What is it in our nature which causes us to want to convert others to our own moral positions? For the record I was a vegetarian for 16 years and have been a pescatarian for a further 16, giving me an exact equal third amount of time spent in each camp. But I never tried to inflict my own personal choices on others- I don’t even like the subject being raised- and even used to get annoyed with my mother when I took her out for a meal and she would proceed to read out the options on the menu, telling all and sundry that I was one of those bloody annoying types.
To my mind I was creating an imposition on the chef in asking him to cater to my specific dietary requests. When I was simply choosing one item from a list, it didn’t matter because I was exercising my free choice- but the mere act of stating a specific dietary preference seemed as though it almost verged upon coercion. Of course, it is a free market, and there is an element of advantage to be had in providing the greatest range of options to the greatest number of people- but my brother the chef was highly annoyed to be told by a customer (who didn’t know what they were talking about), that the government would soon be forcing all restaurants to provide options for customers with food allergies. Another pet hate of his is when customers query why they need to explain what level of food allergy they have- there is a good deal of difference between someone who gets bloated and has wind form eating glutens and a celeriac who might go into anaphylactic shock from a few grains of flour.
I made the decision to turn veggie at 16 because we had always kept pet dogs and I asked myself what was the real difference between a dog and other domesticated animals? Looking back on it, I am surprised at my own ignorance and naivety. The answer, of course, is that they evolved over tens of thousands of years to make themselves of use to us, becoming increasingly prosocial in the process and probably smarter- reflected in the fact that the more ancient breeds seem to be less intelligent than the more recent adaptions like border collies and spaniels. In dog shows, the agility course obstacle events divide into cols and non-cols, and in the latter category it is usually spaniels that win.
Did you know that dogs are the only animals which have evolved to read a human face? It’s why they do that quirky tilt with their head- they are trying to read your emotional state. They pick up differences in expressions on both sides of you face and are better than humans at detecting when someone is trying to deceive as to their emotional state and malign intentions. Some of it is also probably based upon their amazing sense of smell.
Anyway, I turned veggie because I had a friend who worked at a poultry farm. It was probably an extreme example. They had to wear environment suits to enter the area where the poultry were kept, because the hormones and antibiotics had destroyed the chickens natural immunities. He told me that if you threw one of the birds up into the air it would burst when it hit the ground. A more rational approach would have seen me paying a bit more for quality meats from the butcher, but at the time I was hung up on my false equivalency between dogs and other farm animals.
I still have my instinctive dislike of telling other people what to do, based largely upon my dislike of being told what to do. If you want to try to persuade me then have at it, but don’t do it with appeals to emotions, overly sentimental arguments or clever contrivances. Just give me the facts, and give me the freedom to decide for myself. Apart from anything else, we have to consider the very real impacts to human lives which might result from disruptions to the ecosystem of commerce which has built up from farming, animal or otherwise.
On the climate issue, it would appear that a plant-based diet is far less good for the planet than previously thought. More recent research from the US has shown that shifting to a plant-based diet only reduces your carbon footprint by about 2%. Part of this is the global transport infrastructure which supports a varied plant-based diet, but other improvement in the accuracy of our knowledge comes from recent satellite telemetry showing that we drastically underestimated the amount of methane being given off by waste dumps- it turns out that placing our food waste in bags and burying them in landfill really isn’t good, in terms of methane production. If you really want to help, start a wormery, or find a way to put your food scraps out for the birds- they’ll eat anything after all, as will most animals. The hedgehog at the end of my garden is particularly fond of dog food.
I'll present as an initial argument for veganism/vegetarianism.
(1) Imposing on others is wrong.
You seem to suggest it's (prima facie) wrong to impose on people, such as forcing them to cook different sorts of meals than they want to or are prepared to.
(2) Farming animals and killing them to harvest their meet is an extreme form of imposing.
However wrong it is to force or moralize someone into cooking something they don't want to cook because you desire to eat something other than what they're prepared to cook, it is vastly more wrong to kill to eat what I want.
(C) Therefore, it is wrong to kill animals to eat them. Moreover, since the wrongness of killing is vastly worse than the wrongness of imposing someone to prepare a meal that they don't want to, you are justified to impose on people to cook things they don't want to in order to avoid the vastly more grievous wrong.
You could respond to this by trying to show that "imposing" doesn't apply to animals. This would be done by showing that animals lack moral status. I contend that this almost certainly cannot be done because the features that make us, including senile people and children, moral subjects are present in animals. We can experience the good (perhaps in the form of pain and pleasure, if you're a utilitarian), and have ends and goals; animals can do these as well.
I'll present as an initial argument for veganism/vegetarianism.
(1) Imposing on others is wrong.
You seem to suggest it's (prima facie) wrong to impose on people, such as forcing them to cook different sorts of meals than they want to or are prepared to.
(2) Farming animals and killing them to harvest their meet is an extreme form of imposing.
However wrong it is to force or moralize someone into cooking something they don't want to cook because you desire to eat something other than what they're prepared to cook, it is vastly more wrong to kill to eat what I want.
(C) Therefore, it is wrong to kill animals to eat them. Moreover, since the wrongness of killing is vastly worse than the wrongness of imposing someone to prepare a meal that they don't want to, you are justified to impose on people to cook things they don't want to in order to avoid the vastly more grievous wrong.
You could respond to this by trying to show that "imposing" doesn't apply to animals. This would be done by showing that animals lack moral status. I contend that this almost certainly cannot be done because the features that make us, including senile people and children, moral subjects are present in animals. We can experience the good (perhaps in the form of pain and pleasure, if you're a utilitarian), and have ends and goals; animals can do these as well.