This article suggests that we’ll be forced–by resource and environmental constraints, among other things–to give up eating meat, except perhaps the very rich, and that this will lead to a rapid moral revolution in our treatment of animals. It’s an interesting argument and pretty much the reverse of how we usually imagine these things go: first you become intellectually convinced of the moral wrongness of meat-eating, then you give it up. But I think there’s something to it. I suspect that one of the reasons people dismiss vegetarian and animal rights arguments out of hand is that they’re so deeply implicated in the practice of meat-eating (what else explains the disdain and vitriol that vegetarian arguments often produce in their carnivorous interlocutors?). Without that sense of personal investment, people may be more open to AR-type arguments.

(Link via Erik Marcus.)