Can meat eaters who think they're doing something wrong teach us about metaethics?

I dunno. There are definitely people in the world who think that it's wrong to eat animals but do it anyway. Myself, I come close to it. Louis CK thinks the same thing, and if you don't mind the profanity here's a funny youtube video explaining the point.



OK. So some people are convinced that it's wrong to eat animals, but don't do it. How can this help us?

Some arguments against the objectivity of ethics go like this: if we had objective knowledge about ethics, it would be knowledge about a realm unlike anything else that we have knowledge of. Indeed, objective ethical knowledge would have to be about a realm of ethical objects that share the feature of being able to bring about obligations just through knowing them. That's unlike the rest of our knowledge: I don't immediately get any obligation just from knowing that "That tree is green." So, this knowledge of ethics would have to be unlike any other knowledge. And from here a small jump is taken--we have no secure reason to believe that such knowledge is possible or exists at all, and no reason to think that there are any objects such that knowledge of them leads to any sort of obligation.

So, there are two responses I can think of. The first I mentioned in the previous post, and it's the idea that there are actually lots of objects such that knowledge of or about them leads to obligations of some sort (the obligation to believe certain things, I pointed to in the post).

Another sort of response relates to vegetarianism, and people who think that it's wrong to eat animals but eat animals anyway. If you could get enough examples like this, you could begin to wear away at the notion that knowledge of ethical objects necessarily involves obligations--meaning, if you could know for certain, and securely, that it's wrong to eat animals while still not feeling obligated to stop eating 'em then this would be difficult for the notion that there is something intrinsically queer or weird about ethical knowledge. The weird thing, the obligation, has to come from somewhere else. But you could start to wear away at the strangeness of ethical knowledge, and through this you could resist the argument that ethical knowledge would have to be knowledge about a mysterious, curious and queer domain.

Update: As I think about this, a good analogy would be "I see the evidence, but I can't bring myself to believe it." In both cases reasons are given and recognized, and it's conceded that a rational person would probably act differently, but one doesn't believe the thing that he should, or doesn't do what he ought to. I guess, then, my point is complementary to the previous post. Together, I argue that the situation in ethics isn't so different from truth in general, and there are two responses one can make to the argument from queerness about ethics. One is that oughtness, or ought-to-ness is present in discussions of truth in general just as much as it is in ethics. So it's not queer unless truth is. But the other response is that reasonable people can know stuff about ethics/truth without acting/believing, so that knowledge isn't really knowledge of something that is essentially normative.