Relations, Vegetarianism and Principle of Minima

With changing social dynamics, the question of making new friends can get tricky. When exposed to a new set of people (like at your workplace, after your college), you are required to make new friends. You could, like the new age ‘practical man’ (meant in my most sarcastic tone), make friends based on utility. Pick those guys with whom you’d expect to get a lot of work done. As ridiculous as it might sound to some, it ‘actually’ happens. Ethicists might raise a hue and a cry at this idea, citing the selfishness present at its core. The other alternative is to befriend those people who make you feel good; those whom you like talking to. A philosopher, basing his arguments on pure rationale, is not happy with this either. Why? Because there is a certain amount of selfishness in the second option too. The people you’d befriend in the second case are those who make ‘you’ feel good, and this option is obviously selfish. Selfishness is inherent in either case. The solution out of this dichotomy is to choose that option which minimizes the selfishness involved. Since zero selfishness remains only an ideal, the next best thing is to minimize it. The principle of minima if you will. And clearly, selfishness is minimum in the second. Making people feel good just because it makes you feel good is the nearest that we can reach to the ideal.

This (principle of minima) is the only logical basis of vegetarianism. All those fanatics who claim zero harm by being a vegetarian are only fooling themselves. Now the concept of vegetarianism is very subjective – eggs are vegetarian to some and not so to others; ditto with onions, fish etc. Again, where is the vegetarianism in our killing at least thousands of microbes (if not more) to have a glass of clean water? There is selfishness involved in both cases (of a vegan and a non-vegan diet). The amount is lesser in the former – that is the best that we can do. Please don’t think that I want the non-vegans to turn vegans based on this post. If that were to happen, we would face an acute crisis of providing employment to the current butchers. What should/would they do? I am of the firm contention that the world is too good a design for me or you to help it. (In an absolute sense)

In an abstract frame work, knowing that a certain amount of both good and bad is attached with every activity of ours (the proof of which is  a little abstract, I will skip it) , the only way out is a minimization of the negative. If one were to think that doing nothing (neither good nor bad, a very passive morbid life) is a solution, the walls are better examples. To even arrive at this analysis, one has to do some activity. In other words, the wheel is already in motion by the time we realize it, and we are moving with it. The solution is futile because it attempts to realize that a boomerang comes back without even hurling it! Its well nigh impossible.

P.S: Another instance of Math and its applicability to daily life situations.