Thoughts on Being Vegetarian

Vegetarianism has been on the rise for some time now, finally taking root in my own household. I am participating, so to speak, but it’s not that I find arguments for this eating lifestyle particularly compelling; I don’t. No, I participate mostly for the sake of supporting those who are enamored by the idea and because I don’t want to make my own dinner all the time. But why aren’t I completely compelled by the arguments for vegetarianism alone? Let’s examine the typical vegetarian’s arguments for abandoning meat in their diet.

To begin with, it’s fair to say that your garden-variety vegetarian finds the idea of farming animals for food repugnant. I can certainly understand this as I am generally against cruelty to any animal that isn’t human. Packing animals in close corners, feeding them something we wouldn’t eat ourselves, pumping them full of hormones, snatching calves from their mothers, wood-chipping chicks if they’re the wrong sex; well, it’s enough to leave a bad taste in any humane person’s mouth. While those of us who occasionally fall off the vegetarian food wagon hope against hope our chicken piccata roamed around happily clueless before being snatched from its bliss like a child in Indonesia, we really know better, and to know better – to know what’s really going on and be okay with it – kinda makes a person an asshole. And we’ve got enough assholes, truth be told.

Fortunately, I don’t find meat all that tasty, or at least not so tasty I couldn’t live without it. After my own father died of a massive heart attack given his meat-saturated diet (though there was the smoking and some drinking, too), I’ve never thought of meat as something I just had to have. And knowing an animal suffered for my culinary enjoyment kind of makes me nauseous when I think about it. Others disagree and their argument is often something like, “Then they (animals) shouldn’t be so damn tasty.” Yes, but if we suddenly discovered how tasty people were, would that suddenly make it okay to eat them? Sometimes this leads to the follow-up argument that God gave human beings dominion over animals (which somehow got translated into “Be shitty to animals”) so it’s all good; the Boss said so. I’m not convinced. It seems like people treat animals the way they’d like to treat other human beings ‘cept that those pesky societal norms stave off their more primitive desires. I’d say thank goodness if treating each other with some dignity weren’t becoming abnormal.

But I digress; I offer my own counter argument to vegetarians here: That eating a plant is equally or even potentially worse than eating an animal. Vegetarians seem content to take life so long as it does not possess a nervous system like most animals do. The reasoning is that if some lifeform is sufficiently close enough to being human, it is cruel to kill and eat that thing. But this is a completely arbitrary distinction. If you’ll notice, many vegetarians are content to include fish in their diet, citing that fish are sufficiently unlike human beings to warrant eating them. Having seen many a fish hooked and pulled out of the water, I’m reasonably sure they feel as much pain as any land animal. So the argument becomes, “I think X is like me (or worse, X is cute), therefore I will not eat it. Y however…” There is no solid delineation for what is sufficiently like a human being to warrant sparing its life and not eating that thing. Who gets to be the authority on such a matter? Arbitrary reasoning is not objective, so the ‘moral’ choice a person makes to become a vegetarian and how far they take it is based solely on subjective reasoning.

It is likewise subjective to assume that plants do not feel pain or suffer from what we do to them. We know that all lifeforms react to the environment around them and what we can pain are sensations the nervous system sends to our brain to tell us harm is taking place. It is therefore reasonable to assume that tearing or uprooting a plant adversely affects a plant and that they don’t somehow sense this. Granted, plants do not have a nervous system like mammals and other animals do, but certainly plants possess a mechanism to react to harm in much the same way they obviously react to positive conditions like sunlight. For all we know, uprooting a plant may make it feel something entirely worse than pain. We don’t know. In not knowing, we should err on the side of caution, not continue on our merry way and say, “Whoops, sorry, we were wrong about you” if we find out plants do feel pain. Then again, that is the tract the United States took in regards to its era of slavery so I guess there is precedent for behaving/eating the way we do.

Ideally then, we really shouldn’t eat anything that may potentially feel pain in our efforts to eat it, if we’re on a quest to claim some moral high ground. Fruits and nuts appear okay to eat then seeing how they are the attempt of plants to procreate and not ‘alive’ in and of themselves or cannot grow unless they’re given the proper circumstances or conditions. In the end, the so-called moral argument given by vegetarians is utterly lost on me; it rings as hollow as a gourd.

This aside, I do believe there are some good arguments to be made in favor of a vegetarian diet. First and foremost is the environmental argument. While a majority of human beings seem to care very little about how poisonous they make their own immediate environment…well, that’s just it. Look, the Romans didn’t know they were poisoning themselves with lead and this was a contributing factor to the fall of their empire. We don’t have that excuse anymore. We know what we’re doing to the environment and the vast majority of us still don’t care. We don’t care that the environment sometimes – maybe often – contributes to cancer yet people ‘race for a cure’ instead of doing the obvious, cleaning up a toxic environment. (I might also mention that people who constantly consume meat have higher rates of cancer than vegetarians.) I know full well that cancer is a horrible, devastating disease but there are steps we can take to minimize our risk to succumbing to it, and taking care of the environment should be chief among those steps. And this is to say nothing of the methane – a particularly nasty greenhouse gas – that is released into the atmosphere due to cattle farming. Shoot, sorry; I forgot rising temperatures aren’t mankind’s fault. (You know mankind can’t take the blame for anything it does to itself.)

As alluded to a few moments ago, there is also much evidence that a vegetarian or meat-restricted diet is healthier and this is a good reason to choose this dietary avenue. This is not to say that being a vegetarian doesn’t take planning, it does. Much of the protein (and to a much lesser degree vitamins, minerals and fats) we get easily from animal products are not readily found in plants, meaning a vegetarian must eat a broader range of plants to meet their essential nutrient needs. Given the downside of consuming so much meat, both for the environment and our health, taking the time to do a little planning couldn’t hurt. Facebook and Twitter will still be there after the ten minutes you’re gone doing some research.

There is sufficiently proper reasons to be a vegetarian but let’s not pretend that the ‘moral’ argument is one of them. Getting into an ‘conversation’ with a carnivore and bringing that argument up is only going to make said carnivore run out to the store and buy a cow’s worth of ground meat. Of course, hard core carnivores don’t care about being healthy either, so perhaps the point is moo-t. Vegetarians; do what’s right for yourself and let time win the battle for you. While you console the meat-eater in your family as they lay dying of cancer, you can say, “I told ya so.”

Nietzsche on Morality

[Although I’ve never been a fan of Nietzsche (read my blog The Nietzsche Blues), he did have some interesting thoughts about morality. Through the course of his writings, he makes a case for extreme moral relativism and you’ll see what I mean in this examination…]

In The Gay Science, Nietzsche touches upon morality, offering reasons why we (or some of us) ought not to engage in moral judgement. His reasons begin to appear early in the

Nietzsche & his silly mustache.

second book when he takes to task the Realist interpretation of reality as being nothing more concrete than any person’s particular explanation of reality. Nietzsche remarks that the Realist is just as full  of  “prejudice, irrationality, ignorance, fear” (57) as anyone else and  as  such,  this prevents any true interpretation of the world. Later, in Section 116, Nietzsche writes that morality is, “the expression of the needs of a community or herd,” and we can take from this to mean that as an agent in one of these communities, the agent is not an impartial evaluator of morals. Nietzsche also sees that individuals within these communities tend to regard themselves as valuable only insofar as they serve a function within the herd, a view of one’s self that is antithetical to Nietzsche’s free-spirit or overman.

Nietzsche’s view of morality begins to become clearer in Section 301, where he points out that, “Nature is always worthless,” in the sense that morality is not born of or inherent in the natural world but that it is man who creates morality. The failure of men to recognize this creates errors in valuation. In sensing that there is something defective about current concepts of morality, Nietzsche chides historians of morality for not coming to a similar conclusion and as such historians are guilty of not critically evaluating morality. [Their lack of insight perhaps due to acquiescing to tradition or plain and common prejudices.] Nietzsche calls these historians childish, for when they think they are evaluating morality they are actually evaluating people. Thus, it should not be the job of historians to evaluate morality.

Scientists are likewise not to be arbiters of meaning in the world. It is the scientists’ view of the world that would be worst of all in Nietzsche’s opinion, for the scientific view would be the view most devoid of actual meaning. “An essentially mechanical world would be an essentially meaningless world,” he writes, adding how worthlessness a scientific evaluation of music would be (373). To Nietzsche, only a philosopher could possibly investigate such a human construct as morality.

A more precise formulation of morality is exactly what Nietzsche presents in On the Genealogy of Morals. In Genealogy, Nietzsche explains there are two types of morality. [This is not to say there are only two types, but the two types obvious within Western civilization.] There is Master morality—morality in which actions are either good or bad—and Slave morality, which evaluates actions as being either good or evil.

Master morality is characterized by a self-affirmation that they, the Master, are good. This, the self, is where (a) morality begins. If Masters begin by viewing themselves as good, what they value is likewise good: Nobility, courage, open-mindedness, truthfulness—these characteristics are helpful to Masters, insofar as they help Masters maintain their status, and that creates the value of such characteristics. We see then that Master morality is consequence-based; that which does not promote or advance their positions as Masters is deemed bad. [There is at least one notable exception to this rule: Enemies. Enemies are not held in contempt by Masters because Masters see themselves in the enemy. The enemy is trying to do the same as any Master—be a Master—and this, to any Master, should be viewed as honourable.]

Born in response to Master morality is Slave morality, a morality that holds intentions to be either good or evil. The Slave morality comes from weakness, out of being oppressed by Masters and as such does not seek what is good for (strong) individuals, rather it seeks what is good for the entirety of its community. The Slave morality holds that the characteristics Slaves do not possess (those characteristics common to Masters, for example) to be evil since such characteristic can give rise to injustices such as slavery.  Amongst the Slaves then, something such as  humility,  which would be bad as far as Masters are concerned, would be called a virtue by Slaves when in fact Slaves are humble not by choice, but precisely because they do not have a choice, being at the mercy of Masters. Slave morality is a form of resentment aimed at those who they cannot be like or whose goals they cannot assent to. Ironically, Slaves need Masters to define themselves; Masters do not require Slaves in this way.

To Nietzsche however, these formulations of morality are simply the inventions of a given society or culture to advance its own cause. What is good, for example, is merely the expression of whoever wills that conception. There is no metaphysically true morality. We can be fooled into thinking there are moral truths though, perhaps through conditioning or familiarization with the traditional meanings of morality such as they exist in Western civilization. Nietzsche believes that Slave morality has become triumphant in Western civilization, first through Christianity and then through democracy, and this is cause for worry.

Having conceptualized the overman prior to On the Genealogy of Morals, it is not difficult to sense why Nietzsche would be opposed to the triumph of Slave morality. If Slave morality seeks to cast all persons in the same context with the same values, individuals cannot assert any will to power. The Slave’s system of morality favours the interests of the largest numbers of persons, not the few who wish to flourish. An individual cannot create their own values if conditioned to believe tradition-based interpretations of morality. That said, we should make note that Master morality is not without fault either. It is as traditionalist as Slave morality and thus, can be opposed to change and opposed to (other) free-spirits.

Nietzsche thinks there can be morality, but it must come from within us as individuals; morality is never divorced from individual will. Only individual will, the fundamental drive within us, can assign value to anything. Our will to power is the origin of morality. However, if we accept beforehand that morality has fixed meaning(s), we can never aspire to independence and thus, we are surrendering ourselves to other wills. How would we ascend to the overman then? It will not be possible for as long as Slave morality remains embedded to reign over the free-spirit. To Nietzsche, Master mentality is clearly moral and Slave mentality is not because Nietzsche believes in the importance of individuals over any collective mentality. We cannot take Nietzsche to task for this view since he is the origin of morality as much as anyone else.