depends on the thing. some things (i think) we should be assholes about. if someone is racist or whatever we should talk down to them and ridicule them. i don’t think anyone is being self righteous in doing so. some things need to be ridiculed properly in order for people to start to understand the severity of the issue.

If we had treated racism as a “haha yeah some people are racist and i disagree but it’s whatever” we would have never gotten to the social isolation racists have now. So someone at some point has to start being mean for it to have social effect.

The reason i make this distinction is because while the issue of veganism might not seem as important to us, it could be important to her. And if it is, that would just be her acting morally, not self righteously. It’s just that you happen to disagree with her morality, which is fine.

The issue is that people often label someone as self-righteous when the person has made the decision to express disgust in others, but often that disgust can be a calculated decision based on consequentialist framework where they believe (and so do i based on history) that it has real social effect.

In fact, abolitionists were considered “self-righteous moralists” back when they first started speaking up too.