Consistent ethics, comprehensive too

1665: 

This is the world of the specialist. Most people think that we can only be effective if we have specialist knowledge. But what expertise is needed for knowing that the animal business is wrong? When something isn’t right we know it in our gut, it comes from intuition and inborn values. Anyone can see it if they want to. A familiar comment from new vegans is, “Why didn’t I see it before?”

From my own experience, as soon as I tap into instinct, things become clearer, and I can see what needs to be done. And then I’m more likely to gravitate towards ‘the greater good’, only because it is such an obvious way to go. What counts, I think, is optimism and having faith in one's instincts. You can’t sustain much of that if you are hanging around the gates of the abattoir, figuratively speaking. Following convention without questioning it, eating food which we haven’t examined ethically, doesn’t bode well either for our own self development or for the future in general.

         

When any of us choose NOT to buy something we may want, stopping ourselves for ethical reasons, we make an important statement. We say, for instance with animal-derived food, that we can’t eat what shouldn’t even exist - namely foods associated with farmed or hunted animals.

By setting an example in one field but not in another equally important field, we lose credibility. It’s the same problem we have in any human advancement, whether it’s our career, lifestyle, relationships or non-material progress. By neglecting any one vital issue, simply because it doesn’t suit our convenience, we introduce too much incompleteness into our life, and that surely leads to double standards, and a deal of internal turmoil.

In the end, if we can’t muster sufficient personal power to change any faulty parts of our own daily existence, we have to make a compromise. It means we've cauterised part of our instinct, and then we end up with such a reduction in personal authority that we handicap ourselves in any fight against corruption or any attempt to change the system we live in.