Bioethicists Want Ticks to Infect People to Stop Them from Eating Meat

This is not a parody. Two bioethicists have argued in the prestigious professional journal Bioethics that we should breed ticks to cause more infections of a condition that causes an allergy to red meat. Seriously.

Why would anyone want ticks to become more dangerous? Meat-eating is wrong, and so anything (apparently) that causes fewer of us to eat meat is "beneficent":

1. Eating meat is morally wrong.
2. If (1), then eating meat makes people morally worse and makes the world a worse place.
3. So, people would be morally better and the world would be a less bad place if people didn't eat meat.
4. If an act makes people morally better and makes the world a less bad place than it would otherwise be, then that act is morally obligatory. [Corollary of consequentialism]
5. Promoting tickborne AGS [a tickborne syndrome that causes a meat allergy] makes people morally better and makes the world a less bad place.
6. So, promoting tickborne AGS is morally obligatory.

Notice that this isn't a claim about factory farming, but an all-inclusive argument that we have a positive duty not to consume animal flesh.