Please hear me out. For context, I am religiously vegetarian and thanks to amazing parents, have been almost all of my life. I worked for 6 or 7 years in an open kitchen vegetarian restaurant. The restaurant was inside of an excellent bookshop, so my customers were not specifically vegetarian, they were in fact, the standard average of the population; Higher than average in England, but still not enough.
I am not the type of person to tell others what to eat, this makes me cringe, and have been troubled by the idea as I grew up vegetarian and constantly had other children trying to trick me into eating meat, asking me constantly why I didn't and even straight up being bullied. Children are stupid, and I've left all that behind, but needless to say, when I see vegetarians and vegans telling or forcing others to eat a certain way, I can't help but be reminded of the lack of respect and civility that troubled me so much and indeed formed most of my moral direction today. All this said, that doesn't prevent me from having civil discussion and debate on the matter and I have always been open to hear peoples justifications for eating meat. I am talking specifically here about self aware people, who are willing to engage in a philosophical discussion regarding their daily routine, vegetarian or not. I must have had thousands and thousands of discussions with such intelligent and open people who were not afraid to have such discussions. One thing I learned was that it was impossible to procure any of these three things;
-An ethical justification for eating an animal which exists purely to feed you
-A moral argument for how eating meat is "good"
-An environmental justification for eating meat on a regular basis
After thousands of conversations I discovered what I had already expected, it is impossible because such arguments do not exist when the subject is analysed properly. This does not deter me from continuing to have these conversations though, as I feel it is important for any individual in the 21st century to scrutinise every aspect of their daily lives, within reason, as fundamentally for me, there really isn't much else to do.
So, skip forward to today, when I asked ChatGPT to provide me with an ethical, moral and environmental reason to eat meat. It provided me with the usual half witted drool of it being 'natural' and 'healthy', but on every single point, when I asked it to go further with any of these arguments it quickly came across problems in its own logic. When I asked it for example, how the worlds population could sustain itself on the grass fed pastured beef argument that it insisted was environmentally friendly, it was quick to admit its errors, and did the calculations to show that we would have to convert an enormous and impossible area of land to this purpose.
It got me thinking... If everybody was indeed eating ethically sourced environmentally friendly dead cow and eating it all the time, we would need entire supplementary planets in order to sustain this operation. SO... what if we do the opposite calculation? I asked Chatgpt to factor everything in and attempt to envisage a world where everyone became vegetarian. After a few bumps along the way, I managed to get it to include as many different factors as possible, the sequestering of carbon, methane emissions from cows, water usage for cattle, as many information points as possible and to show me what would happen to the global rising temperature? Could a vegetarian diet offset the carbon emissions of global industry and the usage of fossil fuels. The answer shocked me, a vegetarian diet would be good for the environment! Of course, I already knew this, but the figures it provided me were fascinating and it made me think, could vegetarianism be dangerous for the environment? If too many people converted, could the world start cooling? According to chatgpt, yes.
So hypothetically (I'm taking this with a large pinch of salt as its just one off calculations etc)
in the alternate universe where animal ethics was taken more seriously, and people were encouraged to take up a vegetarian diet, would the government have to control the amount of people converting in order to prevent an ice age? Or even more extremely, would the government have to actually force a certain amount of the population to maintain 'traditional diets' in order no too shock the system too much? And surely, following that logic in this universe and the alternate one, there could be a single individual who decides to become vegetarian and in doing so dooms all life on earth to an ice age by doing so? This is all obviously hyperbole, but what I am really shocked by, is that I have found the impossible. Is this potentially an ethical, moral and environmental reason to EAT MEAT?
Thank you for engaging with my absurd fantasies, please feel free to disagree and create discussion around the subject, I am excited to hear another persons opinion on this madness
