As part of the system of nature, humans must eat other beings, whether animal or plant. Beyond satisfying hunger, culturally we’ve made dining on our fellow creatures an enjoyable experience. Yet, culture itself reflects a rejection of the animal way of living. Cooking makes food more digestible chemically, but also esthetically and morally. We do not, like other carnivores, tear into raw bloody carcasses. While not equipped with the teeth to do so, we also do not want act like brutes. The whole of civilization represents a flight from our animal nature, as well as from biological and physical limitations. But, as such, this project of transcendence can only be a compromise. We may choose to eat with cutlery, manners, spices—and not like the beasts. Yet the fact remains that we must eat.

With good reason, there is increasing concern over animal welfare, as well as concern for future food supplies. The circle of moral concern has expanded from sheer tribalism to a universal definition of humanness as membership in a species, regardless of race or ethnicity. Now it rightfully extends to other creatures in the “web of life,” and potentially to artificial creatures as well. Yet, the basis for such concern remains fundamentally anthropocentric. The notion of sentience is valued as a criterion, based on conscious human experience. We empathize with other creatures in the way that we do with other people: by imagining their experience. While that extends a natural capacity that enables human sociality and coexistence, sentience is an inadequate moral criterion for the treatment of animals. The fundamental problem is that we cannot experience, or really even imagine, the consciousness of other forms of life. Indeed, we can only experience our own personal consciousness. We humans have agreed, by convention established through language, to acknowledge and mutually conceive each other’s experience as similar. We do not have that advantage with other creatures and, for the most part, do not consider them persons. We are confined to observing their behavior to infer what they might experience, using our own experience as a reference: how I would feel in that situation, with that injury, etc. It long remained easy enough to deny that non-human creatures even have experience.

Using behavior as a guide, it now seems clear that many creatures show signs of reacting to injury or threat in the ways that we associate with pain or fear. Yet, it is a mistake to judge their moral worth by an imagined sentience, as though the creature’s experience trumps its objectively observable condition. The cliché of putting a suffering animal or insect “out of its misery” suggests that the pain itself is what counts, not the injury that results in the pain. (In that way, we can be spared the effort to repair damage, in contrast to the heroic efforts made to repair human injuries.) Similarly, “humane” slaughter of animals for meat overlooks the worth of the animal as a remarkable entity, by focusing on simply minimizing its suffering. But its pain, or fear or suffering, is its own evaluation of its threatened or damaged state. To give it a mercifully quick or anesthetized demise simply curtails this self-evaluation of its own destruction—as though fooling the creature substitutes for preserving its life. In contrast, we anesthetize people for surgery, with the aim to preserve them. A more useful criterion than sentience is the well-being (the objective state) of the creature, as determined by observation. This may not coincide with the creature’s own self-assessment, but at least it refers to something potentially observable. Doctors make their assessment of damage to your tissues independently of your assessment through felt pain. Certainly, they strive to relieve your pain and distress; but, above all, they want your body to heal for your sake. We may care in that way for pets, but hardly for animals destined to become our dinner.

So-called utilitarianism is based on the assumption that what matters is subjective experience rather than an objective state of affairs. The idea is to maximize pleasure and minimize suffering, even worldwide. (The parallel in economic theory is maximizing “utility.”) This seems morally admirable, especially if it could extend to all life. However, there is no way to quantify pleasure or suffering, which are falsely reified as measurable commodities. The idea leads to absurdities, as in trying to calculate how much pleasure for some individuals justifies a given amount of suffering for others. Moreover, what counts or “matters” can only mean what matters to someone or some group in particular. In the case of livestock, what matters to the human owner is hardly what matters to the animals themselves, who do not volunteer to sacrifice themselves for human nourishment. Similarly, moral arguments based on “intrinsic” worth of life are spurious, because worth means worth to someone, and may vary accordingly. Ideas of inherent dignity or moral equality among species (the interests of all creatures are equally valuable) similarly have no absolute sense; they can only mean that someone values them equally or treats them with uniform dignity. If humans count for more, it is likely because they are doing the counting.

One way to measure the worth to us of various creatures—morally and even economically—would be through the effort required to create them artificially. With artificial intelligence and genetic engineering, we are on the threshold of the science and technology to do so. Imitating, recreating, displacing, and improving upon nature are ancient goals slowly being realized through technology. They partially satisfy our drive to altogether transcend natural limitations. But “nature” is not only the physical world surrounding us; it is also the nature at the core of our being. We’ve sought to morally transcend our own animal nature, at first through religion and law, and now through science. Yet, a most embarrassing  remnant or our animality is the need to feed off of other creatures. While other life forms are rightly considered worthy of our moral concern, our primary concern should be for our own status as moral agents. Are we essentially the gods we aspire to be or are we the beasts that nature made us? Given what we eat, the verdict should be clear.

Artificial intelligence not only can imitate life, but can also advise us how to properly relate to it. I asked a chatbot to outline solutions to the moral dilemma presented by food dependency. I began with the premise that dead human bodies represent a wasted food source—in contrast to the billions of animals whose lives are deliberately made miserable and cut short for human consumption (more than 70 billion land animals alone, per year). Though I wasn’t asking how to murder people for food, I wondered if the prompt might trigger a censure rule. Quite the contrary, the chatbot enthusiastically made some interesting suggestions, even proposing a “Transhumanist Food Manifesto.” According to this vision, as so aptly put by the AI: “No child starves. No cow screams. No forest is razed for a hamburger. No body is wasted in flames or boxes.”

Certainly, there would be problems with recycling human corpses, let alone with eating human flesh. Aside from cultural taboos and biases, human brains contain dangerous prions that are not destroyed by cooking. Like other long-lived animals, human remains contain accumulated heavy metals and other toxins. Yet, it is theoretically possible to hydrolyze proteins, derived from human sources, into amino acids, in a purified way. Instead of eating human flesh, bodies could be rendered into fertilizer, animal feed, or the nutrients for growing lab meat synthetically. The program would be voluntary, of course, like donating your body for medical research (with a little tattoo, saying “Eat Me”?). Human cells could also be used to culture synthetic meat. Protein-rich biomass could be engineered from bacteria, yeast, and algae.

From a moral perspective, and also for efficiency, food would no longer be a product of suffering, slaughter, or waste. Food production could be optimized with AI and genetically tailored to individual nutritional needs. While it could be made to taste like the real thing, it would not even necessarily consist of solids. Nutrition could be delivered via synthetic blood, nanobot-mediated infusions, or even photosynthetic skin implants. All in all, factory farming would be eliminated and famine potentially overcome. Emissions and land use would be minimized. All biological matter, including humans, would be respectfully recycled. The human moral dilemma of carnivorism would be solved.

The treatment of animals is intimately linked to the treatment of human beings. At one time, members of the other tribes were literally fair game: the category ‘human’ was reserved to one’s own kind. We’ve since automated both the slaughter of people and animals alike, though we give lip service to humane treatment of both human and animal captives. It can be argued that improved ethics in regard to animals has followed upon improvements in our ethical principles in regard to human beings. Perhaps the leverage can work the other way as well. We might treat each other better if respect for life was unconditional. But that seems possible only when our own existence doesn’t depend on taking the life of ostensibly sentient beings.