Watching a recent documentary on World War Two, I was struck by one utterly incongruous fact narrated over the images of destruction and death: that Adolf Hitler—the man responsible for a war claiming 50 million lives—was, apparently, a vocal advocate for vegetarianism.

While very few humans display the level of hypocrisy shown by an animal-loving Führer, many of us, myself included, are not entirely immune to engaging in some degree of moral flexibility when it comes to our own behavior, not least to our diets. By this, I mean our tendency to explain away our own morally questionable acts with self-justifying rationales.

I’m a lifelong vegetarian, yet I write this wearing a pair of leather shoes. My friends eat chicken but refrain from pork. Others spend hundreds on pet insurance while chomping down on beef burgers.

Denying that we sometimes engage in these moral somersaults is also largely untenable at this point, as few of us can claim ignorance as to how the global food system works—less of a bucolic idyll, more mechanized slaughter, and Amazon deforestation. Yet, many of us will maintain our meat-eating habits and even justify them publicly and with conviction.

To better understand this, a good place to start is defining what we mean by morality. Existing research has viewed this not as a single judgment of what is right or wrong but as multiple different judgments that emerged in response to pressures placed on our species throughout evolution.

These multiple moralities, described by Moral Foundations........

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