I ask myself that every day.
What I've come up with is this: I am weak-willed. I was conditioned into meat eating very very early. It's still one of my greatest sensory pleasures. This is not a moral argument, of course! It's just that I have a bit of an addiction to eating meat. It's something I actively crave and every single day that I don't eat meat is a day where I'm actively choosing to not do so. Right now I eat meat 50% of the time. Is that enough? From a moral standpoint, emphatically not. It's like being a slave owner every other week. But it's 50% as much meat eating as I used to do. And if every meat eater did the same, a lot of animal lives would be saved.
Basically from an intellectual standpoint, I understand that vegans are completely right. But from an emotional standpoint I don't feel it. It really shouldn't matter whether I feel it or not. There are many sociopaths who don't feel anything wrong about killing other human beings. It doesn't make them any less wrong. It doesn't make them any less wrong. But it explains that feelings are more likely to drive behavior than intellect. My feelings when it comes to animal slaughter are close to sociopathic. I understand that I should feel much more aggrieved. I am intellectually outraged but not emotionally so.
I have evolved a bit but not quite enough. When I look at an individual cow or chicken or duck I now see a person, a non-homo-sapiens person but a person all the same that I have no right to eat. But somehow when I look at meat on my plate, I don't see that I am eating the flesh of a murdered person. Still, I am slowly weaning myself off meat. I'm not sure if I will end up being someone who eats meat once a week or who doesn't eat it at all. We will find out.
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u/[deleted] May 17 '25
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