Well, this is exciting. I want to say congratulations for some reason, but it doesn’t feel right. Let’s go with a fist bump — that seems more fitting. And it’s not just because you re-evaluated things. What I admire most is the actionable nature of your moral quest. Your post, and corresponding actions since then, has made me realize that my position isn’t really much of a position. ((For all our millions of readers, aside from Elyse (Shoutout!), Valentin recently went to a conference in Montreal and was vegetarian for the entire 10 days he was there)). I claim that everything is relative, which it very much is. I claim that it all matters on how you balance your own equation of utility, which it very much does. But, where is the emphasis? And, more importantly, where should it be? Let’s define a simplistic way of analyzing how we make our decisions:

Hedonistic Desires(U) + Avoidance & Suppression of Cognitive Dissonance(U) + Following a Moral Principle (U) = Decision

The utility from how much we like to do a thing + the utility from avoiding/suppressing doing a thing + the utility of doing a thing based on a moral claim = a decision on doing a thing.

Yes, it’s oversimplified, but I believe speaks to the major points in decision making. But, if we want to, we can make it a bit more rigid. For example, you can add time & probabilistic variables to each of the functions: a decision on doing a thing can be based on the hedonistic utility you may have in the future. “I will not eat like a pig right now, so I can maybe get laid later on”. But, I digress.

… And let’s digress some more! A couple of things that I liked from your post.

1) Cognitive Dissonance. How can we forget this puppy! To give you a richer definition from my deep educational background in psychology, CD is defined as “the icky feeling in your tummy when you think about doing any given thing”

2) “Perhaps the only true universal morality is the pursuit of a true universal morality?” – Valentin Peretroukhin. Let’s exclude the question mark at the end of this and we can add this quote to your blooming wikipedia page.

3) Analogy of Moral Pursuits on a Map. Beautiful way of thinking about it!

Now, let’s get back to the question I asked earlier. Where is the emphasis on this balanced equation of utility? And, where should it be? Personally, I’m choosing rock because that’s the default I was born into. There is too much dissonance underlying the thought of changing my behaviour. However, my claim is that as a human being that chooses (and that’s a key word) to live in a civilized society, one should place emphasis on the utility from following a moral principle. This is not to say that one shouldn’t listen to hedonistic desires or trying to suppress dissonance at all. The emphasis on our journey to this theoretical optimal utility wonderland, which doesn’t necessarily exist, should be on moral utility. And this is for two reasons. One, I believe that living this game of life with reason and convictions leads to more happiness. And two, if we choose to live in a society, then living by moral claims allows one to be a better functioning member of that society. Now, where does this leave me? Am I going to reveal my big moral revelation? Unfortunately not … yet. This discussion has made me realize that it’s in my best interests to actively think of a position on this topic, back it up with some rational thought and base my actions on it. So, next time we play Rock, paper, Scissors, you may be in for a little surprise!

~ R

HOLD UP. Before I continue the discussion, we need to clarify something … my main point!

There are a couple of times in your response where you refer to the principle of non-violence I alluded to as “your principle”. Specifically, after stating your Principle of Minimal Suffering, you write “Why is this better than your principle of non-violence?”. It is not my principle. The point of bringing it up was to show that I grew up thinking with this principle, in an absolute, axiomatic moral universe, but only to realize that’s really not how the world works. So when you’re claiming that my main point is the principle of non-violence, and arguing against “my reasoning”, you have misread my intentions. And lets clarify them: my point is that any moral principle you take, whether it be on vegetarianism or honesty, doesn’t always hold true — there is always a ton of grey area. And after realizing that I was fooling myself of this fact, my moral universe collapsed and among other revelations, I understood that being a vegetarian was more of a default choice as a result of my upbringing rather than an active moral decision. Since that’s all cleared up, I think Jorge needs our help.

“Define morality!” Jorge exclaims, while pondering his purchase at the cash register.

You’re right Jorge, we should probably do that. I would define it as a “system of principles that guides one’s behaviour based on what is wrong and what is right”. And this notion of rightness and wrongness is a mesh of rational reasoning and intuitive feelings. Stealing candy from your buddy feels wrong. And also, rationally speaking, you wouldn’t want your buddy to steal from you, so you don’t steal from him.

Now with this in mind, let’s discuss another important notion that influences our eating decisions and that is … utility! We like things that make us feel good. Things that taste good. Things that give us utility. So when we’re talking moral principles and “practicality”, as you alluded to, it really comes down to balancing the utility of eating yummy food and the utility of sticking to a moral principle. (I realize there are other reasons people would eat meat other than taste, but I’m oversimplifying purposefully for the sake of the argument). Now, I’m not saying they have to be mutually exclusive. You can certainly eat yummy food and stick to a moral principle.  So when we’ve concluded earlier that morality is relative and highly individualistic, it becomes more about defining a principle that you extract enough moral utility, but still eat enough yummy food. Some people extract more utility from an extreme moral stance, like veganism, or some people are apathetic to the ethics of the issue all together and stick with the default habit they were born into. It comes down to a highly subjective mix of rational arguments meshed with emotional intuitions and instinctive, hedonistic desires. And everyone has a different combination.

“A moral stance that favours actions which minimize the suffering imposed on other conscious beings.”

This is yours. And that’s cool! I respect the arguments you bring forward to why you chose this and even the statement itself. But, I think I need to help you out with some fact checking on the current sentiment of the scientific community with respect to consciousness in non-human animals. Recently there was a gathering of an international group of cognitive neuroscientists, neuropharmacologists, neurophysiologists, neuroanatomists and computational neuroscientists at the University of Cambridge. This gathering is known as The Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness. And this is the declaration they made:

“The absence of a neocortex does not appear to preclude an organism from experiencing affective states. Convergent evidence indicates that non-human animals have the neuroanatomical, neurochemical, and neuropsychological substrates of conscious states along with the capacity to exhibit intentional behaviours. Consequently, the weight of evidence indicates that humans are not unique in possessing the neurological substrates that generate consciousness. Non-human animals, including all mammals and birds, and many other creatures, including octopuses, also possess these neurological substrates.”

Consciousness is prevalent in many more species other than mammals. And, what is especially relevant for you is that this declaration includes birds! So where does that leave you Valentin? Is it time to recalibrate your moral utility?

I’m a vegetarian. I have been my whole life. My entire family is vegetarian: sisters, cousins, uncles, aunts, and so on. The only thing that has changed for myself and a lot of family members (but not all) is that we did not eat eggs or any egg products growing up, but we do now. So I’m what is called a lacto-ovo vegetarian.  I have, accidentally, tried some butter chicken, thinking it was some creamy, fantastic-tasting paneer. But, other than that, I’m “clean”.  So those are my pre-existing contextual biases, now lets start the blabber.

When vegetarianism comes to mind, as we’ve discussed a plenty of times, one obvious overlaying principle comes into mind and that is non-violence. To put it in simple terms, I define this principle of nonviolence as a moral stance to not commit any intentional actions that hurt other sentient, living beings. It’s a little wordy, and not really simple, but you get the point. But even before getting into the real meat of that discussion, I think it’s important to backtrack and discuss  morality from a higher abstracted layer, and ask how we form our moral universes. Do these universes come from an “absolute” sense or does it exist relative to each contextual situation? So let’s do that first, Valentin. And to make it relevant to the topic at hand, we can use ‘non-violence’ as our guiding example.

If we take the stance that “nonviolence” is an absolute principle, as I defined above, what are the repercussions of this? Is it even possible for something to be absolute? This is where my initial internal struggles with the topic of vegetarianism arose. I quickly realized that any kind of moral statement can be broken down into a contextual or morally relative world, where it would not hold true for me. With non-violence for example, it can devolve as a result of a wide-range of reasons. Let’s go through a few.

1) The principle is contextually dependent on being a rationally functioning human being. And this is not just true for nonviolence as a principle, but for all moral constructs — they developed as a result of our evolutionary history of emotions evolving in our oldest ancestors before our rational conscious brain, which formed later down the evolutionary chain. This, along with all the other random evolutionary occurrences that framed our cognitive minds to exist the way they do, influence every moral principle we hold true today. For some people, it absolutely feels wrong to intentionally harm animals. But this is only true in the human frame of thought, given the way that our brains evolved. Hypothetically speaking, it may not be true for another form of conscious, rational life because they evolved emotional thought at a later stage of evolution, or not at all — or because of any number of cognitive divergences. And in this case, and in all cases of moral claims, this ‘moral relativity blueprint’ breaks down any claim to an absolutely true moral principle.

So I lied. We didn’t need to go through a few reasons. I know you had your hopes up, so you have my sincerest apologies. But it was at this point in my thought process where it sorta hit me — I was really fooling myself all along. Growing up, that’s the way things worked in my mind. You didn’t eat meat because it was wrong to hurt animals. Period. It was simple. And then I realized it wasn’t. And I never really recovered to a point where my moral bubble could be re-inflated.  With the question of why I still am a vegetarian, my answer became: it’s simply the way I was raised. As documented by the Rock Paper Scissors (RPS) Society — yes that exists — rule #1 is to not play rock. Rock is the default position of your hand before you choose from the three moves on your arsenal. This default is what humans tend to do, because it’s easy. And you know what, I think I’m still choosing rock right now.

~ R