are vegetarians more ethical by not eating meat?

[Sal]

Then people that buy factory meat from a grocery store are excused. They didn't kill the animals that constitutes those meat products.

The moral realm doesn't only extend to our own direct physical actions but also to the actions we condone or support with our choices of consumption. Paying someone else to kill is no more moral than killing yourself. Stalin was responsible for the people who died in his gulags even though, as far as I know, he never killed anyone himself.

I agree and concede my point - I think that people should, as far as they can realize, value their actions on how to behave and how to minimize suffering in a bigger picture.

A pipe-dream, if I ever saw one. Very unrealistic. Problem is that we cannot control how others behave, is why I think it's a pipe-dream.

No, not a pipe dream. You can either go around raping and pillaging or you can join a charitable organization and help others in need, you must see that there is a difference in the amount of suffering caused. We control how others behave by our example, its completely intuitive, we follow those whose actions we admire, we imitate them and we change. It's easy to say "but I'm only one person, what difference does my action make", but even if only you yourself change this does make a difference for your own actions and it will affect others actions eventually. Many of the good changes in history came about not by revolution but by individuals taking baby steps.

I think so too, but I also think that the actions of the few unsuspecting individuals is unable to extrapolate to a bigger picture. It seems way too chaotic to me for it to have any meaningful change.

That's anthropomorphizing on a grand scale. Animals don't know they're prisoners in the same sense humans know it.

This argument can easily be turned around: A human prisoner of war for example can endure his prison stay because he has reason and knows that he will be free after the war. An animal has no such capacity, therefore its suffering will be greater since it cannot follow its instincts and move freely.

What if they did not have such a capacity and were wholly complacent?

Again, I'm against factory farming - so I don't stress that point.