Behind my colorful cartoon avatar is a regular ol' person with a mostly regular life. This is my ongoing rambling series where I talk about my personal bits. That sounded wrong. Anyways, potentially boring content ahead. You've been warned.
The worst part about being a vegetarian is people always asking me "don't you wish you could eat this?" I can actually eat anything I want, and I do. If I wanted a hot dog, I would eat one. If I wanted to eat a steak, I would eat one. There's no impenetrable barrier that prevents me from touching that slice of bologna in the back of the fridge. I'm not a vegetarian for any moral, ethical, religious, or health reasons. It started as a challenge to see if I could be a vegetarian for a year, and I simply never stopped. It's just my normal now and I don't even think about it. I'm not at all against people eating animals. I'm not even that strict about it myself. Rarely I'll eat seafood and I'm fine with eating dairy products and eggs. I haven't had beef, pork, chicken, or any animals besides sea critters and maybe a few bugs (don't judge). Eating meat is perfectly healthy and fine and I wouldn't dream of telling others what they ought to be eating. Well, maybe the people who eat bush meat from endangered animals would be an exception. Stop eating tigers and chimpanzees please. I love lamp.
Hampture
I'll be the contrarian then and say I'm a meat eater but don't think doing so is morally neutral. The lives of the animals we eat have moral weight. Killing them for food is varying degrees of morally negative depending how it's done and for what purpose.
I eat meat anyway because that's true of basically anything in life. It is impossible to live a morally perfect life, we can only strive to do more good than bad and struggle to tilt that ratio as much in one direction as practical. Simply to live as a human is to cause some amount of harm to other living creatures, for example the trillions of bacteria killed when we clean our bathrooms and kitchens.
Vegans draw a line between the plant and animal kingdoms, concluding it's fine to eat anything on one side of the line but nothing from the other. But what of mushrooms? Technically animals, not plants. So "Yes to plants, no to animals" is already not precise enough.
They contend animals are conscious but plants aren't. Again, fungi pose a problem for this dichotomy. Consciousness is not a binary but a spectrum. There exist brains, and in the absence of brains, nervous systems of varying degrees of complexity. Plants certainly have some kind of awareness that vegans ignore because it's a problem for their narrative.
Personally I think all life has moral weight, but the amount depends upon their degree of awareness. This means there's no one valid place to draw the line, it depends on what individuals are comfortable with. Even most avowed carnivores feel uncomfortable about the idea of eating dolphins, chimps or elephants, whether or not they realize the reason for it.
I order species on a hierarchy of apparent cognitive capability based on the best currently available information and do my best to eat species as far down that hierarchy as possible without compromising too much on my enjoyment of life (eating only nutritionally complete but foul tasting algae pills for example).
In practice that amounts to fish and crustaceans, although this gets expensive quickly so I eat a lot of chicken and turkey as well. I feel the least morally conflicted about the fish and crustaceans, but slightly conflicted about the poultry. I feel guilt when I indulge myself in steak, bacon, etc. 2 or 3 times a month because of the complexity of cow and pig brains.
But nobody forces me to feel that guilt. I am not being manipulated, by appeals to my guilt, into eating the way I do. It is a result of my own contemplations on the topic. I don't know any other better approach than to decide my own values according to my own best reckoning, using the information available to me.
I don't think that means I'm totally in the clear, as it is in fact possible and increasingly practical to go vegan. I have just done enough, within my means, that I feel I've made a reasonable effort at devising logical values and living by them. That's the best I know how to do.
Bertn1991
That's fair. I can totally respect that. I appreciate this very thoughtful response.