Bernard Prusak, who teaches at Villanova University outside of Philadelphia, recently published a thoughtful article on Catholicism and vegetarianism at Commonweal (you can also read it at his website here). Dr. Prusak was a practicing vegetarian for a while, but gave it up partly because he became convinced that meat-eating was, if not necessary, at least conducive to human flourishing. “Even if we don’t strictly need meat in order to survive, it can help us flourish-and this, I cannot but believe, is good.” This is a more nuanced argument than the usual “eating meat is natural” argument.

I’m not going to try and adjudicate the debate between which is healthier, vegetarianism or meat-eating and I wouldn’t want to try and lay down any hard-and-fast rules about out. Happily, though, there’s no dearth of resources for living as a healthy vegetarian. I found Vesanto Melina and Brenda Davis’s Becoming Vegetarian a helpful resource on vegetarian nutrition.

The rest of Prusak’s essay is a good examination of various moral arguments about the relative moral status of human and animal life. He’s surely right that Christians should resist arguments for animal well-being that rely on downgrading the moral status of human beings. In particular he engages with the late James Rachels’ argument from Darwinism – the idea that evolution has shown that human life isn’t particularly sacred and that we share more with non-human animals than traditionally thought.

Prusak points out that one can accept the second of these claims without accepting the first. And, moreover, downgrading the significance of human exceptionalism might well lead us to stop taking morality as seriously as Rachels urges. “Rachels never considers whether there is a connection between belief in human dignity and commitment to the moral life.”

Indeed, a sense that humans have a special calling to be good stewards of the earth can encourage greater respect for animal life and well-being. Vegetarians and conscientious omnivores can agree that legitimate stewardship requires, if nothing else, respecting the natures of our fellow-creatures. “If the justification for eating meat is that it is natural for us and helps us flourish, consistency requires that we respect in turn the natures of the animals we eat: chickens, pigs, cows, fish, sheep, turkeys, and many others.”