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  • Wolf Gordon Clifton replied to the topic Is lab-grown meat ethically "vegan?" in the forum Dialogues 10 years, 11 months ago

    Thanks for your response Anita! You raise some excellent points. Because as you point out, “ethical meat” could also refer in some degree to meat from non-factory farmed animals, I think lab-grown meat needs to be categorically distinguished from anything that requires slaughtering an animal (I’m not sure where the initial cells would come from, but presumably one could extract them harmlessly from a living animal). Using the term “vegan” does seem odd, though, whether or not it makes technical philosophical sense. Personally, I think a time may come when the term “vegan” itself becomes obsolete, much as the concept of a “Pythagorean diet” which was eventually subsumed into vegetarianism. This could be due to the invention of lab-grown meat, encountering edible non-sentient alien life-forms, or discovering that certain plants are more conscious than certain animals – all of which would complicate the practice of a vegan diet if not the ethical reasoning behind it.