The Ethics of Synthetic Meat: A New Challenging Technology
Under the Ethical Scrutiny - Abstract
Luca Lo Sapio 1
1
    University of Turin, Via Sant’Ottavio 20, Turin, Italy


                 Summary
                 The Ethics of synthetic meat is an emerging field in applied Ethics. As the world's
                 population grows, stakeholders, scholars and manufacturers have begun to hypothesize
                 new strategies to meet growing food needs and to prevent food production from having a
                 deleterious environmental impact. Among the various strategies adopted, the creation of
                 synthetic meat deserves special mention. This technology has aroused both hopes and fears
                 among consumers and scholars involved in the agri-food sector and, lately, among moral
                 philosophers.
                 In this contribution I will dedicate myself to focusing on the moral issues raised by the
                 production and/or consumption of synthetic meat.
                 In the first part I will outline some moral arguments against synthetic meat.
                 First, I will dwell on the so-called repugnance argument according to which the reluctance
                 regarding certain types of foods (or other things) should be taken as a moral indication
                 about the permissibility of using such products.
                 Second, I will address the argument of naturalness according to which synthetic meat
                 should be rejected because of its unnaturalness and because of the serious consequences it
                 would have on the moral character of people who use it.
                 The third argument concerns the distraction of attention from the production of plant-based
                 foods that would result from investing in synthetic meat. Investing in synthetic meat would
                 make these other production lines lose ground.
                 Finally, I will consider an argument that I think is the biggest concern from a moral but
                 also an economic point of view with respect to this product.
                 The large-scale introduction of synthetic meat will generate the loss of thousands of jobs,
                 because of the reduction in the number of workers needed to carry on production and
                 because of the increasing processes of automation that will include the introduction of 3D
                 Printers and artificial intelligence.
                 In the second part of the contribution, I will try to provide counterarguments to show how
                 none of the previous objections are able to provide robust moral reasons to hinder the
                 production and consumption of synthetic meat and, on the contrary, I will focus on some
                 arguments in favor of the consumption of synthetic meat.
                 In the concluding remarks, I will focus on two aspects: 1) that investment in a given
                 technology should not lead us to overshadow the necessary moral transformations required
                 for the structuring of less environmentally impactful lifestyles; 2) that when faced with
                 far-reaching problems, it is always appropriate to adopt a multi-focus strategy, avoiding
                 placing excessive hopes and expectations on a single technology but, at the same time, also
                 avoiding underestimating the potential contributions that a given technology can offer us

                 Keywords 1
                 ethics of synthetic meat, nonhuman animals, animal welfare, ecological impact, multifocal
                 strategies

Proceedings of HAICTA 2022, September 22–25, 2022, Athens, Greece
EMAIL: luca.losapio@unito.it (A. 1)
ORCID: 0000-0003-1606-9355 (A. 1)
              ©️ 2022 Copyright for this paper by its authors.
              Use permitted under Creative Commons License Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).
              CEUR Workshop Proceedings (CEUR-WS.org)




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