Meat-eating (without offsetting) seems to me like an obvious rationality failure.
This poses an interesting question: Where is the difference between failures of rationality and failures of morality? No doubt there is some sort of contradiction (loosely speaking) in holding these two mental states simultaneously:
The belief that eating meat is bad
The intention to eat meat
This would ordinarily be called a failure of morality. But now compare this pair:
The belief that eating chocolate is bad
The intention to eat chocolate
Now this seems more like a failure of rationality.
Perhaps the difference is that in the first pair, “bad” means “bad overall”, while in the second pair, “bad” means “bad for me”. That’s the difference between altruism and egoism.
Now thinking about this a bit more, the first pair might be really a triple:
The belief that eating meat is bad
The intention to eat meat
The belief/desire(?) that I don’t do bad things
This does seem like some form of contradiction (cognitive dissonance?), and some/many people will remove the tension by giving up 1) and keeping the other two. This is called motivated thought, or rationalization: Which is indeed irrational, not just immoral.
The right response would arguably be to give up 2), which would remove the moral problem while not being irrational.
Giving up just 3) (to some degree) would still be immoral, but it’s unclear whether doing so would be irrational.
Different meanings of “bad”. The former is making a moral claim, the second presumably a practical one about the person’s health goals. “Bad as in evil” vs. “bad as in ineffective”.
Hitler was an evil leader, but not an ineffective one. He was a bad person, but he was not bad at gaining political power.
This poses an interesting question: Where is the difference between failures of rationality and failures of morality? No doubt there is some sort of contradiction (loosely speaking) in holding these two mental states simultaneously:
The belief that eating meat is bad
The intention to eat meat
This would ordinarily be called a failure of morality. But now compare this pair:
The belief that eating chocolate is bad
The intention to eat chocolate
Now this seems more like a failure of rationality.
Perhaps the difference is that in the first pair, “bad” means “bad overall”, while in the second pair, “bad” means “bad for me”. That’s the difference between altruism and egoism.
Now thinking about this a bit more, the first pair might be really a triple:
The belief that eating meat is bad
The intention to eat meat
The belief/desire(?) that I don’t do bad things
This does seem like some form of contradiction (cognitive dissonance?), and some/many people will remove the tension by giving up 1) and keeping the other two. This is called motivated thought, or rationalization: Which is indeed irrational, not just immoral.
The right response would arguably be to give up 2), which would remove the moral problem while not being irrational.
Giving up just 3) (to some degree) would still be immoral, but it’s unclear whether doing so would be irrational.
Different meanings of “bad”. The former is making a moral claim, the second presumably a practical one about the person’s health goals. “Bad as in evil” vs. “bad as in ineffective”.
Hitler was an evil leader, but not an ineffective one. He was a bad person, but he was not bad at gaining political power.