Honestly? For everyone?

If this were true, I would agree with you 100%. If meat were necessary, it would be morally required (not to mention appropriate in lots of other ways -- it's simply that Singer is an ethicist) for people to eat meat.

I just don't believe that it's true for most people, that they couldn't survive without eating meat. Obviously, there was a time in human history when eating meat (and pretty much anything else) was the only way to survive, and there are people alive today with nutritional needs that they can only satisfy with meat.

So I'm (more than) willing to conceed that people who need to eat meat to live should feel no guilt about eating meat.

Will you conceed that people who don't need meat to survive shouldn't eat it? If so, then our disagreement doesn't require an ethicist, right? It requires a nutritionist.

And please call me Chris.

people are made of meat, too.

"Is it wrong to torture animals?"

That is dependent on culture. Some cultures believe it is important to torture animals. Some because they think that agony makes for more tender meat, others because it appeases the gods.

"Everyone agrees that it's wrong to torture animals, "

Not only does everyone not agree on this, see the above, the very debate is over just what is animal torture.

Does throwing a chicken in a wood chipper equal torture. How about shocking them unconcious, then killing them. People will spend their lives trying to define what is and what is not torture for an animal.

"but what exactly is the difference -- for people without unique health requirements that necessitate eating meat -- between torturing animals for pleasure and eating animals for pleasure?"

Pleasure has little to do with it and trying to equate infliction of pain for enjoyment and eating is dishones. Animals are meant to be eaten. That is a simple fact. Many are literally eaten alive, torn to shreds by wolves, lions and other predators. Others are eaten after they die, but at some level all animals are consumed by other animals.

Most people frown upon inflicting unnecessary pain on an animal because people understand that those that enjoy inflicting pain on animals probably enjoy inflicting pain on humans as well.

"Is the difference a matter of degree -- no one can possibly enjoy torturing a pig as much as I enjoy a ham sandwich, and a pig doesn't suffer from being made into a ham sandwich nearly as much as it suffers from being tortured?"

Degree doesn't matter because you are linking unlike items.

Pigs in an indigenous will rarely die of old age or some other painless death. Predators will kill and eat the pig at some point as the pig weakens with age. That's how nature works, and humans are a part of nature.

A wolf killing a pig isn't doing so because it hates the pig, or wants the pig to suffer, but because the pig tastes good. Many of us eat pigs for the same reason. Like the wolf, we shouldn't inflict pain on the pig for the pains sake.

"People are more important than animals. Absolutely. But people are not so much more important than animals that people should eat animals because they're more tasty -- that is, more fun to eat -- than beans."

You are entitled to your opinion, and if you chose to eat beans rather than meat, that is your personal choice. However, your personal choices have no value to the choices of others except as an example.

"people are made of meat, too."

Humm, the other other white meat.

Actually, it's an old joke, "If God didn't want us to eat animals, then why'd he make them out of meat."

Chris: I could not concede the point that people for whom meat is not necessary should not eat meat, for the following reasons:

1) Eating meat is not immoral. There's no moral imperative to not eat meat.

2) Meat is a superior source of nutrition. I'm a former vegetarian so I'm well aware of the kind of commitment and knowledge it takes to eat healthfully without eating meat. It's difficult and most people aren't capable of doing it very well.

Suffering itself is personally subjective and so it should never be alleviated? I fail to see the logic in that at all. Could you explain that a bit more?

"Alleviated" just means "eased": it certainly doesn't mean "made to disappear". I agree with you that suffering is a necessary part of life, that it will never be gotten rid of, and that it can even be satisfying (like in your mention of "better to have loved and lost than to not have loved at all"). We all have the memory of that first high school romance that ended badly and we even seem to cherish those memories. Or, as you mentioned the death of your grandfather, that suffering that we feel can remind us of how important that person was to us

But the argument that you anticipated, that this isn't the kind of suffering we're talking about, you dismiss too hastily. "Suffering" is a convenient word to use to represent many awful things that we should want to alleviate. If it is too broad a word in your opinion, I'll be more exact.

In poorer nations and even too often in the U.S., the hunger that children feel in their stomachs, when they're too weak to play and learn -- we should want to alleviate that hunger and pain. The anguish that a woman feels when her husband dies in a car accident, and she is left to raise their children alone, and she is scared for her future -- we should want to help this woman feel better, and hopefully we could help her with other material needs as well. The apparent torment of chickens locked in tiny cages, pecking at each other and wasting away -- we often want to make the insignificant lives of those chickens better.

I could go on and on. I don't mean to mock your point. But you seem to be suggesting that since we don't have one universal, objective definition of the word "suffering", then we don't know what it is when it confronts us. I find this to be an impossible point to defend. The facts and details represented by regular use of the word "suffering" are GENERALLY things that we want to get rid of, or at least diminish.

When we say "suffering", and we're talking in a particular context, we understand the word very well. When your grandfather died, someone probably asked, "Did he suffer much?" I'm sure that your response wasn't, "I don't know what you mean by 'suffer'." If we talk about a poet suffering the cooled affections of his lover, we understand what that means as well -- that it is a matter of poetic conceit.

Even with that, I am sure that if you asked people, "Do you like to suffer?", their answers would be exclusively "no". Suffering is something that is seen negatively by most anyone around, and it is not a very confusing word at all.

Apart from that, I fail to see how "Suffering drives humanity forward" or that "without 'suffering' humanity stagnates to a meaningless existence". It is quite likely that the process of engaging a problem, defining the problem and then solving the problem helps in humans making long term changes and progressions. But I think to say that it is suffering that does it, is to take a strange view of "suffering".