The Ethics of Producing In Vitro Meat - background

Introduction - Background

• In August 5, 2013, Mark Post and his team at Maastricht University presented the first public demonstration of edible in vitro meat by serving a pan-fried hamburger produced in a laboratory.

• Traditional meat production involves raising, feeding, housing, and slaughtering animals to produce meat products.

• In vitro meat (IVM) production allows for meat to be produced in a laboratory environment instead of a farm. This article examines three ethical issues raised by the possibility of wide-scale production of IVM:

  • Disrespect for animals

  • Reducing the number of happy animals

  • The possible spectre of cannibalism

• The article argues that these concerns are not adequate grounds for opposing the wide-scale production of IVM.

• Interest in synthesising consumable IVM has boomed in recent years.

• In 2005, Edelman and colleagues sketched the various pathways that might be used to develop in vitro meat.

• Researchers have succeeded in synthesising muscle tissue and other animal components.

• Barriers to the development of marketable IVM:

  • The current cost (Post's burger ran around $300,000)

  • IVM needs to be made palatable

  • IVM needs to be rigorously tested for safety before it is ready for the mass market

• Once the technology is in place, prices have fallen and safety has been ensured, there is some reason to expect the wide-scale production of IVM and potential replacement of farming as the typical method of food production.

• Ethics and the environment are among the main advantages of IVM.

• Ethical vegetarians object to consuming meat and other animal products because of the conditions imposed on animals: they are confined, disfigured, cruelly handled and painfully slaughtered.

• Egg-laying chickens frequently have their beaks partially amputated without anaesthetic, a process that unsurprisingly induces significant suffering in both short-term and long-term.

• The tight confines used to raise pigs have been shown to cause lesions, foot and leg problems and psychological damage.

• IVM production does not rely on the cruel factory conditions that are widespread today.

• If the standard factory farm were replaced by IVM laboratories, this would have more or less the same effect of reducing animal suffering and/or slaughter as converting everyone to vegetarianism.

• The animal advocacy group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals have offered a large cash prize ($1 million) to the first group to produce marketable IVM.

• Ethical vegetarians who think we have an obligation to avoid eating meat in order to reduce the suffering associated with factory farming should support a pro tanto obligation to support IVM research and production if IVM would lead to far fewer factory farms.

• IVM may help those consumers who are 'on the fence' - they would like to be vegetarians for ethical reasons, but just love the taste of meat too much to convert.

• IVM would allow such weak-willed individuals to consume tasty hamburgers and steaks without worrying about causing animal suffering.

• There is a strong market for 'ethical' meat products; consider the relatively recent proliferation of 'cage-free' and 'free-range' labels as well as the popularity of meat substitutes.

• One survey found that, while most Americans do not rank animal welfare concerns very highly, they nevertheless believe that farm animals should not suffer.

• Another consumer preference survey suggests that the greatest barrier to the expansion of the meat substitute market is not the paucity of the ethical arguments, but the 'sensory quality and resemblance to meat' of the substitutes.

• IVM may also be welcomed by environmentalists.

• Current animal farming methods produce a large amount of pollution and resources, in large part because of the need to raise animals from birth to slaughter.

• Even non-animal farming methods also involve a significant amount of harm to local wildlife, both directly through ploughing and harvesting as well as indirectly through the use of various pesticides.

• With IVM, however, much less land and water will be needed and fewer pollutants, including greenhouse gasses, will be emitted - posing less of an overall environmental burden than factory farms.

• Given the controlled environment in which IVM would be produced it would also be less likely to transmit infectious agents like Mad Cow Disease or e-coli.

• Widespread IVM production will likely lower the demand for food like cornmeal to feed animals. This will either reduce the intensity of the farmland that produces the animals' food, or reduce food prices and potentially help alleviate famines in certain parts of the world.

• The reduction in animal suffering is perhaps the most morally salient reason to support research into and production of IVM.

• Not all contemporary farming practices involve inflicting significant amounts of harm on animals. There has been a recent movement towards less-intensive farming, with many marketing animal products with 'cage-free' and 'free-range' labels.

• More traditional farming methods such as those employed by the US Amish and Mennonite communities avoid many of the modern practices such as close confinement and mutilation that induce a significant amount of suffering.

• Supporting IVM is perfectly compatible with the continued existence of such happy farms, whether through direct demand for 'natural' meat or potential state subsidies if necessary.

• While IVM is too much in its infancy to attract many full-fledged objections, the emergence of some resistance is likely inevitable.

• Hopkins and Dacey (2008) have surveyed a large number of such potential objections, in the hopes of both encouraging a debate on the issue as well as providing pre-emptive responses. Their survey is extensive.

• This article will focus on three salient concerns about IVM and discuss each in detail:

  • Disrespect for animals

  • Reducing the number of happy animals

  • The possible spectre of cannibalism

• The article argues that these concerns are not adequate grounds for opposing the wide-scale production of IVM.

Respect for Nature

• One way in which in vitro meat could be problematic is that it is inherently disrespectful - either to nature, or to animals themselves.

• The idea that something could be disrespectful towards nature or problematically unnatural is rather vague and covers a wide range of concerns.

• To clarify the relevant concern, the article draws on Helena Siipi's taxonomy of naturalness (Siipi, 2008):

  • Historical naturalness (concerning how something came to be)

  • Property naturalness (concerning something's present properties)

  • Relational naturalness (concerning the relationship between people and some being or object)

• Insofar as IVM can provide a rough cellular facsimile of real meat, property naturalness will not be relevant.

• Historical objections are not very plausible - the use of innumerable inanimate tools with unnatural origins is unobjectionable, and there are no obvious reasons why unnatural origin in itself should be a special problem for IVM.

• Serious objections could be raised, however, concerning what IVM does to the natural relationship between people and meat (or meat-producing animals).

• Roger Scruton has argued that there is value in our relationship with the natural world. This value is meant to be a sort of secular piety, characterised by a recognition of our 'underlying fragility and dependence, and the attitude of respect toward the world and the creatures that live in it'.

• The importance of respect for natural relationships is also emphasised in various religious traditions such as Confucianism (Fan, 2005), Hinduism (Dwivendi, 1990) and Native American traditions (Dussias, 1998).

• Meat-eating is permissible insofar as people recognise the consumption of meat as part of a greater pattern of interdependence and interconnectivity with the broader natural world, involving an appropriate balance between technological manipulation and unintrusiveness with the natural world.

• Factory farming violates this value insofar as it does not recognise any interdependence with the natural, but instead involves dominating nature and bringing it into line with human needs.

• A similar criticism could be levelled against IVM: it is a subversion of our previous relationship with the natural world. It involves substituting interdependence with total independence; no longer do we need to rely on nature for our survival, but can synthesise all our necessary nutrients independently.

• Similar objections have been raised to synthetic biology.

• IVM disrespects nature insofar as it treats the natural world as simply a tool for our use, rather than a partner in a certain sort of relationship.

• IVM can be seen to distance ourselves from the natural world, alienating us from our origins and the creatures around us.

• This argument relies on a notion of respect according to which relationships of dependence are important and valuable.

• It is doubtful that dependence is intrinsically worth preserving.

• The agricultural revolution involved a massive change from a relationship of dependence on the vagaries of local ecosystems to radically controlling the environment in which plants and animals were raised.

• IVM can be seen in this light - moving on from our previous mode of meat-production.

• Another analogy is the modern pharmaceutical industry. Through most of history, humans were dependent on natural roots, extracts and other products for medicinal effect. Modern medicine has extracted the active ingredients and produces these by mass, artificial production in the form of pills, liquids, etc.

• There is nothing objectionable about the loss of dependence on natural medicines in favour of modern Western medicine. Food is like medicine - it is something we need. If it can be produced with distinct ethical advantages, though artificially, it should be.

• Even if nature is owed a certain amount of respect, respect for nature and our natural relationships with the world could be preserved through various forms of ethical farming mentioned above.

• The risk of totally alienating ourselves from the more 'natural' past could be staved off by maintaining a sufficient number of such farms.

• Participants at a recent in vitro meat workshop in the Netherlands proposed a novel compromise between the value of natural means of meat production and the benefits of IVM: raise a handful of animals, perhaps in people's own backyards, under ethical conditions while periodically retrieving tissue samples that could be used as 'donor cells' to generate various IVM products.

• This scheme could preserve the purportedly important relationships between humans and the natural world while allowing large-scale production of meat, all without many of the significant ethical, economic and environmental costs associated with traditional meat production.

Respect for Animals' Wholeness

• Many object to consuming meat because the production of meat wrongs animals; similarly, some might object that the production of in vitro meat wrongs animals.

• This analogous case against in vitro meat is not entirely straightforward, however. Meat production is typically taken to wrong animals because animals are (grossly) harmed in the process, through their treatment and/or slaughter. In vitro meat is unique, though, in that no animals need be harmed at all.

• Some scholars have pointed to ways in which animals can be wronged without being harmed. It might be said that, even though no individual animals are harmed in the process of IVM, they are in fact disrespected.

• One way to characterise this disrespect is a modified version of Scruton's argument: instead of thinking about disrespect for nature, perhaps we disrespect animals themselves. One prominent thought in this vein is the objection to any interventions that diminish animals' species-typical capacities.

• Bernice Bovenkerk, Frans Brom and Babs van den Bergh (2002) have written, in objection to the production of eggs by chickens genetically engineered to have no brains (and so not suffer), that such would violate animals' integrity:

However, when the intervention is directed toward the animal's own good, we do not speak of a violation of its integrity.

• The senseless chicken's integrity is violated insofar as it is made unwhole, unbalanced and non-intact. It is, in effect, a gross mutilation and depravation of the chicken's nature.

• This principle is more or less an attempt to systematise our intuitive reaction to the generation of such senseless lobs of flesh.

• Similar principles that militate against the inhibition of animals' capacities have been proposed by a number of thinkers (e.g. Balzer, Rippe & Schraber, 2000; Fiester, 2008; and Thompson, 2008).

• This framework could potentially be applied to IVM - IVM, after all, involves making meat cells that certainly lack most of animals' typical capacities and are in no way part of a whole, intact animal capable of sustaining itself.

• In both cases, a primary reason to fundamentally alter the nature of the animal is for the animal's own good. Suffering is reduced, and no conscious animal need be slaughtered for our dietary desires.

• This does not necessarily mean that the animals in question are necessarily better off dead; instead, the intervention is a way to ensure we do not wantonly harm animals.

• An anti-inhibition principle only makes sense as characterising a harm to already-existing animals.

• As Paul Thompson (2008) notes, in the case of IVM, there is no animal being mutilated and so the argument will not be applicable. It is cells and tissue that are created, which are more akin to a plant than any animal organism, even a non-sentient one.

• IVM does not lead to the generation of a new type of animal, but rather replaces the need for the use of animals at all in meat production. A group of cells in a petri dish, after all, do not constitute a living animal; the species of chicken, cow, pig, etc. are unperturbed by the development of IVM.

Respect for Animals' Rights

• A complication arises from certain methods employed in the development of IVM hamburger. Some techniques, including those used by Mark Post, require the acquisition of a small amount of 'donor' stem cells from the relevant animal, which will then be multiplied and used as the basis of IVM.

• The cells are acquired via a nonlethal, allegedly painless biopsy procedure.

• This is a far cry from the worry of Bovenkerk, Brom and van den Bergh that animals will be made unwhole, but may run afoul of another proposal that animals have inviolable rights just like humans.

• This view has been famously pressed by Regan (2004), and more recently by Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka (2011).

• These inviolable animal rights may be enumerated in a number of ways, but are encapsulated by the (neo-)Kantian notion that we should not treat beings (including animals) as mere means to our ends.

• This rules out the use of animals in nonconsensual experimentation, even if the expected benefit is quite large (just as we cannot justify using children in nonconsensual experimentation even when the benefits are quite large).

• The taking of a biopsy to generate IVM is arguably just such an instance - taking animal tissue samples nonconsensually for the larger benefit of both animals and humans.

• Firstly, efforts should be made to ensure the biopsy obtaining 'donor' stem cells is indeed safe, painless and leaves minimal scarring.

• Secondly, perhaps donations could be obtained from the carcasses of dead animals so no pain is involved.

• Thirdly, one may ensure that the animal 'donor' lives in a free and open environment in line with Donaldson and Kymlicka's vision, not the cruel confines of factory.

• Fourthly, the animal 'donor' could be appropriately compensated for its contribution to IVM, rewarded with food, toys or other resources favoured by the species.

• The animals cannot possibly consent to the 'donation' because they do not appreciate either the costs or benefits involved.

• Non-therapeutic research on children is permissible provided the risks are minimal and parents or legally appointed decision maker consents.

• In the case of animals, a responsible and respectful caretaker or other representative would need to consent and risks would have to be minimal, minimised and reasonable.

• Donaldson and Kymlicka might then object that, while IVM is in theory acceptable, the way it is currently produced by the likes of Post is objectionable. This speaks more to the faults of our society as a whole (in failing to adopt their vision of 'zoopolis' where animals are given similar citizenship rights as humans) than the particular problems of IVM.

• Even obtaining cells for IVM from animals already in factory farms does a great deal to significantly reduce the massive violations of rights of other animals. One 'donation' of stem cells could be used as the basis for a massive amount of IVM products.

• Taking a small amount of muscle tissue involuntarily from animals doomed to the slaughterhouse anyway seems like a small price to pay for the immense ethical benefit of a great number of animals spared a similar fate.

• It would be possible to push for more and more ethical methods of obtaining donor cells - potentially without the need for a donor at all, but with wholly synthetic origin cells instead.

Happy Animals

• A worry sometimes raised against ethical veganism and vegetarianism is that, for all the suffering animals undergo, their lives are nevertheless worthwhile.

• '[T]here can be no real animal liberation, as liberation is tantamount to virtual extinction. Would millions of hogs, chickens and cattle prefer not to exist than to live in a world where they are raised for human consumption and profit?' (F. Bailey Norwood and Jason L. Lusk).

• The idea is that being farmed is actually in animals' interests, as a life in a factory farm is better than no life at all.

• IVM replaces regular animal farming, it will lead to fewer animals that overall have lives worth living, which is arguably a bad outcome.

• It is not clear that animals involved in intensive farming have lives worth living. The life of such animals may not consist of constant torture, but the degree of maltreatment certainly makes it plausible that such animals may be better off dead.

• There are metaphysical problems with claiming some being is harmed or wronged by not being brought into existence. After all, in such a case there is no being in existence to be the subject of wrong or harm.

• It is difficult to argue that it is better for the (prospective) animals that we bring them into existence through farming and breeding practices.

• The objection only has force if it is always good to bring more beings with minimally-worthwhile lives into existence. This implies a view of population ethics on which one should bring into existence as many beings with minimally-worthwhile lives as is sustainable, at the expense of a smaller number of lives that are, on average, much happier.

• Such a state of affairs seems deeply objectionable - Derek Parfit (1984) has referred to it as a 'repugnant conclusion' - and is a powerful, if perhaps not decisive, reason to reject the argument in question.

• The objection becomes more plausible when we focus less on animals produced in factory farms and look instead at 'ethically' farmed animals.

• Some proponents of ethical veganism and vegetarianism, such as Regan and DeGrazia, will still object to the final step of slaughter or the way animals are exploited along the way, but others such as Singer tend to find rearing animals (or at least those lacking in self awareness) in such a way less unobjectionable, to the extent the animals' lives are generally pleasant and the killing of one incentivises bringing more happy animals into existence.

• For this class of animal, it is a good thing that they exist (avoiding the more problematic claim that it is good for them that they exist, we can still say there is some impersonal value to their existence).

• There might be good reason to avoid endorsing a policy that would eliminate all instances of such 'ethical' farming.

• Promotion of IVM becomes such a policy because it will replace all or even almost all instances of 'ethical' farming.

• Even if IVM becomes wildly popular, there will always be niche markets. Some consumers will prefer authentic, 'real' meat, raised in a traditional manner.

• The commitments of some producers to traditional, non-intensive farming methods, such as the American Amish and Mennonite communities, will likely persevere even in the face of the great popularity of IVM.

• Moreover, any impersonal value lost by the reduction in the number of ethical farms will be outweighed by the more-significant value of reducing the number of animals subject to the intense conditions of factory farming.

• There is some appeal to this picture of a world full of happy, contented animals sustained by eager but ethically conscientious meat consumers, but it nevertheless has some troubling implications.

• The view still implies a controversial 'total' view of well being that aims at maximising the amount of happiness in the world in part by bringing more and more creatures into existence.

• So individuals would have obligations to have as many children as possible, until an additional child would not have a happy life - imposing severe and possibly unreasonable reproductive burdens on people.

• Vegetarianism is ethically wrong because people should be buying 'ethical' meat, bringing more happy animals into existence.

• Additionally, even if we accept that there is positive reason to bring about wide spread rearing of happy animals, IVM is eminently defensible so long as it is substantially cheaper than the production of ethical meat.

• As Singer notes, the happy animals argument requires the contingent fact 'that for economic reasons we could not rear the animals unless we eat them'.

• Yet sufficiently cheap IVM will allow for the rearing of happy animals without slaughter, while also preserving people's ability to eat actual meat.

• Modern meat prices are as low as they are because factory farming gains efficiencies often at the expense of animals' wellbeing. Small cages, crippling weight, psychologically degrading environments and other ills exist because they make the process more efficient.

• Current prices of marginally more ethical meat (such as that under the 'free-range' label) are higher because it is simply more costly to raise, house, maintain and slaughter animals ethically.

• Conversely, there is also some reason to think that IVM could eventually be produced for sale at prices similar to that of current factory farm meat. IVM does not require resource-intensive feeding, confinement, rearing and slaughter of animals, potentially cutting costs even more than factory farming has.

• Low-cost IVM were achievable, then we may have a morally superior option to the consumption of ethical meat: consume IVM, and reserve the cost savings from choosing IVM over ethical meat to pay for nature preserves where animals could live long, happy and fulfilling lives.

• Consumers may be unwilling to actually donate their savings in this way, but again that speaks against the motivation of consumers, not the ethicality of IVM.

• There are strong environmental arguments to limit the number of happy animals (and, for that matter, humans). Maintaining livestock requires land not just for the animals themselves, but additionally for the food they eat - a double cost not present with IVM.

• Traditional meat production involves a large amount of pollution from the animals themselves, including greenhouse gasses.

• Large-scale maintenance of even happy animals for slaughter may then pose environmental hazards. Some moderation in even happy animal farming will be required.

• IVM and ethical meat need not be exclusive. Both could coexist and together exert maximum social pressure against unethical meat production.

Cannibalism

• The ability to synthesise meat may not only change the way meat is produced, but also expand the range of meat that can be produced. This may include endangered species, difficult-to-domesticate animals, extinct animals-and, perhaps most disturbingly, humans.

• Cannibalism is indeed a near-universal taboo in contemporary society, and IVM raises the spectre of a new, easily-produced human flesh for the consumption of a small minority who might want to engage in or experiment with cannibalism.

• It is a slippery slope objection to IVM.

• The most obvious reaction to this possibility of human IVM is to ban it. Just as, for instance, cloning is banned in the 13 US states and the European Union for moral reasons, we could put in place strict restrictions on the synthesis of human flesh for the purpose of consumption.

• We should ask first, what is so wrong with cannibalism of artificially created human cells and tissue that it must be banned? This will not only help us understand whether potential cannibalism is a reason to oppose IVM, but also clarify what, exactly, is wrong with cannibalism in the first place - a topic that has received relatively little attention in the philosophical literature.

The Harm of Cannibalism

• Most actual cases of cannibalism are morally objectionable because they involve two features in addition to the consumption of human flesh: the killing of a human being, and the desecration of a corpse.

• We rightfully react in horror when someone is murdered for the sake of a very specific sort of meal - the taking of another person's life is one of the gravest harms possible.

• Consuming the victim's corpse makes the killer's action even more objectionable - it is a form of desecration. This can be construed as a sort of posthumous harm (incredible disrespect to the dead), or in the very least a wrong to the family of the victim.

• IVM importantly involves neither of those factors. No human would be killed in the process of producing human IVM, nor would any corpse be desecrated. So is cannibalism per se wrong?

• Prosecution for cannibalism itself is very rare. The most famous convictions of cannibals were not for cannibalism itself but murder and desecration of a corpse. This is simply because cannibalism is rarely outlawed.

• Idaho is the only US state to explicitly ban it, and few other jurisdictions internationally have similar statutes.

• A distaste for something is no reason to think it immoral - just as a distaste towards eggplant is no reason to think its consumption immoral.

• Interestingly, whether there is any further wrong to cannibalism - over and above the killing and desecration - has received scant attention in the literature, perhaps because it is rarely of practical relevance nowadays.

Respect for People

• Frederick Ferre (1986) has argued that cannibalism is wrong because it is disrespectful to the inherent value of humans:

• Ferre does go on to note the further problem that cannibalism threatens people's lives, but he appears to take disrespect to be a wrong independent of the loss of life.

• This demand for respect is grounded in humans' unique psychological capacities; consuming human flesh is taken to be a denial of the significance of such capacities, and cannibals instead see humans as an object to be consumed.

• This view would account for many people's intuitions that cannibalism is wrong even if fully voluntary, such as in the case of Armin Meiwes.

• The wrongness of such an act might lie in part in the failure to respect the person, our fundamental humanity.

• This might well be a solid grounding for the wrongfulness of typical cases of cannibalism over and above killing and desecrating a corpse. There, Ferre would say, the cannibal is disrespectful towards his or her victim, even if the victim is oneself.

• The argument might seem to have problematic implications - does it mean we could not synthesise human tissue for the sake of medical procedures like blood transfusions or organ transplants, due to the possibility of seeing other humans just as medical resources?

• Ferre could point to a life-saving exemption to the prohibition. Just as we forgive cannibals who only eat the flesh of humans for the sake of survival, life-saving organ synthesis could be seen as permissible due to the extremity of the benefit.

• With human IVM, there is no human being involved in the process who could be disrespected. No human being is being used as meat instead of as a being deserving of equal consideration, and no human is deprived of the capacities Ferre claims are central. It is mere human tissue and cells that are used for food.

• There is no 'failure to respect human persons' objection to giving one's cells and tissues to be used for medical purposes, or to using those of another, or even those created by stem cell technology.

• It might be said that there is disrespect towards humans as a species in producing human IVM. However, how this disrespect would manifest itself is not clear.

• Initial human IVM production requires a human 'donor' to provide genetic or tissue samples that would serve as the model for future products. However, this just means that the donor must give their proper informed consent; once consent has been obtained, there would be little reason to worry the donor is being treated disrespectfully.

Conclusion

• The preceding discussion has covered three potential worries about the production of IVM: violation of respect, reduction in happy animals and facilitation of cannibalism.

• While these worries are relevant, none of them are sufficient to ground serious opposition to the development of IVM.

• The prima facie case for promoting IVM: less animal slaughter and suffering, less pollution, potentially lowered costs, etc. - is powerful enough to show that we should be supportive of the continued research into and ultimate production of IVM.

• At the very least, IVM could coexist with ethical meat production to maximally reduce factory and other unethical farming practices.

• Ethical vegetarians have strong obligations to reduce our infliction of animal suffering and death, we may have similarly strong obligations to support research into IVM in order to ensure that it becomes marketable as soon as possible.