Meat and Moral Flexibility

Here’s how people use moral arguments to defend and promote eating meat.

Reviewed by Davia Sills

Key points

• Everyone demonstrates a capacity to self-justify their own morally questionable acts from time to time.
• When it comes to food, this moral flexibility is often used to rationalize high meat intake.
• Plant-based food advocates tend to appeal to harm or purity moral narratives to promote meat reduction.
• Other moral framings, including loyalty or authority, may be more effective to reach heavy meat eaters.

Hitler, the Vegetarian

Watching a recent documentary on World War Two, I was struck by one utterly incongruous fact narrated over the images of destruction and death: that Adolf Hitler—the man responsible for a war claiming 50 million lives—was, apparently, a vocal advocate for vegetarianism.

While very few humans display the level of hypocrisy shown by an animal-loving Führer, many of us, myself included, are not entirely immune to engaging in some degree of moral flexibility when it comes to our own behavior, not least to our diets. By this, I mean our tendency to explain away our own morally questionable acts with self-justifying rationales.

Meat and Moral Somersaults

I’m a lifelong vegetarian, yet I write this wearing a pair of leather shoes. My friends eat chicken but refrain from pork. Others spend hundreds on pet insurance while chomping down on beef burgers.

Denying that we sometimes engage in these moral somersaults is also largely untenable at this point, as few of us can claim ignorance as to how the global food system works—less of a bucolic idyll, more mechanized slaughter, and Amazon deforestation. Yet, many of us will maintain our meat-eating habits and even justify them publicly and with conviction.

Multiple Moralities

To better understand this, a good place to start is defining what we mean by morality. Existing research has viewed this not as a single judgment of what is right or wrong but as multiple different judgments that emerged in response to pressures placed on our species throughout evolution.

These multiple moralities, described by Moral Foundations Theory, are based on five bi-polar concerns of care vs. harm, fairness vs. cheating, loyalty vs. betrayal, authority vs. subversion, and purity vs. degradation. These are thought to be rapid responses to stimuli in our environment that we ‘feel’ intuitively, often before we have developed a fully articulated, logical argument in their support.

Morality and Meat Reduction

When it comes promoting plant-based diets for food system sustainability, moral arguments are one major tactic in our persuasion playbook. In particular, those focusing on care vs. harm and purity vs. degradation are frequently used to convince people to change their behavior to protect the planet.

In terms of the latter, eating meat is often rationalized and heavily promoted, according to the Four N’s—that it’s a natural, normal, necessary, and nice part of the diet. Conversely, novel or “alternative” proteins are often framed by the media as ultra-processed, fake foods. Intriguingly, far less coverage discusses the risks posed by anti-microbial resistance and the contributory role of intensive livestock farming.

The moral polarity of care vs. harm has more frequently been used by advocates of plant-based diets to highlight the suffering experienced by animals bred for slaughter. This usually takes the form of messages or images to evoke empathy or highlight a disconnect between our outwardly stated beliefs and actual food choices (such as this “organic dog meat” campaign, designed to challenge inherent speciesism in moral judgments of harm).

Yet, research has demonstrated this appears to have a moderate impact at best, while also risking a “backfire” effect. We switch into self-denial and re-affirm our original position as a way to minimize unpleasant feelings induced by the harm messaging. Moral flexibility prevails as an easier way to rid ourselves of guilty feelings than cutting down on the meat we eat.

Where Next for Moral Messaging?

Given the muted success of moral messaging to transition our collective diets, and the accompanying risk that people “double down” on their original position, we are left contemplating the best way forward if we wish to continue trying to appeal to morality into future meat reduction campaigns.

One option is to improve our messaging. This could be done by deploying tactics to address our tendency towards self-justification. An example of how to do this is asking people to publicly espouse their own moral positions (i.e., that plant-based meat is a processed food and thus impure) while privately reminding them when their own behavior has transgressed this opinion (i.e., they recently ate a highly processed meat meal). An effective technique, but not necessarily one that is easy to introduce in an ad campaign.

Another option is the wider use of the technique of moral framing. That is, rather than promoting a goal (like meat reduction) using your own moral judgments as to why it’s the right thing to do (i.e., “it harms animals”), you instead frame this change in terms of your audience’s major morality concerns. For example, encouraging a reduction in meat to strengthen national food security (loyalty vs. betrayal) or to protect local food traditions (authority vs. subversion).

Finally, we might question whether we should continue to emphasize moral issues at all. Especially in the context of mounting evidence to show that we can effectively reduce meat intake using other behavior change approaches such as nudging. These require no effort to convince people of any moral arguments whatsoever.

Embracing the Grey Area

Interestingly, recent research indicates that we may be more convinced by softer, nuanced arguments rather than by more morally absolutist stances. For example, messaging could suggest we reduce our meat intake, rather than cut it out of our diets completely. This pragmatic approach circumvents the need for strong moral arguments that aim to encourage much more extreme changes in behavior.

While I can’t begin to justify the moral convolutions underpinning Hitler’s avoidance of meat, I would perhaps use this last point to rationalize my own moral flexibility. As a leather shoe-wearer but a vegetarian one nonetheless, perhaps life in this moral grey area is a small yet practical step in the right direction.