How to Eat Meat Ethically

The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.

— Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

The undeniable trend throughout the history of morality is the continuous growth of the set of beings that are considered to be deserving of our morality. There has not been too much change regarding what we consider to be good or bad things to do people; the real changes lie in who exactly we consider “people” to be. In the times of our ancestors long past, when humans lived in small groups rarely exceeding Dunbar’s number, morality (if you could even call it that) only applied to those in your tribe. You needed to cooperate with and be good to just those people. Anyone else that you might encounter was simply a competitor.

In fact, this tribal way of life is likely the reason that humans evolved morality in the first place. Humans needed to be nice to each other, or else we wouldn’t have been able to work together to hunt down large animals to eat. Or, say, leave a few women at home to take care of the children while others went out to forage for food. In such a tribal structure, anyone who acts out or does something bad for the tribe can be excommunicated, in which case there is little chance of their survival. So evolution made it very important to the human psyche that we do good for the “tribe”.

As humanity began to develop and create larger, more complex societies, our “tribes” grew, and with them our moral senses. In Ancient Greece, philosophers like Socrates and Aristotle began to consider the nature of ethics. Perhaps this was moral progress. On the other hand, in Ancient Greek society, women were typically treated very poorly, and there was a lot of slavery. So they weren’t quite the shining pillars of virtue that they may have claimed they were.

Religions also developed with their own ethical views. Now it’s hard to make broad generalizations about the ethics of religions because different people can often interpret the same things in different ways. But with that being said…

Consider Islam, which has the concept of the Ummah, the community of all the Muslims in the world. The Ummah is meant to transcend race and class, for everyone is equal before god. Beliefs like these led to early Islamic societies often being pretty egalitarian relative to the norm at the time.

This can easily be explained in the tribal frame as well. For Muslims, the Ummah became the tribe. The same parts of our brain that used to have us being nice to those in our hunter-gatherer party could now be applied to the whole Islamic world.

There’s also Christianity. Take a look at Matthew 5:43-48:

You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you . . . If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? And if you greet only your own people, what are you doing more than others?

Here presented is the idea that we should love everyone. Definitely moral progress from how we started out. Of course, not all Christians were actually successful at following this principle. But the seed of universal goodness was planted.

As moral concerns expanded beyond religion to political philosophy, societies began codifying these ideals into law.¹ The United States was founded on the idea that all men are created equal and have a right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. This was radical at the time! But soon countries all across the Western world were demanding similar things. Unfortunately, despite these ideals, millions of Africans were enslaved in the Americas. And many more bad things; that’s just one example of how equality did not yet apply to everyone.

But the arc of the moral universe bends towards justice. Slavery was eventually abolished. Soon thereafter women started getting suffrage and more generally equal rights. Martin Luther King Jr. helped to create the Civil Rights movement, and he gave his speech where he talked about this very topic.

In the present day it’s a pretty widely accepted idea that all human lives matter equally. This point is well expressed Ho Chi Minh (a person decidedly not alive in the present day, so bad example JJ!), in his speech at Ba Dinh Square.

All the peoples on the earth are equal from birth, all the peoples have a right to live and to be happy and free.

The world is fully globalized, and we can consider the entire human population to be a part of our “tribe”. No matter who you are, where you live, or what you believe, we are all humans, and we all deserve love and kindness. So goes the ethical beliefs of today.

So is that it? Is moral progress over?

I predict no! Even without considering the actual mechanisms by which something is “good” or “bad”, one can simply observe the past trajectory of morality and make some guesses about the future. I think the most obvious next step in the arc of moral progress is towards animals.

Animal welfare is a thing, of course. Humans usually feel sad when they see a fuzzy mammal getting injured. But on the whole, we do not care about animals. Take, for example, the practice of chick culling. Humans eat a lot of eggs. To get eggs, you need hens. To get hens, you need lots and lots of baby chickens. But they need to be females; the males are pretty much useless. Factory farms deal with this problem by macerating any baby males they get in a high-speed grinder.

A sack of male chicks, waiting to be killed. Source.

Source

It’s not just male chickens that are treated in such a way. 26% of hens are killed while being transported in trucks, because of how tightly they are packed together. Compare this to the middle passage.

I’m not particularly knowledgeable about the details here, however, so I will just tell you that there is a lot more information about the horrors of factory farming out there. (Here are some links from The Humane League, Vox, Bentham’s Bulldog)

Even if you try to get more ethically sourced meat, it doesn’t change the fact that if you’re going to eat an animal, that animal needs to be killed. Death is bad!

And in case it is in question, it is generally agreed upon that most vertebrates do feel pain. If you want to make an argument in the vein of “maybe animal lives just don’t matter”, it will likely need to be predicated on something about whether animals are conscious or not, which is a different question. But does something need to be conscious for it to be valued in an ethical sense? Is murder okay if the victim is sleeping? They’re not actively conscious, after all. Part of the problem here is that consciousness is a very poorly defined concept. This is a tricky road to go down.

It’s usually best not to get too wrapped in overarching theories of ethics, and instead just consider things at the object level. Does it seem bad to you that we put baby chickens on conveyor belts that feed them into grinding machines? That we place so little value on the lives of animals that we allow millions of them to die just by accident? What about at a more personal level: would you feel bad if you ran over a puppy running through the street? Are you sad when your pet gets injured? If the answer to any of these is yes… you probably care about animals, at least a little.

Vegetarianism is a good answer to this problem. If we stopped eating meat, pretty much all of this would stop. Meat is an incredibly inefficient source of nutrition anyway. Studies have found that only around 4% of the proteins and 3% of the calories that we feed to cattle end up in the beef that is eaten by us. If we just ate the feed that we gave to animals instead of the animals themselves, our planet could feed ~3.5 billion additional people.

But it can be hard to change one’s diet. There are many scenarios in which it is very inconvenient to not be able to eat meat. Beyond this, many, myself included, also just like meat. While some good alternative meat products are starting to crop up, these can often be expensive.

Side note on the meat alternatives: people talk a lot about Beyond or Impossible Burgers, but much more rarely discussed are things like Beyond Chicken. Which is a shame, because the fake chicken that we have right now is quite good. When presented in a “fried tender” format, it’s pretty difficult to distinguish from the real thing. At least to my palate. In comparison, fake burgers are fine, but you can generally tell that they are not real.

Anyway: what is one to do if they care about animals but don’t want to avoid eating meat entirely? A simple answer is to donate to animal welfare charities to “offset” the animals that you “kill” due to your meat consumption.

FarmKind is an organization that has done the math on all this and calculated that, based on the average anglophone’s meat consumption, one should donate $23 per month to effective animal welfare charities to properly offset the animal deaths/suffering that they cause.

What’s particularly nice about this website, though, is you can tell it how you eat specifically and it will adjust the numbers for you. For example, if you move to only eating fish, then you’ll only need to donate $11 per month. If you go vegetarian but not fully vegan, you should donate just $1 per month (although you’re not eating any animals themselves, there are still poor conditions in factory farms for hen-laying chickens and dairy cows).

If you switch the calculator to advanced mode, you can tell it how much you eat of every particular meat / animal product each month and it will do the math with that. However, the website also warns that people tend to underestimate their consumption, which I agree with. If you want to tailor your donation amount to your particular eating habits, I recommend logging everything you eat for a month to get a good baseline, don’t just make up numbers.

Or, you can do what I’m doing, and try to base your donations more exactly off of every specific meal that you eat. I looked into the data that FarmKind uses in these calculations, which allowed me to figure out exactly how much money is needed to offset one gram of any given animal. I then made a spreadsheet where I can just log every meal I have with how many grams of any given meat (or eggs or dairy) it had in it. Then a formula calculates how much I need to give to charity for that particular meal.

The nice thing about this is that it naturally encourages you to eat less meat. If I’m ever trying to decide between two different things to eat, but one has meat and one doesn’t, I’ll gravitate towards the thing with no meat, because it costs me less! It’s sort of like a soft version of vegetarianism. Instead of ruling out meat entirely, I’ll just punish myself by losing a bit of money any time I eat some. Except the money isn’t lost, it’s given to a charity that helps with animal welfare!

If you want to try it yourself, you can make a copy of this template I made and start logging all of your meals. It asks you for the quantities of food in grams, but this doesn’t matter too much. It tells you in the heading cells about how many grams any given serving is, which will probably be pretty close to accurate. Alternatively, you can ask an AI like ChatGPT to estimate the numbers for you. This is particularly useful for things like dairy and eggs, where the numbers may not be very obvious. Just ask:

Tell me how much the following food has of: 
Beef or lamb (in grams)
Eggs (in eggs)
Pork / bacon / ham (in grams)
Fish (in grams)
Poultry (in grams)
Crustaceans (in grams)
Dairy (in grams)

[Insert food here]

If you use this spreadsheet, you may notice that by far the most “expensive” meat to offset is fish. Crustaceans and chicken are also somewhat costly, while beef and pork are practically nothing. Why is this? Think about it like this: when you eat a burger, you are not actually killing one whole cow. Cows are really big, and one can serve many people. So one serving of beef only requires that you offset the life of a small fraction of a cow. In comparison, smaller animals like chicken, fish, and crustaceans only make for a few servings, and therefore need to be offset much more frequently. Of all the animals listed here, cows actually cost the most to save. But the average person only eats like 1/10th of a cow per year. For chickens, this figure is ~33!

Fish, however, are much more costly to save than anything else on this spreadsheet: $4.48 per serving of fish. I’m honestly somewhat skeptical of the numbers here. But then again, all of the numbers are just estimates. The fish price may be a bit too high, but there may be others that are a bit too low. In the long run, any such mistakes should hopefully cancel each other out.

So if you are a progressive-minded person who cares about the lives of animals, I recommend that you consider donating a little bit of money to offset the meat that you consume, reducing your meat consumption, or both. $23/month is an easy number to follow if you don’t want to think too much about it, but if you want it to be a bit more accurate or are considering cutting down on your meat intake to a certain extent, it may be nice to track all of your consumption in a spreadsheet. Where should the money be donated? Well, the calculations done by FarmKind were done with their specific fund in mind. Note that FarmKind is not really a charity themselves. If you donate to them they will direct the money to various specific charities that they have evaluated to be the most effective. You can read more about this on their website. The Effective Altruism Animal Welfare Fund is also probably a good choice. But the specifics don’t matter too much, as long as you’re doing something. There are billions of animals suffering, all across the planet. Let’s continue bending the arc of the moral universe a little more towards the side of justice.

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Meta-commentary:

This article is kind of strange because I started by talking about the history of moral progress, but then the whole thing turned out to just be advocating for animal welfare. Particularly strange is the way I kept talking about how tribalism is the core of human morality. It felt like I was going somewhere with it, but then it just stopped and I didn’t mention it at all in the rest of the article.

What happened is this: I’ve been wanting to write something on where human morality comes from and specifically the reason that human morals have changed over time for a while. Why were all these things that we now consider to be so horrendous once taken as normal? It’s not because the people back then were inherently super evil. The best explanation I can give is that the victims of cruelty typically weren't a part of the “tribe” of the oppressors, and so they weren’t really cared about. Now everyone is more often seen as part of the global “tribe” we call humanity, and so a lot of that stuff is now seen as horribly reprehensible. Of course, humans still do bad things to each other today, but we are much quicker to recognize them and point them out now than we may have been in centuries past.

So I wanted to write that article. But then I also wanted to write about this meat-offsetting thing. So I started writing and it turned out that the two could kind of be combined into one piece, but they didn’t go together perfectly. So I ended up needing to write a little note at the end apologizing for the awkwardness :(

1. This sentence was written by ChatGPT! I asked it to critique this article and it suggested adding this.