As far as I’m concerned , I worry far more about the public-health and ecological consequences of our current meat-production system than I do about the animals within it. I worry more about lakes of pigshit than I do about the suffering of pigs, more about the growth of drug-resistant bacteria due to pumping cows full of antibiotics than I do the violence of the slaughterhouse. But I do realize this is a matter of priorities.

I do think our conception of animal rights as a society tends to be totally arbitrary and based on traditional relationships and nothing else (which is why killing dogs is “cruel” but killing pigs – arguably more intelligent creatures – is just business).

(For instance, consciousness is not a binary, but rather a spectrum, so the question becomes whether an animal has more right to life if it is more conscious– a cow has more right to life than a lobster, which has more right to life than an earth worm, etc.)

You can’t dodge this judgment by not being vegan/vegetarian. You undoubtedly find killing and eating humans morally distasteful; this is not because of there mere humanity, but because of properties (consciousness or others) that humanity holds. Pretty much everything we have that can be considered morally relevant is on a spectrum. And so we draw a line.

That the line is in some ways imperfect or slightly arbitrary because it is placed on a spectrum does not make it invalid, anymore than the sliding level of maturity of a child growing up makes the idea of an age of consent invalid.

Also, the question is met with derision because
(1) We’ve all heard it before, even those of us who never bring up our vegetarianism/veganism, and people seem to think we haven’t considered it.
(2) It usually is being asked by someone who’s just being an asshole, and so derision is usually the appropriate response.

I’ve heard this all before. And here’s the dilemma, for you: what you are then arguing for is not that many people stop eating meat. Rather you are arguing that a small number of people stop eating meat, and that their number gradually increase. So since you are in fact arguing for a kind of incrementalism, I have to ask: isn’t my intransigence on this issue– my continuing to eat meat– satisfying, in some way, your vision of progress?

No, it’s simply an admittance that vegans/vegetarians do not have magic powers to defy the path of every single previous social change in history. And hell, if *everyone* did instantly switch to vegeterian/vegan, they’d simply stop running the killing machines and let the cows live out their life where they are now, with likely a bunch of funding from all the newly converted vegans/vegetarians to buy larger amounts of land to do so. Since we’re talking about mass conversions here.

You’re making an argument saying “isn’t the practical consequence of what you’re arguing” when relies on an event that will never actually happen, so there’s no way is in any way an actual practical consequence.

Incidentally, I think one argument that the average vegetarian or vegan doesn’t grapple with enough is the fact that ending widespread meat eating will result inevitably in a massive slaughter of cows, chickens, pigs and other animals we farm, as they will have lost their economic reason for being.

Yes, because it will all happen instantaneously overnight.
Look, that’s simply not going to happen because even if the world somehow goes vegan/vegeterian en masse it will be over time, a long slow shuttering of farms and so on and so forth as it becomes uneconomical to keep running. There’s never going to be a mass cull, let alone the kind of slaughter that occurs right now.

The need to argue about a “sliding” moral scale in terms of consciousness is therefore irrelevant in the debate on meat-eating and animal rights. If meat-eating, in evolutionary terms, actually increased human consciousness by increasing brain power, how could we turn around and renounce it? Irony of ironies: it may be our elevated consiousness in part derived by a transition to an omnivorous diet that even allows us to debate the merits of being omnivorous! That’s a philoshopical paradox you should be discussing.