Fake meat, violent movies, sex stuff: is there a moral duty of sensual discipline?
Fischer and Ozturk (2017, link) argue that vegans shouldn't eat "facsimiles of flesh," i.e. fake meat (I read about it in this blog post). The argument is that, in order to enjoy fake meat, an ethical vegan needs to compartmentalize their enjoyment of the fake meat apart from their sensitivity to the wrong of eating real meat. But it is wrong to compartmentalize our moral feelings in this way, so it is wrong to enjoy fake meat.
This argument can be schematically generalized to other cases:
- Vegans eating with non-vegans. To enjoy a meal with friends when some of them are eating real meat requires us to compartmentalize our enjoyment of the company and sharing the meal away from our sensitivity to the wrong of eating real meat, which is happening right in front of us and perhaps even with a kind of tacit approval.
- Violent movies. To enjoy a violent movie requires us to compartmentalize our enjoyment of the movie away from our sensitivity to the wrong in real violence. The presence of tropes of justification in violent entertainment might be thought to heighten this problem because it suggests that the compartmentalization is imperfect.
- Sex stuff. Many people enjoy in their romantic and sexual lives practices that relate to non-egalitarian gender relations that they don't reflectively endorse. E.g., suppose you think that the gender role in which the male heterosexual partner takes asymmetric responsibility for protecting the female heterosexual partner is an unequal one that should be abolished. Nonetheless, you might still enjoy when your male heterosexual partner does things that embody this role, like opening doors or carrying luggage etc. To enjoy such acts requires us to compartmentalize our enjoyment away from our holistic social value judgments.
This suggests that the problem diagnosed by Fischer and Ozturk is quite a broad problem -- a broader problem for vegans than they recognize, and a problem in general for anyone whose conscience overshoots the norms of mainstream practice and still feels the pull of that practice in some way, which may indeed be just about everyone. Either morality requires of us a high degree of sensual discipline in many contexts, or there is something wrong with the argument.