These women are wearing matching chinchilla coats which they all bought at the same store two months ago. It’s hard to imagine anything more immoral than wearing the peeled-off skin of sentient beings as a fashion statement, yet for one woman the coat is moral, for another it is in a grey area, and only for the third is it pure evil. Get ready for some intricacies in vegan philosophy, for here is a situation in which future intent and what is in a person’s mind are more important than what is on her body.
A month after buying her coat, the woman on the left got lost and wandered into a Veggie Fayre. She went to the Vegan Outreach booth, thinking “vegan” was a brand of sausage or cheese and that there would be free samples.
Instead she got a booklet that at first glance looked like something Jews for Jesus would hand out. A few nights later she found the crumpled “Why Vegan?” pamphlet in her patent leather D&G handbag. She’d always known meat was from animals, but had previously been able to put it out of her mind. The shocking images from factory farms and slaughterhouses changed that forever. She watched “Meet Your Meat,” burst into tears and resolved never to exploit animals ever again.
“Oh shit,” she thought. “What about my new coat?”
She joined a vegan support board and asked for their expert opinion. Did she need to burn her leather handbags, her snakeskin boots, her mohair sweaters, her polar bear rug and her chinchilla coat to wash the oceans of blood off her hands? Because if that’s what it took, that’s what she was going to do.
“Can you return the coat?” someone with a vegetable-related pun username asked her. No, the 30 days were up. Nor could she exchange it for anything vegan, since everything at the store was made from flayed animal parts. “You’re in luck!” someone with a fruit-related pun username replied. And that’s when she learned about salvation through “preganism.”
Because she bought the coat before her vegan conversion, because burning the coat wouldn’t bring any animals back, and because she now knew the coat was wrong and would never buy another one like it again, the coat was deemed “pregan” and thus acceptable to wear. She doesn’t even have to say a prayer for the deceased rodents whose fur now keeps her warm and sexy. (But when she thinks of it, she does.)
Thus, knowing the coat is wrong is what makes it not wrong. Which is why it’s called “the pregan paradox.”
But there can be no pregan loophole without veganism, so let’s look at the case of the woman in the middle, who never got the “Why Vegan?” memo.
On the day of purchase all three of these coats were unconscionable. And they stayed that way until 30 days later when it was no longer possible to return them. If the store had an exchange policy that lasted indefinitely and vegan items to exchange for, these coats could have remained immoral forever. But neither of those things were true.
Nevertheless, only one of the coats has gone full moral. As you can see, the coat of the woman in the middle exists in far murkier territory. But why is she possibly guilty while the woman on the left is in the clear? The situation is the same for both of them in the sense that the damage is done and not wearing the coat isn’t going to save any animals. Just like the woman on the left, the woman in the middle couldn’t return the coat even if she wanted to.
Ah see, but there’s the catch. She doesn’t want to, because she’s not vegan.
Middle woman doesn’t think that wearing the fur of murdered animals is wrong, and that misconception is what makes it wrong. Mainly this is because of the implications for her future actions — nothing is stopping her from buying another morbid death coat, unlike the woman on the left who has promised her message board to buy a Park Slope neighborhoodie next time.
The reason she’s in a grey zone rather than out-and-out evil is because we can’t discount the possibility that she’ll discover veganism before she buys her next coat. If she does that, and her next coat is V-certified, then it will turn out that her chinchilla coat had become moral as soon as she could no longer return it. If, however, she never discovers veganism — or worse, rejects it — and buys another fur coat, this original coat will retroactively become immoral.
Which brings us to the woman on the right. She is an ex-vegan. She gave up 10 years of moral living for a piece of bacon, and she didn’t stop there. Getting the girls together for “a wild and glamorous fur day” was her idea, a selfish “fuck you” to the animal kingdom she had thanklessly defended for too many years. Of course she was never a real vegan and did it wrong, but that’s another issue. There is no hope that she will ever be vegan again, which makes her coat (and her) as bad as it gets.
