are vegetarians more ethical by not eating meat?

[Angrboda]

@littleendian:

You have said that if a human had to eat meat to survive, it would be okay; that if the choice were between eating meat and dying, the death of that animal to survive would be justified. In saying this, you are making an implicit value judgement. If both the cow and yourself were put on the scales of justice, and you could only choose one to live, apparently you value the continuation of the human life more valuable. I'm not sure the cow would agree with you on that point. Regardless, you've already made the value judgement that human life is more valuable than animal life. The only question is how much more valuable, and whether there is any absolute value to the animal's life and happiness in and of itself. In setting the values, you've drawn your lines rather arbitrarily. My enjoyment of a juicy steak is less valuable than the suffering and death of the cow? According to what? If you suggest it's because I would value my avoiding similar suffering more than I would value the experience of the steak, then you're attempting to argue that the experiences of the cow are of equal value to the same experiences in me, yet you've already clearly declared that they aren't when you said that, ceteris paribus, if the choice is between the cow suffering and dying, and you suffering and dying, the cow's suffering is less important. You can't have it both ways. Either they are fully morally equivalent, and we all become Jaina, or they are not equivalent, and setting the nature of that relationship is at issue.

In another thread, you suggest that morality is just a fancy word for what "feels right." You seem to believe that experience, particularly the experiences of pleasure and pain, are primary, that our ethics should be motivated by our compassion and, though you haven't explicitly said so, that our ethics should be determined upon the basis of our empathy with others. You also state that we should apply reason to determine our ethics. However, it seems that in doing this, you are simply using reason to adjust things so that they comport with your feelings (in this case about the values of avoiding suffering and such). However, your "feelings" in and of themselves are not rational, nor is your empathy a rational response; apportioning how best to match your actions to your values and your feelings may be a rational way of maximizing those things you value, but it doesn't make your valuing them in the first place rational. No matter how much you tune the match between your values and feelings and that of the consequence of your actions, you will never actually make that tuning rational in the sense that it has a rational, objective basis, or at least, not that I can see. At bottom, you still have non-rational values, feelings, and empathy driving the whole thing, and no amount of the application of how best to satisfy non-rational goals will make the process rational in the sense that you've taken something subjective and relative and made it objective. You've just made it more efficient, not more rational. And since you've already acknowledged that the experiences of the cow do not have the same value as my experiences, it seems rather arbitrary to say that avoiding a certain amount of suffering in the cow is more valuable than my avoiding the suffering I will face if I have to go without that steak. What basis do you have for setting the relation between the value of the cow's experiences and the values of my experiences in this way?