How to support animals and still eat whatever you want

Well, the only way is to stop wanting to eat their corpses, bodily fluids, etc. But, importantly, I’d speculate such a condition is achievable for most people, and indeed more easily achievable than most people realize—certainly moreso than I ever expected.

Contrary to what one might naively expect, how hard it is to do the right thing and how much you want to do the wrong thing are not proportional to how much you’re giving up by doing the right thing. It would be difficult for me to charitably give $1,000 to a stranger, even in a case where I’m morally obligated to; I would certainly have to overcome temptation. But if I find $1,000 in a wallet on the street, I am not even remotely tempted to keep it (assuming I’d be able to get it back to the owner), even though the sacrifice is the same.

The discrepancy is because, when I find the wallet and return it, there is no point at which I regard the money as mine, and regard myself as $1,000 poorer than I otherwise would have been for having done the right thing. Keeping the wallet simply does not present itself to me as a possible action, and so of course it’s not painful to return it. The only two things I perceive as realistic possibilities are not finding any wallet and finding a wallet and returning it if possible; I’m just as well off in either case, so why would I experience any pain at finding out the second possibility is actual? In contrast, it’s normal for me to keep most of my money or spend it on things I want or need, and so giving to charity is doing something, and I perceive it as a sacrifice, and I have to overcome temptation to do it.

People sometimes ask me whether I’d eat eggs if they came from some guy with chickens in his back yard who treats them well.1 They not only ask the worthwhile philosophical question of whether it would be permissible to eat the eggs, but they ask whether I, specifically, in the real world, would do it. My sincere reaction is simply: “Why would I? Ethics aside, eating others’ eggs is not something I need to do, it is not something I want to do, and there would be no reason to change that. I don’t have to go out of my way to eat something else, so I’d just keep doing that.” If an action is generally wrong, I might consider cases where I’d be permissible for philosophical purposes, but as far as actually planning how to live goes, I don’t sit around thinking about how much I can get away with. Maybe I’ll end up in circumstances where I have a really good reason to keep the stranger’s wallet or eat eggs from some guy’s back yard, who knows; if that happens, I’ll reevaluate. But for now, it’s just easier to regard stealing and eating eggs as impossibilities.

I don’t want to eat flesh, etc. any more than I’d want to keep the wallet. If, tomorrow, all the flesh, eggs, and cheese were replaced with lab-grown stuff, probably the only reason I’d start eating them would be for the sake of convenience. But I still do not in my current circumstances desire that convenience, since I do not perceive obtaining it as a possible course of action for me, just as I wouldn’t want to keep the wallet even though I desire $1,000 in the abstract.

Anyway. I speculated that having such a frame of mind, where eating flesh, etc. is not perceived as an option and one is not remotely tempted to do it, is achievable for most people. Why do I suspect that, and how do I think people could go about achieving it? The answer to the first question is easy: because I managed it, and I used to be just like everyone else (at least with respect to eggs and cheese). I liked eating cheese as much as anyone else, and while I still perceived doing so as an option I might forego or not, refraining from eating it was as difficult as it would be for anyone else.

As for the second question, my answer is, again, simple: just regard eating flesh, eggs, and dairy the way they would be regarded in a decent society that treats such acts the same as any others acts of killing or abuse.2 That such things are wrong is clear, and there is no excuse; being in a society that tells you otherwise is no excuse, because the supposed difficulty of dissenting from the majority is a mere self-fulfilling prophecy. Such acts are, morally, no different from killing and torturing animals for fun or other trivial benefits, and most anyone would be able to see that all arguments to the contrary are transparent rationalizations if they applied the same reasoning in any other case, which is one of the first things you do if you want to be correct. Whatever action you take, whatever you believe, try to imagine defending it to a normal person from a society that is sane about these things, and don’t hold yourself to a lower standard than they would.

Accepting these things is difficult, but they are still true. Obviously, I’m not infallible, and I’m sure some will say I only believe these things because I want to feel better than everyone else.3 In fact, all I’ve ever done is stop resisting having the above attitudes, and I did resist. If my conclusions are motivated, they’re not motivated in such a cliched way.

So: people have no excuse, and I had no excuse. The right thing to do is to just stop. It’s the bare minimum. If you think you have a really good reason to not just stop, then that is all the more reason to do so, at least for long enough that you’ll be able to evaluate the matter from a less biased perspective. Put eating flesh and other products of senseless violence in the not-to-be-done box in your mind. That idea that such a thing is difficult is, in my experience, another self-fulfilling prophecy.4