You Eat What You Are: The Role of Identities and Socioeconomic Factors in Meat Consumption and Acceptance of Protein Alternatives

<p>The consumption of meat has serious implications for environmental issues. It contributes to carbon emissions, soil degradation, and habitation loss. Meat consumption also has negative impacts on health, and animal ethics. Despite these issues, meat is still the preferred source of protein for many, and this reliance on meat will likely lead to food security issues in the future. Meat is not only a source of sustenance for some but is strongly connected to their identity. Due to this connection, meat remains an important part of diet, regardless of price increase and availability of protein alternatives. In order to reduce meat consumption, connections between meat consumption and identity must be understood. Using the Social Identity Theory, this research investigates how identities are connected to meat consumption, how they interact with different motivations for vegetarianism, how they can change to include vegetarianism, and how they resist protein alternatives. One-on-one interviews were conducted with a mixture of vegetarians and omnivores, followed by an online anonymous survey focusing on masculine, ethnic, and socioeconomic identities. Results indicate that these identities interact with both the three core concerns for vegetarianism and the perceptions of protein alternatives in different ways. The implications of this research suggest that identities can assist in efforts to reduce meat consumption, but this depends on the identities.</p>

You Eat What You Are: The Role of Identities and Socioeconomic Factors in Meat Consumption and Acceptance of Protein Alternatives

<p>The consumption of meat has serious implications for environmental issues. It contributes to carbon emissions, soil degradation, and habitation loss. Meat consumption also has negative impacts on health, and animal ethics. Despite these issues, meat is still the preferred source of protein for many, and this reliance on meat will likely lead to food security issues in the future. Meat is not only a source of sustenance for some but is strongly connected to their identity. Due to this connection, meat remains an important part of diet, regardless of price increase and availability of protein alternatives. In order to reduce meat consumption, connections between meat consumption and identity must be understood. Using the Social Identity Theory, this research investigates how identities are connected to meat consumption, how they interact with different motivations for vegetarianism, how they can change to include vegetarianism, and how they resist protein alternatives. One-on-one interviews were conducted with a mixture of vegetarians and omnivores, followed by an online anonymous survey focusing on masculine, ethnic, and socioeconomic identities. Results indicate that these identities interact with both the three core concerns for vegetarianism and the perceptions of protein alternatives in different ways. The implications of this research suggest that identities can assist in efforts to reduce meat consumption, but this depends on the identities.</p>

Animal Business: an Ethical Exploration of Corporate Responsibility Towards Animals

The aim of this paper is to take normative aspects of animal welfare in corporate practice from a blind spot into the spotlight, and thus connect the fields of business ethics and animal ethics. Using insights from business ethics and animal ethics, it argues that companies have a strong responsibility towards animals. Its rationale is that animals have a moral status, that moral actors have the moral obligation to take the interests of animals into account and thus, that as moral actors, companies should take the interests of animals into account, more specifically their current and future welfare. Based on this corporate responsibility, categories of corporate impact on animals in terms of welfare and longevity are offered, including normative implications for each of them. The article concludes with managerial implications for several business sectors, including the most animal-consuming and animal-welfare-threatening industry: the food sector. Welfare issues are discussed, including the issue of killing for food production.

‘Utilitarianism for animals: deontology for people’ and the doing/allowing distinction

It is tempting to think that zebras, goats, lions, and similar animals matter morally, but not in quite the same way people do. This might lead us to adopt a hybrid view of animal ethics such as ‘Utilitarianism for Animals; Deontology for People’. One of the core commitments of deontology is the Doctrine of Doing and Allowing (DDA): the view that doing harm is harder to justify than allowing harm. I explore how this core tenant of deontology applies to non-person, non-human animals and whether hybrid views of animal ethics can accept it. In doing so, I aim to do three things. First, to show that my defence of the DDA can solve a problem surrounding our duties to wild animals, while making only minimal claims about animal moral status. Second, to offer an argument that for many non-person, non-human animals, we should recognise deontological constraints on their treatment, but also see those constraints as importantly different from the constraints against doing harm to persons. Third, to get clearer on how we should understand Utilitarianism for Animals and Nozickian hybrid approaches to animal ethics.

Animal activism in the business school: Using fierce compassion for teaching critical and positive perspectives

This article explores a practical approach to teaching animal ethics in food systems as part of a business course. We argue that tackling such complex and emotionally charged topics is vital to shifting unsustainable and hurtful behaviours towards more positive futures. Our teaching example outlines a pedagogy of courageously witnessing, inquiring with empathy and prompting positive action; an activist approach we term fierce compassion. These three layers blend positive and critical perspectives in a classroom to address contentious issues of large-scale industrial animal production hitherto largely neglected in a traditional business curriculum. While acknowledging that academic activism is controversial, we argue that fierce compassion – noticing the suffering that is remote and often systemically hidden – can inform and structure education towards more post-anthropocentric and just futures for all living beings – human and nonhuman alike.

Beneficence, Non-Identity, and Responsibility: How Identity-Affecting Interventions in Nature can Generate Secondary Moral Duties

In chapter 3 of Wild Animal Ethics Johannsen argues for a collective obligation based on beneficence to intervene in nature in order to reduce the suffering of wild animals. In the same chapter he claims that the non-identity problem is merely a “theoretical puzzle” (p.32) which doesn’t affect our reasons for intervention. In this paper I argue that the non-identity problem affects both the strength and the nature of our reasons to intervene. By intervening in nature on a large scale we change which animals come into existence. In doing so, we enable harmful animals to inflict harms on other animals, and we put other animals in harm’s way. The harms that these animals will inflict and endure are foreseeable. Furthermore, since non-human animals aren’t moral agents, harmful animals cannot be morally responsible for their harmful actions. I argue therefore that by causing animals to exist, knowing that they will inflict and suffer harms, we become morally responsible for those harms. By engaging in identity-affecting actions then we take on secondary moral duties towards the animals we have thereby caused to exist, and these secondary moral duties may be extremely demanding, even more so than the initial costs of intervention. Finally, these duties are duties of justice rather than duties of beneficence, and as such are more stringent than purely beneficence-based moral reasons. Furthermore, this conclusion flows naturally from several plausible principles which Johannsen explicitly endorses.