This blog post describes a survey of philosophy professors specializing in ethics, philosophy professors not specializing in ethics, and non-philosophy professors. The professors were asked to rate the morality of eating the meat of mammals, how many times per week they ate meat, and whether they had eaten it at their last evening meal. Almost 60% of ethicists felt eating meat was wrong, while just under 45% of non-ethicists agreed, and only 19.6% of non-philosophers thought so. However, all three groups were more similar in their actual behavior.

[Abstract excerpted from original source.]

“It seems that ethicists are substantially more condemnatory of eating meat (at least beef and pork) than are non-ethicists. Among the 196 ethicsts who responded to this question 59.7% espoused the view that regularly eating the meat of mammals was somewhere on the morally bad end of the scale (that is, 4 or less in our coding scheme). Among the 206 non-ethicist philosophers, 44.7% said eating the meat of mammals is morally bad. Among the 168 comparison professors only 19.6% said it is morally bad. (All differences are statistically significant.)

Ethicists condemn meat-eating more than the other groups, but actually eat meat at about the same rate. Perhaps also, they’re more likely to misrepresent their meat-eating practices (on the meals-per-week question and at philosophy functions) than the other groups.”