Do Animals Have Inherent Value? (abridged)

Angus Taylor’s Animals & Ethics: An Overview of the Philosophical Debate delivers on its title’s promise: it summarizes the philosophical debate over animals, often phrasing points more clearly than the philosophers did themselves. One of the key figures in this debate is Tom Regan, author of The Case for Animal Rights, and Taylor applauds him for his main contribution to the animal rights debate, “inherent value”:

The key concept in Regan’s philosophy is inherent value. Inherent value is a quality that Regan attributes to every creature that (to put it briefly for the moment) has a life that matters to it. To say that a being has inherent value is to say that it has a value that is independent of any use that it may have for others. Inherent value, then is to be contrasted with instrumental value. To have inherent value, in Regan’s view, is to have the fundamental right never to be treated merely as an instrument, or means, for others. …

The kind of autonomy that Regan says many animals possess is preference autonomy. To have preference autonomy, as he defines it, is to have preferences and the ability to initiate action with a view to satisfying them. In Regan’s view, preference autonomy is the key to having a life that matters to oneself, to being what he calls the subject-of-a-life. Those who are subjects-of-a-life are those who ‘have beliefs and desires; perception, memory, and a sense of the future, including their own future; an emotional life together with feelings of pleasure and pain; preference- and welfare-interests; the ability to initiate action in pursuit of their desires and goals; a psychophysical identity over time; and an individual welfare in the sense that their experiential life fares well or ill for them, logically independently of their being the object of anyone else’s interests (Regan 2004a, p.243). Regan believes that normal mammalian animals of at least a year in age meet this criterion and thus have inherent value and hence moral rights. Birds are probably subjects-of-a-life, and some other creatures may be too (Regan 2003). …

Now, asks Regan, what is it that accounts for our ascription of inherent value to someone, regardless of whether that individual is a genius or a moron, regardless of whether that individual is a morally responsible agent? What relevant similarity can we point to among individuals who have inherent value? Regan answers that what plausibly accounts for our ascription of inherent value to them is the fact that the individuals in question have lives that matter to them, that fare well or ill for them, independently of their usefulness for others…

Further, in Regan’s opinion, this inherent value that we ascribe to persons depends neither on the quality of their experiences nor on whether they are saints or sinners. All who have inherent value have it equally, he says, and it does not matter whether someone is Mother Teresa or an unscrupulous used-car salesperson. (67 – 70)

Taylor does a good job of summing it up, but I thought I’d better consult the original. At the beginning of Chapter 7 of The Case for Animal Rights, Regan unveils his core concept, using slightly more obscure terminology than Taylor:

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--Tagged under: Ethics--

--Tagged under: Vegan Leaders--

The (Mostly Anecdotal) Evidence for a Vegan Diet

Many ex-vegans and ex-vegetarians quit for health reasons, but animal agriculture abolitionist James McWilliams doubts their credibility in his post “The Evidence for a Vegan Diet,” saying:

Perhaps inspired by Lierre Kieth’s The Vegetarian Myth, a book that chronicles the author’s losing battle with a plant-based diet, bloggers have clogged foodie networks with angst-ridden accounts of fatigue, sickness, hair loss, anxiety, diminished sex drive, and mental breakdown after quitting animal products. The problem with these accounts, as far as I can tell, is that those who made the vegan leap (and I praise them for doing it) did so without doing due diligence on the details of intelligent veganism. Someone can live on potato chips, pot, and cherry soda and call himself a vegan. Many recidivists have evidently tried to do just that.

McWilliams then goes on to imply that if only all vegans ate at restaurants like the vegan macrobiotic spot Casa de Luz in Austin, the above issues would never happen:

For me, the most persuasive evidence supporting a healthy vegan diet is anecdotal. The vegans who frequent Casa de Luz, my breakfast (and often lunch) destination, are paragons of good health. Many of them are significantly older than I am — in their 50s, 60s, and 70s — but they rock on with glowing intensity, looking much younger (in some cases by 20 years) than they are. Every now and then a local vegan hero will drop in — John Mackey (founder of Whole Foods), Rip Esselstyn (pioneer of the Engine 2 diet), a noted musician who will remain unnamed — and we’ll gawk in admiration. The everyday reality, though, is that a dozen or so ordinary people with whom I eat have done extraordinary things as a direct result of intelligent veganism. They’ve conquered obesity, chronic disease, depression, and a host of food-related disorders by exclusively eating an exciting diversity of plants. If there’s one lesson I’ve learned by eating with seasoned vegans it is this: the diet empowers.

Dude, I used to work at Casa de Luz. I volunteered there off and on for a couple of years before I finally got a job there, which I kept for about a year; I quit to leave Austin for New York, where I quickly got a job at the quasi-macrobiotic vegan restaurant Angelica Kitchen. It’s all about who you know: one of the managers at Angelica was the daughter of a manager at Casa de Luz. I worked there for about a year too, and it was only six months after my Angelica run that I quit veganism because of angst-riddenness, fatigue, sickness and brain fog. I still had some Angelica Kitchen hijiki in my freezer when I started loading up on salmon and eggs. And look at the blog I write now! Are you sure that telling vegans to eat at Casa de Luz is a good idea, McWilliams?

McWilliams makes scientific claims for veganism to bolster his anecdotes, but fails to cite sources for his claims that:

a low-fat vegan diet can substantially mitigate the impacts of type 2 diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis, and Parkinson’s disease. Veganism reduces the risk of colon cancer. … Veganism is more effective at combating obesity than other prescribed diets, such as that promoted by the National Cholesterol Education Program.

He also quotes vegan activist Dr. Michael Greger saying, “A plant-based diet is like a one-stop shop against chronic diseases.” But what about these vegans, Dr. Greger?!

Admittedly, when I reference vegan health issues, I fail to cite studies about brain fog in long-term vegans, but I don’t try to make grand health claims about veganism on this blog (…anymore). The the only direct claims I’d make about health and veganism now are that: some nutrients are harder or impossible to get on a vegan diet without supplementation (I’m including “non-essential” nutrients because some bodies are better at manufacturing them than others), a more varied diet has good potential to be healthier than a less varied diet and veganism is a less varied diet (but of course it depends on what constitutes the added variety in the diet and on the person), and many people quit veganism after feeling horrible and then feel better once they start eating animal products again.

Anyway, after referencing a little science, McWilliams then re-emphasizes, “I could continue in this scientific vein, but again, it’s the stories of personal transformation that make the biggest impression.”

Though there are vegan success stories, as McWilliams says, there are plenty of vegan failure stories too, and not all of these ex-vegans subsisted on potato chips and pot. In fact, vegan RDs Jack Norris and Ginny Messina have suggested that it’s ironically the most health-obsessed vegans who often end up failing the most, because they restrict too much — such as raw foodists and the clientele at Casa de Luz, many of whom are terrified of nightshade vegetables and refined soy products.

Here’s an anecdote for you, McWilliams: Michio Kushi, founder of the macrobiotic Kushi Institute, got colon cancer at 81. He fortunately survived, but his wife died of cervical cancer at 78. And unless it’s changed since I left, they sell Kushi’s books at Casa de Luz, including The Cancer Prevention Diet and The Macrobiotic Approach to Cancer.

McWilliams is right that many new vegans experience health improvements. This isn’t surprising, since veganism inspires many people to switch from a junky mainstream diet to a fruit- and vegetable-heavy one, which cuts out a lot of harmful foods. The problem, many ex-vegans theorize, is that veganism often swings the pendulum too far in the other direction — from excess to deficiency. Which means that early improvements are no proof that everyone benefits from being vegan for life. 

So if you want to go after the ex-vegans, McWilliams, you’ll need to do better than suggesting that all failed vegans were non-supplementing, chip-addicted potheads who skipped too many Casa de Luz Guatemalan nights.

(Thanks for the tip, Stella)

Why Veganism Should Move Beyond “No Animal Products Ever”

Jonathan Safran Foer’s Eating Animals opens with the sentence “Americans choose to eat less than .25% of the known edible food on the planet.” That sounds like it’s supposed to be a criticism, but then for the next 266 pages, Foer proceeds to badger Americans into restricting their diets even more than that.

No wonder so many vegans like that book! Vegans sometimes portray themselves as rebels subverting the mainstream, upending SAD-ist notions of “tradition, convenience, habit and taste,” and yet what veganism usually comes down to is piling on new taboos.

The early vegan pioneers deserve credit for pointing out the fatal paradox in lacto-ovo vegetarianism – simply avoiding meat doesn’t address the issues that vegetarians actually want to address – but then they just took the vegetarian idea and added even more restrictions to it, defining veganism as:

A way of living which excludes all forms of exploitation of, and cruelty to, the animal kingdom, and includes a reverence for life. It applies to the practice of living on the products of the plant kingdom to the exclusion of flesh, fish, fowl, eggs, honey, animal milk and its derivatives, and encourages the use of alternatives for all commodities derived wholly or in part from animals.

If the first official vegans had been less hasty to spell out the dictates of their philosophy and had clearly defined the sentiment of veganism while leaving the application open to interpretation, maybe veganism wouldn’t be as commonly mired in dogmatism as it is now. Seven decades after “Vegan” exploded into the world, everyone’s first exposure to it is still, “Vegans don’t eat or wear animal products,” which presumes a robust line between animal and vegetable that isn’t actually there and makes it sound like veganism is a set of restrictions in search of a motive. 

If vegans want to convince us that it’s ethical to eat plants and unethical to eat animals, they need a coherent reason for this. So vegans settled on sentience. And yet when people want to eat non-sentient animals and say it’s okay by vegan ethics, the vegan majority gets upset. Christopher Cox outraged a ton of vegans with his “Consider the Oyster” manifesto that held up non-sentient oysters as a veganism-compatible animal food. Well, vegans… if oysters aren’t sentient, what is the problem?

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--Tagged under: Ethics--

The Non-Vegan Pet Loophole

Vegans wanting to extend their ethics to every domain under their control often rear their dogs and cats as little furry meat abstainers. Some call this cruelty to animals (a charge that is sometimes undermined by the accusers’ support of factory farming), but if imposing a vegan diet on someone is a form of cruelty, it’s at least a cruelty that vegans are willing to foist upon themselves. Vegans have good reason to fill their omnivorous dogs and carnivorous cats with animal-free kibble: it’s the only way for them to be relatively consistent with their ethics. It’s vegans feeding their rescue pets carcass who open up a vicious anti-vegan loophole.

“If wild animals get to eat other animals, why can’t humans?” is a stock question that vegans get a lot, and seasoned veggie apologists have their retorts ready. Unless they are obsessed with suffering reduction, most vegans are happy to wash their hands of what animals do to each other when humans aren’t looking. Wild creatures don’t live by complex ethical frameworks, so no ethics are breached when a porpoise eats a fish. As long as humans aren’t involved, what happens in nature stays in nature.

Also relevant, vegans say, is that humans have tamed the land to produce vegetables, fruits and grains, somewhat at our whim, making it possible for us to live without eating meat. Eating meat becomes cruel the exact moment it is possible to survive without it. Wild animals, who lack the intelligence and opposable digits required to plant, harvest and write out ethical screeds, can’t be blamed for eating meat; they have no choice.

But a variation of this question can highlight the culpability of (some) vegans in a scenario that hits closer to home. Something like: “If you don’t have a problem with buying meat for your pets, why do you have a problem with me buying meat for myself?”

With non-vegan pets, it’s not an issue of animals eating animals outside the bounds of human civilization. Dogs and cats may not know how to plant and harvest, but their vegan owners should know how to read labels and look for that green V on pet food labels. Yet vegans –- who are against humans eating animals –- are sometimes complicit in feeding animals to each other. How do they defend this?

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Dr. Joel Marks on his Amoral Veganism

For some professors and authors, making a career out of philosophy means developing a theory or set of principles that they then elaborate on — and never seriously question — for the rest of their productive lives. Not so for Dr. Joel Marks, professor emeritus of philosophy at the University of New Haven and a Bioethics Center Scholar at Yale University. For instance, you don’t have to travel too far back in the works referenced on his main website to figure out that Marks used to believe in morality.

His 2009 book Ought Implies Kant: A Reply to the Consequentialist Critique took the existence of right and wrong as a given, and argued for a version of Kantian ethics that would extend moral duties to animals and universally obligate humans to follow a vegan diet. Now, however, Marks is putting the finishing touches on a new book titled Ethics Without Morals, suggesting that he changed his mind about a few things in the past two years. What changed is that Marks stopped taking right and wrong as a given. In fact, he had an epiphany and decided they were myths. His “Moral Moments” column at Philosophy Now magazine became “Ethical Episodes,” he took to questioning some key components of animal rights philosophy such as inherent value and announced his new thinking in a New York Times column called “Confessions of an Ex-Moralist.”

But none of this affected how Marks felt about animals. He still wants people to go vegan — it’s just that now he emphasizes that his call for a vegan humanity is based on his own desires and aversions, not innate rules that he deduced by objectively observing the workings of the universe. Since its tendency toward moralizing is the main thing I don’t like about standard vegan proselytizing, I admire Marks’ amoral “desirist” approach (and can’t wait to read his next book), even though I don’t share his desire for everyone to stop eating animal products.

Joel Marks

Could you summarize why you don’t believe in morality?

It’s very simple (although devastating to our everyday but unexamined assumptions). The universe as we now understand it consists of such things as spacetime, dark energy, dark matter, gravity, stars and planets, quarks and gluons, beliefs and desires, plus the natural laws that govern all of these things, plus mathematics and logic. Granted we do not yet have a single overarching theory of everything that explains how all of these things fit together perfectly, but there is a certain type of reality that adheres to them that does not adhere to moral values. In other words, it is not to be expected that the final theory will have any place in it for moral good or moral bad or moral right or moral wrong, nor any of their attendant concepts such as moral responsibility and moral desert. Everything that needs explaining can be explained without postulating any of those phenomena.

For example: There is no need to postulate the notion of moral wrongness in order to explain why most human beings believe that torturing babies is morally wrong. All you need is some kind of evolutionary explanation along the lines of: Creatures that thought it was OK to torture babies would (or did!) simply die off because their offspring would be too debilitated to reproduce. But suppose that under certain environmental conditions the only successful reproducers were those who had been “toughened” to the max. Then maybe under those conditions, torturing babies would be the ticket to survival (that is, of the genes that in combination with that environment, motivate the torturing of babies). So there is no “objective” or “absolute” wrongness attaching to the torturing of babies; there is simply the survival, under given conditions, of certain practices and prohibitions, some of which assume the mantle of objectivity or absoluteness in order better to motivate us to carry them out.

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--Tagged under: Veg*an Interviews--

"Testimony from a defense psychologist had suggested that Schuler’s medical and physical ailments, combined with her vegan diet and use of alcohol and an antidepressant, helped impair her ability to tell right from wrong."
— “Stacy Schuler, Ex-Ohio Teacher, Convicted Of Having Sex With 5 Students”
Confessions of a Vegan Meat Eater

After a while, I did not lose debates. I distilled conversations into scripts while predicting rebuttals. By weaponising my argumentative tools for the higher purpose of persuading and challenging attitudes, I convinced myself that my militancy was just, and only had to find tactful—or not so tactful—ways to convince people to have the courage and willpower to change. How could I not be outspoken? Accepting the premise that animals suffer, and realising how many we slaughter daily, our society becomes much more atrocious than that of Nazi Germany. Debating with people, I explained how vegetarianism was healthier for them, humane for the animals, and more ethical for society. I described how the diet was not so hard once getting used to it, and how much happier I was since changing. Their silence, lack of satisfactory rebuttal, and frustrated anger proved I was right.

I was wrong.

Via reddit/vegan.

--Tagged under: Ethics--

Interview With a Vegan: Speciesist Vegan

If you think humans are better than other animals, you’re a speciesist, and you might as well be judging humans on the color of their skin.

At least, if you believe anti-speciesist vegans. 

Speciesism, they say, is no more acceptable than other forms of discrimination; looking down on organisms because of their biological classification is just as arbitrary and loathsome as doing the same to humans because of their gender or sexual orientation. We’re not nature’s most impressive creation — we’re just nature’s most arrogant, our delusional sense of self-importance blinding us to the reality that we’re just one of many kinds of sentient creatures who happen to inhabit this planet, none more or less valuable than the rest. 

Many who go vegan for ethical reasons believe that anti-speciesism is a key component of any serious vegan philosophy, and that vegans who don’t accept it are vegan for the wrong reasons and are part of the problem. For this reason, vegans who can’t quite get into the idea that species is a meaningless division which shouldn’t really be considered at all tend to be private about this view. 

But not Speciesist Vegan, the anonymous vegan writer who uses his blog — also named Speciesist Vegan — to discuss why he thinks anti-speciesism doesn’t make sense, as well as why there is still an argument for veganism anyway.

The blog is only about a month old but is already one of the most fascinating vegan blogs I’ve read. Which is why I did this interview. 

And in case you prefer your speciesist veganism in small doses and can’t commit to the full interview just yet, CarpeVegan has the abridged version.

SpeciesistVegan

Many vegans say that speciesism is a form of discrimination akin to racism, sexism, anti-Semitism, ableism, classism and heterosexism. You, however, are speciesist, yet maintain an opposition to prejudice against different groups of humans. What makes speciesism different than those others?

Well, to state the obvious, all the -isms you mentioned in the first sentence concern intraspecies relations and speciesism deals with interspecies relations. 

Basically, for various reasons, but largely because I AM a human and not some other type of animal, I feel that humans have more moral worth than other animals. I hope it will be more clear why by the end of this interview.

And just to be clear, it’s not like I don’t see any similarities between how some people treat animals and how some people treat (or used to treat) other humans who are different from them. There are plenty of analogies to be drawn. I just have a general distaste for moral argumentation by analogy. Even if there are some legitimate parallels that can be made between dairy farms and slave plantations, the analogy is offensive to me (and almost all non-vegans). If I have to explain to you why the analogy is offensive, you’re definitely a vegan and your name might be Gary.

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--Tagged under: Veg*an Interviews--

Factory Farming That Even Vegans Could Support

In the entry “How Animals Eating Each Other Royally Screws Veganism” (which I probably should have given a more philosophical sounding title), I pointed out the obvious: vegans are flirting with nihilism when they say there is nothing morally wrong with non-human omnivores eating other animals simply because these flesh-devouring devils don’t have a conscience and thus don’t believe in right and wrong.

If it were inherently wrong to intentionally kill a gazelle, I theorized, then it would be wrong to do so even if you weren’t aware that it was wrong to kill a gazelle. Otherwise, there would be nothing wrong with eating meat if you weren’t aware of its wrongness — a stance that vegans admittedly do sort of lean toward when they say that eating meat is less immoral before you’ve seen Earthlings. 

If zero moral rules apply to creatures who experience zero sensations of right and wrong, then wouldn’t only one moral rule apply someone who experiences only one sensation of right and wrong? In other words, if animals are off the hook because they don’t experience any morality, it would seem to follow that individual moral rules only apply to people who feel those particular rules. You can’t say that everyone who is capable of feeling right and wrong is obligated to follow every plausible moral rule, because there are just too many of them, most of which are compelling to some people but not others. Which would mean that it is not immoral for us to eat meat as long as we do not personally feel that it is immoral to do so. 

Arguably.

The reason I’m dusting off this oldie is that a commenter who recently barraged it with comments disagreeing with my conclusions (wtf?!) did concede one of the points I made: if it is not morally wrong for animals to commit violence because they are not guided by moral considerations, then the actions of amoral human psychopaths also cannot be judged wrong.

Through experience, observation and training, psychopaths do know what is popularly accepted as right and wrong, and they realize they’ll be punished for behavior deemed wrong if they are caught. However, this obedience to rules they do not believe in is no morally different from a dog who is trained, through fear of punishment or through positive rewards, to behave in ways humans like. In both cases, if the amoral being violates the training, they cannot be said to have committed an objective moral wrong, since they have no conscience, do not experience the sensation of wrongness, and so operate outside of morality.

And abolitionist-esque vegans agree!

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--Tagged under: Ethics--

Interview With an Anti-Veganism Vegan: Dave D

That’s an interview with Vegan Represent founder Dave D that I posted to CarpeVegan. 

But don’t worry, I haven’t abandoned Let Them Eat Meat for Carpe Vegan. I promise to post at least two real entries this month. In the meantime, read Forks Over Knives: Is the Science Legit?, which puts my Forks Over Knives review to shame. Writing mine a year earlier doesn’t get me off the hook - I should have used charts.  

Also, since this review is nothing but links… in England, you can’t be fired for your animal rights views. Hopefully this applies equally to people who don’t believe in animal rights. I would hate to move there and then find out I can’t hold down a job because of my controversial pro-animal-use views.

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