Becoming a Vegetarian, Part 1

This is the first in a two part series on my recent decision to stop eating meat. This has been going on for about 9 months.

“Cognitive Dissonance” is a Psychology term that refers to the unpleasant mental state of holding two conflicting ideas. Essentially, the mind will perform amazing rhetorical backflips in order to ease this type of conflict.

The concept itself isn’t new, but I started thinking about it in relation to vegetarianism/veganism after listening to a Definitely Not the Opera podcast in which Carol Tavris was interviewed about her new book Mistakes Were Made (But Not By Me).

What does cognitive dissonance have to do with vegetarianism? Well, I think it was an encounter with cognitive dissonance that fueled my rather abrupt decision to stop eating meat.

People like to have a positive image of themselves. When we look in the mirror, it’s nice to think that we’re generally good people. It’s true, we all do bad things sometimes, but very few of us think that we are genuinely rotten people.

This desire to see ourselves as more or less “good people” ends up preventing us from properly evaluating our actions as “good” or not. If a person has already decided that he or she is a good person, then it obviously follows that the majority of actions he or she takes must be good.

This kind of presupposition sets the stage for cognitive dissonance. I liked to think of myself as generally kind, compassionate, and averse to the unnecessary production of suffering. I also thought of myself as someone who ate a lot of meat, and didn’t see a problem with it. Since I enjoyed eating meat, and I believed I was a good person, it followed that either eating meat is also a good thing, or I was not actually being as good a person as I thought. Recognizing that I had set up the question with an assumed answer (of course I’m a good person!) was the first time I realized that my views on the ethics of eating meat were based less on any sort of argument and more on my desire to remain in a state of cognitive consonance.

In the interest of fairness, I did some brief research and formed a vegetarian argument. If I couldn’t easily argue against it, then I would assume that my position on the matter was, at the very least, unexamined.

Here is the argument that I came up with:

Eating meat is not a necessary part of a human diet. In fact, diets without meat, or with a smaller consumption of meat, are healthier than those that contain excess amounts of meat. The production of meat creates suffering on the part of meat animals, and if we grant that meat is unnecessary part of a diet, then the suffering is produced unnecessarily. If I am a compassionate person, I will try to minimize the suffering that I cause during the course of my life.

Viewed without the motive to harmonize my existing actions with my self-image, the argument appeared sound to me. Since I couldn’t come up with a counter-argument that satisfied me, I decided that it would make sense to stop eating meat in the interim and think about the whole issue a bit more.

>> READ PART 2 >>