Harnessing Moral Psychology to Reduce Meat Consumption

How can we make moral progress on factory farming? Part of the answer lies in human moral psychology. Meat consumption remains high, despite increased awareness of its negative impact on animal welfare. Weakness of will is part of the explanation: acceptance of the ethical arguments doesn’t always motivate changes in dietary habits. However, we draw on scientific evidence to argue that many consumers aren’t fully convinced that they morally ought to reduce their meat consumption. We then identify two key psychological mechanisms—motivated reasoning and social proof—that lead people to resist the ethical reasons. Finally, we show how to harness these psychological mechanisms to encourage reductions in meat consumption. A central lesson for moral progress generally is that durable social change requires socially-embedded reasoning.

Moral Development

One traditionally important part of education, broadly conceived, is to foster moral development. Drawing on the long history of moral life, and using examples of moral progress, the chapter elaborates an approach to moral decision-making. It argues that the method used must be collective. No individual, whether sage, priest, prophet, philosopher, or professional ethicist, has the final authoritative word. Rather, moral reform should emerge from the style of deliberation identified in Chapter 4. This perspective is used to suggest ways of helping the moral growth of children, adolescents, and adults. Chapters 3–5 thus combine in a synthetic picture of how two of the main goals of education—personal fulfillment and morally responsible citizenship—might be achieved together.

The Limits of Conversation

This commentary raises a series of questions for Philip Kitcher’s theory of moral progress. First, does the history of moral progress really challenge metaethical realism, as Kitcher claims—or the liberal fantasy that we are all equally equipped to get onto the moral truth? Second, is Kitcher’s theory really, as he claims, morally neutral—or does his notion of “ideal” deliberation smuggle in substantive normative claims? Both questions point toward a different way of reading Kitcher’s proposal: not as a metaethical theory of moral truth, but as a substantive, first-order procedure for achieving moral progress. But Kitcher’s proposal falsely presupposes that the history of moral progress has been a history of conversation, when in fact it has, in large part, been a history of power: the wielding of power by the dominant against the oppressed, and the eventual seizing of that power by the dominated.

Visualizing Pain

Although Seneca often expresses a disdain for the body, vividly detailed evocations of bodily experience feature frequently in his writing. In particular, he presents the repeated imagining of anticipated pain and suffering (praemeditatio futurorum malorum) as an important psychotherapeutic technique. This strategy should be seen in the context of Stoic theories of perception and the embodied nature of emotion (theories that resonate in significant respects with findings in cognitive neuroscience). Yet Seneca’s approach is also profoundly colored by a perception of the relationship between imagination and emotion which lies at the heart of ancient rhetorical theory. While anticipating future misfortunes is sometimes presented as a means to dull anxiety, a method of cultivating stereotypically Stoic impassivity by rooting out negative emotions, Seneca also highlights the power of the vividly imagined scene of suffering to stimulate an ardent love of virtue, a positive emotion which plays a crucial role in the moral progress of the Stoic student.

2. Morality

‘Morality’ considers Hume’s moral thought as developed in Book Three of A Treatise of Human Nature, various of his essays, and, especially, An Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals. Hume engages with the moral sense theory of Francis Hutcheson in the Treatise. He then turned to essay writing, in relation especially to the essays of Joseph Addison in The Spectator. This turn to essay writing sees Hume modify the purely ‘anatomical’ philosophy of the Treatise in favour of a more practical engagement with the morality of common life. In his work, Hume considered the damage done to natural moral sentiments by religion, and by Christianity in particular. Hume displayed a lack of confidence in moral progress, and showed a sense of the persistence and pervasiveness of human unhappiness. Hume also made an important contribution to aesthetics.