IMO, the omnivory morality that we’re calling “old-fashioned” has 2 forms, each of which rests on an underlying value that’s not directly related to killing or eating at all:
“Kill what you eat” embodies a distaste for hypocrisy. Distaste for harvesting one’s the meat one eats is often rooted in an intuition that killing animals somehow harms or sullies the people who do it. They’re not entirely wrong; it isn’t (and shouldn’t be) emotionally easy to dispatch an innocent creature. When someone expresses a desire to eat meat without “getting their hands dirty”, they’re implying that they’re better or more deserving of comfort and ease than whoever they’re asking to do the dirty work for them. That inconsistency of suggesting that some people are “better” than others in that they deserve to get the benefits of unpleasant tasks without doing the tasks themselves tends to map closely with value systems that modern western cultures express great distaste for when they’re stated explicitly. The “some people deserve more comfort than others” concept only becomes palatable when wrapped in meritocratic ideology—“I don’t wish to kill what I eat so I work to pay someone else to kill it for me” is such a wrapper.
“Eat what you kill” embodies a distaste for gratuitous waste. I suspect that this distaste is very deeply embedded in the cultural or even perhaps genetic patterns of society which have been shaped through life-or-death competition: minimizing wasted resources now tends to maximize available resources later. I suspect that historially, the tribes, villages, and societies who wasted a significant portion of their resources were less successful than those who disliked waste, so we see more of the latter groups’ values surviving to echo in the present. I don’t always eat what I kill—I’ve never been desperate enough to eat a mouse or rat, for instance, although I have destroyed both at various times to keep them from destroying things of value to me—but in general I think that killing something without eating it requires a highly compelling reason.
I view morals as being somewhere in between chosen and discovered: They’re discovered in the sense that causality tends to work mostly the same for pretty much everybody, and chosen in the sense that there are many possible states of the world that various people try to use causality to optimize toward.
IMO, the omnivory morality that we’re calling “old-fashioned” has 2 forms, each of which rests on an underlying value that’s not directly related to killing or eating at all:
“Kill what you eat” embodies a distaste for hypocrisy. Distaste for harvesting one’s the meat one eats is often rooted in an intuition that killing animals somehow harms or sullies the people who do it. They’re not entirely wrong; it isn’t (and shouldn’t be) emotionally easy to dispatch an innocent creature. When someone expresses a desire to eat meat without “getting their hands dirty”, they’re implying that they’re better or more deserving of comfort and ease than whoever they’re asking to do the dirty work for them. That inconsistency of suggesting that some people are “better” than others in that they deserve to get the benefits of unpleasant tasks without doing the tasks themselves tends to map closely with value systems that modern western cultures express great distaste for when they’re stated explicitly. The “some people deserve more comfort than others” concept only becomes palatable when wrapped in meritocratic ideology—“I don’t wish to kill what I eat so I work to pay someone else to kill it for me” is such a wrapper.
“Eat what you kill” embodies a distaste for gratuitous waste. I suspect that this distaste is very deeply embedded in the cultural or even perhaps genetic patterns of society which have been shaped through life-or-death competition: minimizing wasted resources now tends to maximize available resources later. I suspect that historially, the tribes, villages, and societies who wasted a significant portion of their resources were less successful than those who disliked waste, so we see more of the latter groups’ values surviving to echo in the present. I don’t always eat what I kill—I’ve never been desperate enough to eat a mouse or rat, for instance, although I have destroyed both at various times to keep them from destroying things of value to me—but in general I think that killing something without eating it requires a highly compelling reason.
I view morals as being somewhere in between chosen and discovered: They’re discovered in the sense that causality tends to work mostly the same for pretty much everybody, and chosen in the sense that there are many possible states of the world that various people try to use causality to optimize toward.