Is it wrong to eat lab-grown meat?Footnote 1 The standard response from the ethical vegan is “no”.Footnote 2 This is because the wrong-making features of much ‘real’ or ‘traditional’ animal meat-eating arguably do not take hold, or at least take hold to a significantly lesser extent, to lab-grown meat-eating.Footnote 3 For example, the production of lab-grown meat avoids human caused animal suffering. This places lab-grown meat consumption in a class of ‘ethical meat eating’ shared by other kinds of meat consumption, such as eating animals who have died of natural causes.Footnote 4 In other words, ‘real’ animal meat-eating can be considered morally ‘off-limits’ because it realises certain wrong-making features, and lab-grown animal meat-eating can be considered morally ‘fair-game’ because it doesn’t realise those features. While there are several ethical issues that arise concerning lab-grown meat which may render the practice of eating it morally off-limits,Footnote 5 it is our claim that even if we take for granted what Alvaro (2019) calls a ‘desirable outcome thesis’ whereby “in the future lab-grown meat will become readily available, cruelty-free, affordable, environmentally safe, and taste the same as real meat,” (Alvaro 2019, p. 128) and therefore many of the wrong-making features of real meat eating are not readily available for lab-grown meat-eating, there is still some lab-grown meat, such as human and white rhino meat, that is nonetheless intuitively off-limits to eat.Footnote 6 It is the claim of this paper that accepting such an intuition generates a moral puzzle that needs resolving.

The puzzle, which we are calling the ‘Puzzle of lab-Grown Meat’ challenges those who would endorse the moral permissibility of eating some ‘fair-game’ lab-grown meat, such as chicken and fish, but would reject the moral permissibility of consuming other ‘off-limits’ lab-grown meat, such as human meat, to account for what makes the former morally permissible and the latter morally impermissible.Footnote 7 To reject this challenge, we claim, forces an endorsement of one of two implausibly strong positions: either that all lab-grown meat is morally impermissible to eat, or that all lab-grown meat is morally permissible to eat, and as a result ‘anything goes’ as long as it is lab-grown (for example, human meat is ethical to consume). But both views are, intuitively, false (or at least not plausibly true), and this gives us a reason to take on this challenge. To accept the challenge, is to resolve the puzzle by showing that there is at least one morally relevant distinction to be drawn between fair-game and off-limits lab-grown meat, that justify the intuitive moral permissibility of the former and the intuitive moral impermissibility of the latter. We will consider several candidate resolutions that attempt this; however, we argue that while some are more promising than others, none of these candidates can resolve the puzzle.

This paper consists of three parts. We first argue for the necessity of accepting Alvaro’s “desirable outcome thesis” by outlining what lab-grown meat is and the various ethical and feasibility concerns that arise with current production methods. We then outline and argue for the existence of the Puzzle of Lab-Grown Meat and contextualise it by considering the relevant background literature. We then offer several resolutions to the puzzle and show that each is unable to resolve it. We finally consider what this unresolved puzzle entails and where it leaves us.

What is Lab-Grown Meat?

Under current food systems, approximately eighty billion farm animals are slaughtered for food each year (Ritchie et al. 2024). Animals reared for food are often subjected to painful procedures such as debeaking chicks or tail-docking piglets, usually without anaesthesia (Hughes and Gentle 1995; Morrison & Hemsworth 2020). For most of their short lives, these animals will be confined in sheds or cages which harm their welfare (Rollin 2016). Aside from the obvious and serious ethical concerns that our current agriculture system raises, there are also grave environmental problems that come with raising that many animals. Some of these problems include animal agriculture being a major contributor to carbon emissions, deforestation, and biodiversity loss (Steinfeld et al. 2006).

Some of those concerned by these moral and environmental problems have adopted vegan, vegetarian, or low-meat diets. Many countries have animal activist movements, organisations and political parties which promote dietary change and improved welfare measures for animals. Environmental bodies, most notably the Food and Agriculture Organisation have recommended shifts to low-meat diets as effective strategies for mitigating climate change (Steinfeld et al. 2006). However, uptake of these diets is still low with vegetarians making up 5% of the US population and vegans 3% (Choudhury et al. 2020).

Lab-grown meat promises to solve these ethical problems by producing meat which does not require the slaughter of a living, sentient animal. Unlike plant-based meat alternatives, which are made from a mixture of plants and fungi, lab-grown meat does not merely simulate the taste and texture of animal meat but is genuinely animal meat. To produce lab-grown meat, cells are first collected from live animals and are then induced to grow in a series of bioreactors. These are vessels in which the cells are suspended in a liquid medium of micro- and macro-nutrients. After enough cells have grown, the meat is removed from the bioreactor and can then be prepared as food (Humbird 2021). The production of meat that doesn’t involve killing animals or causing them pain has obvious moral advantages over conventionally grown meat. Similarly, lab-grown meat has the potential to be a more environmentally sustainable meat-production system (Parlasca and Qaim 2022).

Further, lab-grown meat promises to overcome consumer hesitancy to switch to plant-based diets. A study by The Good Food Institute, an organisation which promotes alternatives to traditional agriculture, found that ethical concerns have a mild effect on consumer choices whereas cost and taste had large effects (Parry & Szejda 2019)Footnote 8. Lab-grown meat promises to overcome these consumer sticking points by producing genuine meat and by, eventually, becoming cost competitive.

Finally, lab-grown meat can expand our culinary options. The meat of any species can be produced provided the appropriate biological material is available. Lab-grown white rhino can be served without threatening that species with extinction. Extinct species our ancestors ate such as the woolly mammoth can be re-introduced to our diet. Chimerical meat such as tiger-flavoured lobster can be synthesised and, most pertinently for our topic, human meat can be on the menu.

However, in its present stage of development, the technology has several moral, environmental and feasibility issues. Currently, the most efficient medium to grow cell-based meat is in Foetal Bovine Serum which is a byproduct of the dairy industry harvested from deceased or unborn calves (Humbird 2021). Were lab-grown meat to remain dependent on this medium, then the technology would do little to overcome the moral problems of traditional agriculture (at least in regard to cattle). Others have doubted whether large scale, industrial lab-grown meat factories would be environmentally sustainable when water, land use and greenhouse gas emissions are properly accounted for (Chriki & Hocquette 2020). Further, there are serious feasibility concerns which may mean this technology is unlikely to ever become commercially viable, let alone disrupt traditional agriculture (Humbird 2021).

These current practical and moral concerns, while no doubt interesting and pressing, obscure the ethically interesting puzzle we are presenting which is why we must sideline these issues. The Puzzle of Lab-Grown Meat is positioning itself against a stronger target, being the hypothetical case whereby these issues are resolved. Following Alvaro (2019), this takes the form of imagining a “desirable outcome thesis” whereby “in the future lab-grown meat will become readily available, cruelty-free, affordable, environmentally safe, and taste the same as real meat” (Alvaro 2019, p. 128). It is an empirical question whether the desirable outcome thesis can be realised. If it cannot, then those persuaded by vegan arguments may accept the position that lab-grown meat is morally impermissible to eat on the grounds that eating lab-grown meat involves similar harms to traditional meat production. The more interesting claim that we focus on is that there is something unethical about some lab-grown meat, even in their most idealised form.

Despite dealing with an idealised situation, resolving the Puzzle of Lab-Grown Meat has its practical implications. There is considerable effort to develop lab-grown meat and some companies have focused their attention on potentially off-limits meat such as the meat of endangered or extinct species (Taylor 2024). Resolving the Puzzle of Lab-Grown Meat provides us with practical moral guidance as to whether potentially off-limits meat should be developed or not.

What is the Puzzle of Lab-Grown Meat?

What makes eating ‘real’ meat wrong, if it is wrong, generally involves an account of it causing, inter alia, animal suffering, and for lab-grown meat, this justification is claimed to be unavailable (we will consider this claim more fully in the next section). That is, if, inter alia, causing animal suffering is wrong, and an animal has had to, inter alia, suffer for you to eat it, then eating it is wrong. On the other hand, because an animal hasn’t had to, inter alia, suffer for you to eat lab-grown meat, then it is morally permissible to eat. Therefore, while lab-grown meat may be a kind of meat, it is morally asymmetrical to ‘real’ meat and is ‘fair-game’ to eat. We will refer to the position that there is no morally relevant feature(s) of lab-grown meat that would render it impermissible to eat as the ‘amoralist’ approach to lab-grown meat.

A dilemma, however, rears its head for the amoralist when we consider the range of hypothetical lab-grown meat, and the intuitively unpalatable positions they must accept. For example, while amoralism seems intuitively plausible when applied to some lab-grown meat, such as lab-grown chicken and fish, to be rationally consistent, the amoralist would have to extend their approach to all lab-grown meat, such as human, white rhino and Tasmanian tiger, which are intuitively ‘off-limits’. That is, off-limits lab-grown meat is intuitively morally symmetrical to its ‘real’ meat counterpart, as eating off-limits meat such as human meat, whether or not it’s lab-grown or ‘suffering-free’, is nonetheless still, intuitively, morally wrong. We will refer to this argument for moral symmetry as a ‘moralist’ approach to lab-grown meat, in that there are morally relevant features of lab-grown meat that render it morally impermissible to eat.Footnote 9 A dilemma arises, in turn, for the moralist, who finding off-limits lab-grown meat morally impermissible to eat, is left having to hold all lab-grown meat off-limits, unless they can account for why fair-game lab-grown meat, like lab-grown chicken, is morally fair-game to consume, and not also off-limits. We therefore have two horns of a moral dilemma concerning the moral permissibility of lab-grown meat which needs solving, which we are calling the ‘paradox of lab-grown meat’.

The Puzzle of Lab-Grown Meat can be stated as a paradox in the following way, whereby each proposition is seemingly true, yet inconsistent when taken as a set:Footnote 10

  1. 1.

    Intuitively, eating lab-grown ‘fair-game’ meat such as chicken is morally permissible.

  2. 2.

    There is no morally relevant distinction, in terms of permissibility, between eating ‘fair-game’ lab-grown meat such as chicken and ‘off-limits’ lab-grown meat such as human.

  3. 3.

    Intuitively, eating lab-grown ‘off-limits’ meat such as human is morally impermissible.

There are three strategies to dealing with this puzzle. First, one could accept the moralist approach and reject the intuition that lab-grown chicken is morally permissible to eat (reject proposition 1), and therefore hold that no lab-grown meat is fair-game to eat; all lab-grown meat is off-limits to eat. There is some support for this approach in the literature (see Alvaro 2019; 2022; Deckers 2016; Miller 2012; Fischer & Ozturk 2017). Fischer & Ozturk, for example, argue that enjoying any lab-grown meat amounts to ‘enjoying bad by proxy’ and as a result renders the practice immoral. The moralist strategy however does not seem promising. On the outset, as already has been shown, there is good reason to think that there is a stark moral asymmetry between eating ‘real’ meat and lab-grown meat. Eating a factory farmed chicken is substantially distinct from a hypothetical lab-grown chicken in terms of the wrongs that are generated through the production of the former as well as the scale at which these wrongs might occur. For example, ethical issues concerning animal suffering and ecological damage do not arise for lab-grown meat under the assumption of the desirable outcome thesis.

To make this point clearer, imagine dining at a restaurant and being given the choice between two identical chicken burgers. One of these burgers, the menu reads, ‘involved the suffering, confinement and death of the chicken’, and the other, the menu reads, ‘never lived and was grown in a lab’. Consuming the former burger is clearly morally worse than the latter. Various philosophical traditions have argued for the moral impermissibility of consuming ‘real’ meat such as Utilitarianism (Singer 2002), Deontology (Regan 2004) and Virtue Ethics (Hursthouse 2006) where, despite theoretical differences, avoiding animal suffering is a central reason for its impermissibility.Footnote 11 Similarly, contemporary production of meat has serious environmental harms (Steinfeld 2006). Therefore, if we accept that suffering (or environmental impact) makes consuming lab grown meat morally impermissible, and we accept that (under the desirable outcome thesis) that lab-grown meat does not involve suffering (or environmental impact) then we can move forward accepting that lab-grown meat, at least in virtue of its not involving suffering (or environmental impact), is pro tanto morally permissible to eat; it can be fair-game to consume.Footnote 12

The second strategy involves accepting the amoralist approach and rejecting the intuition that eating human lab-grown meat is morally impermissible (rejecting proposition 3), and therefore holding that no lab-grown meat is off-limits to eat; all lab-grown meat is fair-game to eat. There is some support for this position in the literature (see Milburn 2016; Schaefer & Savulescu 2014). Milburn, for example, argues that, on consequentialist grounds, the proposed moralist responses are unable to outweigh the clear benefits of lab-grown meat over ‘real’ meat, and consuming human meat may be morally preferable to consuming non-human animal meat insofar as it addresses some of these moralist concerns. However, we can at least minimally grant that embracing the permissibility of eating human flesh, even if lab-grown, is an intuitively challenging idea.

To illustrate the intuitive implausibility of the amoralist view, consider the following scenario. You are flicking through the menu at a hypothetical lab-grown meat restaurant. You order a lab-grown chicken burger, and your friend orders the human meatballs. You look at your friend and say, ‘I know it is lab-grown, but why would you order that?’. Asking such a question appears reasonable. Yes, in either case the food is lab-grown and avoids the usual ethical objections levelled towards eating meat. However, it seems as though the kind of lab-grown meat being eaten is nonetheless an ethically relevant consideration.Footnote 13 To express this intuition more clearly, consider an imperfectly analogous scenario: You are starving to death in a lifeboat in the middle of the ocean with little hope of rescue. In the lifeboat with you are two strangers who have died of hunger. One is a human being, and the other is a chicken. Imagine that all you know about them, besides that they have died of natural causes, is that they both have nobody who would care about their remains, and that eating either would be medically safe. Starving, you decide to eat one of them. Who should you choose? If by a miracle, rescuers arrived and found you had chosen to eat the human instead of the chicken, it would be reasonable for them to say, ‘I know you had to, and they were already dead, but why did you make that choice?’ As with the restaurant scenario, you again are in a situation which avoids the usual ethical objections levelled towards eating meat (being complicit in animal suffering etc.) and the kind of meat that is being eaten is ethically relevant. Footnote 14 If the amoralist is right, and there is no morally relevant feature of lab-grown meat that would make eating it morally impermissible, then why do we feel like there is an ethical difference between different kinds of lab-grown meat?

Let us call these first two strategies dissolving strategies, since they deny the existence of a puzzle by rejecting either proposition 1 or 3.

The third strategy, which seems to resolve the issues for both the moralist and amoralist approaches, is that one can hold that eating some lab-grown meat is intuitively fair-game and that others are intuitively off-limits but argue (rejecting proposition 2) that there is a morally relevant distinction between the two. Doing so allows one to accept the intuitive force of both the amoralist or moralist approaches in some cases and morally distinguish those cases which do not apply to their approach by appealing to a morally relevant distinction. To take this strategy is to show why lab-grown chicken, or lab-grown meat like it, is morally permissible to eat, while lab-grown human, or lab-grown meat like it, is morally impermissible to eat. The issue is then identifying this moral difference, which will be the focus of Section “Solving the Puzzle of Lab-Grown Meat.“

Before identifying what lab-grown meat is, it is worth making a brief clarificatory point. When considering the meat we eat, our language often operates at the level of species and elides the fact that we eat an individual hen, cow, pig, or sheep. A similar oversight occurs when we talk about eating lab-grown human meat since someone in particular must have their cells harvested to begin the process of creating a lab-grown human meat. This may raise distinct ethical concerns for individuals or particular groups within a species. For example, there may be something distinctly wrong about eating an individual, whether it be a human or a chicken, that talking at the level of species fails to capture (see Locarno 2023). We take it that a resolution to the Puzzle of Lab-Grown Meat operates at the species level, and therefore while there may be moral reasons to exclude certain individuals or groups from being consumed when lab-grown, these reasons will not explain the puzzle’s grounding intuitions. We consider some of these concerns in Section “Solving the Puzzle of Lab-Grown Meat.“.

In this section we have outlined the Puzzle of Lab-Grown Meat and have highlighted three strategies for overcoming it. We have suggested the third strategy of providing a morally relevant distinction that justifies the intuition that some lab-grown meat, like chicken, is fair-game, and others, like human, is off-limits is the most promising strategy in resolving the puzzle.

Solving the Puzzle of Lab-Grown Meat

In this section, we will consider a range of candidate resolutions to the Puzzle of Lab-Grown Meat and one candidate dissolution. These are ‘resolutions’ to the extent that each view attempts to identify a morally relevant feature of off-limits lab-grown meat that justifies the intuitive moral distinction between off-limits lab-grown meat, such as lab-grown human meat, and other fair-game lab-grown meat, such as lab-grown chicken.

Eating Off-Limits Lab-Grown Meat is Unconventional, Unhealthy, or Disgusting

Convention, health, and disgust can be appealed to as a response to the puzzle in at least two ways. The first is as a resolution to the puzzle. The argument runs that because off-limits lab-grown meat violates conventional norms, have health and safety concerns, or provoke attitudes of disgust in a way that fair-game lab-grown meat does not, and these features are taken to be morally relevant, then they are able to account for the moral difference between fair game and off-limits lab-grown meat. In other words, the resolving strategy denies premise two of the puzzle. The second is as a dissolution of the puzzle. The dissolving strategy denies premise 1 or 3 of the puzzle. Convention, health, and/or disgust could explain away the intuition that consuming off-limits lab-grown meat is immoral or consuming fair-game lab-grown meat is moral by showing the intuition to have a non-moral basis. Without the moral intuition that off-limits lab-grown meat is impermissible, or that fair-game lab-grown meat is permissible, the puzzle would be unmotivated.

Let us take the resolving strategy first. There are several ways one might explain why certain lab-grown meats are held to be off-limits but fail to show why they are immoral. For example, eating off-limits lab-grown meat might be said to be socially unconventional, disgusting, or unhealthy. Any of these reasons may be true and they may motivate people to avoid off-limits meat, but they all fail to identify a morally salient distinction between off-limits and fair-game meat. For example, it can be argued that eating lab-grown chicken is fair game while white rhino meat is off-limits because this tracks onto conventional standards about what kinds of animals are considered food. However, this argument fails primarily because it is not clear that conventional standards necessarily track onto morally permissible behaviour. For example, it may be conventional to consume chickens as food, however it does not follow that it is therefore morally permissible behaviour. The same could be said in terms of health and disgust concerns as just because a particular behaviour is considered unhealthy (this would need to be empirically shown for off-limits lab-grown meat) or disgusting, it doesn’t necessarily follow that it is also morally impermissible.Footnote 15 The resolving strategy, therefore, fails to justify the difference in our judgements of what is fair game and what is off-limits.

The dissolving strategy works to explain away the puzzle by arguing that what appears as a moral intuition is not actually a moral intuition but some other kind of intuition. We may think that our intuition regarding off-limits meat is provoked via its tracking a moral fact. However, it may be being elicited because consuming off-limits meat is against conventional practices or because it is disgusting. Since neither convention nor disgust provide good reasons for determining the morality of practices (see Alvaro 2019 who resists this claim), we should reject the third premise of the puzzle. In other words, we should reject the claim that we have an intuition that off-limits meat, like human, is morally impermissible.

It may be objected here that this dissolving strategy comes to too strong a conclusion. The puzzle may still be sustained if we have reasons for believing premise 3 independently of our intuition. But we currently don’t know what those reasons are or whether they even exist. To provide them would be to resolve the puzzle by denying premise two.

The problem with the dissolving strategy is that neither convention nor disgust seems to accurately explain our intuition regarding off-limits lab-grown meat. Not all unconventional meat is intuited to be off-limits. Insects are not conventionally consumed in western societies, but they are not intuited to be morally off-limits in those societies. Nor is all disgusting meat intuited to be off-limits. Insects are also disgusting but they are not off-limits morally. So, neither convention nor disgust seem to be equipped to adequately explain (away) our intuitions regarding off-limits lab-grown meat.

More bluntly, our intuitions regarding off-limits lab grown meat such as human and white rhino meat, just do seem to be moral intuitions. When your friend orders lab-grown human meatballs and you say to them “I know it’s lab grown but why would you order that!?” your intuitions here are moral. You are not asking your friend to account for their different culinary preference (“you may find it disgusting, but I think it tastes nice”) but to morally justify their preference.

Consuming Lab-Grown Human is Cannibalism

It could be argued that the reason eating lab-grown human meat is off-limits is because it amounts to cannibalism, and because cannibalism is wrong, eating lab-grown human meat is wrong (see Schaefer & Savulescu 2014 and Milburn 2016 who consider, and reject, this approach). This is because while lab-grown human meat is lab-grown, it is nonetheless actually human meat. The intuitive pull to refrain from cannibalism is, rightly, a strong one, and may have explanatory force insofar as it may help account for why plant-based meat that simulates real meat by tasting like it is ethically distinct from lab-grown meat.Footnote 16

However, the argument here is too hasty as it is not clear that eating lab-grown human meat is a morally impermissible kind of cannibalism (see Schaefer & Savulescu 2014 and Milburn 2016).Footnote 17 Two substantive moral features that make cannibalism wrong are that someone is harmed in order to be eaten and second that they (or those who knew the dead) are harmed by their body being mistreated. The harm caused by killing someone to eat them is clear. It is more difficult to say what makes mistreating a body wrong. One candidate is that an individual suffers a post-humous harm by having their body mistreated (by being eaten) because it violates an interest they had in being treated respectfully in death (see Schaefer & Savulescu 2014 who reject this view), or alternatively, because it undermines an intrinsic respect owed to the dead (see Blustein 2008; Stokes 2021). Additionally, it may be that it wrongs people who knew the dead by preventing or disturbing normal funeral practices.Footnote 18 Put simply, cannibalism is a post-humous harm because it is disrespectful.

Neither of these reasons apply to the case of consuming lab-grown human meat. No human is killed to produce lab-grown meat so post-humous concerns regarding respect for the dead or proper funerary practices would not arise (Alvaro 2022; Schaefer & Savulescu 2014). Therefore, even if eating lab-grown human meat is a kind of cannibalism, it is not clear that it realises the wrong-making properties that make cannibalism generally morally objectionable, and so, isn’t clearly a morally impermissible kind of cannibalism.

Further, as discussed, the Puzzle of Lab-Grown Meat is not exclusively concerned with the off-limits status of lab-grown human meat, and therefore even if it was shown that lab-grown human meat was justifiably off-limits because it amounts to an immoral kind of cannibalism, the puzzle would remain unresolved as long as any lab-grown meat was still intuitively off-limits. For example, while an appeal to cannibalism may justify the impermissibility of lab-grown human meat, it won’t be able to show what makes consuming lab-grown white rhino off-limits.

A broader resolution may be attempted that aligns off-limits lab-grown meat with certain individuals that are justifiably respect-worthy, and so to eat them is to treat them as food which is to undermine a duty of respect that we owe them and is as a result morally wrong behaviour. Something like this kind of approach may undergird what makes cannibalism wrong; that to eat a person’s body is to treat them disrespectfully. However, if we accept that it is plausible that some individuals are justifiably respect-worthy to the extent that their bodies ought to not be treated as a kind of food product, it becomes unclear why only certain animals are respect-worthy to that extent (See Deckers 2016; Locarno 2023). What morally relevant feature could be appealed to, for example, that would make a cow justifiably not respect-worthy to the extent that it can be treated as food, but a white rhinoceros justifiably respect-worthy to be spared from such a treatment? It seems instead what may be happening is that we are being guided by non-moral features to decide what animals ought to be treated as food and what animals ought to be spared by, for example, appealing to species charisma or other morally irrelevant features. An appeal to respect is therefore unable to do the required work in morally distinguishing between fair-game and off-limits lab-grown meat to resolve the puzzle.

Consuming Off-Limits Lab-Grown Meat is Offensive

It may be argued that eating lab-grown human meat is wrong because it is offensive whereas it is not offensive and therefore not wrong to eat lab-grown non-human meat. For example, the human individual whose cells became the lab grown meat, which is being eaten, or the group to which an individual belongs, may be offended by the idea that they are being treated as food. Or we may be offended that certain animals, such as white rhinoceros, are being treated as food even if it is lab-grown. If causing offence is immoral, then a morally salient distinction between fair-game and off-limits meat could be made based on their offensiveness.

A fault with this argument is that the kind of offence being generated is not necessarily the kind that makes it morally impermissible. This is because offensiveness is a contentious basis for determining the wrongness of acts, utterances, and expressions (Barrow 2005). The mere fact that someone feels offended does not mean that the action, utterance, or expression that caused offence is immoral. If any case of offensiveness is morally impermissible, it is most plausibly in instances where people intentionally insult others (Barrow 2005). Our purpose is to show that consuming lab-grown human meat does not fall into the most plausibly impermissible category of offensiveness. For example, suppose Jones were to eat lab-grown human meat in front of Cynthia, from whom the lab-grown human meat was derived, with the intention to upset her. Cynthia may justifiably feel offended by this and demand an apology from Jones. But the morally relevant feature of Jones’ behaviour is their intention to denigrate Cynthia and not the means by which they do it (Archard 2014). Ordinary acts of consumption of lab-grown human meat wouldn’t necessarily bear any such intention; any offence caused thereby would not fall into the category of insult and would hence be morally permissible.

Consuming Off-Limits Lab-Grown Meat has Adverse Consequences

It may be the case that consuming off-limits lab-grown meat leads to adverse consequences that are not present for fair-game lab-grown meat. The worry is that a society which normalises the consumption of lab-grown meat may create a demand for their real counterparts (see Miller 2012). The wide availability of lab-grown white rhino meat, for example, may encourage some to try real white rhino. Perhaps this would be so in a society where consuming the real-life versions of lab-grown meat becomes a sign of status which stimulates a luxury market in endangered species. More ghoulishly, lab-grown human meat may awaken a perverse taste for cannibalism. Were it the case that off-limits lab-grown meat had these consequences, or ones like them, and fair-game lab-grown meat did not, then we would have a morally relevant distinction between the two that resolves the puzzle.

However, these arguments are speculative. We do not live in a society with a ready availability of lab-grown meat, so it is difficult to say what sort of norms such a society would have. We don’t know how slippery the slope is and we should not be so risk averse that the mere possibility of negative consequences determines the morality of a technology. Furthermore, measures already exist to combat the hunting and consumption of endangered species. Cannibalism, likewise, is illegal. These measures can prevent or at least mitigate the negative consequences of off-limits lab-grown meat eating. And, at any rate, can the consequentialist be sure that these off-limits meats really do have bad consequences overall? Perhaps the price of a few white rhinos is, on balance, worth it for the pleasures that billions of humans have from eating lab-grown versions of their meat (considering only a few may need to be killed to generate a plentiful supply).

The consequentialist may instead refer to the suffering that may be prevented by eating fair-game and off-limits meat. Lab-grown meat which displaces the traditional meat industry would prevent billions of animals from being reared in painful conditions and slaughtered at an early age. By contrast, the lab-grown meat of endangered species would not displace any such industry. The committed consequentialist would say that we have a moral imperative to develop lab-grown meat to minimise the amount of harm in the world. Does this argument resolve the puzzle? We agree that developing lab-grown meat that displaces the traditional meat industry should be a priority, but we disagree that this resolves the puzzle. It speaks to the question of which lab-grown meat should be prioritised when developing the technology, not the question of which lab-grown meat is permissible to eat once the technology has been developed. Empirical work investigating these claims would help develop this approach.

Further, even if it could be shown that off-limits lab-grown meat does have harmful consequences not shared with fair game lab-grown meat, there remains something unsatisfying with the consequentialist answer. There seems to be something directly wrong with eating lab-grown human meat, independently of any consequences that may come about. That is, pointing to any moral difference between consuming fair-game and off-limits lab-grown meat doesn’t seem to satisfy a resolution to the puzzle. Rather, a moral difference that resolves the puzzle needs to be able to account for the normative force of the intuitions that motivate the puzzle in the first place. So, while a consequentialist account may be able to resolve the puzzle (if this was empirically shown to be the case), it appears to do so merely accidentally.

Consuming Off-Limits Lab-Grown Meat Reveals a Bad Character

One might argue that the desire to eat off-limits lab-grown meat reveals immoral or vicious aspects of one’s character (see Alvaro 2019; 2022; Fischer & Ozturk 2017). Alvaro (2019; 2022), adopting a virtue ethical stance, argues that it is intemperate to consume lab-grown meat. Temperance is the virtue that relates to bodily pleasures such as eating. To be deficient in this domain of action is to accord too little importance to bodily pleasures (a vice that Aristotle thinks almost no one has, Aristotle 2019, 56) and to be excessive is to accord too much importance to it. What, then, counts as according too much importance to the pleasure of eating food? Alvaro argues that to eat temperately is to eat only foods conducive to health and in moderation where nourishment, not pleasure is the primary reason for eating food. The pleasure of eating should have some role in our decision to eat food, but this pleasure should not take precedence over our health and nourishment. Eating meat is correlated with many serious health problems including heart disease, cancer, and diabetes so, Alvaro argues, it would be intemperate to consume them (whether or not they are lab grown) since, despite being tasty, they are not conducive to nourishment and health (Alvaro 2019).

Alvaro is thus a moralist. That is, he argues that all lab-grown meat is off-limits. But his argument fails since it does not follow from his premises that eating any amount of lab-grown meat is intemperate. Excessive consumption of meat may correlate with health problems and therefore be intemperate, but limited consumption may be healthy and therefore temperate. In fact, the Mediterranean diet allows for small amounts of meat per week and has been associated with reduced overall mortality rates, cardiovascular incidence, and neurodegenerative disease (Sofi et al. 2010). So, consuming lab-grown meat does not necessarily demonstrate a vicious character that values the pleasure of taste above nourishment. It is only intemperate to consume lab-grown meat if done so to an unhealthy degree. Indeed, Alvaro (2019) considers this objection and argues that consuming any food that has the potential to cause health problems should be avoided as intemperate. Since meat has the potential to cause health problems, it should be avoided. Here, Alvaro draws an analogy to smoking, where not smoking, as opposed to smoking on occasion, would be the habit of the fully virtuous person.

The problem with this response is that it is far too strong since many things we do have the potential to cause health problems. Crossing the street bears the potential of being struck by a car, and even the healthiest plant-based diet comes with the potential of choking. A weaker version of Alvaro’s argument may offer us a resolution to the puzzle if it can be shown that eating off-limits meat is always intemperate and eating fair-game meat is temperate when consumed in moderation, in a way conducive to health and so forth.Footnote 19

Perhaps consuming off-limits meat is motivated excessively by taste. Our existing lab-grown meat is sufficient to provide us with tasty foods and, when eaten in moderation, accord with the virtue of temperance. Adding yet more kinds of meat to our culinary options could only be a case of intemperate desire for pleasure, the argument may go. However, this argument has three problems. First, it fails to distinguish between novel ‘fair-game’ meat, such as including lab grown insects into our diet, and novel ‘off-limits’ meat such as lab-grown human. The mere fact of novelty should not make eating a lab-grown meat intemperate. Second, a resolution that fails to distinguish between ‘fair-game’ and ‘off-limits’ meat does not do justice to the strength of the moral intuitions regarding lab-grown meat. And finally, in a counterfactual situation where human meat was not a novel addition to a culture’s diet, we would still want to say that that culture is wrong to eat lab-grown human meat.

It might be that consuming lab-grown off-limits meat reveals immoral fantasies that the fully virtuous person would not have. Young (2020) distinguishes between idle fantasies, where the fantasy itself is what is enjoyed and surrogate fantasies where the fantasy is a means to what one really enjoys. It is the difference between eating lab-grown human meat and enjoying the simulated taste of real human meat and eating lab-grown meat to fantasise about actually eating real human meat. The surrogate fantasy of eating lab-grown human meat may therefore be the fantasy of being a cannibal.

We can assume that it is always wrong to have surrogate fantasies about immoral practices for our purposes here since even on this assumption the argument fails to resolve the puzzle. For it is having the fantasy that is wrong, not the particular props one uses to enact that fantasy. Suppose that someone uses lab-grown fair-game meat to enact a cannibalistic fantasy; they pretend that the meat they are eating is actually human meat. In this case, we would not say that that meat is wrong to consume, but that it is wrong to consume meat in that way. Further, this argument would fail to explain what is wrong with someone who treats the lab-grown human burger as just a burger.

Where Does this Leave the Puzzle of Lab-Grown Meat?

It might be said that we are giving too much weight to the plausibility of moral intuitions regarding emerging biotechnology, where presumably, there has not been enough time for our intuitions to become morally attuned in the appropriate ways, and therefore we have good reason to sideline them for counterintuitive moral arguments. Perhaps the amoralist position will be more intuitively attractive once the technology becomes widespread and we will have been wrong to intuit that there was anything distinctly wrong about some lab-grown meats to make them off-limits. The intuition, that for example it is wrong to eat lab-grown human meat will no longer be held (if it even is now), and so this intuition won’t be able to count as prima facie evidence against the amoralist. We think further empirical research is warranted to see if it is the case that moral intuitions regarding off-limits and fair-game lab-grown meat do in fact exist. We take it to be prima facie plausible that they do, but this should be empirically verified. Our claim, minimally, addresses those that believe lab-grown meat is morally permissible, but human lab-grown meat is impermissible. Unless we can resolve the puzzle, we must conclude that if any lab-grown meat is fair-game, then all lab-grown meat is fair-game, or that if any lab-grown meat is off-limits, then all lab-grown meat is off-limits.

The puzzle of lab-grown meat is intentionally presented in a similar way to the Gamer’s Dilemma (Luck 2009) to bring out the shared features of both problems. That is, both problems present sharply clashing moral intuitions that are difficult to reconcile. They are difficult to reconcile because in both problems, we are confronted by acts which are intuitively impermissible yet are not able to be made sense of via traditional ethical means, for example, by an appeal to fairness, autonomy, or harm. The formal similarities between the puzzle and the dilemma, despite their differences in content, promise to be mutually enlightening. A comparison between the two allows us to ask whether a resolution to one problem is applicable to the other, and if so, what are the shared features of both problems that will contribute to a solution.

A further implication of the puzzle may be a contribution to thinking in animal ethics. For example, if we accept that it is plausibly true that some lab-grown meat is off-limits to eat, which it seems we do (at least intuitively), then this tells us that it is more than just, inter alia, animal suffering that contributes to the intuitive impermissibility of meat-eating. That is, because eating some ‘suffering-free’ meat is intuitively morally off-limits, then there must be more than just the unethical features of ‘real’ meat production that make it unethical to eat.Footnote 20 Therefore, while the unethical features of ‘real’ animal production certainly play a central role in what makes eating ‘real’ meat wrong, it isn’t playing the only role.

This puzzle also presents a philosophical challenge to a growing commercial industry. For example, an Australian company has recently engineered a lab-grown woolly mammoth meatball, and markets themselves on the promise of producing exotic lab-grown meat (Taylor 2024). The ethical issues regarding bringing extinct animals such as the woolly mammoth, which were, among other causes, hunted to extinction, back from extinction to be ironically used as a food source, are unclear. However, resting on the notion that lab-grown meat is ‘suffering free’ and therefore harmless, lacks the fine-grained analysis required to provide practical guidance on this issue.

Conclusion

The Puzzle of Lab-Grown Meat offers a novel way of framing a moral dilemma concerning the impotence of the moralist and amoralist approaches to accord with the seemingly justified claim that some lab-grown meat is fair-game to eat, and others are off-limits. In other words, the moralist cannot make sense of the intuition that some lab-grown meat is fair-game to eat, such as lab-grown chicken, and the amoralist can’t make sense of the intuition that some lab-grown meat is off-limits to eat, such as lab-grown human meat. To square these intuitions, the approach is to expose the incoherence between amoralism and moralism when allowing some lab-grown meat to be fair-game to eat and others to be off-limits. This is by showing that we cannot, at pain of inconsistency, hold that lab-grown meat is both fair-game, as the amoralist would have it, and off-limits, as the moralist would have it. In other words, the Puzzle of Lab-Grown Meat shows these two approaches to be incompatible, unless it can be resolved by showing a moral distinction between fair-game and off-limits meat. The puzzle appears to be, as of yet, unresolved. We have raised several seemingly promising candidates, yet each appears to be unsatisfactory in undoing the puzzle.