Orin Kerr asked a great conversation-starter question at VC: what current practices will be considered, a century from now, as barbaric or outrageous? There are some very interesting answers. (I particlarly like the answer: Amazon.com). The most common answer seems to be meat-eating, although one commenter makes a plausible case that the opposite might actually happen: future generations may be astonished by the wastefulness of our taboos against eating dogs, cats, insects, &c. Here are my answers. I do think that eating meat from animals will probably be regarded by our great grandchildren as a barbaric practice. I don't think eating meat will be regarded as horrific; but by 2525, if man is still alive, genetic science will have advanced to the point where meat proteins indistinguishable from our meats can be grown in some other mechanism, possibly on plants, and it is precisely this that will cause our posterity to regard animal-eating as horrific on ethical grounds as well as disgusting for sanitary reasons. (On this score, don't miss John Varley's short story "The Bellman," in The John Varley Reader.) Thus, technology will create a consciousness such as does not really exist today, not even among vegans. As Jacob Bronowski put it, in discussing the way machines changed European and American attitudes toward animal and child labor,
We today are scandalized that boys went on climbing in chineys for nearly eighty years after the heart-rending poems which Blake wrote about them around 1790.... But the boys had been climbing for a hundred years before Blake without a line of protest from Addison or Gay or Dr. Johnson. In their broad Augustan day, Scottish miners were legally still serfs, just as the miners of Greece had always been slaves; and neither civilisation thought anything amiss. So today in China and India and other countries with few machines, life is brutal and laborious, and sensibility is unknown; I have seen it so myself, under the rusty thin surface of mechanisation in Japan, for women and animals alike. It was the engine, it was the horsepower which created consideration for the horse; and the Industrial Revolution which created our sensibility.
J. Bronowski, The Common Sense of Science 10 (1951).
I am not saying that I am prepared at this point to say that killing animals for meat violates their rights. But it is already a practice that is ethically troubling, and is gradually becoming less necessary, at least in the industrial parts of the world. And there is no question that the current methods of raising and slaughtering animals (at least birds and mammals) is unnecessarily and disgustingly brutal. And yet, of course, I and many other people still eat it. It will take a major cultural revolution to change that.
But then, a hundred years ago people would have expected that slavery and ignorance and dogma would be considered barbaric and outrageous, and what has happened instead is that concepts of "toleration" and moral relativism have been used to justify and excuse and even praise these things in the free and advanced west.
