Calling actions ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ confuses the issue, because it assumes an absolute scale of value. In many systems, actions are of (positive or negative) value to someone, and of different value to someone else. So eating a chicken is certainly bad for the chicken, but it may be good for the eater, and then you need to weight the two things against each other.
It’s perfectly consistent for me to believe that eating meat is ‘wrong’ in the sense of being harmful to the animal being eaten, and yet I do eat meat because the value to myself outweighs that, so it’s ‘right for me’.
“Right” and “wrong” mean something more than “bad for X and good for Y”, they are normative, “wrong” meaning “what one ought not do”. So if I believe that it’s wrong to eat meat, I am saying something more than eating meat is bad for the chicken, I mean that I should not eat meat.
Calling actions ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ confuses the issue, because it assumes an absolute scale of value. In many systems, actions are of (positive or negative) value to someone, and of different value to someone else. So eating a chicken is certainly bad for the chicken, but it may be good for the eater, and then you need to weight the two things against each other.
It’s perfectly consistent for me to believe that eating meat is ‘wrong’ in the sense of being harmful to the animal being eaten, and yet I do eat meat because the value to myself outweighs that, so it’s ‘right for me’.
“Right” and “wrong” mean something more than “bad for X and good for Y”, they are normative, “wrong” meaning “what one ought not do”. So if I believe that it’s wrong to eat meat, I am saying something more than eating meat is bad for the chicken, I mean that I should not eat meat.