chapotraphouse

I think breathing solder fumes is disgusting. I pay for someone else to do it for me and they don't get paid well. My using electronics is contributing to humans dying for pennies. How is that more ethical than paying someone to process meat instead of doing it myself?

Do you think someone breathing poison for pennies on the dollar is how it should be? Probably not, right? But you can change those. Better pay is possible, as is better working conditions. It's just the option ain't really there for meat

You're talking yourself in circles.

OP's point is very simple: many people do not confront the unnecessary violence in their habits. Commodities are decontextualized, as you're attempting to say. To many, animal products just don't seem like animals and they get very upset when they truly understand those products as being other thinking, feeling things. OP is challenging people to go through that exercise and, hopefully, recognize that they do actually care enough to make minor habitual changes and not kill the animals for entertainment purposes. They just hadn't confronted it sufficiently.

Personally, I think you and others do understand this. Very few questions, lots of rationalization.

Re: your disgust at soldering, it's obviously not the same. You're not morally disgusted or upset by the existence of soldering fumes, which is the confrontation in OP's post. You're changing the basic nature of the disgust from discomfort at the idea of killing another thinking being to merely reacting to a smell. I think we all understand that these are very different bases of disgust and that the moral disgust has a component evoking personal moral consistency while the other is a simple physical response.

You did try to find a way to talk about moral consistency in consumption, as all leftists do when confronted with doing something immoral at the personal level that involves consumption or production. No ethical consumption under capitalism, right? No ethical production, either! Individualist. Moralizing. These thought-terminating cliches get trotted out whenever a lefty wants to avoid addressing these kinds of issues and it's always highly selective. The same person will hate cops or get pissed about someone they know building baby-killing bombs for money or carry out one-person boycotts because they hate one particular company.

Anyways, the kernel of truth in your example is that you know it's wrong that someone else is underpaid. You haven't really said that you think the fumes are a problem for the workers doing the work you're avoiding, so there's nothing implied to be wrong with that. In bb fact, you didn't explore what the alternatives would be at all, because this isn't a serious attempt at counteepoint. But differential exploitation, especially with such vast differences due to imperialism, yes that's something we agree should be abolished.

If we make your analogy fit despite the other flaws, that would make you someone who thinks the vegans are right but you're personally not making your own changes.

Does that describe you? The vegans are right about all of this but dang it, you just can't make the change?

I doubt it.