Veganism

[Belacqua]

I'm not sure which form of anti-realism you accept specifically, but from what you've said it seems that you accept some form.

I'm not sure if moral realism is right or not... I've never worked out everything that would entail.

I do think that some normative statements are persuasive to the point that no reasonable person would disagree with them. 

So a normative statement like "it's bad to chop the arms off of healthy babies for entertainment" seems undeniable to me. And I think that anyone who disagreed with it would be seriously deranged. 

(Right at the beginning of the Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle says that different fields of thought allow for different degrees of clarity and specificity. Ethics can never be as precise as many scientific fields, nor can its assertions be proven in a scientific way. But that doesn't mean that we can't be confident about some aspects of ethics.) 

So an extreme statement like that might be "just opinion," but it's an opinion that any sane person would hold. 

I also think that "less suffering is better than more suffering" is pretty hard to deny. Even if you think that a lot of suffering is necessary to teach us hard truths, the end goal of such a hard education is to get less suffering. 

Also, less extreme but fairly undeniable, is "it is best to make the most efficient use of limited resources." 

And I choose those two statements (that I think most people would agree with) because they form the basis of arguments for veganism -- at least the ones I've heard. 

Cows and pigs are feeling creatures and suffer when raised for slaughter. Raising animals for food requires more resources than growing beans for tofu, when measured per gram of protein. So those are two descriptive facts which support the normative statements. 

In fact I think there are several subjects in which the purists, in this case the vegans, have the better arguments, but I fail to follow their prescription. I still eat meat. This is because while we can think logically, we tend to live practically. It's easier for me to eat a healthy diet if I include the (fairly small) amount of meat that I do now. I hope that people in the future will do better than I do. This would require more than ethics-based personal commitment, though. A more general re-organization of how get our food would probably be necessary, just to make veganism more appealing and more normal, and not something that we have to commit to as if it were an ascetic regimen. 

My niece and her husband both majored in biology as it relates to food production, and both have been vegans for years. They claim that it's easy and they don't miss meat at all. But they've been practicing a long time, and they live in a college town where a significant % of the population makes the same choice. It's harder for me, as an old dog who learns fewer new tricks.