Andrew Light judges New York Times contest on the ethics of vegetarianism

Is it ethical to eat meat?

That short question, posed in these pages a few weeks ago, inspired a debate heated enough to roast a fatted calf (or a really enormous zucchini, depending on your dietary orientation).

To encourage omnivores to do some of the same hard thinking that vegetarians and vegans have done, I invited them to make, in 600 words or fewer, the strongest ethical case for the meat they eat. And to judge those arguments I gathered some of the strongest ethical critics of meat, or at least of the way we consume it — Mark Bittman, Jonathan Safran Foer, Andrew Light, Michael Pollan and Peter Singer.