Any Vegetarians/Vegans here?

[Angrboda]

You keep forgetting two things.

a) Since my ethics is based on evolutionary principles, counter-claims are a matter of basic survival.

b) Since my ethics operates at the species level, it can't be used to support gender or race distinctions directly.

Your appeals continually violate these two basic facts.

I would agree that we should eliminate unnecessary animal suffering if it doesn't result in a drain on our survival. But if being altruistic involves sacrificing the goals of humans for the sake of animals, then your altruism is irrational. Altruism evolved to serve species goals, and when you take it outside of that, you are costing lives.

Regardless, if animal suffering is only partially a constraint on human behavior, it doesn't lead to an ethical mandate to eliminate the eating of meat. There are good, evolutionary reasons why we don't want to be insensitive to the suffering of creatures that remind us of ourselves. However, vegetarianism is a case of looking for an ethical principle to use to justify an ideological position, and holding fast to that rationalization in spite of the consequences. If I felt empathy were a sound basis for morals, they might be right, but so far all you've shown is that some people "want" it to be the basis of morals; not that it is. And mounting your ethics on the principle of "mere preference" guts your ethical stand more surely than any naturalistic basis can. If it's "just preference," then there's no argument you can make if I want to enslave blacks or oppress women; one preference is as good as another if that is all that it is.