Also, there is no correlation between goodness and vegetarianism:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adolf_Hitler_and_vegetarianism
> For the sake of the experiment, let's assume the sci-fi writers are right, and eating animals will eventually be considered immoral.
Also, is it vegetarianism if you only eat lab-grown meat? It's still meat, right, so you're still not vegetarian. Or is it the "not eating animals" that makes you a vegetarian now?
I tend to think that (e.g.) Iain M Banks is right, and that eventually eating animals will be considered immoral (and not the same as vegetarianism). You may disagree, and that's fine - everyone has an opinion.
The interesting question is not whether the future will consider this immoral, but whether if it becomes immoral in the future that applies retroactively and makes it immoral now? Does morality change over time, or regardless of time?
I grew up in the '70's so I've seen the change in morality first-hand, but that all kinda caught us by surprise. It's going to be interesting being more aware of the change in morality around this.
That's the point of ethical veganism/vegetarianism, yes.
The culture has about as much chance of coming into existence as the fact that we discover unicorns. So why should we take him seriously?
Banks himself said that the Culture has no chance of being created by actual humans, that people would need to change in order to create it. But as a thought experiment for "what would a technological Utopia actually look like?" I think it's a very valuable contribution. There are very few Utopias that I've read about that I would actually want to live in - the Culture is probably the most attractive of any of them.
In this respect, the advent of lab-grown meat does pose the question of whether it's morally acceptable to eat animals. As far as I'm aware, only SF authors have considered this, because that's the kind of thing they do. A technological change has triggered a moral conundrum - this is the stuff that good SF ponders. It's not necessary to get the details of the technology right, or to correctly predict it. It's enough to get us thinking about this stuff before it happens.