Buddhist Reflections at Sea Level: a Response to Goldberg’s “i Want My Beef”

David Goldberg's beef isn't just about beef. His goal is to justify the raising, killing, and eating of cows, steers (castrated bulls), and the myriad of other animals we routinely kill for food. While he promises to give us three arguments in defense of meat-eating, I detect five arguments: (i) the monk aping argument (If monks do it, so can I), (ii) the selfish gene argument, (iii) the animals can't suffer argument, (iv) the high elevation argument, and (v) the prey-liberation reductio. The arguments are independent of each other and will be treated as such. In what follows, I will address arguments (i) – (iv), starting with (ii). [I won't address argument (v) per se, because Singer has already addressed it in Chapter 6 of Animal Liberation.] Along the way, I will argue that Goldberg misinterprets Dawkins, Singer, and Norcross, and that for this reason, along with countless others, his defense of eating meat fails. Goldberg contends that Peter Singer's call for a nonspeciesistic ethic flies in the face of the biological reality of gene selfishness. In The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins argues that traditional evolutionists are mistaken in thinking that species is the primary unit of selection in natural selection. He contends that the fundamental unit of selection is the gene. A successful gene will be long-lived (in the gene pool), fecund, and have a high degree of copying-fidelity. An unsuccessful gene will promptly be removed from the gene pool. But how exactly do selfish genes succeed? Here is the gist of selfish gene theory: An individual gene is like a tiny self-replicating computer program that builds/designs certain features into a resulting organism. As such, genes give rise to the phenotypic traits of the individual macro-organisms they, in concert with other genes, design. Those phenotypic traits that help an individual organism survive and procreate in a given environment are fitness enhancing (in that environment) and, as a result, are likely to be passed on to the next generation, and hence, the genes responsible for those phenotypic traits are selected for. Genes that result in maladaptive phenotypic traits are likely to result in organisms that die before procreating. Waxing Quinean, we might put the point as follows: Those genes that give rise to organisms ill-suited to their environment have the pathetic but praiseworthy tendency to remove