The Meat Paradox
The term “moral conflict” refers to a situation in which we have trouble making a decision because of competing moral sensibilities, obligations, or worldviews.
You might experience moral conflict when thinking about buying a shirt on Amazon because their business model conflicts with your sense of economic rightness, or because the shirt was manufactured in a country where human rights and environmental standards do not align with your preferences and values. But at the same time, maybe you can’t afford to buy something that actually does line up with those ideals, so you have to either buy the morally imperfect shirt, or no shirt at all.
Many people in the wealthy Western world experience moral conflict when it comes to eating meat. This discomfort is highlighted by the question of why so many of us are comfortable eating the meat of a cow or pig, but not the meat of a dog or cat. All of these animals are edible, and the difference between their nutritional content and taste is negligible (if we ignore our relative familiarity with the varying flavors, at least). So why do our moral standards for meat sources vary, both culturally and personally?
This conundrum is often referred to as the “meat paradox,” and most research on the subject suggests that those of us who address the paradox head-on (asking ourselves whether it’s moral to eat a particular kind of meat, perhaps) get around the issue by distancing ourselves from the animal-ness of what we’re consuming: focusing on the processed end-product (bacon) rather than the source (pig), and psychologically compartmentalizing until it we no longer feel dissonance.
A recent study aimed at better understanding how this judgement process plays out involved the creation of an edible robot that could be imbued with human-like features. The robot was made from apple juice, gelatin, and sugar, was rectangular prism-shaped (like a plank of wood), and had little arms and two dots for eyes.
The main component of the robot was edible and wobbly, then, a bit like those inflatable, flailing arm tube figures installed in front of car dealerships. But it was attached to a stand that could jiggle it around, making it looks like it was dancing, and it was attached to a speaker that allowed it to vocalize in response to humans.
Subjects were tasked with gauging how likely they were to eat this creature—which was named Eddie—and multiple variations of Eddie were used, including one that was meant to be more rational and authoritative, like a god, and another that babbled and made scared and joyful sounds when encountering new stimuli, like a baby.
The goal was to determine what sorts of traits made theoretically edible creatures seem more appealing, in the sense of wanting to eat them, and what features made them more appealing in the sense of not wanting to eat them.
The researchers found, in violation of their initial hypothesis, that baby Eddie actually seemed more edible to most of the subjects than god Eddie, the subjects reporting that they would be less reluctant to eat the former than the latter, while experiencing the same amount of guilt for eating either.
This suggests that imbuing creatures that are potential sources of nutrition with human-like traits might make people who could theoretically eat them feel bad about it, but doesn’t necessarily stop them from doing so.
Most of the research in this space has been not terribly well conducted, in part because it’s difficult to get ethics board approval for anything that might result in the killing of an animal (like, for instance, showing subjects a video of a pig playing video games and then seeing if that changes their willingness to eat bacon).
The development of Eddie and similar non-living, edible robot models is meant to help address this gap, making deeper research into this subject more viable in the future.