One thing I think about that I didn’t see you mention in your post is the pressure to remain consistent with this rise in your moral standards.
i.e. if eating meat has a Badness Score of −20 but eating dairy has a badness score of −10, then going from vegetarian to vegan seems to apply pressure on you to give up all your other behaviours that fall between −20 and −10 on the spectrum. (Maybe you now have to care more about recycling or something.)
I use the recycling analogy when talking to people about this issue. I consider myself to be one-who-recycles, but if I have bottle in my hand and there’s nowhere convenient to recycle it, I’ll throw it away. Holding onto that bottle all day because I’ve decided I’m a categorical recycler seems kind of silly. I treat food the same way.
Regarding your broader point re consistency, my guess is that we way over-emphasize the effect of diet over other relatively cost-less things we can do to make the world a better place—in large part because there are organized social movements around diet. That of course doesn’t necessarily mean we should eat more animal products but rather that we should try to identify other low-hanging-fruit means of improving the world.
I’m in a similar place to you.
One thing I think about that I didn’t see you mention in your post is the pressure to remain consistent with this rise in your moral standards.
i.e. if eating meat has a Badness Score of −20 but eating dairy has a badness score of −10, then going from vegetarian to vegan seems to apply pressure on you to give up all your other behaviours that fall between −20 and −10 on the spectrum. (Maybe you now have to care more about recycling or something.)
I use the recycling analogy when talking to people about this issue. I consider myself to be one-who-recycles, but if I have bottle in my hand and there’s nowhere convenient to recycle it, I’ll throw it away. Holding onto that bottle all day because I’ve decided I’m a categorical recycler seems kind of silly. I treat food the same way.
Regarding your broader point re consistency, my guess is that we way over-emphasize the effect of diet over other relatively cost-less things we can do to make the world a better place—in large part because there are organized social movements around diet. That of course doesn’t necessarily mean we should eat more animal products but rather that we should try to identify other low-hanging-fruit means of improving the world.