If the moral arguments for expanding the circle are indecisive, we may still ask the predictive question: will our circle of moral concern someday expand to include non-human animals? As a colleague of mine once quipped, if soy or tofu could be made as tasty as prime rib, then it seems easier to imagine that in the future our negative emotional response to the suffering of all sentient beings will carry the day, notwithstanding, in the case of non-human animals, their lack of reason and language, and notwithstanding the fact that the moral judgment implicit in the prioritization of such sentience per se might lead us down the Singerian road to infanticide, at least dialectically. That tofu might actually taste good—and thus be integrated into all the cultural and religious traditions in which food figures—is far more likely, of course, than that cows and chickens will talk and reason, which would seem to doom our tolerance of factory farming almost immediately. But that what is really required for human attitudes to shift would be equally appealing non-meat substitutes for the meat of non-human animals is itself instructive: for it means that sentience matters practically along many dimensions beyond suffering, that the multifold pleasures attendant upon our consumption of non-human animals occupies an important place in our thinking about how to live.

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