Lab Grown Meat

[Jaanbaz]

Will it be Halal?

 

[Zabaniyah]

@gambit No, I'm not going to eat human flesh not only because it is against my religion. It is disturbing!

Lab grown meat is a novel idea, but I don't think that it'll a marketable commodity. There will be many controversies behind it like religion, employment, general acceptance of the consumer, security and that across many different cultures. Maybe they'll never accept it save a few early adopters.

The only area I believe it'll work is in space, or on another planet. It'll be an indispensable part of space life. That is path is a feasible one.

 

[Daneshmand]

So childish.

I knew yesterday, this exact question, would be following but I decided not to crash the thread. After all this was the level of "intellectual debate" when I was in junior high so I am quite familiar with it.

The OP might think that he has created a philosophical and moral 'dichotomy' here. But it is really not the case.

I will explain why and then I will create a real dichotomy based on similar thought experiment, something that would actually divide thinkers. This way at least OP can go and impress his buddies.

For Muslims (at least the Shia here) they can refer to their Marja Taqlid and find the answers regarding this, using the concept of "Hormat" and "Halal-Haram-Makroh" system. After all religious discussion is banned on this forum and I do not intent to start a war here.

But for the OP who is apparently not a Muslim, I will use the underpinning and the deep foundation of his society, culture, law and philosophy, namely the Aristotelian thoughts with a bit of touch up from science.

There are several concepts here, one is that of essence and substance, and the other is the why-s of cause. It pays to know these terminologies before hand to understand what is coming up below.

In this example, the "flesh" or accurately the muscular tissue is the substance we are talking about. The essence of it, makes it a cow tissue or a human tissue. The essence here goes beyond the DNA (both nucleus as well as mitochondrial) and rather is a philosophical concept of a thing or substance it belongs to. That is, a human tissue grown in a lab or in its natural homeostatic environment both are considered human flesh since they are of the same essence. The method of production would not really matter whether it be cloning, petri-dish culture, or surgical removal from a living body.

What the OP has done here was the replication of, the material cause and the formal cause with regard to human tissue. He has forgotten the final cause completely and is opaque about efficient cause (though it can be argued the efficient cause is actually different, but also counter-argued that its the same since we are using the natural DNA, not creating a completely new one and as I explained above, it would not really matter). In a normal human society, with no prevalent psychiatric or pseudo-religious issues, the formal cause for at least certain animals is to be eaten by humans. But the human meat is usually not considered in the context of being edible whether by slaughter or by natural death. Otherwise the material cause and the formal cause existed for this purpose since antiquity in order to generate human meat even before today's DNA science, but most of human societies never raised humans as they did cattle. The humans were enslaved but for other purposes and not for this final cause.

From an ethical, moral and scientific point of view, there are other issues to be considered. Most of what we consider our "rational" ethical and moral standards, are actually quite irrational, that is we do not have conscious control over them eg. consider our reaction to the trolley problem. Most of our "rational" ethics and morality are actually hardwired behaviors in our brain which provide us with means to form societies by allowing us to predict with fair accuracy what others around us are going to do (for example they are not going to eat me and therefore I should not eat them).

And another evolutionary point of view (the scientific view) would be the survival values imparted by these hardwired behaviors. Take the instance of intra-species cannibalism which is associated with various forms of TSE's mediated by prions. The kuru and mad cow disease are famous examples but the continuous and sustained cannibalism, whatever its form, would create new biological niches which would definitely be filled by new prions, viruses and even bacteria creating new complex diseases which often with the case of prions have long term incubation periods sometimes in decades.

So this is not really a dichotomy, whether in philosophy (which under pins law), morality, ethics or science. Things are pretty much clear here except if you are still at the level of junior high.

The real dichotomy:

Say for instance in 30 years time, Monsanto labs , researching on thermodynamics of food production, realizes the current food production methods are highly inefficient, labor intensive and time consuming. Take the example of meat. First a crop has to be raised and fed to a pregnant cow. Once the calf is born, it has to be fed with crops and time has to pass before it becomes ready for slaughter. The crops themselves are highly inefficient in converting solar energy to stored nitrogen compounds (proteins). The calf and the cow are themselves highly inefficient in converting the plant proteins to animal proteins aka meat. Not only they are inefficient but also they take a long time to grow and produce lots of waste needing management eg. manure and some waste which can not even be managed eg. greenhouse gases. But people love the meat, because of its nutrients as well as taste.

Therefore Monsanto creates a completely new specie. An artificial one. Its DNA is not coming from cow or from human or from any known species. It has a new DNA, which codes for a new being specially designed for a special purpose. The final cause of this new being is to produce highly delicious meat. Similar to designer drugs which are highly efficient and targeted towards what they do, this meat in addition to being more nutritious than the natural one (eg. it even has vitamin C), is actually devoid of any harmful effects of natural meat say cholesterol and other irritants causing cancers associated with natural cow meat. Not only that but the designers have even used the insights of taste perception and processing by humans to take the taste of this meat to new levels. The natural meat by comparison tastes raw while the Monsanto meat tastes heavenly.

But it is not the whole story. This new being does not need crops to be fed. It is not per say an animal either. It is a biological system rather a biological "machine", that directly converts the air nitrogen to meat using solar or thermal energy with an efficiency several times that of natural systems and contracting the time schedule several times more.

Here, its final cause is ofcourse is to be eaten. And its material cause, is different and its formal cause is nothing like seen before. Its efficient cause of course is Monsanto . Its essence has nothing to do with nature.

Now consider this, the green peace activists and their buddies, discover that this highly engineered meat is actually very similar to human flesh under light/electron microscopy almost indistinguishable from each other. Biochemical tests confirm that the chemical composition is exactly that of a human uterus during gestation. Its actin-myosin filament arrangement is the same. Further freaking out these activists are tests that show the human immunity system does not react to it (the immunity system does not recognize it as a foreign tissue as would strongly in the case of cow meat).

Monsanto maintains that this is just a coincident. The molecular structures of the meat has been designed to be as efficient and as delicious as possible. It is not an intentional outcome that the Monsanto meat is human like. Beside, the immunity system not recognizing it, would actually help with people who have allergies by reducing their allergen load. If human societies switched to Monsanto meat , there would be no global warming, and cardiovascular and cancer rates would go down as would the price of food production. But the activists are freaking out.

Is it morally, ethically, philosophically and scientifically right to consume Monsanto meat?