The ethics of eating meat has been long debated by philosophers, activists, and religious leaders. Today, in the West at least, vegetarianism and veganism is on the rise as more people feel eating meat cannot be justified on ethical, religious, or environmental reasons. 

This debate is framed as one of a personal choice: is, for the average person, eating meat immoral on practical or principled grounds? While we recognise that ethics and morality are subjective, that does not mean that they are not debatable. Societal attitudes to many moral issues have changed dramatically over the past several centuries due to the kinds of discourse we seek to emulate and explore here. 

This is not a debate about banning meat, although it is logical to assume that not eating meat would (over time) help lead to the decline of farming and hunting animals as activities. We assume that for most people the choice to not eat meat is possible; that it isn’t a choice between abstention and starvation. We also assume that eating artificial meat, if it were to go mainstream, would be considered compatible with vegetarianism — that it is essentially a ‘fake meat’ similar to existing imitation products because it similarly does not require killing animals.