Meat and Sustainability

    My favorite musical theatre show is Sweeney Todd: the Demon Barber of Fleet Street. The plot revolves around a man who takes on a new identity and tries to murder the judge who transported him on false charges and raped his wife many years ago. Along the way, someone from his past recognizes him, and Sweeney kills him to avoid being blackmailed. He and his partner in crime, Mrs. Lovett, must then decide what to do with the body. Sweeney says he will bury it somewhere when it is dark. Mrs. Lovett has a better idea. She begins singing:

Seems a downright shame.
Seems an awful waste.
Such a nice plump frame,
what’s his name has - had - has!
Nor it can’t be traced.
Business needs a lift,
debts to be erased.
Think of it as thrift,
as a gift,
if you get my drift.
I mean,
with the price of meat,
what it is,
when you get it,
if you get it...

    Mrs. Lovett is, of course, suggesting that they use the body as meat in her meat pie shop. Which is exactly what they do. For the majority of the second act, Sweeney, a barber, slits the throats of men who simply wanted a shave, and Mrs. Lovett uses their flesh for her now-successful business.
    Sweeney Todd is a very dark, twisted show and is by no means a model of ideal business strategies. Obviously, we find it wrong to eat other humans. Even in nature, many species refuse to eat their own kind. There is something natural inside of us that says it’s wrong. But what if that weren’t the case? What if we didn’t find it wrong? Think of how sustainable that would be!
    In my opinion, overpopulation is the cause of the majority of our environmental and social problems. There are so many of us that, in order to support us all, we have to use destructive practices like factory farming. We have to mass-produce vegetables and fruits, spraying them all with toxic pesticides. Who does the manual labor, picking these vegetables and managing and slaughtering these animals? Only the people willing to do such an undesirable job - migrant workers. The managers don’t respect their rights, so they are treated horribly and forced to work around all the fatally dangerous pesticides. The chemicals run off into fields and rivers, destroying fragile ecosystems. There are so many of us, using resources and cutting down trees and putting more and more carbon into the atmosphere. When we reproduce at such a high rate, there is no doubt that we are destroying the earth and creating a series of social injustices. If there were less of us, we could use less resources and start moving towards a sustainable way of living. But there are just so many of us that it is just impossible to feed all of us sustainably.
    Why shouldn’t we use human meat? Yes, there is something naturally wrong about it, but our society is so corrupt in the first place that we might as well do something wrong that brings about good results. I’m not saying we should ignore the interests of dead people and eat their bodies. But what if some of us decided that we wanted our deaths to be as sustainable as possible? We already harvest the organs of dead people who indicated that they wanted their organs to be donated. What if some people wanted to be eaten after they died? Not necessarily by humans. Naturally, many species do not eat their own kind, and we are one of those species. Is it wrong for another species to eat us, then? I think Cora’s Diamond’s argument should be a little more specific. She writes that, if it’s true that something has interests if and only if it can suffer, then amputated limbs and dead people don’t have interests and can be eaten. Then she writes that it is wrong to eat dead people and amputated limbs. I’m skeptical, though, of the use of moral judgements in logical arguments. “Because it’s wrong” is never a strong argument. I think this part of the argument should be “We consider it wrong to eat amputated limbs and dead people.” Then, the conclusion should be that we should also consider it wrong to eat the dead bodies of animals. It’s only fair. Of course, I think the flaw of that argument is that other animals who won’t eat their own kind do eat other animals. The distinction is that we shouldn’t say we can eat other animals and not other humans because we are humans and it’s just wrong to eat humans because we’re better than other animals. If anything, we should say that we can eat other animals and not humans because we are humans and nature tells us that we should not eat from our own species. But there’s nothing wrong with another species eating us. We’re just lucky because we happen to have no predators, except for perhaps crocodiles and large cats that would eat us if we were foolish enough to enter their territory. For the purposes of sustainability, why shouldn’t we feed our dead bodies to animals who will eat them? Or maybe grind it up and put it into dog food? It’s unnatural, people would say. But we’re unnatural. Our whole civilization is unnatural. The goal used to be survival, now it’s happiness. We use technology and medicine to prolong our lives and alter our bodies considerably. We are so separated from nature and the rest of the animals in the world that we don’t call ourselves animals anymore. We say we’re better because we can think in terms of morality. Then let’s put that morality into practice. If we don’t live natural lives, then we don’t get to do what is “natural” - eating other animals. Because we know the huge environmental impact factory farming has, as well as the immense suffering it inflicts on the animals, we should stop doing it. Some people say that being human means that they get to be in charge of animals and they have the right to treat them however they want. That is clearly an abuse of our intelligence and ability to reason morally. Fairness and sustainability should be a moral priority because it will prevent us from inflicting pain and destruction.
    So, if we think it’s okay to kill animals for food, so be it. Our supposed morality should tell us that it is wrong to kill animals cruelly and abuse them in life, at the very least. Yet we still use these practices. We say we’re better because we have morals, but we ignore those morals and abuse everything around us. If we’re going to ignore these morals in such a huge way, why should we consider ourselves better than other animals? We don’t deserve this life-preserving technology. We should have to live in the wild just like the rest of the animal kingdom. If what makes us different is something that we don’t practice, then we really are no different.