Been blogging around...

And found an interesting article about vegetarianism written by a Philosophy major at some school in the US. You can find the original article here. Be sure to also check out the response posted at the bottom by the vegan. I think that both articles present some interesting points. You can also find the author's response to the letter here. Being a lapsed vegetarian myself, with vegetarian longings, I found this discussion quite intriguing. I think that the question raised by this discussion is not whether everyone should be vegetarian (this answer is obviously yes) but rather whether we can ever find a standard set of ethics. Are ethics universal? How much importance should we lend to the idea of personal choice? What I find problematic about both arguments is the idea of ethics coming from the outside. In the original article, it is through notions of logic and the idea of there being one defensible set of morals for everyone. In the letter, there is the reliance on religion to provide a moral framework. Both of these viewpoints seem to erode the idea of personal choice. But then, I do believe that each society needs an ethical standard that everyone agrees to in order for that society to function, hence there being a legal system, which is put in place to reinforce those ethical standards. It gets confusing... where do we draw the line between public and private choices? Comments, anyone?