There's this bizarre, illogical trope that doing some good is pointless if you can't be absolutely, impeccably perfect in every way. Again, it's just obvious bullshit from people who don't even really believe what they're saying, they're just playing a stupid gotcha game.
In general, the ethical question of how to assign moral weight to different beings is an open one. Some people would argue that a human being has greater moral worth than an insect. Others argue that all animal lives carry equal weight with human lives (I don't know who these people are, but they worry me).
Moreover, when people (unprompted) claim to be vegans in the presence of non-vegans, they are morally distinguishing themselves. It is the unstated claim "you are in my out-group" that non-vegans find so offensive. But then, a lot of people are offended when anyone they might call a friend goes out of their way to make a moral distinction, and this is not specific to diet preference at all.
I'd consider myself one of these. All living things are equally fair game to be eaten. Obviously some carry social and legal consequences that make it not worthwhile, but ethically, we're all organic matter. Life consumes other life to keep itself going. That's how it works. I don't know why I should be concerned about a cow but not a stalk of celery. They're equally alive.
I guess if you only care about the most primitive, baseline definition of "alive". I would think we had evolved beyond believing killing is killing no matter the circumstance. Do we not wish to distinguish ourselves from primal, purely survival-driven animals?
If you're not survival-driven, you will eventually be out-competed by something that is. If we don't survive, everything else is pointless.
A lot of caring from the vegan community is feeling-based. What this means is that one _feels_ that one cares about living species while not _actually_ caring about them. Furthermore, when one strongly feels in this manner they tend to hold strong beliefs as well. Much like religion, this results in people fighting over their cherished feelings and beliefs.
In the end, nobody seems to _actually_ care about the animals.
Think about it.
Even from a completely amoral perspective where nothing is preferable to anything else, do you not see the social benefits of a community which has the socially-enforced value of "suffering is bad"?
In general I prefer life should go on living and creating more life in a sustainable fashion, but generally that does involve some amount of suffering for some life somewhere.
An amoral framework has no basis whatsoever to argue that any value system is wrong. Why would a moral person care about the material reasons why society is altruistic? There's nothing you can argue at the object level that will change someone's moral values.
If you take scientific materialism to it's extreme 'we are all just particles' ergo, none of intelligence/life/love/wisdom/creation even really exist, it's all just how we perceive randomness.
'Sociopaths' and 'Psychopaths' cannot exist in materialism after all: we're just mounds of atoms.
But once you accept the life principle, which is not so well defined but nevertheless evident to us all at least due to the fact we are conscious ... well then you can start to arrive at why we might think we are 'more important' than rocks.
Then things like 'community' etc. make sense.
But one's metaphysical view needs to have something more transcendent that e=mc2 at the root of it in order for it to work.
The OP's comments are actually reasonable in the context of materialism, and that they are a little 'shocking' to someone normally engaged in life is only evidence of the hollowness of our current rational regimes at explaining the most basic question, which is 'who/what are we'. Knowing how 'dark matter' works will be nice, but it's still secondary to understanding the nature of life itself, I think.
I thought as well that human lives are more important than animal lives, but the question is that when AI gets smarter than us and concious, do you want AI to have the moral value of human life having lesser importance than AI life?
I'd love to know if there is a handy word/term for this phenomenon where an odd amount of energy is spent opposing those people/views which are more similar than less similar.
People want strict rules that they can follow that gives them a measuring stick by which they can gauge their own (and others) "worthiness", "purity" or "success". If we set specific boundaries, then we can more easily judge ourselves if we succeeded/failed or others if they are in/out. This type of thinking is most commonly found in diets. We decide which foods are "bad" and which are "good" so we know whether or not we have achieved our goals. It's easier to know when you "fell off the horse" when you ate a food previously deemed "bad". It's not so easy to make judgements on ourselves and others when the rules are not so clear-cut.
I think many are afraid of looking to ourselves as the deciders of our own realities/moralities. We prefer to look outside to leaders/gurus/experts to tell us what the truth is.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcissism_of_small_difference...
As for "some good", you might really want to get off your high horse and objectively look into the catastrophic environmental damage that a vegan diet causes. Not to mention the long term harm it does to the human body.
You literally cannot survive in nature on a vegan diet. You'd starve to death. You literally cannot have a vegan diet without fossil fuel ( good luck growing avocados in alaska or NY ). You literally cannot have a vegan diet without killing nearly infinite number of bugs, worms, vermin, etc. I know truth can be triggering to a cult member, but this is agricultural and economic reality of a vegan diet.
Personally, I'd love to society move to a "hunter gatherer diet" as that's the most natural, healthy and environmentally friendly diet possible. Rather the elites want to put us on a diet akin to the "vegan diet" livestock on industrial farms are fed. It's funny how industrialization is turning humans more and more into livestock. Maybe the UN will recommend troughs filled with vegetables for human beings.
But "har har, vegans are all crazy toxic assholes, amiright?" is a popular trope, no matter the factuality.
How many billions of people can earth supported wih a hunter gatherer diet? Veganism is one of the least CO2-intensive diets possible in a modern society (https://i1.wp.com/shrinkthatfootprint.com/wp-content/uploads...), and if you knew any vegans personally I think they'd agree with measures to reduce the CO2 intensiveness of agriculture. I'm not exactly sure who or what you're arguing against.
With regards to insects, plenty of people are interested in insect and wildlife suffering, including vegans - https://reducing-suffering.org/why-vegans-should-care-about-.... Under some assumptions, by reducing land & water use, veganism does reduce insect suffering somewhat. Clearly, it also reduces livestock suffering.
Other diets such as vegetarianism are much more clearly harm minimization based, which makes it easier to deal with issues like this.
I have never in real life heard of anyone contemplating nuts and avocados as 'vegan' or not, but I hear all the time from my vegan-leaning friends about GMO's, palm oil, and everything else.
Most of us just want a croissant made with butter and would like for it to work out in some reasonable way for everyone including the cow.
Vegans (I don't know what vegan-leaning means, but I'm referring to most actual vegans here) want this as well. The difference is that they recognize that this is largely untenable.
If it’s vegetable fat based butter or genetically modified yeast making milk from which butter can be made, that’s not an issue.
I maintain that the Vegan Police from Scott Pilgrim are one of the finest satirical concepts I've ever seen in fiction.
With the introduction of ethical meat riding on the back of GMO & science I bet we'll see an emergence of very different forms of veganism.
I've slowly reduced my meat & dairy consumption, but haven't eliminated it. This year I have almost entirely eliminated cow meat from my diet (probably ate ~100-200 grams this year for cultural reasons), but am highly anticipating the impossible burger 2 coming to local restaurants.
Good for you! More people need to realize this is an option. Too many in the vegan community and elsewhere push a "all or nothing" approach which is harmful to the movement overall. People don't do well with totally changing their lifestyle overnight. Slow and steady is the key to long term adoption.
...the loud, obnoxious ones you know about, perhaps. Most vegans and vegetarians in my experience (hopefully including myself) don't try to preach, lecture, or abuse...but you likely don't even know their eating habits as a result.
Likewise - are you even hearing from actual vegans/vegetarians? Or are you hearing repeated stories that curdle outrage?
When I was in high school I wrote an essay about how ridiculous it was that I could be insulted for daring to hold a door for a woman when I hold doors for everyone! It was a couple of years before I realized I never HAD been insulted, I had simply been told I could be. This has happened with any number of items in my life: the outrage far exceeds the actual experiences.
I won't deny there are _some_ smug and self-righteous vegans out there - there are annoying people everywhere. But have you actually encountered the "community" (to use the word from above poster)?
I'm de-facto a vegan every second day, without thinking about it.
I do dispute however the OP's point 'non-vegans' splitting hairs on vegans 'a thing' or 'the thing'.
The 'finger wagging and moral high ground posturing' is almost entirely a function of the vegan side of the equation.
For example: GMO's, as someone noted below, it's 'not a vegan issue' - of course not strictly, but it's the same crowd of 'food concerned people'.
'Organic, GMO, Vegan' overlap quite a bit - this is where the discussion and marketing (as a result of demand no doubt) is happening.