Over on my Substack, I’ve written about why technical fixes are underrated. Specifically, I take on an argument made in The Guardian last week that we should avoid the technical fix of lab-grown meat.
Here’s an excerpt:
Moral progress is often tangled with technological progress. We are more likely to do the right thing when it’s easy. It is hard to imagine the practice of sending eight year olds up chimneys would have been abolished when it had, if not for inventions such as George Smart’s mechanical chimney sweep.
Kleeman’s view of human nature, i.e. malleable, altruistic, and open to persuasion, may seem attractive, but it doesn’t seem accurate.
Reading between the lines, Kleeman appears to think that some preferences can be intrinsically bad. It’s not enough to eliminate the associated harms of acting upon them, you need to get rid of them altogether. I think this is a strange view in general, but a particularly strange one to apply to meat eating. After all, it would presumably apply to oat milk and the Impossible Burger as well cultured meat.
Even if it were possible, at some sacrifice, to get the world to adopt a vegan diet (or at the very least, limit meat consumption to a meal a week) on ethical grounds alone, it is not clear why this is preferable to a world of no-kill cultured meat.