The vegan thing is actually quite a handy reference point. Presumably the vegans in question believe that eating meat is an immoral act on account of it causing suffering, etc., etc. They clearly believe that it is morally correct to refrain from causing said pain. (Their motives for said beliefs , as always, run the gamut). They are surrounded by people like you, me, and OP who happily eat meat without a second thought.

We, to their moral philosophy, are actively engaging in causing suffering in a manner they have rejected as cruel and unnecessary, largely for our own convenience and pleasure - particularly in a world where many protein alternatives are available.

But they are surrounded by us carnivores and our system. They can go through their entire lives putting themselves in a societal fringe, or they can make peace with the fact that the best they can do is be good by themselves and tolerate everyone else. How they rationalize that is up to them, but it usually takes the form of tolerance and deciding it’s not a irreconcilable flaw in people like OP. They presumably would have a much harder time dealing with the world if they reacted to meat eating the same way they did to, say, human traffickers.

I mention this because the interesting thought experiment is if they achieved a moral majority, BMH (and us other carnivores) might be looking at prison sentences for burgers. No doubt in that case they would not tolerate OP, but rather scorn him and declare him evil.

In contrast, there are parts of the world that forum policy won’t let me specifically name, where the keeping of pre-adolescent boys in sex slavery is more or less treated the like meat eating for us. There’s a few people who might disagree with it, but at most they personally abstain. They certainly have a live and let live attitude towards it happening, and pay no more attention to the matter than a vegan does to his friend eating a steak. We here in the west of course would lock these people up in a heartbeat as more or less the personification of evil, and condemn in the strongest terms possible (with a strong chance of conspiracy charges) anyone who had “accepted them for who they are.” I don’t think anyone on this board would argue that our jailing or even execution of that type of person was anything but righteous.

So why the sudden escalation between meat and horrific crimes? Because it turns out that one of the easiest ways for Good and Evil to get along is to put a power differential in place. There is a human tendency to normalize morality in accordance with what the likely effect of resisting Evil/Good will be. And I don’t mean a cold calculating “play along, but our day is nigh!” I mean that literally the needle on the outrage caused gets so tamped down by the need to accept and rationalize acts if we want to participate in society that very quickly objective Evil/Good can become a non-issue by being marginal and near irrelevant for a given act.

Which is, of course, just how easy it is to get Good and Evil characters working together. You’re good but live in Evil Lulz land? Chances are you’ll pretty quickly change your definition of evil even though the rule book won’t. Your evil and live in the Good and True land? Eventually you’ll find a way to rationalize most Good behavior as really letting you do your evil thang.