Veganism

[The Grand Nudger]

I think there might be a factual difference between assault and self defense....

Don't look now, but you're making the point that morality might be rooted in this or that context. Hardly objective if the same act can be acceptable and uncceptable depending on circumstance.

Descriptively speaking, these terms explicitly refer to the context in which moral statements are made, apprehended, and considered -  it's not clear why this would be a problem.   Insomuch as a moral statement is intended and constructed to make a fact statement, that the arguer believes to be a fact statement, I will consider it as an attempt at a fact statement. That seems entirely appropriate to me. Ultimately, there may be no such thing as fact (of this or any kind, let's go nuts) but on the face of things moral statements appear to invite realist consideration. Pretty quick and easy defense of moral realism right there, too, don't you think? "Jon said I should do x because y was true, but y is not true - Jons moral argument has failed". Subjectively, Jon said - is all that matters. Relativisticaly, that jons utterance is in accordance with his societal organization- is all that matters. I think facts exist, and facts matter, and this is what signifies that I am a moral realist in-practice even if moral realism is, for reasons I/we don't fully understand or can't coherently articulate, metaethically false.

Metaethically speaking you may be confusing absolutist or universalist consideration for objective consideration (and as above, moral standards and moral consideration are not interchangeable concepts).  If the specific facts of an act are the moral making facts, rather than facts about a persons opinion or the society they were raised in, then OFC different factual circumstances could produce different moral conclusions?  The conclusion could not be fully objective if it omitted such things.  In my experience, this is another effect of the history of subjective deistic deontological contamination.  We find ourselves looking for the thing a bunch of charlatans and zealots told us "objectivity" was, and finding that objectivity is not that, decide that objectivity cannot be objectivity, or does not exist.

Bringing it back to ethical veganism, because this is really on point imo, it seems to me that the ethical vegan argument I'm considering takes for granted a certain set of factual circumstances. The ones that my vegan livestock producer evades. My disagreement with the argument is not in principle but in the accuracy and specificity of the facts that argument invokes..which is as things should be, if we're considering things rationally and objectively, no? I think that there are ways to raise livestock that do not cause the harms specified as the wrong-making properties of meat consumption. I think the argument fails to account for facts, including factual circumstances, that do produce same-said wrong-making properties the arguments premise is to avoid. The conclusion ends up being wrong in fact but not in principle. There's probably some version of the argument that would succeed, but that version may not actually lead to the desired conclusion of vegan normativity.

(Probably worth noting here that my position..as a moral realist, is that most moral propositions are wrong, and wrong in fact. We're not very good at it, we haven't even tried to be good at it for most of our history.)