Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I, however, armed with Singer's arguments from Animal Liberation could show that eating meat needs to be justified and that I can't justify it. The amount of philosophy needed is not too significant. One needs to know enough logic to show that inability to find a justification doesn't mean a justification doesn't exist. So if someone is using Singer's arguments from Animal Liberation to persecute meat eaters and yo…
I glossed over some of the subtleties. To show that eating animals needs to be justified requires extending our ethical framework to animals beyond humans. Nobody feels the need to justify eating vegetables, for example, nor have compelling arguments been presented that this is unwarranted. Also: most disciplines require "general skill at persuasion," philosophy being no exception.
To the contrary, almost every vegetarianism argument on the Internet has comments like "plants are living things which you slaughter for food", and they just get ignored.
I suspect because if you seriously believed killing living things for food is wrong, it would be suicide, so the only conceivable answer is to reason in such a way that it comes out with the answer you want - draw your arbitrary cutoff between important-living-things and not-important-living-things somewhere above plants and bacteria while staying comfortably below humans.
Then let the argument rage as if there was a real substantive difference between drawing the line above cow or below cow, or just diverting it around milk, or only around milk sourced in a particular way.