My general understanding still seems to hold, however, and that is that it represents a more comprehensive effort to avoid exploiting animals than your average vegetarian can claim still eating eggs, wearing wool, etc.

Now, I DO eat meat and consume other animal products, but don’t have any special emotional attachment to the moral integrity of it that I’m aware of. If it turns out that a firmer committment to animal rights as expressed anywhere along the vegetarian/strict vegan spectrum—widely disseminated—happens to produce a greater degree of human happiness, then I can be counted upon as an activist, public and private.

Since Julian has made the point that no mainstream vegan or vegetarian he has encountered considers other animals equivalent to Homo sapiens, I shouldn’t think that it’s controversial to make our own interests as a species the determining factor.

excessively attribute reason and strength to “moral positions” that rest more on a leap of faith than we are typically able to acknowledge.

While this doesn’t invalidate the arguments, it does incline us to overvalue our own arguments and excessively attribute reason and strength to arguments that rest more on a leap of faith than we are typically able to acknowledge.

I think the meat and morality question is a perfect example of the phenomenon.

It’s veganism that doesn’t have a leg to stand on. Maybe I’m wrong about this, but I think we have a higher moral obligation to members of our own species than a host of organisms that wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for our own stewardship in the first place.

The health care thing: it was an OpEd by Paul Krugman, of all people, that turned me on the issue. He pointed to the eventual acceptance of primary education as a basic civil right—as a valuable investment in human capital, in our infrastructure—as a model for nationalized health care. I thought it was a pretty good argument.

To this day, it’s the only thing he ever wrote that changed my mind about something.

As noted above by several commenters, the human body makes its own vitamin D with a bit of sun exposure.

Yet, like health care, we can establish a baseline level of protection for everybody and work toward the ideal of maximizing certain key components.