Overall I have been pleasantly surprised at how constructive this conversation has been, thanks to OP for creating space for it. Generally I find ethical discussion with EAs to be pleasant, but I had anticipated there might be an exception where veg*ism is concerned.
I would add one extra point, which is that while I do think that all of life’s activities come into the scope of ethics, I think it’s important to preserve space to make meaningful decisions without subjecting each one to conscious ethical deliberation. By analogy, sometimes we scrutinize all the available data before we make a decision; other times, we ask an expert or a friend for their opinion and defer; and still other times, we just go with our gut. I think this also applies to ethical quesitons.
There’s a perfectly good reason to elevate meat and animal product consumption to a higher level of ethical attention. But what ought our total “ethics budget” be, and what would an appropriate allocation of ethical attention be, considering all the many problems in the world? My ethics budget is relatively small, and mainly reserved for issues related to my professional work and expertise—I am interested in issues related to biomedicine because I am a professional biomedical researcher, and spend considerable time on the ethics of organ sales because that is a particularly important, tractable and neglected question to interrogate.
It seems to me that the idea that all our personal life decisions ought to be the subject of continuous moral scrutiny, or that we ought to be making “morally safe choices” in all areas of life all the time, is an overly restrictive and not very “ethically efficient” rule. So partly based on that idea, I see dietary ethics as being in the reference class of “personal life ethics,” which I downweight in my ethical calculus. That’s counterbalanced by the high level of suffering I have witnessed when I’ve watched factory farming videos, and counterbalanced again by the heavy integration into my culture and diet of meat consumption. And my current pattern of meat consumption—eating it, enjoying it, not feeling particularly guilty, but making gradual steps to phase out factory farmed meat—is the result of that balancing act.
But I would also add that I approve of people who are passionate about an ethical stance and take action to implement it in their lives, and so I applaud vegans and vegetarians, even though I do not join them. To me, it seems like there are many ways to be more virtuous in one’s live, and veganism and vegetarianism are two good examples but not mandatory for everyone.
Overall I have been pleasantly surprised at how constructive this conversation has been, thanks to OP for creating space for it. Generally I find ethical discussion with EAs to be pleasant, but I had anticipated there might be an exception where veg*ism is concerned.
I would add one extra point, which is that while I do think that all of life’s activities come into the scope of ethics, I think it’s important to preserve space to make meaningful decisions without subjecting each one to conscious ethical deliberation. By analogy, sometimes we scrutinize all the available data before we make a decision; other times, we ask an expert or a friend for their opinion and defer; and still other times, we just go with our gut. I think this also applies to ethical quesitons.
There’s a perfectly good reason to elevate meat and animal product consumption to a higher level of ethical attention. But what ought our total “ethics budget” be, and what would an appropriate allocation of ethical attention be, considering all the many problems in the world? My ethics budget is relatively small, and mainly reserved for issues related to my professional work and expertise—I am interested in issues related to biomedicine because I am a professional biomedical researcher, and spend considerable time on the ethics of organ sales because that is a particularly important, tractable and neglected question to interrogate.
It seems to me that the idea that all our personal life decisions ought to be the subject of continuous moral scrutiny, or that we ought to be making “morally safe choices” in all areas of life all the time, is an overly restrictive and not very “ethically efficient” rule. So partly based on that idea, I see dietary ethics as being in the reference class of “personal life ethics,” which I downweight in my ethical calculus. That’s counterbalanced by the high level of suffering I have witnessed when I’ve watched factory farming videos, and counterbalanced again by the heavy integration into my culture and diet of meat consumption. And my current pattern of meat consumption—eating it, enjoying it, not feeling particularly guilty, but making gradual steps to phase out factory farmed meat—is the result of that balancing act.
But I would also add that I approve of people who are passionate about an ethical stance and take action to implement it in their lives, and so I applaud vegans and vegetarians, even though I do not join them. To me, it seems like there are many ways to be more virtuous in one’s live, and veganism and vegetarianism are two good examples but not mandatory for everyone.