Or, if I become a vegetarian for reasons mostly related to animal suffering, I would want to judge others more harshly for not being vegetarians, which is very poor form in conventional social interactions.
Judging others is about making predictions on their future actions in morally challenging situations. If they eat meat, it’s a good predictor that they will eat meat in future, but it doesn’t say much about whether they’ll jump into the canal to save a drowning child.
That’s true as far as it goes, but it seems to me that jumping into a canal to rescue a drowning child is as morally easy as it gets: your explicit beliefs are nicely lining up with your intuitions and emotions.
Eating ethically is much harder; it involves the ability to make some sacrifices without the benefit of strong emotional spurs. Vegetarianism/veganism, assuming it’s based on essentially consequentialist reasoning (not all of it is), is basically a real-world application of “shut up & multiply,” which I find admirable.
Judging others is about making predictions on their future actions in morally challenging situations. If they eat meat, it’s a good predictor that they will eat meat in future, but it doesn’t say much about whether they’ll jump into the canal to save a drowning child.
That’s true as far as it goes, but it seems to me that jumping into a canal to rescue a drowning child is as morally easy as it gets: your explicit beliefs are nicely lining up with your intuitions and emotions.
Eating ethically is much harder; it involves the ability to make some sacrifices without the benefit of strong emotional spurs. Vegetarianism/veganism, assuming it’s based on essentially consequentialist reasoning (not all of it is), is basically a real-world application of “shut up & multiply,” which I find admirable.