The more that people experience moral emotions about meat-eating, and the more that they think about animal emotions and animal suffering, the more that they are likely to think about meat-eating as a moral issue.
ART MARKMAN: ‘There are many things we choose to do or not to do that don’t seem to tap into our moral sense… Many people choose to eat meat. For most of them, that decision has to do with what they enjoy or what they feel is good for them, and does not have any moral implications. Some people choose not to eat meat. For many of those people, the choice to avoid meat has a moral component to it. How does an activity like eating a particular food come to have a moral dimension?
This question was explored in a paper in the July 2019 issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology by Matthew Feinberg, Chloe Kovacheff, Rimma Teper, and Yoel Inbar. They looked specifically at what makes people turn eating meat into a moral issue.
They argue that there are some forces that drive people away from thinking about behavior as a moral issue. Getting pleasure from an activity, like eating meat, will make it less likely that people moralize it. In addition, when faced with the conflict between their actual behavior (eating meat) and the prospect that it has a moral dimension, people will experience cognitive dissonance. A common way to reduce that feeling of conflict is to avoid treating meat-eating as a moral action.
Other forces drive people toward treating an issue as moral. One is if they experience emotions like guilt, shame, disgust, or anger related to these actions. These emotions are often associated with morality and can help to moralize a behavior. Another force is if people think about the issue in ways that are explicitly moral, that can lead them to lend a moral dimension to the behavior…
Consistent with the researchers’ proposal about moralization, when people think meat is tasty and they enjoy eating it, they are unlikely to treat meat-eating as a moral issue. The more that people experience moral emotions about meat-eating, and the more that they think about animal emotions and animal suffering, the more that they are likely to think about meat-eating as a moral issue’. SOURCE…
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