And in that other thread I made a simple rebuttal to that view. There are certain things that almost every culture has arrived at as “wrong”. This is the closest thing to moral objectivism as you can get. So, all of your examples here, raping, slavery, killing gays. Notably, they’re almost always crimes against PEOPLE. This is because morality is a system, for humans, to be used for the benefit of humans.
Morality only exists because of the social nature of humans. If we lived entirely alone, we’d just do whatever we want. Because humans don’t function very well like that, we have a series of standards, mostly brought about by the simple idea of empathy for the position of another human. I can put myself in this spot, and it sucks. I don’t want that to happen to me, so I can’t let it happen to anyone else.
Humans, and animals, worldwide have agreed that it’s permissible to eat other species of animal. It’s simply nature. Where we run into issues, and where I think you DO have a moral leg to stand on, is the absolute worst slaughterhouse conditions, factory farms… The “hunter” in this post. People who kill animals to excess, often without intention of actually using the meat. That’s just wasteful and causing suffering for no reason. This is why I said I advocate for reduction of meat use, for sourcing your meat when possible.
Let me pose you a couple of scenarios. What do you think about a subsistence hunter, who lives off the land. Someone who hunts, yes, but uses as much of the animal as they can?
Second scenario, a survival situation. Someone who has been left in an unfortunate situation, where they’re hungry, about to starve, and they happen upon a deer or rabbit they can hunt.
In both of these scenarios, if you believe that morality is objective, then both people are in the wrong. The first shouldn’t use any part of any animal ever, and the second should just die. If morality is objective, and eating meat is objectively wrong, both of the above scenarios are in the wrong. I don’t think you believe that, though. At very least the second scenario, I don’t think any reasonable person would believe the person is in the wrong for killing an animal so that they might survive.
I will admit that there is one angle that I could be swayed on. I’ll give you moral objectivism, if you also give up that morality is relative, as opposed to absolute. Perhaps you can say with certainty that a specific scenario is right or wrong, even if they both include something that is normally morally wrong, such as eating meat. In which case sure, you can make a claim about objectivity, but we still fall flat on the epistemological side. I don’t know the situations of most people who eat meat, and thus I cannot make any kind of true moral claim.
It all boils down to, let people live their lives as long as they’re not doing something completely insane like this person did. You can make the sacrifices it takes to not eat meat, good for you. Others aren’t in that situation for any of a number of reasons, and I’m not going to try to claim superiority to them. If you want to actually spread your gospel, because that’s what it is, then do so with grace and dignity, not vitriol and venom. You might actually change some minds.
Potatos_are_not_friends