Just to clarify, I don’t think that vegetarianism is morally depraved. I enjoy many meat-free dishes in my own diet. My beef, rather, is with the moral case for vegetarianism, the logic of which leads to various social pathologies, including, yes, moral depravity.

The least of these pathologies is obnoxious self-righteousness. Early in my research career, my field work in Namibia was supported by volunteers who paid to come for two-week stints as field assistants at my research site. It was rough living, but the work was fun, filled with camaraderie that was smoothed along by meals prepared communally and eaten around a campfire. Most of my volunteers were wonderful people, but there were occasional misfits. One volunteer, for example, informed everyone the first night on site that he was a vegan and would not eat any food prepared in a pot where meat had been prepared. He was quickly invited to fend for himself.

To be fair, my vegan volunteer was simply taking the moral case for vegetarianism to a logical end. If consumption of meat means animal suffering, living a moral life means not eating meat. Take the argument one step further to anything produced by animals, such as eggs or dairy products, and you get veganism, along with veganism’s insufferable combination of logical consistency and moral certitude.

How easily this logic tilts into moral depravity came into focus in two articles in a recent issue of the journal Bioethics. The first, Beneficial Bloodsucking by Parker Crutchfield and Blake Hereth, puts forth a modest proposal to spread the vegan gospel to all. They do not propose to do so through persuasion or evangelism, but through bioweaponry.

Alpha-gal syndrome (AGS) is a food allergy to red meat, primarily beef and pork, but also meat from any mammal, including deer, rabbits, horses, and other game. Notably, it does not affect poultry, fish, or shellfish, and, curiously, primate meat appears exempt. Some patients also react to dairy products and gelatin derived from mammals.

The most common symptom is gastrointestinal discomfort that appears two to three hours after eating meat, often in people who previously had no issues consuming it. Like Lyme disease, AGS is transmitted through tick bites. But unlike Lyme disease—which is caused by a bacterium carried in tick saliva—AGS is triggered by a substance in the saliva itself. In the United States, the primary culprit is the Lone Star Tick, which is widespread across the Midwest and is responsible for most cases there. The food allergy is found elsewhere in the world, and different species of ticks are probably the disease agents there.

Crutchfield and Hereth propose to engineer a more virtuous society, by which they mean a vegan society, by spreading AGS to as large a swathe of the human population as possible. By ensuring that everyone who eats red meat—as well as dairy products and gelatin—gets sick, consumption of meat will decline, the infrastructure of meat production will become unprofitable and unsustainable, and the human-inflicted suffering of animals will be relieved.

Crutchfield and Hereth are doing what philosophers do: posing ethical questions in a provocative way so that ethical dilemmas can be explored. That’s me being charitable: how else can one meet their fatuous argument that forcing people to make themselves sick is not a form of medical tyranny? A Clockwork Orange comes to mind, and not in a good way.

In a later issue of Bioethics, Rainer Ebert and Christian Koder respond to Crutchfield and Hereth. Their paper, titled Why It is Wrong to Promote Alpha-Gal Syndrome, demolishes most of Crutchfield’s and Hereth’s absurdities. Count among these is the blithe assumption that making people allergic to a subset of meats—most mammal meat—will wean people off all types of meat. Ebert and Koder look at the actual dietary habits of people afflicted with AGS, and show with data that while some shift to vegetarian diets, most simply shift to eating meats that do not make them sick. Animal suffering would not be reduced by inducing AGS worldwide; its burden would just be shifted to other species. Even so, Ebert’s and Koder’s critique is burdened by the same elementary fallacy: that vegetarianism per se is a virtuous habit toward which all persons should strive.

Where things get sticky, as they did for my vegan volunteer, is how the virtuous should respond to unvirtue. Does virtue include cultivating virtue in others, in this case, those who do not share your definition of virtue? By introducing himself as a moralistic prig, my vegan volunteer did nothing to advance virtue; he just alienated his fellow volunteers. We eventually found a place where he could buy his own bowls and cutlery, and pumpkins to eat. While he took his meals with the rest of us, he was tolerated at best. Imagine the reaction to a moralistic prig from the Center for Disease Control showing up at your door with a bottle of Lone Star ticks for your mandatory tick bite, and you get an idea of how Crutchfield’s and Hereth’s proposal would fare. You don’t need to imagine it, in fact: just look back five years at our disastrous experiment with mandatory COVID-19 vaccinations.

Ideally, persuasion should be the preferred tool to cultivate virtue. If persuasion fails, coercion may justifiably follow. The question in all instances will be: where should the line be drawn? If, for example, virtue means not stealing another’s possessions or money, and if persuading people not to steal fails, punishing theft comes next. The same question can be asked about less consequential matters, like fashion preference? If wearing a blue shirt is a sign of virtue, wearing a red shirt might be regarded as a lack of virtue. At what point are the blue-shirted justified in punishing the red-shirted? There is no such point, most people would argue. Even so, fashion choice can become a matter of coercion if it masquerades as something else: women forced to wear the hijab in the guise of public morality, or Chinese forced to wear the Mao jacket in the guise of class solidarity. This is how virtue tends to tyranny, and the moral depravity that often goes with it.

This is precisely where the virtuous vegetarian finds himself. The familiar arguments for persuasion—it’s healthier, it reduces animal suffering, it’s a better use of land and resources, it mitigates climate change—have not eliminated carnivory among humans. To make their case for coercion, Crutchfield and Hereth enlist science—or more properly a simulacrum of science—as their instruments of deflection, prevarication, and myth.

They do a particularly poor job of it. Some of their shortcomings are, to steal President Trump’s recent description of Iranian shenanigans, “cute,” particularly their use of genetic engineering as the MacGuffin that covers all plot holes. The Lone Star tick can only induce AGS within the limited geographic range where Lone Star ticks live. No problem! Just use genetic engineering to enable Lone Star ticks to expand their range worldwide. Here’s another use of the MacGuffin. A peculiar component of the saliva of Lone Star ticks is the triggering agent for AGS, which is absent from the saliva of most other tick species. No problem! Just use genetic engineering to make those other tick species produce the triggering agent in their saliva. It’s almost adorable in its naíveite, really.

There’s also statistical legerdemain. AGS is an immune response that can go haywire in some devastating ways, such as anaphylactic shock. The incidence of anaphylaxis in AGS is 1-3 percent. The estimated number of AGS patients presently ranges from 250,000-500,000, or 2,500-15,000 cases of anaphylactic shock. Inducing AGS in the world’s 8.3 billion people gives you 83-249 million deliberately induced cases of anaphylactic shock. By comparison, COVID-19 deaths worldwide were about 7 million, according to the World Health Organization. Proposing a worldwide medical intervention that “only” carries a 1-3 percent risk is a callous distraction.

Finally, we scarcely understand how the immune system works, which undercuts Crutchfield’s and Hereth’s case that AGS would be a benign intervention against carnivory, akin to inoculating against measles. Any assessment of risk involves the so-called “unknown unknowns,” which abound for AGS. Recently, one of these unknown unknowns was shifted to the rank of “known unknowns,” which slightly clarifies the actual risk that AGS patients face. This was a connection between AGS and anomalous reactions to cetuximab, a monoclonal antibody drug that ameliorates reactions to organ transplants. The similarity likely means that patients with AGS will face an increased risk with organ transplants. The risk may be small or large, but it is unknown. Many further unknown unknowns abound for AGS. Scientists still have no idea what component of tick saliva triggers AGS. Philosophers playing with the immune system is like babies playing with thermite: reckless endangerment.

At the end of the day, there is only one morally acceptable justification for vegetarianism: simply that you like it. Bioethics seems to be uncomfortable with such an individualist and essentially hedonistic choice. At this point, we should all breathe sighs of relief that bioethicists do not rule the world. We should not sleep peacefully, though, because they seem to want to.

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