Ethics is disturbing.

"We all have a tendency to complacency with our own ways..."

A brief conversation I had yesterday illuminated this argument well:

"I don't want to talk to you because you always have a way of making me want to be vegetarian."

"Why?", I asked politely.

"Because it's not right what we are doing. I was a vegetarian for about three months but a friend made some food one time, and well...I just don't think about it anymore."

Consider for yourself what this response reveals, and if it parallels your own arguments against those who ask, "Shouldn't the suffering of everyone capable of suffering count?"

Simon Blackburn writes in Being Good,

"We do not like being told what to do. We want to enjoy our lives, and we want to enjoy them with a good conscience. People who disturb that equilibrium are uncomfortable, so moralists are often uninvited guests at the feast, and we have a multitude of defenses against them. Analogously, some individuals can insulate themselves from a poor physical environment, for a time. They may profit by creating one. The owner can live upwind of his chemical factory, and the logger may know that the trees will not give out until after he is dead.

Similarly, individuals can insulate themselves from a poor moral environment, or profit from it. Just as some trees flourish by depriving others of nutrients or light, so some people flourish by depriving others of their due. The western white male may flourish because of the inferior economic or social status of people who are not western, or white, or male.

Insofar as we are like that, we will not want the lid to be lifted."

We exist in an ethical environment:

"This is the surrounding climate of ideas about how to live," Blackburn writes. "It determines what we find acceptable or unacceptable, admirable or contemptible...It shapes our emotional responses, determining what is a cause of pride or shame...what can be forgiven and what cannot. It gives us our standards - our standards of behavior...It shapes our very identities (emphasis added).

This environment enables the monster of a paradigm animals-as-property. It justifies our collective speciesism. We avoid, because of the prevalence of this standard, the question begging nature of making species membership - a human genetic code - the necessary requirement for membership in the moral community. This, then, results in fallacious reasoning and undefended assumptions that are generally accepted, often unconsciously, as perfectly valid.

These are stories we tell and re-tell to defend our actions to ourselves. Therefore, when the pattern is interrupted our intuition responds with A) anger, B) "I don't want to talk to you because...", or C) mere dismissal, which is made possible by the majorities' position of numerical and power superiority.   

As Blackburn argues, "Ethics is disturbing."

Will be crossposted @ Vegan Soapbox