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ChrisHibbert comments on Unspeakable Morality - Less Wrong
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I've rehashed this several times, but I'll repeat it for your benefit: I think it is wrong for many people to eat meat. Some people, through circumstances beyond their control, would find their quality of life unacceptably diminished by a lack of meat consumption. I do not think it is morally wrong for those people to eat meat: their quality of life is more important than the lives of the animals they eat. I, and many other people, can be happy vegetarians. People who can be happy vegetarians (or who won't be significantly less happy as vegetarians than as omnivores) should be vegetarians. For those people, it is wrong to eat meat because it is unnecessarily destructive of animal lives, which have non-negligible value even if they aren't more important than human quality of life.
There is an overwhelming amount of gory detail about the suffering undergone by the majority of domesticated meat animals in developed countries. If you are curious about how much suffering your food underwent to arrive at your plate, PETA et. al. will be happy to supply that information and you can find it without my help.
I disagree. I think many animals (and people, for that matter) ought not to have been born.
I'm not particularly curious. I have no doubt that I could find plenty of testimony from partisans. Why should I expect that testimony to present the issue in a fair light? Are there any non-partisans trying to find a middle position and present a balanced view of the issue?
That paragraph responded to pwno's statement:
If you're not curious, that's okay. As for fair presentation, I don't doubt that PETA and its less insane friends heavily skew every piece of evidence that passes through their hands. However, the amount of skewing I can believe went into a mountain of video documentation is necessarily limited by the fact that I don't think PETA et. al. are staging elaborate scenes of animal torture for the greater good of our noble friends the chickens. Take from that as much or as little as you will; it's certainly at least weak evidence that bad things happen to food animals between entering the world and leaving it.
If you find any, let me know. Everybody eats, so everybody has a stake in the issue: there is no way to be sure that an omnivore isn't being defensive or a vegetarian isn't being self-righteous if they come up with the conclusions you'd expect. I would be surprised to find an omnivore who concluded that food animal conditions were bad enough to warrant not eating meat; most people aren't equipped to make that kind of admission. Some vegetarians are, or claim to be, vegetarians for reasons unrelated to animal welfare - but they probably would not be inclined to invest time and care into crafting a nonpartisan analysis of the meat industry.
I'm one.
But admitting you knowingly do wrong is creepy. Faux pas. The normal way out is to rationalize, but sometimes I forget...
I'm fairly sure conditions are easily that bad; what I'm undecided on is the moral weight that I place on the suffering of animals.
I also acknowledge that being an omnivore with a high desire for variety in food discourages me from trying too hard to make up my mind, because I estimate a non-trivial chance that my final decision would be to eliminate at minimum most mammal meat.
For what it's worth, my dietary variety has increased since I became a vegetarian. This could, however, be because the switch coincided with ending my dependence on school cafeteria food and with my literal overnight development of a taste for vegetables. (It was the weirdest thing. I woke up one morning and wanted cauliflower.)