Yes, your example is outside my model. If snarf is morally acceptable to some and abhorrent to others, this represents a moral conflict. My offered ‘strategy’ only applies to cases where one party is neutral and the other party cares, then you may have a chance of considering the caring party more morally sensitive.
Similarly, meat eaters would probably not agree that vegetarians hold the high ground.
Really? What if it were suddenly possible to harvest livestock without neural systems? If this were possible (and for the least convenient world, assume that such meat was understood to be just as healthy for consumption), do you predict that many people (even current meat eaters) would prefer farming the non-sapient livestock? If so, this would show that many people believe that the suffering of livestock has some moral weight—but perhaps currently offset by other considerations.
In the situation you describe, some meat eaters might still want to eat sapient livestock because some people consider “natural” behaviors to be moral. But there’s no reason to belabor the point—what I was trying to convey above was this: most-moral-minority sometimes oppresses the minority (e.g. the snarf example above) and impedes moral progress. There are certainly cases where it does work, but there are also borderline cases like this one and negative cases like snarf.
Yes, your example is outside my model. If snarf is morally acceptable to some and abhorrent to others, this represents a moral conflict. My offered ‘strategy’ only applies to cases where one party is neutral and the other party cares, then you may have a chance of considering the caring party more morally sensitive.
Really? What if it were suddenly possible to harvest livestock without neural systems? If this were possible (and for the least convenient world, assume that such meat was understood to be just as healthy for consumption), do you predict that many people (even current meat eaters) would prefer farming the non-sapient livestock? If so, this would show that many people believe that the suffering of livestock has some moral weight—but perhaps currently offset by other considerations.
In the situation you describe, some meat eaters might still want to eat sapient livestock because some people consider “natural” behaviors to be moral. But there’s no reason to belabor the point—what I was trying to convey above was this: most-moral-minority sometimes oppresses the minority (e.g. the snarf example above) and impedes moral progress. There are certainly cases where it does work, but there are also borderline cases like this one and negative cases like snarf.