sorts of alleged moral mitigants. As pointed out above, plenty of individuals have chosen otherwise, and plenty of others are demonstrably capable of choosing otherwise without anything more than relatively minor inconveniences to themselves. These individuals, particularly in the West, are also more than capable of accessing resources capable of showing them the realities of industrial meat consumption. Even if one conceded that meat blindness is structurally facilitated in our societies, it is not to the extent necessary to preclude, or even significantly attenuate, an individual’s capacity to choose differently if they really wanted to.

Hence, we are forced to conclude that neither of these two types of accounts, whether locating culpability in the individual or not, provides a truly adequate explanation for the phenomenon of meat blindness. What alternatives remain to us? Should we resolve the dilemma by denying the premise and accepting that industrial meat consumption is moral? But to concede the essential morality of industrial meat consumption, that it is ‘moral’ to inflict immense suffering on moral patients for wildly disproportionately small benefits, would require employing some stipulative definition for the predicate ‘moral’, almost entirely divorced from its actual usage (and, presumably, the phenomenon it refers to in that usage), simply to render the statement ‘industrial meat consumption is moral’ intelligible at all.

Even conceding that, what potential explanations remain to us? I believe there is a way in which the moral mitigant account, in particular, can be revised to eliminate its undesirable entailments, and thus can provide the specific character of the indeterminate failure mode of the pseudo-Pelagian account. Instead of characterising the relevant structural factors as mitigants that reduce the degree of culpability of those affected, they should be envisaged as contaminants that effect a qualitative shift in the nature of the culpability itself and how it is sustained. Thus, the effect they produce is not that the individual’s culpability for any given act of industrial meat consumption is present but attenuated, but instead that the primary locus of the individual’s culpability is relocated upstream, so to speak, in the conditions that produce the disposition towards regular industrial meat consumption. The primary locus of their guilt is not the ‘choice’ per se at all, but their active permissiveness in letting the choice be made for them by default.

I think it is worth articulating how moral contaminants, as I call them, function differently from moral mitigants. The reason moral contaminants do not simply reduce the degree of culpability is that they do not directly impair an individual’s evaluative faculties or make them less capable of producing morally correct judgements. What they do instead is act as occasions for pre-existing moral defects to express themselves in circumstances in which an individual would ordinarily be incentivised to surmount them. This is precisely how the self-perpetuating cultural ubiquity of industrial meat consumption functions: it provides an occasion for an individual’s akrasia, their weakness of will, to express itself by producing social incentives that fail to penalise such a moral defect and, indeed, may reward it. Hence, through continuous re-engagement with the morally contaminating condition, the psychological cost of consciously reckoning with your actions increases, and continuing as one is becomes, over time, the path of least resistance. This is how morally contaminated dispositions, including that of industrial meat consumption, form themselves. Possessing such dispositions is not, in itself, sufficient to mitigate culpability; an individual’s actual capacity to reverse course is never impaired. The operative issue is their willingness, or lack thereof, to do so. This, I believe, is the nature of meat blindness.