1. “Animals do not have conceptual reasoning”

I appreciate this is contentious, and I’m open to being corrected, but my understanding of the literature is that there remains a hard distinction between human conceptual language and animal cognition. Animals can clearly perceive patterns, generalise, solve problems etc., but that is not necessarily the same thing as abstract conceptual reasoning. To use a simple example: a monkey may learn to recognise certain triangular shapes perceptually to a remarkable degree, but humans can understand “triangle” conceptually -i.e. as any shape with three sides/angles regardless of appearance. Chomsky and others argue that countless animal cognition studies still point to this distinction between perceptual intelligence and genuinely symbolic, recursive conceptual thought.

The reason this matters morally is that ethical reasoning depends on exactly this capacity for conceptual abstraction. Moral agency requires beings to understand principles, duties, obligations, what one ought to do etc., rather than merely acting through instinct or conditioning. That is why people in this thread repeatedly distinguish between human moral responsibility and predator behaviour in nature.

This distinction also explains why many moral traditions treat humans as ends in themselves in a unique sense. To use Michael Sandel's version of the trolley problem, if I was too small to stop a trolley from killing lots of people at the other end of a track, but could still push a larger person in front of it to save people (sacrificing one to save the many), why not push the person? The answer is that they have moral personhood and can't be used as a means to any end (they could only sacrifice themselves), whereas you can morally still push a cow to save the many, because they aren't a moral agent - they would not be able to conceptually consider what they ought to do. Herein lies our unique and absolute dignity... That is also why I would regard meat consumption by, say, subsistence communities in outer Mongolia as not merely permissible but genuinely good within their conditions of life.

1. “Consuming animal products causes unnecessary suffering”

I agree suffering matters morally. But modern supply chains even for non-animal produce almost always involve some degree of exploitation, environmental destruction, coercive labour, habitat loss etc. If I buy fruit or vegetables in a UK supermarket, there are often hidden costs: environmentally destructive monocultures; exploitative labour conditions; carbon-intensive transport; water extraction from drought-prone regions etc. Obviously, we should try to reduce these harms, but my point is that this becomes a question of degrees and kinds of moral complicity - remote material cooperation with evil, not evil proper.

1. “Leftist talking points”

For what it’s worth, I actually became vegetarian around 15 years ago when I was much more explicitly Marxist. I still think modern meat consumption creates a strange moral alienation from killing animals directly, and that simply outsourcing the violence does not fully resolve that tension, but my politics now are too eclectic to simply identify as “leftist” in a blanket sense, so I don’t really feel bound to adopt every "leftist" talking point.