CarnivoryCon 2019: Nick Mailer — “The Tragedy of the Empathetic Carnivore“
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After obtaining a degree from the University of Leeds in English and Philosophy, Nick Mailer co-authored the first book in the United Kingdom on the educatio...

Ethics of food.

After obtaining a degree from the University of Leeds in English and Philosophy, Nick Mailer co-authored the first book in the United Kingdom on the education possibilities of the Internet. He co-founded The Positive Internet Company, UK’s premier open-source managed services organisation. He also founded the Campaign for Unmetered Telecommunications and has spoken at conferences on the nexus of culture, technology and semiotics.

Since 2010, Nick has adopted a paleo-ish LCHF lifestyle, to which he nevertheless applies a multidisciplinary scepticism. He lives in London with his wife, daughter and cat.

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The tragedy of the empathetic carnivore

  • Vegetarianism is ancient, cross-cultural, and persistent; it is not only a shallow modern fad.
  • The ethical problem is separate from health, because meat-based nutrition and moral questions occupy different domains.
  • Vegetarian reasoning links animal inclusion to human moral progress: slaves, race, women, and then animals.
  • That move depends on large premises about equality, moral agency, and the scope of ethical concern.
  • The core question is not whether meat is useful, pleasant, or healthy, but whether eating animals is morally condemnable.

Ethics, axiology, and the “meat is murder” syllogism

  • “Meat is murder” expands into a syllogism: eating meat equals murder; murder is wrong; therefore eating meat is wrong.
  • The hidden weakness is the premise “murder is wrong,” because it may not be a truth-apt fact like “John is unmarried.”
  • Ethics belongs to axiology, the study of values, alongside aesthetics; value judgments may not behave like scientific or analytic facts.
  • Applied ethics asks whether eating meat is right; normative ethics builds systems; metaethics asks what ethical language means at all.
  • Vegan moral pressure hides these layers and makes moral condemnation seem simpler than it is.

Cognitivism, divine command, and Kant

  • In moral cognitivism, moral sentences can be true or false, but that truth needs a ground.
  • Divine command theory fails the Euthyphro problem: either God’s command makes morality arbitrary, or God answers to a standard beyond himself.
  • A divine vegan commandment would not by itself ground Herc’s vegetarian morality.
  • Kant’s categorical imperative seeks universal duties by testing whether a maxim can become universal law.
  • Kantian vegetarianism turns a generalized principle into an axiomatic rulebook, but the rulebook still needs a foundation.
  • Rigid principle can become grotesque when consequences matter, as with starvation during a famine and dependent infants.

Utilitarianism and animal-rights math

  • Consequentialism moves from first principles to outcomes.
  • Bentham’s utilitarianism measures morality by net happiness and suffering, and its animal-rights footnote feeds later vegetarian ethics.
  • Singer’s Animal Liberation carries that line into preference utilitarianism, where sentient preferences are weighed.
  • Utilitarianism becomes unstable when it tries to quantify happiness, suffering, preferences, species differences, and distributions across many beings.
  • The trolley problem, organ allocation, eugenics, and Holocaust rationales show how end-focused calculation can license horror.
  • Vegetarian utilitarian math often makes the happiness of a field-living cow and the suffering of sick humans fungible units.
  • Ballerstedt’s ruminant analysis, Lierre Keith’s The Vegetarian Myth, type 2 diabetes, and malnutrition alter the arithmetic.
  • The moral upper hand requires visible working, not a private calculation.

Hume, Moore, Mackie, Ayer, Hare, and Stevenson

  • Hume marks the leap from “is” to “ought,” where moral language changes category.
  • Moore’s open question problem blocks easy reductions of “good” to pleasure or any other natural property.
  • The naturalistic fallacy means no pile of natural facts simply becomes goodness.
  • Moral nihilism and Mackie’s queerness case push the problem further: objective moral entities would be strange things, and no one has found them.
  • Singer’s Practical Ethics includes the absence of overwhelming reasons that force everyone to act morally.
  • Ayer’s emotivism turns moral speech into approval and disapproval: “meat boo,” “veganism hooray.”
  • Hare and Stevenson add prescriptive force: moral language becomes an attempt to change others and command the world into one’s own approvals and disgusts.

Evolution, disgust, and empathy leakage

  • Morality may be aesthetics with a cudgel: taste, disgust, guilt, pride, and approval armed with social pressure.
  • Evolution makes disgust useful, from bitterness that warns against poisons to moral revulsion against betrayal and murder.
  • Social hunting species need cooperation, truthfulness, sharing, equity, and empathy, because group survival depends on coordinated behavior.
  • Wolves show proto-ethical algorithms; human cooperation with wolves fits a wider hunting heritage.
  • The ethics used in vegan persuasion partly grows out of hunting: shared labor, shared risk, compassion, and fellow-feeling.
  • Human empathy overflows kin, pack, and hunting partners until it reaches prey animals themselves.
  • The predator then feels the prey’s pain, and the capture that once generated “hooray” becomes “boo.”
  • Vegetarian ethics is empathy leakage from the cooperative hunting mind into animals beneath the airplane and in the field.

Douglas Adams and the final tragic knot

  • The Restaurant at the End of the Universe gives a talking animal bred to want its own consumption.
  • Arthur’s revulsion matters because consent bred into prey does not dissolve the tragedy of predation.
  • A happy self-offering dinner animal may satisfy classical utilitarian arithmetic, but it remains ethically fraught.
  • The prey is tragic because it is bred to welcome subservient doom.
  • The predator is also tragic because predation nourished the brain complex enough to empathize with prey.
  • The ethical knot is the tragedy of the empathetic predator: the animal-eater whose own evolutionary success creates the guilt that can turn against eating animals.

References

  • TheLeadenSea@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    3·
    2 days ago

    What makes it good besides that you ought to do it? divine command theory? 🫠

    I do disagree with the fundamental premise of the latter half of your comment

    • silly_goose@lemmy.todayEnglish
      3·
      2 days ago

      I mean It’s fine to disagree. What do you believe makes anything objective like physical constants or math? Or do you believe everything is subjective (based on opinion)?