I have married friends who I know have had sex with someone other than their spouse. It is completely against my moral code, and I think they are wrong for having done it, but I am still friends with them.
(I also have friends who believe in astrology, but I guess that’s not a moral thing, unless you count being irrational as lacking morals.)
I think my vegetarian friends accept my worldview that killing an animal to eat (as opposed to hunting for sport, torturing for fun, etc.) is morally neutral. They may not agree with it, but they accept it as a defensible position. Much the same way, I suppose, that I accept a pro-life stance as defensible even though I am totally opposed to it. (Actually, that reads badly. I am not anti-life, just pro-choice!)
I care for my friends. I care about my ethics. My ethics require me to respect my friends for their ethical choices, and my religious beliefs require me to forgive them the lapses in their behavior that do me harm.
Nothing about my philosophy, or my faith require me to make conformity to my ethical judgement a prior condition to my friendship. I eat meat. I do find it . . . curious that eating vegetables seems to require a philosophy. Have some broccoli.
I keep my vegan friends in mind when I know that they will be present at a meal I am going to prepare. I make sure that there will be food that they can eat, and enjoy. I make sure that that food is not cooked or served in vessels that have been used for meat products. (No, I don’t keep two sets of service, but I do make sure that while I am preparing vegan dishes, no utensil gets used for both. In between I use a dishwasher, on hot.) I also don’t ask my non vegan friends to become vegans for the evening. That seems inhospitable to me. I go to the same “trouble” for my Jewish friends, and my Islamic friends. I can’t guarantee that my kitchen meets Halal or Kosher standards. But I make an honest attempt to avoid anything that would be an insult to their beliefs.
Courtesy and hospitality are ethical standards too, you know.
This is an unreal and ridiculous notion. Everyone is at some point immoral. We all do things that break the moral code. Sure, some of us do things that can be considered “more immoral” than others, but that’s a subjective scale. If you truly were not friends with anyone who did immoral things then you would have no friends. Furthermore, if your friends had that code, then they would not be friends with you.
I have friends who do things I consider quite immoral. But they also have a friend who does things which are immoral (me).
Don’t make the mistake that you can live a perfect life and that your friends must, too. It’s an unrealistic goal.
I didn’t say it was morally wrong. I just said that I prefer not to be friends with such people.
E.g. if I knew a friend of mine was actually a hit man for the mafia, I would stop seeing him. I could not continue to talk comfortably to him if I knew he went and blew peoples’ heads off every day.
I consider myself a semi-vegetarian, because I do not eat beef or pork. I don’t eat these things because of morality reasons, and all of my friends know it. I have told them my views on things, and why I choose to not eat these things, and they understand and respect that. I do not try to change their eating habits, nor do they try and change mine. I choose my friends based on many different criteria, not solely on “they don’t eat beef or pork”.
I was friends with the same people years ago, when I did eat all types of meat, and they know why I’ve changed and don’t look down on me for it. I realize just because I have changed doesn’t mean that others have to as well. I find it morally wrong for <i>me, myself</i> to eat a hamburger, but it doesn’t bother me if my boyfriend does. I will not cook beef for him, but he can go ahead and cook all he wants with it.
The examples above by Left Hand of Dorkness and Lord Mondegreen are pretty good ones (except I’m a bit baffled by the “Not voting” one)
And I’ll add another one I hadn’t thought of before: buying stuff that you know was stolen.
So for me, the list of things that I wouldn’t do because they are immoral, but could see myself continuing friendship with people who do them, would be
cheating on your spouse
buying stolen stuff
buying stuff you know was made in a sweatshop
Although, if one of the above was very egregious or conspicuous, I might reconsider my friendship.
However, even with people who do the above whom I would still consider friends, I would hold what they do against them to a degree, in the sense that I would not hold them in as high esteem as I would have if they did not do these things.
I would lose some respect for a friend of mine I found out does the above.
I also imagine that some people with strong opinions on the abortion debate, would lose some respect (even if very small) for a person they knew, if they one day found out that that person held the opposite view on the issue.
However, I assume that vegetarians do not lose some respect for people they find out are meat-eaters.
Is there any other action for which you would say:
“I find it morally wrong for me, myself to do X, but it doesn’t bother me if my boyfriend does.”
If not, what is it about eating a hamburger (or beef and pork in general), that makes it morally bad for you to do it, but you are OK if others do it?
I can see how you can tolerate your friends and boyfriend doing something you find morally wrong, but can’t see how it doesn’t even bother you.
If something is being done that I find is morally wrong, it means that someone (person or animal) is suffering in some way due to that action. So, even though I might tolerate others doing it, I don’t see how it would not even bother me.
If it doesn’t even bother me that some person or animal is suffering due to the actions of others, I don’t see how I should even consider that action immoral.
Vegetarianism isn’t in any way a choice like not stealing. Vegetarianism isn’t against the law, for one thing. I would not consider it a “moral” choice as much as a “life-style” choice. I don’t avoid people who eat chocolate ice cream, even though I dislike it.
You never did say it is morally wrong to eat meat, but for the context of this thread, you asking why “moralist” vegeterians can be friends with meat-eaters, which comes with the implications that meat-eating is immoral. At any rate, I am not making a statement specifically to you, it’s to the hypoethical moralist vegetarians who think that meat-eating is immoral and he shalln’t be friend with meat-eaters.
From your second statement, “In general I cannot be friend…” indicates that you take the position that you cannot be friends with those who take a position which you consider immoral.
Then you say, “I didn’t say it was morally wrong. I just said that I prefer not to be friends with such people.”
The ‘Not voting’ one is the only one I actually agree with LHoD on…the rest (well, maybe not the Sweatshop one) are partisan issues, not morality issues. Obviously his mileage varies.
As to the OP…of course its fine for vegetarians to be friends with meat eaters. While I don’t have a lot of issues I define as ‘moral’, being a live and let live kind of guy, I have friends who thing what I do in some cases is ‘immoral’ according to their own code…yet we are still friends. Some issues (such as murder or stealing) go beyond the pale and put a huge strain on maintaining a friendly relationship with someone (though again, I’m sure murderers and robbers in jail have friends…I’d draw the line there myself though). Being a vegetarian though I just can’t see how that would put a major strain on either party to maintain a friendly relationship that already exists simply because one person refrains from eating meat and the other is normal ( ).
For the record, my sister, her husband and their little boy are vegans for both the moral as well as health reasons (my sister also practices Traditional Oriental Medicine…even that doesn’t put any strain on even though I’m somewhat of a ‘nonbeliever’). I’ve noticed zero strain with any of them on this issue…even at Thanksgiving or Christmas. Basically when we all get together my mother simply makes one of those Tofurkeys (or whatever they are called…Tofu shaped like a turkey with ‘real’ plastic bones and such) and we all chow down on what we want. I have several veggie friends and the only strain comes when we are watching Lost and I get pissed off because there is ALWAYS plenty of the veggie pizza left but mysteriously none of my standard ‘sausage, pepperoni and extra cheese’ that no one every claims to want, but that always gets scarfed down (leaving plenty of the eggplant, mushroom and spinach pizza of course).
I guess what it comes down to is, do you like your friends? Is their company worth giving up because you think their behavior is immoral? I’m not a vegetarian, but I do have friends who do things I consider immoral. I know a couple people who are petty thieves, for example. It really bugs me that they do that, but not enough for me to cut them out of my life. I suppose associating with them represents some sort of an ethical compromise, but life is full of compromises. If you purge your social circle of everyone who doesn’t share your exact moral system, you’re going to end up pretty lonely.
Heh, if someone made the appropriate animal noises while I was eating, I’d probably end up laughing at an inopportune moment and end up choking. :eek:
Not a vegetarian here (well, I guess I am a vegetarian if we can count steak and chicken as processed hay and grain), but I do happen to be friends with a number of people whom I disagree with on any number of moral issues, ranging from issues of sexual preference/gender identity, foreign affairs, domestic affairs, religion (I once knew a girl who, despite being quite the intelligent young woman, thought that Catholics were cannibals and polytheists. If that’s the case, I can only assume I don’t go to Mass enough or I just don’t pay attention), etc.
A lot of it comes down to the fact that I’m friends with them for reasons unrelated to our morality stances. It might be other common interests (I have been friends with people with whom I could agree on literally nothing except that Star Wars is a cool movie), it could be just the fact that we’re friends by association (ie: We work together in the same organization and somehow have managed to not actively antagonize eachother), and on rare occasion, we might become friends simply because we share a dislike for someone else (The enemy of my enemy etc.)
So, random sidebar question: If Vegetarians eat vegetables, what do Humanitarians eat?
I don’t see them as partisan issues so much as I see them as moral issues translated into electoral terms. I consider them to be objectively immoral acts, but I acknowledge that I could be wrong.
You said: “Is it morally wrong to be friends with people who have commited any form of wrongdoing?”
So, you were asking whether the act of being friends with immoral people is in fact immoral.
Yes, I do find some things immoral (like stealing and killing), and I wouldn’t want to be friends with people who do this stuff. But I did not address in this thread whether being friends with these people is moral or not.
And yes, “moralist” vegetarians think eating meat is immoral, but is it immoral of them to be friends with meat-eaters?
All I was saying in my reply to you was that I did not claim that it is immoral to do so.
However, even though in the OP I had not addressed the issue of being friends with immoral people as a moral question, now that I think about it, it is an interesting way to look at it.
An argument can be made that it is somewhat immoral to be friends with immoral people, if those people have done severe stuff, not if they did something simple like disobey the speed limit.
So, you consider someone who doesn’t vote as immoral?
So you do have a threshold above which you will not be friends with someone (killing and stealing).
But can you see how, if someone feels as strongly against eating meat as you do about killing and stealing, that they might not think you are “simply eating meat, so what’s the big deal?”
It seems though that most vegetarians either don’t feel too strongly against eating meat, or they do feel strongly about it but their selfishness/fear at the thought of losing some friends overcomes any problem they may have with meat eating.
If you were friends with Geoffrey Dahmer and you liked him and enjoyed his company, and if one day you found out what he did, would you just go right ahead being friends with him, simply because you enjoy his company?
You don’t have to find people who “share your exact moral system”, but I’m sure that if you avoided petty thieves, you would still have a large enough pool of people to find friends from.
Maybe that’s the point, re the OP. If we avoid murderers, there are still a lot of people to choose from for friends. If we avoid robbers, there are still quite a few people left. Now, if we want to avoid adulterers, the number of people left reduce drastically, so most people tolerate it. And then, if we want to avoid meat-eaters, the pool of people left is severely diminished. And that’s why it is so widely tolerated by vegetarians.
So, in some sense, besides the issue of how immoral we think an act is in determining if we want to be friends with someone who commits it (which is an altruistic consideration), it seems that people do a subconscious calculus to see how small their “potential friend pool” might be if they took into account this act to reject people as friencs (which is a selfish consideration)
No. It simply means that tolerance of meat-eating might be motivated by a desire to have a substantian circle of friends. This is not the same as demonstrating that this is part of their motivation.
now, if you can demonstrate that people do indeed perform a “subconscious calculus” to determine the size of their “potential friend pool,” then you might have a case. So far though, I have yet to see any evidence that this comes into play for most vegetarians. Maybe it does, but that seems like pure supposition at this point.
I’m a vegetarian, but not for moral reasons exactly. I’m personally not comfortable with the idea of eating meat, but I don’t think it’s “wrong” in the sense that murder or rape is wrong.
However, I think there are lots of instances where people are friends with someone even if they don’t entirely agree with their morals. I don’t think sexual promiscuity is wrong – a bad idea, perhaps, but not wrong – but I know many people who do think that and who nevertheless have friends who are promiscuous. I also know of people who think that homosexual behavior is wrong (again, I’m not one of them) but who have homosexual friends. (Although it takes a pretty thick-skinned person to put up with a friend who condemns their lifestyle.) Or, what about people who think illegally downloading copywrited material is wrong – in many cases they have friends who do it.
I think there are different degrees of “wrong” behavior. There are some things we might think are “wrong”, but nevertheless we can think that a person who does those things is still basically a good person. I think for most vegetarians-for-moral-reasons (VFMR), eating meat falls into this category. Whereas, there are other things that we think are so wrong that no one who does them can really be considered a good person. I’d say rape falls into this category, for example.
Now, maybe for someone who thinks the life of a pig is of equal value to the life of a human, then there would be a conflict in being friends with a pig-eater (assuming they’d never be friends with someone who eats humans.) But even among VFMR, that’s a rather extreme view. Most simply believe that the life of a pig is of sufficient value that you shouldn’t kill it for food.
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