Veganism

[Belacqua]

I'm saying that you don't have moral agreement. You have what's fashionable today.

And assuming that moral agreement is just "what's fashionable today" is just question-begging again.

In his book After Virtue, Alasdair MacIntyre argues that we currently lack the grounding to make morality into anything other than current fashion.

A lot of people have found his argument against that idea to be persuasive. The book clarifies a number of issues about the problem, even if you don't end up agreeing with it. (Though a surprising number of people from different backgrounds have ended up agreeing with it in whole or in part.) 

It's not the kind of book we can discuss here, but I think you'd probably enjoy it, if you haven't tried it yet.

[Paleophyte]

I'm saying that you don't have moral agreement. You have what's fashionable today.

And assuming that moral agreement is just "what's fashionable today" is just question-begging again.

No, it simply isn't assuming that what we take for morality here and now is what we'll be viewing as moral a century from now. Every generation before us made that assumption and they were wrong.

[The Grand Nudger]

I'd say also rather than just.  Fortunate thing for the cats too.

I say "just" because it costs me nothing.

Maybe you take it for granted because you're a decent person?  You (broadly, we) think "hey, I can be kind while doing whatever I do, np!".  It's probably not actually true that progressive morality or empathy costs you (or us) nothing, though. 

It costs 1 cubic foot of space and 7 weeks worth of feed to produce marketable poultry.  It takes 30 cubic feet of space and 27 weeks of feed to produce a smaller bird, empathetically.
It costs .75 cubic foot of space and 16 weeks of feed to produce 1.5 eggs a day.  It takes 3 cubic feet and 52 weeks of feed to produce a 1 smaller egg a day, empathetically.

You can see how that's going to cost someone time and money - and you as the consumer are going to pay for that time and investment.  I can put a pretty solid dollar amount on the cost of kindness to chickens.  $27 dollars a bird at the low end.  That's why the price for niche poultry can easily hit $9 a pound.  Sustainable/ethical roasters are on the small end at around 4lb and nearly 30weeks by date of sale...actually losing weight with respect to feed in by that point...and with an impressively large footprint compared to what I call cruelty enhanced products.  

This is where I think vegan and vegetarian arguments from the ethics of production succeed.  No rational (let alone empathetic) person could look at minimum entry cornishx chicken breast production ala purdue affiliate farm and think "nothing untoward or concerning going on here" - and that;s just what's happening to the birds. Nevermind the knock on effects of that production model at scale.  That's what actually costs us nothing (extra).  Every step from that to anything else is a burden on the consumer which those consumers have decided is worth it. In my anecdotal experience the only reason anyone ever picks the cruelty enhanced bird over the kindly produced bird is money. If you told someone they cost the same only a psycho picks the tortured bird.

I said also in the sense that I think that moral progress -is- one effect of extending empathy, yes...but I also think that the conclusions empathy produces in us are at least sometimes true in and of themselves regardless of whether or not we've arrived at that truth by following our empathetic hardwiring. The same way that two scientists or teams can arrive at the same theory of x from different angles of attack. Multiple instances of independent construction. That a thing can be kinder for cats (or chickens) and we may have noticed that by expanding our empathetic umbrella...but even if we hadn't done that or been motivated by that, it's still true that the thing is kinder for cats (or chickens).

Now, how many people reading would pay $9 a pound for chicken, and how many people could successfully feed their own families trying to market chicken at that price? I failed, personally, on both accounts. I am neither able to pay that price nor to convince enough consumers to pay that price to make kindly produced chicken a thing. I know how to do it, which suggests it's a thing that can be done - but I don't know how to get enough people to pay for it to cover what it costs for me to do it. Other people may succeed here, just not me. I guess I could blame that failure on everyone being a moral midget.....but I suspect that's more cope than fact.