A pair of bioethicists from Western Michigan University suggest that a tick-borne allergy that renders people unable to eat red meat may not be a public health issue at all, but rather a moral improvement.
In a paper titled “Beneficial Bloodsucking” published in Bioethics, Parker Crutchfield and Blake Hereth argue that alpha-gal syndrome (AGS), an allergy spread by the bite of the lone star tick, should be seen as a “moral bioenhancer.” Because AGS makes people sick when they eat mammalian meat, the researchers said it discourages an act they assume to be morally wrong: eating meat.
“AGS promotes in the people who have it a resistance to eating mammalian meat,” the authors wrote. “Thus, they eat less mammalian meat, which is an improvement in their capacity for moral behavior.”
AGS develops when the immune system reacts to a sugar molecule introduced by a tick bite. The only effect is an allergy to red meat and other mammalian products, which can trigger hives, stomach upset or even anaphylaxis. The condition is not fatal, and symptoms appear only after consuming meat.
While health officials have treated AGS as something to prevent—working on vaccines and warning the public about ticks—the authors flip the script. If eating meat is wrong, they argue, then preventing AGS only protects people’s ability to continue doing wrong.
Gene editing
The main obstacle to the permissibility of the authors’ recommendation is that lone star ticks also spread other diseases, including ehrlichiosis and tularemia, which can be debilitating or deadly, the authors said.
Crutchfield and Hereth propose genetic engineering as the way forward. They point to advances in mosquito control, where gene-edited insects have been released to combat diseases carried. They also cite CRISPR experiments that have successfully eliminated Lyme-carrying capacity in ticks.
In their view, the same methods could be used to:
• Engineer lone star ticks to reliably carry AGS.
• Remove their ability to transmit other pathogens.
• Enable them to adapt to new environments so they can proliferate widely.
If scientists succeed, the authors say, they would not only be permitted but obligated to spread the engineered ticks. “Today we have the obligation to research and develop the capacity to proliferate tickborne AGS and, tomorrow, carry out that proliferation,” they wrote.
The Convergence Argument
The heart of the paper is what the authors refer to as the “Convergence Argument.” It combines three major approaches to ethics—consequentialism, rights-based theory and virtue ethics—to make the case for the spread of AGS.
• Consequentialism: Eating meat makes the world worse, they argue, by harming animals and contributing to climate change. AGS prevents this by forcing people to stop.
• Rights-based deontology: The syndrome does not violate anyone’s rights, they say, because it is comparable to vaccination—a permissible public health intervention that prevents harm.
• Virtue ethics: By curbing the desire to eat meat, AGS nudges people closer to virtuous character, making them less likely to act wrongly.
According to the authors, if an intervention makes the world better, does not violate rights and promotes virtue, then society has a strong moral obligation to pursue it. “Promoting tickborne AGS satisfies each of these conditions,” they write, concluding that it is “strongly pro-tanto obligatory.”
Synthetic alternative
The authors also considered whether a synthetic form of AGS could be developed and administered directly, cutting ticks out of the process. They describe this as another form of moral bioenhancement. Unlike many theoretical proposals in bioethics, synthetic AGS would be “a feasible targeted intervention with a known morally enhancing effect”—safe, effective and reliable.
But they note practical and ethical obstacles. Few people would volunteer to receive an injection that prevents them from eating meat. If imposed by force, the intervention would raise serious concerns about autonomy and freedom—challenges they say their tick-based proposal avoids. “Rejecting tickborne AGS in favor of synthetic AGS is not as simple as it may initially appear,” they wrote.
Crutchfield and Hereth stop short of calling for immediate action. Instead, they frame their paper as a challenge to conventional assumptions about health, morality and biotechnology. They argue that if one accepts the premise that eating meat is wrong, then the logic of promoting AGS follows naturally.
“Assuming that eating meat is generally morally impermissible, acquiring AGS is likely to morally enhance a person’s behavior, as they are far less likely to eat (red) meat if they are allergic to it,” the paper concludes. — Charles Wallace, WLJ contributing editor
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