Hahaha!

It's an interesting moral question though. Take the difference between slaughtering an animal yourself in cold blood, with its blood curdling screams in your ears and, say buying a nice cling-film wrapped steak in the supermarket.

If it's all about the consequences of one's actions then these two things are morally equivalent. If it's about intentions then, perhaps they're not.

I am often ribbed by my friends because I am vegetarian but on the basis that if someone is throwing meat away then I will eat it, because this doesn't result in the death of any more animals (according to my economic model, which I agree is dodgy). In fact I like the taste of meat, so I am not upset when someone is throwing it away.

In the first example you offer (kill animal vs buy meat) the only diff I find is one of aesthetics and of course the immediacy of the experience; but logos says they're equivalent.

In the example regarding your practice of eating meat that would get thrown away - besides the dodgyness that would only go away if you were to eat it, unknown to anyone else, straight from the garbage bin - I find that it makes sense at a conceptual level. However, this does not rid you from your responsibilty for the death of these animals. Virtually all products of this society, including cyber-entities, run on blood (part of it human) and as long as one remains a consuming part of this society, one continues to bear part of the responsibility.

Unfortunately, I find that this is one more case of (living human) = (bad human). You cannot survive while maintaining a completely clean slate moraly; the tragically unavoidable moral self-rejection of a rational individual. Intentions are abstract things, that besides often being erratic and volatile, they do not amount to anything more than predicates whose intension and extension, in all their subjectivity, cannot cover death and evil in all their unexpected shapes and colors. Shades of gray, at all levels, can be discussed.

Very nicely put. Negligence/ignorance is another important moral factor. I tread on hundreds of snails. Every time I come back from a car trip, there are hundreds of dead insects which have transected the path of my car. I guess because I don't consider their lives important enough to slow down or carry a torch.

Negligence is also a bottomless pit. Intentional murder is a fairly clear-cut thing, but one could always do more to hinder effects of one's actions on other beings. Uncertainty has a role. Often I can't see the consequences of my actions, but if I bothered to think about it, or investigate more, I might. For example I ate Parmeggiano for years, without bothering to find out if it contains meat. Also things can happen extremely quickly, not giving one the chance to think. It seems children can be scarred for life by a few careless words from their parents (well you often hear people saying - my Dad said xyz.... how could he...).

It's also amazing how social norms affect my conscience. If I see everyone else doing something, in certain cases it becomes almost impossible for me to react to it as I would to something I consider equally immoral (I'm not sure I believe in the usefulness of the concept of morality anyway). Eating meat is a good example. Logos-wise it seems no different to killing a child - a being just as sensitive suffers just as much (I suppose), but I can't possibly react in the same way.

yeah, yeah...I know what you mean. Killing a child, killing a calf, what's the big diff? They are both capable of suffering and agony. The thing is that we are killing children today by our inaction at several levels - as a society I mean; we don't even have to go to moral equivalence arguments to know that we semi-consciously choose the death of others over our own inconvenience.