Rule-following helps you not act like a psychopath

[content: hurting animals] Yesterday in a discussion with some undergrad philosophy students, one of them argued it’s immoral to benefit from wrong acts. If someone kills an animal and nothing will be different if you do or you don’t eat it, is it ok to eat it? He thought no, I thought yes. In this thought experiment, your choice doesn’t change at all whether any other animals are killed. I couldn’t see any way that this made anybody worse off, and that’s what I care about. He thought it was inherently wrong, even though you weren’t changing any outcome. We reran the argument with various other appalling variations: theft, torture, etc. (This was at breakfast; gotta love philosophy students.) I thought these things were upsetting and I wouldn’t want to be connected with them, but it’s out of some basic squeamishness rather than because I really believe it’s morally wrong to benefit from them, if truly there’s no downstream harm. Strict rule-following feels like the wrong approach to…