I love steak. I was looking at a diagram of different cuts of beef recently. Apparently, I like the bits just in front of the hindquarters, hanging slightly underneath the spine. So, if you put your hands on your hips, start moving them toward the middle of your back, and quit when you’re halfway there, those are your tasties. Now, I’m well aware that there is a certain subset of the population who would call my preference in this regard morally abhorrent. They’re called hippies. Er, animal rights activists.

Most of the time, I would consider myself ambivalent to their concerns. On the one hand, I recognize that cow-life is pretty awful. On the other, cows only exist today through our domestication efforts. So, really, the fact they have a life at all is because we’ve turned them into burger factories. But I’m not deaf to the suffering of the animals themselves. However, I find the position that they have rights akin to our own totally unconvincing. Especially when those rights compete with my affinity for tender, tender meat. I also wouldn’t go so far as saying that humans have an inalienable right to raise, murder and devour cows. I think the issue should be decided on other considerations.

Recently, efforts have been made to bring people like myself into the fold. The People’s Republic for the Ethical Treatment of the Animal Proletariat or PETA, is offering $1 million to any person that can “come up with a method to produce commercially viable quantities of in vitro meat at competitive prices by 2012.” You might be tempted at this point to ask the unfunny question: Where’s the beef? The answer being: Not in cows. “In vitro” meat is a vision of the future in which meat is grown in massive lab-farms, replacing our repulsive butchering houses with morally sanitary factories.

At first blush, this may seems like an unequivocal good. Of course, there will be practical concerns, like transitioning the beef industry into freakish meat-growing farms or making in vitro meat taste exactly like the cow-made kind. Overall, though, who could disparage the premise?

Well, some find this contest morally abhorrent. And they’re also members of PETA. They say that the million dollar prize misses the point. The goal of PETA, according to them, is to spread the message of animal rights. Pumping the killers full of in vitro meat doesn’t accomplish that at all.

I think that many people will find this viewpoint unreasonable, even ridiculous. After all, these people are basically saying that PETA is being too practical. That’s a whole new level of radical. However, I disagree.

You have to understand that ethical frameworks are, and should be, inherently unreasonable. Not in the sense that they are absurd or irrational, but they are just not the sorts of things that practical considerations have any bearing on. An ethical obligation, like spreading the message of animal rights, cannot be canceled by modifying behavior. If we stop eating meat from cows, does that make eating a cow ethical? These people see their involvement as a calling to ethical outreach, and PETA shouldn’t spend a cent on other projects.

Now, I disagree entirely with their ethical priorities. I feel that in vitro meat has limitless potential in decreasing our negative impact on the environment, and is therefore an ultimate good.

We should always hold our personal ethical frameworks as sacred. I’m not denying that these frameworks are instilled in us by our cultural community. I’m not even denying that we should make efforts to carefully moderate our ethical positions on complex questions. But sacrificing our ethical truths at the behest of temporary circumstances is to rob them of their meaning. So, we should not disparage the stalwart unwillingness of these radicals to bow to practical considerations. Although we may disagree with them completely, their moral courage is exactly what sustains our society.

Justin is a senior in religious studies. Imagine how many tiny flags they would need to make you feel bad about eating cows.