I suppose there isn't anything wrong with my title statement this week, because Peter Singer did indeed get Richard Dawkins to concede that he's wrong about eating meat in a Q&A after one of his lectures.  This is something of a big deal, since Richard Dawkins spends most of his time responding to people who are out to catch him in a public "gotcha!" moment.  I'm sure there are countless legions of the faithful who would love to stump him and gleefully return to church, bragging about how they slew this New Atheist dragon.

Peter Singer and Richard Dawkins largely agree about atheism, so that's not what I'm talking about here.  Peter Singer is a Professor of Philosophy and Ethics at Princeton, and he might be the most influential and controversial philosophers alive today.  His views on animal rights, world poverty, and abortion are particularly provocative.  The particular incident I've been referring to concerns vegetarianism.

Oh Snap!

I haven't been able to locate a recording or even a transcript of the actual exchange between Dawkins and Singer, but the incident was discussed on an episode Point of Inquiry.  In summary, Singer points out that evolution ought to make us realize that "species-ism" is nothing more than an immoral and unjustifiable prejudice.  Once we get past the religious belief that humans were specially created by a deity and/or possess a supernatural soul, the moral distinction between a human being and an animal evaporates.

The rebuttal that springs to mind immediately is that human beings are more intelligent or capable than animals, and thus ought to have higher moral standing than other animals.  However, this argument quickly falls to pieces when you compare a profoundly retarded human being to a chimpanzee.  By any reasonable standard, the chimpanzee is much more of a moral and intelligent agent than the severely disabled human.  Arguments like these are what drive Singer to his strong advocacy for animal rights and his support for euthanasia, abortion, and even infanticide.*

*You'll have to see his works for the details of his arguments and positions; I don't know them terribly well, and I disagree with many of them.  For my part, this exact argument got me to admit to my undergrad Intro to Philosophy/Ethics Professor that, yes, I was a species-ist.  I still admit that, but for what I consider a much more nuanced reason.  You'll have to judge for yourself in the next section.

The great apes are the best place to start this discussion, but let's finish going over exactly what happened between Singer and Dawkins.  Singer suggested that Dawkins hasn't taken the implications of evolution far enough.  The notion of eating a human being is repugnant to most people, as it well should be.  Furthermore, many people (Dawkins included) champion the rights and privileges of primates, due to their apparent intelligence and capacity for emotion.  Singer then claimed that evolution demonstrates that these distinctions are completely arbitrary.  Common descent means that we are ultimately related to all animals.  We won't eat a fellow human being because they are like us; that is, we are closely related to them.  But, we are also rather closely related to cows.  Many societies grant extra, near-human rights to chimpanzees and gorillas because we are closely related to them, but we are also pretty closely related to pigs.

If we draw the line at the species level, then we are merely being species-ists.  According to Singer, this is not morally different than when a bigot discriminates along racial, religious, gender, or ethnic lines.  Prejudice is prejudice, and it's ugly and immoral.

Dawkins ceded this point to Singer, and admitted to being inconsistent.  I believe he has since said that he regrets eating meat, but does so for social and selfish reasons.  Some googling turns up evidence that he doesn't take issue with meat from well-treated and humanely-killed animals, but I'm not positive.  (Regardless, any meat consumption would still technically be morally inconsistent, per Singer's arguments.)  At the risk of oversimplifying or putting words in Dawkins' mouth, I would say that he accepts the validity of Singer's moral argument but does not (or cannot) follow it.

Settle Down, Vegetarians ...

Wow!  Richard Dawkins smacked down for not understanding and embracing the implications of evolution.  Who could have imagined it?  It gets even worse, since he's rejecting this evolution-based morality for one ultimately derived from the vestiges of religion.  Damn!  And, just when you thought it couldn't get any worse, the attack came from the guy who wrote Animal Liberation, the book that launched countless animal rights extremists' careers.

Let's take a step back and look at Singer's argument.  His point is that people who eat meat have arbitrarily drawn a moral line between their own species (homo sapiens) and the rest of the animal kingdom.  He claims that there is no objective reason to discriminate between killing animals for food and killing other people for food, because you are ultimately related to all other animals.

I can sympathize with this sentiment.  I personally wouldn't eat bushmeat.  I often joke about trying gorilla or orangutan meat, pointing out that it would be kind of like eating a person.  Without fail, this gets a rise out of people.  Apparently, my friends and I aren't species-ists, but we are definitely order-ists.  (If you went up to superorder, you'd encompass rabbits, and I suspect most people would be off the wagon and at the dinner table.)  Though slightly more inclusive, the placement of our moral line is still arbitrary.

Well, so is Singer's.  Though evolution teaches us that we are related to all animals, it also teaches us that we are related to all plants.  We are also related to all fungi, protists, bacteria, and even viruses**.   You are related to every living organism on the planet, from blue whales to palm trees to smallpox.  If Earth happened to seed life on Mars, or visa-versa, then you are even related to Martians.
 
**This means that, depending on your choice of definitions, we might be related to things that aren't even alive!  There is no consensus definition of life, but viruses don't always satisfy all the criteria of some definitions of "living."

Just as humans and primates are not inherently special in a moral sense, animals are not either.  If most people are species-ists or order-ists, then evolution neatly demonstrates that Singer and other vegetarians are equally-prejudiced kingdom-ists.  Dawkins was wrong to cede the point.  Vegetarianism is absolutely not the logical consequence of evolution.

"But wait," Animal Liberation Front extremists scream as they dump paint on hamburgers, "look at my gruesome slaughterhouse videos!"  That is a completely separate argument concerning a completely separate issue.  Animals have the capacity to feel pain, and you can argue that inflicting pain on something that can experience pain is immoral.  However, this has absolutely nothing to do with evolution or species-ism.  It would be a distinct moral construct.

Moreover, I suspect this construct would be fraught with its own arbitrary moral distinctions.  Plants react to distress; why is that not considered pain?  What about the pain experienced by a field mouse going through a wheat thresher?  Do the violent death throes brought about by pesticides count as pain for bugs?  And, even these considerations ignore the trillions of microscopic elephants in the room:  microorganisms.  It seems like it would be impossible to construct a non-domain-ist moral philosophy, as our bodies mercilessly destroy countless bacteria daily.

Settle Down Again, Folks

Now, I know that I blithely dismissed a whole lot of philosophical and ethical discussions in that last paragraph.  I have no doubt that Singer and plenty of other people have spilled tons of ink constructing moral systems that conclude vegetarianism is the only morally consistent way to live.  I'm not aiming to refute those, and I won't even claim that I've addressed them properly.

My point is that species-ism is a frivolous charge to levy against meat-eaters, and furthermore I maintain that common descent is not something from which to construct a reasonable morality.  Charles Darwin taught us that all living creatures descended from a common ancestor:  we're all cousins, where we comprise all life on earth.  You shouldn't accuse a meat-eater of inconsistency between bites of a carrot or mushroom.  In terms of evolution, you have both drawn arbitrary lines on the tree of life.  One is indeed more inclusive than the other, but both are prejudiced.

Let me again emphasize that I'm not dismissing vegetarianism or Peter Singer's specific moral philosophies out-of-hand.  What I'm doing is pointing out that his argument to Richard Dawkins was terrible.  Evolution does not provide us with a good argument for animal rights.  Singer accused Dawkins of not following Darwin's ideas to their ultimate logical conclusion; on the contrary, Singer hasn't followed his own ideas to their logical conclusions.  If you won't eat meat because you're related to the animal it came from, then you'd better not eat fruits or grains either!  You also better hope there's no eternal judgment waiting for you, because your immune system is massacring countless relatives every day.

I'm sure Peter Singer and many other vegetarians have fine moral arguments for vegetarianism and/or veganism.  I would guess they're based on pain or consciousness; no matter how you define those terms, I'd think most animals are rather close to humans and well beyond plants (which would themselves be well beyond microorganisms).  But, this position is not the logical conclusion of evolution, nor does not mean meat-eaters are prejudiced.  If you're going to appeal to evolution or anti-species-ism, you'd better be living off rocks.