Sure, you can recall a sensory experience in which you gain (or recall) knowledge of someone else's experience.  For example, I can see that bull being castrated.  That is not the same as identifying with, or going 2nd position with, that bull, in the classic NLP sense. One difference demonstrated is that between knowledge of, and association with, someone else's suffering. You wrote, "But are you a willing participant in the death of animals for consumption of their flesh?" Of course I'm not a willing participant!!!!  There are two kinds of participant: an immanent participant, and a determinant participant.  My premise "the meat in the cooler is just meat, the animal is long dead." doesn't settle whether I'm an immanent participant.  To propose that "I'm not the factory-farm employee who does the job" is another way of proposing that I'm an immanent participant in the death of animals on a factory-farm, not a determinant participant.  If the other premise, "what can one person who doesn't eat meat do?[nothing]" is true in its implications, that I should feel guiltless.  Why?  Because my choice of abstaining from eating meat brings no shame to others who will continue to eat meat, and those people will support the factory-farming practices,.... And I don't visit factory farms so I can watch stuff like that.  But I did educate myself about factory-farming practices.  I don't think that the entire (not just the premise you singled out) conductive argument is grounds for my eating meat.  Nevertheless, it is a conscious argument, and I don't associate into the position of animals on a factory farm who will be slaughtered because I continue to eat meat - so I have the option.  Nothing continues to convince me to kill animals for food (I'm an immanent participant in that process?), but something about eating the meat convinces me to eat it.  A serious effort to provide myself vegetarian food that I enjoy would be multifold: 1. Make it quick and easy to make and eat grilled vegetables on a tabletop grill. Grilled vegies add great flavor. 2. Find an alternative to meat as a protein source, while keeping my fiber consumption reasonable. 3. Find me something that I can chew: something that chews like a steak or chicken breast or pork chop, for when I eat it with rice or pasta.  TVP? What you wrote, "The discrimination between what you care to identify with and the things you don't, is that a worthwhile basis for ethical conclusions?  Is that what we've got ethically?" is a lot like what I tell myself, AFTER I've ignored my argument for continuing to eat meat, while agreeing with myself to continue to eat meat. Does a human have a nonconscious basis for accepting other people's experience as a contributing factor in his decision-making?  Dr. Grinder gave an example of developing communication competence by going second position (in thread "NLP Research") with another, but does that competence hinge on knowing how the other FEELS?  About just the communication act, or how the other feels IN GENERAL?  If in general, then when are the feelings felt?  At the time of the communication, before it, or after it?  If knowledge of another's feelings are necessarily involved, does developing communication competence depend on ASSOCIATING with how the other feels, or just knowing how the other feels?  Ethics is about responding to the knowledge about another's situation, whether or not the association into that situation is there.  A person doesn't wait around to be ethical until he has a really good association with another person's suffering.  Instead, person X thinks about it, strategizes, to protect person Y from person X's misbehavior.  Castrating a bull is not necessarily to communicate with it.  To protect some bull I will never see or hear, I am ethically strategizing.  That's what I'm stuck with, for the time being.  I could bleat all day about how difficult it is to go 2nd position..., but when I do it, I know it's not ethical. -nj ps: another possible idea is to distinguish the "reality" of something to you, from your knowledge of it.  The concept of "reality", in NLP, is of a different logical type than what I call "reality", and is not consistent with my logical type "actuality".  Actuality contains myself plus the external world.