@Alex Both, it's natural to harm and help any number of organisms.

In the end, right and wrong actions can only exist in a mind complex enough to understand morally.

We as a species are our own judge and Jerry.

In this era of history eating animals is fine.

In the next era it won't be acceptable.

I live closely to our worlds Overton windows around morality, but that doesn't mean I believe in it. I simply have to follow it to socialize with other people.

I believe it is best to try minimizing harm done when possible. While it is impossible to truly live ethically or do no harm, it's best to try cutting down on it where we can. If you have two choices and one causes a lot of harm and the other causes a little harm, then all else being equal the latter should be chosen. I can cut out meat and still live a comfortable life without inconveniencing myself much, I can choose not to live a lifestyle I know is causing pointless suffering to innocent creatures for minimal benefit to me. Simple little changes can reduce the harm we cause, and they might not change much in the grand scheme of things, but they do reduce our involvement in the evils of the world. It keeps the soul clean.

As you said, we're our own judges and jury. The only person we know for sure has any power to judge our soul is ourself. The knowledge that I contribute to what I view as one of the world's greatest evils weighs heavily on my soul, so I seek to minimize that contribution.

@Alex @Mr_NutterButter If you want to minimize harm, veganism is NOT the way to go. Veganism actually kills more animals than meat eating.

https://consumerfreedom.com/2023/01/peta-admits-vegan-diets-kill-animals/

Peta is not an animal rights organization and literally nothing they say about anything can be trusted. Peta is a scam organization thats sole purpose for existing is to trick people into giving them money. It's the animal rights equivalent of the komen foundation.

The argument that vegan or vegetarian diets harm more animals than meat based diets is fundamentally rooted in the idea that you need farms to grow food for humans, but that all farm animals magically sustain themselves by drawing nutrients from the aether. If you compare the amount of farmland required to grow vegetables to feed humans to the amount of space required in a factory farm to contain animals, then yes, a farm growing produce will take up more space than a farm that's merely containing animals. This ignores that those animals need to eat, too, and you expend far more produce feeding an animal than you would need if you fed it to a human directly.