Aaron, I believe you're getting confused because you haven't established for yourself a clear notion of basic morality or ethics. Many philosophers have covered what it means to act morally -- Aristotle, Socrates, Kant, and even Jefferson and Franklin. There's even a word for the effects-based moralizing you went through: consequentialism, which most people associate with Mill and Bentham. This usually leads to various forms of utilitarianism.
Being firmly in the deontological camp (rationalist ethics) myself, though, I would recommend you check out Kant, Nagel, and the many advocates of the non-aggression principle (pick your author). I believe our intrinsic notions of morality are mostly deontological, which makes some sense as non-aggression and other subforms of the school allow a person to act morally with local information, rather than requiring global knowledge for every act, as much of utilitarianism requires in the final analysis.
If you would kill one innocent person because you thought that action might save five innocent people, though, then you are probably (and unfortunately) a utilitarian. Do consider both sides though.
Please also consider the role of mutual consent in your world view -- it's important! The servers and cooks work in that restaurant because they want to as compared to their other options for using their time. We could speculate about how great it would be if they could do whatever they wanted without any concern for serving others, but that isn't the nature of the resource-constrained world in which we live.
And, believe it or not, those people working in foreign sweatshops want you to buy their products. They work there because that factory job provides higher pay and a generally safer work environment than the rice-paddy (or wherever) they otherwise would have been working. I think they would find it a bit patronizing and naïve if you were to tell them they should leave those jobs behind. To people in poor countries, a job at a factory is part of the path to a better life. For the country itself, it is part of the path to industrialization and prosperity.
Also remember that just because you could make something better, it doesn't necessarily follow that you must to act morally. Much of a rational notion of morality involves avoiding acts that cause harm to others or that violate the person or the free will of other individuals. All acts are not only moral or immoral. Some actions are supererogatory -- morally praiseworthy but not morally necessary.
Actually there are three main schools of thought in ethics: consequentialist, deontolological, and virtue based. (Before someone asks me to summarise, I'll note that I'm not expert on any of them).
One place where the distinction can become vital is in ER rooms. The following case was described (in another, closed, forum) by the chief on an actual ER: Suppose your ER is full, but you get a call about a patent in critical condition who needs an ER slot, and your ER is nearest. You have one slot occupied by a patient in a relatively stable condition, who could, with low risk, be moved to another ER, clearing the slot for the more critical case.
The utilitarian response is to accept the new patient, as the certainty of helping them outweighs the low risk in moving the existing one.
The deontological response is to refuse; you have accepted duty of care to the current patient, but not yet to the new one.
I don't know what a Virtue ethicist would do.
Actual ERs in the UK have different policies, depending on whether their ethics policy was written by a utilitarian or a deontologist. My interlocutor said that he would usually respond by the deontological rules, but in a crisis would (and in fact, had) act in a utilitarian way.
I don't believe that is necessarily the deontological response. Remember that morality is mostly a tool for exclusion; more than one moral choice often remains.
A deontological person can still practice triage. Without more information (such as published policies, prior agreements, patient consent, etc.) it is hard to say if the question is even really a moral dilemma. If you are standing on the street and two people get hit by a bus, deciding which one to help is not a question of morality. By helping either, or both, you are acting morally, and perhaps even supererogatorily. Deciding whether or not you should go kick them while they're down, though, is a moral question. It would be moral (though not particularly praiseworthy) to refrain from doing so, and it would be clearly immoral to kick them.
Interestingly, Catholics actually believe in the idea of a moral safe harbor. That is, if you've given serious and reasonable consideration to a moral question, and act in accordance with your earnest conclusion, then you will be held blameless regardless of the ultimate righteousness of the action.
One thing that is puzzling me for some time is why vegetarians think it's more moral/nice/whatever to eat plants and not animals. They too are living creatures and most of the times you are killing a being in order to consume it for your personal gain. I'll skip the analogy between fruits and their mamal equivelant, but you get the idea..
Thing is, survival is a really competitive process and unless you want to get off sooner, you have to take things away from other organisms, human or otherwise. We, as a civilisation, may have raised it to a more noble, according to our perception, level but fundamentally it's still the same.
Ethos is mostly the refined version of pack rules evolved to make sure an individual doesn't hurt the well being of the group. It's a human fabrication.
With that said I agree with the author's view, try to do as much good as you possibly can, while realising that just by living you are causing harm to someone/something else.
Ah, but consider the apple. The purpose of an apple is to get eaten so that the seeds get geographically distributed. The apple is ready to fall--else it won't taste good--so you are not killing it. This is true for most all fruits.
If it weren't for cows and pigs and chickens being so tasty, they would probably not be so ubiquitous, because then humans would not have reasons to breed them en masse.
By this logic, I say we start eating endangered species, creating a market demand and thus an economic reason to breed them.
Good idea, but it's already been thought of - L Neil Smith had Eagleburgers in one of his North American Confederacy novels - developed by a conservationist specifically to encourage the breeding of eagles.
Once you reach Level 5 Vegan, you can exist only on sand and twigs (that have fallen naturally). Level 7 Vegans can exist on only air (but they still consume oxygen from it).
One thing that is puzzling me for some time is why
vegetarians think it's more moral/nice/whatever to eat
plants and not animals
If you acknowledge that animals are sentient (and it's not hard if you've had pets), then it's interesting to look at the meat on your plate and them compare it to the animal that's your friend that's lying down next to you. If you're eating pig there's a good chance that the animal you're eating had potential to be even smarter than the dog. That's weird. That we choose some animals to slaughter for what is really a minor convenience (being able to eat meat) yet we make equivalent animals a close friend. It's similar to this idea that we can at the same time be good neighbours yet be happily gassing/bombing/napalming populations a little further off just because we don't know them.
A problem with meat in the modern world is that it's all packaged when you get it and this makes the relationship impersonal. It's good to ask before every meal involving meat, "if I had to make the decision to kill this in order to eat it, would I do it?"
It becomes a sliding scale thing and you pick a position. Does it ruin my day if I step on an ant on the way to work in the morning? Do I write poems to the death of flies? No. At the same time, I've cut the majority of meat out of my diet.
It's a human fabrication.
True, but you're papering over something. I doubt you live a life comparable to the guy in _A Clockwork Orange_. I doubt that you walk away from restaurants when you're in a foreign city and have zero change of being caught. Your own conduct is evidence that you agree that not all fabrications are equivalent. Obviously you have principles yourself. You can break the cycle you criticise of ethos being pack oriented by choosing to live by a value system that extends beyond the human pack.
try to do as much good as you possibly can
The circumstances in which meat is created is a horror. Cutting down on the amount of meat you eat is a fast way to reduce your footprint. I think pigs, chickens, lamb and cage eggs are the worst, and have found no impact on my life by eliminating these altogether apart from inadvertently eating things with those eggs in.
"As with many white people activities, being vegan/vegetarian enables them to feel as though they are helping the environment AND it gives them a sweet way to feel superior to others. For further evidence, note how the vegetarian world has increasing levels of extemism (no meat, no dairy, no eggs, no fish, nothing that has been cooked, etc)."
The short answer to the articles final question is "Yes, many philosophers have considered this question."
If he's really interested in philosophy, he'd have come across these already, but the fact that he's asking the question would indicate he's not. That's ok, of course, but the question seems a bit odd.
The author is going to have to go back to the basic question of "What is good?" before he can answer the questions he's asking in the article.
He's making assumptions on the answer to that question based on his circumstances, which are totally different than a sweat shop worker in another country. Sweat shop working might be "better" than the alternative for that person.
My wife says, "You just have to do everything with love."
Luther became concerned that everything he did was sinning in one form or another. It created quite a bit of cognitive dissonance.
For Luther, this intellectual pain led to a completely new idea of the concepts involved. Sounds like Aaron is ready for the same kind of game-changer.
I believe it was initially sola fide (only by faith), but he also added sola scriptura (only by scriptures) and sola gratia (only by Grace)
Luther was increasingly upset over being able to fully reconcile with God. Even at confession, he was concerned that in trying to do a good job confessing he might exaggerate his sins, committing another sin. He might feel proud that he did such a good job confessing, committing yet another sin. It was like an endless loop for him, which sounds a lot like this article.
To top it all off, Luther saw the church selling indulgences, which basically meant you could write a check and then do bad things and you were covered. I think that was the straw that broke the camel's back. A similar observation, which this article did not make, is where famous people who break these rules are still deemed "okay" because of the monetary support they give to the correct causes. If Aaron had made this observation it would have been almost a perfect analogy to Luther's early concerns.
Giving indulgence money to rich bishops, to allow them to eat, drink, and bugger the choirboys, is ethically different to compensating for your high-consumption lifestyle by giving poverty-stricken subsistence farmers fresh water and their eyesight back.
It does make a difference who you pay the money to.
Singer warns not to consider moral positions as "rules" as stated in this essay, but guidelines. You can't be 100% perfect at all times (as Franklin discovered).
In addidition, moral views are mutable. My friend has been vegetarian for 10 years and on account of some book about a farm in Virginia he thinks maybe eating meat is all right. My argument against his decision may have some weight, but ultimately virtue and ethics are an individual's business.
You really can't just completely separate yourself from the "wheel of suffering". Even if you did drop out of it completely, what scalable solution is there for everyone else?
There's no net benefit for such drastic lifestyle changes, other than the smugness and pride of feeling morally superior.
Being firmly in the deontological camp (rationalist ethics) myself, though, I would recommend you check out Kant, Nagel, and the many advocates of the non-aggression principle (pick your author). I believe our intrinsic notions of morality are mostly deontological, which makes some sense as non-aggression and other subforms of the school allow a person to act morally with local information, rather than requiring global knowledge for every act, as much of utilitarianism requires in the final analysis.
If you would kill one innocent person because you thought that action might save five innocent people, though, then you are probably (and unfortunately) a utilitarian. Do consider both sides though.