Life After Meat

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So far this little experiment is going pretty well... Although I may have cheated, depending on how you classify shrimp. Seems the chef in the cafeteria seems to think it's vegetarian, so when I found it in my pasta... I decided not to make a fuss. I REGRET NOTHING!

Some stray thoughts:

Is it possible to be a good person? Does being a ethical require you to never do wrong? As an example, if being "good" requires a person to become a vegan, and they can only manage to become a vegetarian (still responsible for some pretty awful treatment of animals in today's world)... should they even bother being a vegetarian at all?

A slightly more extreme example would be a murderer (say the character Dexter from that awesome TV show) found a way to curb his impulses and only murder someone once a month rather than twice a month. He's saving lives! Is he a hero or a monster? A half-monster?

This brings up a pretty interesting difference between the nature of utilitarian ethics vs. Judeo-Christian ethics. My gut reaction towards the murderer in the example above makes me want to say that murdering one person rather than two doesn't make him half as evil. Do I need to invoke the concept of sin or heaven and hell to put all murderers in their own classification of evil?

Bottom line - if the ethics one adopts are so demanding that pretty much everyone falls somewhere in the "kinda evil" category.... is something wrong with the ethical system or something wrong with all of us?