> Or am I just expecting too much introspection from someone who hasn't examined their own motives and actions?
You're expecting logical consistency from the author, but the author is partly pointing out that our emotions and feelings do not always obey such a rigid framework.
The author is examining how they feel about the pig's death; that sometimes comes before, or is not in congruence with, their other motivations.
If you reflect on this a bit more, the normal course of a farmer (and to a greater degree, industrial meat production) is to view their animals as a product and to not regard them as feeling individuals, as that might rather get in the way of their work. But the farmer is slowly drawn into a situation where the pig is more than future meat, but a suffering fellow creature.
Just to add to this point, with something that Yuval Noah Harari said in an interview with Sam Harris:
"If tensions, conflicts and irresolvable dilemmas are the
spice of every culture, a human... must hold contradictory
beliefs and be riven by incompatible values. Cognitive
dissonance is often considered a failure of the human
psyche. In fact, it is a vital asset. Had people been unable
to hold contradictory beliefs and values, it would probably
have been impossible to establish and maintain any human
culture."
Godel's Incompleteness Theorem proves that at least in math, there's a tradeoff between power and completeness / consistency, in that formal systems than can encode arithmetic can prove more things, but they are necessarily either inconsistent or incomplete.
Would make a lot of sense if this tradeoff were also present in other contexts.
You're expecting logical consistency from the author, but the author is partly pointing out that our emotions and feelings do not always obey such a rigid framework.
The author is examining how they feel about the pig's death; that sometimes comes before, or is not in congruence with, their other motivations.
If you reflect on this a bit more, the normal course of a farmer (and to a greater degree, industrial meat production) is to view their animals as a product and to not regard them as feeling individuals, as that might rather get in the way of their work. But the farmer is slowly drawn into a situation where the pig is more than future meat, but a suffering fellow creature.