January 2012
4 posts
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Vegans May Not Be Speciesist, But That Doesn't...
“Following the civil rights movement, veganism is the next step for moral progress in our society. I think the movement will follow the same historical trajectory as all previous rights movements - through denial and anger, but finally acceptance.”
– Ruby Roth, author of That’s Why We Don’t Eat Animals
“It is racism when we choose to save one white person over two blacks. It is speciesism when...
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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...
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...
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Why Veganism Should Move Beyond "No Animal...
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...
December 2011
2 posts
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....
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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...
October 2011
5 posts
“Testimony from a defense psychologist had suggested that Schuler’s medical...”
– “Stacy Schuler, Ex-Ohio Teacher, Convicted Of Having Sex With 5 Students”
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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...
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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...
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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...
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...
August 2011
6 posts
1 tag
Forget Sentience: Here’s the Real Reason We Grant...
In my entry “Problems With the Argument From Marginal Cases and Using Sentience as a Basis for Rights,” I attempted to debunk the argument from marginal cases, the keystone argument that holds up obligatory veganism and the notion that sentience is the basis for rights.
I’m getting tired of summarizing the argument from marginal cases, so in case you’re unfamiliar with it, here is Jack Norris...
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Case For a Baby-Free Argument From Marginal Cases
I talk a lot about the argument from marginal cases on this blog, because it’s the moral equation that glues logical veganism together. This argument is the bridge that makes it possible to think of humans and other animals as morally equivalent. It’s what allows vegans to say “what if you did that to humans?” every time you talk about some aspect of animal use that you...
Why Not Buy Some Snake Oil With Your Animal... →
In the beginning of 2010, I interviewed Jed Gillen, author of Obligate Carnivore: Cats, Dogs & What it Really Means to be Vegan, a book that is ostensibly about why vegans should raise their companion animals—even cats(!!!)—as vegans. As I said in the introduction to that interview, I got that book because I was sure this Jed Gillen had to be a ludicrous dogmatist with no grasp on...
Why Vegans Should Strike Meat Off the Agenda
Yesterday someone posted this comment on my blog: “It is amazing the lengths people will go to to justify causing unnecessary suffering.”
I have gone to some lengths, admittedly, but is this blog a justification for unnecessary suffering? That’s hard to say without knowing the definition of “necessary.” Is survival necessary? Is thriving necessary? Is pleasure and...
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Confessions of an Ex-Moralist →
From Joel Marks:
I used to think that animal agriculture was wrong. Now I will call a spade a spade and declare simply that I very much dislike it and want it to stop. Has this lessened my commitment to ending it? I do not find that to be the case at all. Does this lessen my ability to bring others around to sharing my desires, and hence diminish the prospects of ending animal...
July 2011
3 posts
Why the Top Priority of Vegans Should be Human...
“If you don’t want to die, don’t be born!” — Child soldiers in Johnny Mad Dog.
In Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming Into Existence, lovable curmudgeon David Benatar argues that life always contains suffering and death and so we cause unnecessary harm by having children. Harm is only possible through existence, and though life contains pleasures, the good almost...
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Interview With a Vegan: Adam Weitz......
Adam is a graduate student and instructor of philosophy, maintains the food blog H.E.A.L.T.H., and is a film review editor for the Journal of Critical Animal Studies. He emailed me in March of this year; he’d come to my blog wanting to hate it, but found himself appreciating some of my arguments, and hoped I would discuss veganism with him. I didn’t follow up on the email, but Adam got...
June 2011
14 posts
1 tag
Veganism is Not the Lifestyle of Least Harm, and...
In 2003, Steven Davis wrote a paper called, “The Least Harm Principle May Require That Humans Consume a Diet Containing Large Herbivores, Not a Vegan Diet.” As you might have guessed from the title, the paper intended to show that a diet including ruminant animals fed on grass would kill fewer animals than a diet based purely on vegan agriculture. Davis wrote:
[A] vegan diet...
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Interview With a Vegan Paleontologist: "The Humane...
Robert, aka “The Humane Hominid”, is the vegan paleontologist behind PaleoVeganology, a blog that looks at the evolution of humans and animals, as well as the paleo diet movement, from an ethical vegan perspective.
Robert went vegetarian in high school “to impress a pretty girl,” and stayed that way for the animals. He has been vegan for six years. This didn’t stop...
Justice Nears for Invasive Species →
According to “alien eater” and subsistence hunter Jackson Landers, the invasive species eating movement is about to take off.
It's What's For Dinner →
By Scott Korb:
We must remember that when it comes to our relationship with animals, managing their supposed fear and dread of us—presumably to mitigate both their suffering and our guilt—is not a new proposition. We’ve been doing it, or so we have always imagined, since the beginning. If humanity was understood to inspire fear and dread in animals as we hear in Genesis, we must also have...
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It's Easier to Tolerate Sinners in Christianity...
Despite the reputation that Christians have for being judgmental, the Christian view of non-believing sinners is potentially more forgiving than veganism’s. Christians want to save sinners from themselves, or from Satan, or, you could also say, from God’s overblown standards. Though Christians wouldn’t exactly put it this way, their conception of saving frames God as the brutal...
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Why Stun One But Shoot the Other? →
After seeing an agricultural scientist shove his arm into a fistulated cow, Marianne Thieme went vegan and founded Party for the Animals, a Dutch political party devoted to advancing animal welfare. They won two seats in Dutch parliament, which is now on the verge of passing Party for the Animals’ law to rescind the legal exemption allowing Jews and Muslims to kill animals for food without...
“I think consuming animal products is a moral wrong, but just because someone...”
– thejoewoods
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Interview With an Animal Activist: Camille Marino
Camille Marino is the founder and Senior Editor of Negotiation is Over and is on the Advisors and Speakers Panel of the North American Animal Liberation Press Office. NIO strives to be an instrument of defiance, disruption, disobedience, subversion, creative and aggressive grassroots action, and a catalyst for revolutionary change. NIO’s belief is that “Total liberation — human...
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Interview With a Vegan: Joshua Katcher
Joshua Katcher launched The Discerning Brute in 2008 as a resource for “Fashion, Food & Etiquette for the Ethically Handsome Man”. With a focus on sustainability, social justice and animal rights, Katcher deconstructs the mainstream understanding of masculinity and offers a vision of men that are protectors, defenders, and heroes for animals and the environment. His lecture...
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“Veganism is not hard; ever noticed how picky almost every person placing their...”
– Nil Zacharias, “The Inconvenience of Being Vegan”
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Mark Zuckerberg and the Annoyance of Non-Vegan...
If you saw a goat-shaped cloud in the sky recently, it might have been the soul of one of Mark Zuckerberg’s meals. The CEO of facebook and anti-hero of David Fincher’s The Social Network recently announced that he has already murdered a goat, a chicken, a pig and a lobster as part of a one-year plan to eat only animals he has snuffed out himself, in a quest to get in touch with the...
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Interview With an Ex-Adventist: Ronald L. Numbers
Ronald L. Numbers is Hilldale Professor of the History of Science and Medicine and of Religious Studies, and a member of the department of medical history and bioethics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he has taught for over three and a half decades. He has written or edited more than two dozen books, including, most recently, Galileo Goes to Jail and Other Myths about Science and...
May 2011
5 posts
1 tag
“But if an individual felt it was necessary for the [vivisector] to be...”
– Nicoal Sheen, Negotiation Is Over
James McWilliams Explains Why We Must Not Eat if... →
B.R. Myers is the most articulate anti-meat scold at The Atlantic, but James McWilliams is the most prolific. His recent contribution to the food debate, “Foodies vs. Darwin: How Meat Eaters Ignore Science,” starts off like a less interesting version of Myers’ “The Moral Crusade Against Foodies,” with finger wags aplenty at food writers who care more about gustatory...
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The Moral Schizophrenia of Farm Sanctuaries
A lot of us say that we like animals… and yet we gleefully eat their tortured, rotting corpses. I, for instance, think ducks are adorable, but this doesn’t stop me from eating duck tongue every chance I get. To animal rights philosopher Gary L. Francione, this makes me and most of the world “moral schizophrenics”. But perhaps meat eaters are not the only ones who need to...
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Why Bugs Annoy Vegans
Bugs are small, they get around, they like our food, we need them for their pollination skills and there are just so damn many of them. And because of all this, we are killing them constantly — especially in agriculture. Yet they meet the vegan qualifications for suffering consideration and rights.
This is a problem.
Recently I’ve seen a couple of vegan blogs criticizing...
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April 2011
10 posts
2 tags
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The Survival Exemption: Great for Vegans Stranded...
Three major animal rights philosophers agree: it is okay to kill animals when you have no other form of sustenance.
None of this discussion is intended to suggest that people who need to kill animals in order to survive – people living in poverty who are struggling to get enough to feed themselves and their families, or those living a traditional hunting and gathering existence – should not do...
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Interview With Rhys Southan of Let Them Eat Meat →
Jimmy More of Livin’ La Vida Low Carb interviewed me at the beginning of March, and posted the podcast interview today. I haven’t listened to it yet because I’m too terrified, but on his blog Jimmy included a detailed summary of what we talked about. “He” is me:
* Why he initially decided to become a vegan after high school
* His progression from eliminating meat...
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“Apparently my books may have been bound with a non vegan glue? I can’t...”
– TheFounder
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Stock Photos and the Illusion of Veganism
ROSENCRANTZ: We think not so, my lord.
HAMLET: Why, then, ‘tis none to you; for there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.
— Hamlet and Rosencrantz
ALEX: I feel like i’ve been staring at a nudie mag only to find out that the centerfold is underage.
— Alex, on why he is upset that VegNews magazine used stock photos of animal products as stand-ins for...
VegNews Passing off Meat as Yummy Vegan Yumminess →
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How Animals Eating Each Other Royally Screws...
“Hey vegan, why is it okay for animals to eat animals if it’s wrong for us to eat animals?”
Though a cliché, and probably on a “defensive omnivore bingo” card somewhere, there’s something to this. Vegans say that causing animal suffering is wrong. But animals cause suffering to each other all the time. Shouldn’t vegans see that as wrong too?
Vegans have...
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How Will We Talk Aliens Out of Eating Us if We Eat...
One of the major worries that vegans have about humanity’s meat habit is that an advanced alien species will come to Earth, see that we’re eating animals, and then think it’s okay to eat us. Jonathan Safran Foer, just one of many meat abstainers to raise this concern, asks in Eating Animals:
If we were to one day encounter a form of life more powerful and intelligent than our...
Why Vegans Can't Disown the Latest Vegan Baby...
Whenever a vegan baby dies — a rare but always heavily publicized occurrence — the vegan community initiates a ritual shaming and shunning of the responsible parents so as to keep veganism’s reputation pristine. Nothing is allowed to tarnish the big, shiny green V. This damage control is invariably some version of: ”Veganism didn’t do that, bad parenting did it!...
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Vegan Parents Sentenced to Five Years in Prison... →
I am going to post my own take on this story this weekend.