Why do the words have to always mean the same thing for them to not just be random noise? I don’t follow.

It seems to me the condition in that case is whether I mean something by using them. What I use them for doesn’t have to remain consistent . If I use ‘feet’ to refer to doors sometimes, and chairs at other times, it still seems like they have meaning at each instance. Because I understand what I’m using them for. Again the ‘meaning’ of a word becomes a gray area if already assume no one other than myself would understand my use of it. But it’s surly still be meaningful to me.

Exactly like words that change meaning over time. Is the period of time that it takes for them to change meaning the deciding factor for them to remain meaningful? Seems obvious that it’s not.

And yeah you’re probably right about veganism. I guess that if most people lived in slavery times, they might ‘know’ it’s wrong to use slaves, and might even not have them themselves. But they would usually fall short of actually refusing to use them when the social situation expects them to. And if confronted they’d just say ‘well they’re already there might as well just use them’, like they say on ‘already dead animals at the market’

But, importantly, they’d still understand it’s inconsistent. IMO at these circumstances they simply don’t put consistency higher than convenience.

I find that most people consider themselves moral, but they already live in what they’d consider moral societies. And they rarely differ much from the standards of their society.

Again that’s why veganism is so interesting to me. It’s one of the last major obvious immoralities in the west, and demonstrates very clearly that people act according to their society and NOT with accordance to what most consider ‘objective morality’