It's a Personal Choice

“What I eat is my personal choice. Live and let live!”

I’m not sure if people actively make the choice to eat meat? For me I never really made a choice. It was just learned behaviour from everyone around me. I never even questioned my so called ‘choice’. I was blindly following the norm.

Unfortunately, I questioned my choice.

Your right to swing your fist ends where my nose begins

The harm principle acts as a foundation for criminal law and a functioning society. It essentially states that individuals are free to act as they wish unless their actions cause harm to others. There are of course criticisms as the defintion of harm can be quite vague but the core idea is simple: one person’s freedom ends where it harms another

Or, as the old saying goes: “Your right to swing your fist ends where my nose begins.”

For example some actions are fine when they only affect myself, but become problematic when they start to impact others.

• Listening to music at home full blast when no one else can hear it is my personal choice
• Listening to that same music on a bus at full volume without headphones starts to infringe on the eardrums and peace of others.
• Choosing to take in a cat is my personal choice.
• Choosing to kick that cat is not a personal choice, because the cat is the victim of my actions.

Side Note: Is Aloo 🐱 a victim if he gets hurt by someone else? Or am I the victim because of the emotional distress caused by seeing him suffer? Or is society the victim because someone who kicks cats might go on to harm humans?

Short answer: Aloo is the victim! If you want to go down the philosophical rabbit hole of why I believe this, read my breakdown of Anthropocentrism vs. Sentientism to see why pain is pain, regardless of who feels it.

Live and Let Die?

Eating meat is not a victimless action. It requires the forced breeding, confinement, and slaughter of a sentient being. And the animals can’t argue back or report an injustice like humans can.

If I saw someone kicking a cat in the street, I would never respect their “personal choice” to do so. Similarly, I cannot claim that eating meat is merely a personal choice when it involves the suffering and death of sentient beings no matter how hidden away it may be.

If my action requires taking someone else’s life, calling it a “personal choice” was just a polite way for me to ignore the victim.