Oh. Would you care to say more?
This wouldn't be the first time I've run into inferential distances when discussing ethics on LW, and I suspect it to be the case here, perhaps in part due to differences in terminology, in part due to unstated background assumptions.
on what grounds do you think it likely that I mean that
I don't know if you in particular mean that, but it's a common usage I've noticed among people who do things that they say they shouldn't do.
I think I rambled a little too much in my expansion, so to compress it into something more compact: "I occasionally do things I and/or people whose opinions I care about label as 'morally bad', and when I do these things, I think the words 'I shouldn't do this'. In part I've internalized that doing this thing is 'bad', but I don't actually think it's bad, and I still choose to do it." To further clarify, when people say "I shouldn't do X", they mean that it feels like an external imposition for them, and if they could do what they wanted, they'd cast it aside and do X, and only the desire to be moral (perhaps motivated by guilt, shame, or adherence to social norms) is keeping them from doing it. There is another sense of "I shouldn't do X", as in "I shouldn't put my hand on a hot stove" - there's no external imposition there, motivation is entirely internal. Both meanings of "should" are common, and perhaps I am wrong to say that only the second, internal meaning of "should" is valid.
If one thinks that one externally-shouldn't eat meat, they may still eat meat because they don't think they internally-shouldn't eat meat. I forgot (due to inferential differences) that belief that morality is external is common (a belief I do not share), and in that case it's certainly possible to believe you're acting unethically and still consistently want to eat meat.
Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age takes place several decades in the future and this conversation is looking back on the present day:
I'm not sure if I agree with this characterization of the current political climate; in any case, that's not the point I'm interested in. I'm also not interested in moral relativism.
But the passage does point out a flaw which I recognize in myself: a preference for consistency over actually doing the right thing. I place a lot of stock--as I think many here do--on self-consistency. After all, clearly any moral code which is inconsistent is wrong. But dismissing a moral code for inconsistency or a person for hypocrisy is lazy. Morality is hard. It's easy to get a warm glow from the nice self-consistency of your own principles and mistake this for actually being right.
Placing too much emphasis on consistency led me to at least one embarrassing failure. I decided that no one who ate meat could be taken seriously when discussing animal rights: killing animals because they taste good seems completely inconsistent with placing any value on their lives. Furthermore, I myself ignored the whole concept of animal rights because I eat meat, so that it would be inconsistent for me to assign animals any rights. Consistency between my moral principles and my actions--not being a hypocrite--was more important to me than actually figuring out what the correct moral principles were.
To generalize: holding high moral ideals is going to produce cognitive dissonance when you are not able to live up to those ideals. It is always tempting--for me at least--to resolve this dissonance by backing down from those high ideals. An alternative we might try is to be more comfortable with hypocrisy.
Related: Self-deception: Hypocrisy or Akrasia?