素食主义者必须要坚守吃素的标准吗？偶尔吃肉的素食主义者难道不是更可爱些吗？这种“接地气”的素食主义或许更为大众所接受。
吃素的艺术
作者：Alberto Giubilini
译者：刘 蕊
校对：刘 璠
策划：刘 璠
Why vegetarians should be prepared to bend their own rules
为什么素食主义者应当违背自己的素食主义
本文选自
Aeon
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It’s a common enough scenario. A vegetarian has been invited to a friend’s place for dinner. The host forgets that the guest is a vegetarian, and places a pork chop in front of her. What is she to do? Probably her initial feelings will be disgust and repulsion. Vegetarians often develop these sorts of attitudes towards meat-based food, making it easier for them to be
absolutist
s about shunning meat.
下述场景想必是很常见的了：一位素食主义者受邀前往朋友家享用晚餐。朋友却忘记了她是一名素食主义者，端上来了一份猪排。她该怎么办？起初，她或许会感到难受反感。素食主义者常常对肉制食物产生这种情绪，而这种情绪也反过来使得他们
更加绝对地
拒绝吃肉。
absolutist
/'æbsəlu:tist/ one who advocates absolutism
Suppose, though, that the vegetarian overcomes her feelings of distaste, and decides to eat the chop, perhaps out of politeness to her host. Has she done something morally
reprehensible
? Chances are that what she has been served won’t be the kind of humanely raised meat that some (but not all) ethical vegetarians find permissible to consume. More likely, it would be the product of cruel, intensive factory farming. Eating the meat under these circumstances couldn’t then be an act of what the philosopher Jeff McMahan calls ‘benign carnivorism’. Would the vegetarian guest have done something wrong by breaking her own moral code?
但是，假设这位素食主义者克服了这种反感，并决定——或许是出于对朋友的尊重——开始吃肉，那是不是意味着她应该在道德上
受到谴责
？有的（但并非所有）伦理素食主义者认为“人道饲养”的动物是可以食用的。但很可能这位素食主义者眼前的这份肉并非是“人道饲养”的，而是残酷的密集型工业化养殖的产物。食用这种肉的人，肯定不是哲学家杰夫·麦克马汉所谓的“良性肉食主义”。那么，如果这位素食主义者违反了自己的道德标准，吃了肉，是不是就算是做错了呢？
reprehensible
/rɛprɪˋhɛnsəbḷ/ reprehensible behaviour is very bad and deserves criticism
Most vegetarians are concerned about animal suffering caused by meat consumption, or about the impact of factory farming on the environment. For simplicity’s sake, I will consider only the case of animal suffering, but the same argument could be applied to the other bad consequences of today’s practices of factory farming, including, for example, greenhouse gas emissions, inefficient use of land, and use of pesticides, fertiliser, fuel, feed and water, as well as the use of antibiotics causing antibiotic resistance in livestock’s bacteria which is then passed on to humans.
食肉意味着动物饱受折磨，工业化饲养也会对环境造成影响，这些都是素食主义者们担忧的地方。为了方便，在这里我仅从虐待动物这一点出发，但下述观点同样适用于当下工业化饲养所带来的严重后果。例如：温室气体排放量增多，土地利用效率降低。同时还有杀虫剂、化肥、燃料、饲料和水的使用和消耗。此外，抗生素的使用使得牲畜的机体产生抗药性，并最终传递至人类身上。
Because eating meat typically supports the practice of raising animals in factory farms where they are inhumanely treated and killed, eating meat is likely to contribute to animal suffering (or to the other bad consequences of factory farming). Now, if we agree that one of the good reasons for being vegetarian is that eating meat to some degree encourages practices that cause animal suffering, then at a first glance it might seem that eating meat only rarely is morally permissible (but see the philosopher Shelly Kagan for a counterargument) because it is very likely that eating meat only occasionally will not have any impact on the amount of suffering inflicted on animals.
工业化饲养的动物饱受虐待，遭到残忍杀害，吃肉实际上助长了这一产业的发展，因此吃肉很可能会加剧动物所遭受到的虐待（同时也加剧了工业化饲养所带来的其它后果）。假设我们认为成为素食主义者的理由之一，是吃肉在某种程度上加剧了我们加诸于动物身上的痛苦。那么，乍一眼看上去，吃肉确实是有违道德标准的（但哲学家Shelly Kagan却有不同观点），因为只有在极少数的情况下，吃肉才不会增加动物的痛苦。
