When is it wrong to eat animals? The relevance of different animal traits and behaviours

Stefan Leach,Karen M. Douglas,Kristof Dhont,Robbie M. Sutton

doi:10.1002/ejsp.2718

Abstract

AbstractResearch suggests that animals’ capacity for agency, experience, and benevolence predict beliefs about their moral treatment. Four studies built on this work by examining how fine‐grained information about animals’ traits and behaviours (e.g., can store food for later vs. can use tools) shifted moral beliefs about eating and harming animals. The information that most strongly affected moral beliefs was related to secondary emotions (e.g., can feel love), morality (e.g., will share food with others), empathy (e.g., can feel others' pain), social connections (e.g., will look for deceased family members), and moral patiency (e.g., can feel pain). In addition, information affected moral judgements in line with how it affected superordinate representations about animals’ capacity for experience/feeling but not agency/thinking. The results provide a fine‐grained outline of how, and why, information about animals’ traits and behaviours informs moral judgements.

Highlights

If you had five chickens could you tell them apart by just the way they acted? Or would they all just be walking around? Cluck, cluck, cluck? Because if they have individual personalities I don’t think we should be eating them
We present four studies examining how moral judgements shift in response to information about whether animals have and lack different characteristics
Four studies documented how and why different characteristics shifted moral judgements related to animals with varying cultural status

Summary

Results and Discussion

We analysed the single-items measures of thinking, feeling, and moral wrongness. Judgements of thinking and feeling were correlated (rs = .16 - .72). We again found that some characteristics more strongly affected moral judgements than others, F(24.57, 5111.31) = 6.95, p < .001, ηp2 = .03 Focusing on these differences showed that sharing food, pain and suffering were amongst the most important characteristics for judging whether or not it was permissible to eat an. We explored judgements of thinking, feeling, and morality at the level of the characteristic To do this we analysed difference scores between animals described as having and lacking each characteristic. Beliefs about the capacity for feeling (as opposed to thinking) largely accounted for the relative impact of each characteristic on moral beliefs These results demonstrate that information about concrete behaviours inform moral judgements about meat eating

Participants & Design

Procedure and Materials

General Discussion