New challenges to cultivated meat

Abstract

 Meat production raises a host of ethical problems that a move away from animal agriculture and towards cellular agriculture could, partially, resolve. Unsurprisingly, then, ethicists have offered a range of positive cases for cultivated meat, and ethics has been an important part of the broader conversation about the technology. However, academics continue to raise new ethical challenges to cultivated meat. In this paper, to bolster the positive ethical cases for cultivated meat offered elsewhere, we respond to three recent challenges to cultivated meat. These are Ben Bramble’s argument that we should not want to be the kind of people who want to eat cultivated meat; Carlo Alvaro’s suggestions that a virtuous individual would not eat cultivated meat and that cultivated meat will fail to eliminate animal agriculture; and Elan Abrell’s claim that endorsing cultivated meat represents a missed opportunity. All three challenges, we contend, fail.