system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Why does killing animals seem to have a matter of degree (e.g., you can be a responsible hunter or vegetarian and it's better than eating tons of meat from the store) while killing or even physically hurting people seems to have a discrete ethical boundary?

I for example have been motivated to try to a "better" job at being meat-free. I'm going to the store today and picking up vegan food. But honestly I'm going to eat an entire dairy cheese pizza from my favorite place once in a while. And I'm not going to obsess over the odd animal byproduct in my non-food products. (My spare money just goes to books anyway.) Subjectively, it seems like I'm "doing my part". My vegan best friend says "the effort is enough".

This seems intuitively to be the case. Doing a little is better than doing nothing. Yet if I only eat a little bit of people, that seems to be unethical. If you restrain yourself to just punching people, you'd be a criminal.

Is this more to do with that status of animals, the relative ethics of living in an unjust system, or is there a bigger question of whether ethics is something you can do in moderation? Or is it simply that the common sense intuition is wrong, and vegetarians too are discretely unethical? Or something else?

I read a tiny bit of animal rights literature given to me by mediaisdelicious, but not in depth because the formatting was bad and one paper turned out to be just a summary of a book media had recommended.

Edit: I wrote this in the middle of texting my friend so I didn't explain myself well. Of course hurting people has a matter of degree too. But punching someone is "wrong" in most cases. But I don't think people would say vegetarianism is wrong. That's all.
gpt
Singer would probably think you're asking the right questions. And he would *definitely* say eating any amount of animal meat is more unethical than not eating meat at all, for the same reason that eating any amount of human meat is more unethical than not eating humans ever. For Singer, animals have the same rights as humans, and especially important to his argument is the right to equal consideration of interests. When you say that it seems intuitive that someone who eats human meat *only sometimes* is still acting unethically, Singer would say, "Yep, and the same should go for animals too."

But he's a utilitarian, so he'd also probably be happy that you're at least trying, if the alternative was that you'd return to not having vegetarian habits at all.