Article
The Appeal to Nature
But lions eat meat!
“It’s natural! It’s part of the food chain, like lions eating gazelles! We’ve eaten meat for thousands of years, so it’s not that deep.”
If it’s natural, doesn’t that mean that it’s completely fine? Then naturally I would continue eating meat without any moral qualms.
The Naturalistic Fallacy
When we make an argument that something is good or acceptable simply because it is “natural”, the argument relies on the Appeal to Nature fallacy (also known as the Naturalistic Fallacy): we think that because something is “natural”, it is automatically good or morally acceptable. This is a logical fallacy because there are many things that are natural but not good, and many things that are unnatural but good (e.g. vaccines, medicine, eye glasses!).
We can explore this further in the context of human diet:
Wild Animals Lack Moral Agency
Obligate carnivores (like lions and cats) must consume meat to survive and do not possess the mental faculties required to evaluate the ethics of their actions.
Humans in modern society possess both moral agency (the capacity to evaluate right from wrong) and nutritional choice (access to non-animal food sources). Using wild animal behaviour to establish human ethical baselines doesn’t really make sense cause they’re wild.
I cover the fact that animals lack moral agency more in this article here
2. Selective Application of “Natural” Behaviour
Wild animals regularly engage in behaviours that we all find egregious:
- Infanticide (National Geographic): Male (and sometimes female) lions routinely kill cubs belonging to rival males upon taking over a pride.
- Rape (Wiki Article): Yes this happens in the animal kingdom unfortunately.
- Cannibalism (Wiki Article): Various species consume members of their own kind when resources are scarce or territorial disputes arise.
We consider infanticide, rape, and cannibalism to be quite impolite, possibly morally reprehensible and so with that in mind “nature” can’t serve as our moral compass. Because these behaviours are unethical, wild animals eating meat cannot be selectively chosen as a justification for humans eating meat.
3. Modern Factory Farming is Not “Natural”
Even if “naturalness” dictated ethics, modern animal agriculture bears no resemblance to natural ecosystems:
- Artificial insemination and selective breeding on an industrial scale.
- Confinement in artificial, climate-controlled facilities.
- Mass transport and mechanised slaughterhouses.
Claiming that purchasing meat from a supermarket is “part of the natural order” is a crazy stretch. We are not hunting or killing animals for our food like our ancestors did. We are paying corporations to raise and kill animals in ways that are not natural or normal.
Conclusion
The fact that an action is “natural” or observed in the wild provides zero logical justification for whether someone ought to do it. We humans have evolved to be more than just our base impulses and have the capacity for ethical reasoning.