For those of us fortunate to live in advanced western countries, the claim about being able to have an adequate diet without meat and or poultry is obviously possible and maybe correct. But that doesn't speak to the moral issue.
A close friend of mine and my younger son, both no longer eat meat, occasionally they might eat fish, guiltily though.
IF you ask me to offer a defence of this position, I'm not sure I can do it. Though I could be quite convinced by some of the arguments for vegetarianism, I eat meat, poultry and fish.
Does that mean that we can't be confident in calling the system of adding pink slime to red ground beef, or the whole factory farming and transportation system as it exists right now in most advanced countries of the world and led by the United States a moral outrage??
The relationship between philosophical reflection and daily life can be a complicated thing.
Further thought on the same theme as one could ask whether torture could be justified in a "ticking bomb" scenario, or killing an unarmed young adolescent and calling it self defence,or even the massacres by reigning regimes in some parts of the world, I believe that these kinds of situations are designed to lead to judgemental impasses and paralysis.
Such situations can encourage us to lose our confidence in our judgement about the majority of real world situations that we might face.
Can we imagine circumstances in which so many important considerations and decisions in addition to animal suffering are in play that we're not quite sure what to say about eating animals ???
Thoughts from an exchange with Alexander G. AS usual thanks for your time and patience.
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