Values Over Virtues: How Children Trade Off Their Moral Concern for Animals With the Importance of Human Eating Practices

Children care for animals more than adults do, yet as they develop, find it increasingly acceptable to eat meat. How do children learn to consume some animals while continuing to care for others? We argue that observing the cultural importance of food practices leads children to trade-off their moral concern for animals against cultural values. In two pre-registered studies, we examined how the cultural importance (high vs. low) of eating animals influenced participants’ (total N = 597; ages 4–85), moral judgements and reasoning about eating animals. Based on quantitative and qualitative data, we show that only for children did high cultural importance lead to evaluations of eating animals as more morally acceptable, and to greater reasoning emphasis on human traditions. We conclude that in childhood, resolving the conflict between moral values and human cultural practices is one way in which humans come to care for some animals and harm others.