For Vegans, Human Health Comes Before Animal Lives

Most vegans and meat eaters agree: the lives of animals are not worth enough for us to willingly sacrifice our health for them. Vegans just don’t think that giving up animal products entails such a sacrifice.

In The Case for Animal Rights, Tom Regan writes:

There is no question that meat is a nutritious food. In particular, it is a source of complete protein, containing all the amino acids essential for human health and vitality. If it were true that these nutrients were not otherwise obtainable, then the case for eating meat, even given the rights view, would be on solid ground. If we were certain to ruin our health by being vegetarians, or run a serious risk of doing so…and given that the deterioration of our health would deprive us of a greater variety and number of opportunities for satisfaction than those within the range of farm animals, then we would be making ourselves, not the animals, worse-off if we became vegetarians. Thus might we appeal to the liberty principle as a basis for eating meat, assuming the other provisos of that principle were satisfied.

To concede the necessity of meat in a healthy diet is to concede more than is meat’s due. The essential amino acids are essential, that is true; but there are alternative ways to obtain them, ways that do not rely on meat. … Certain amino acids are essential for our health. Meat isn’t. We cannot, therefore, defend meat-eating on the grounds that we will ruin our health if we don’t eat it, or even that we will run a very serious risk of doing so if we abstain. Any “risk” we run can be easily overcome by taking the modest trouble required to do so. (337)

In Eating Animals, Jonathan Safran Foer approvingly quotes the American Dietetic Association’s vegetarian position paper giving its stamp of approval to a vegetarian diet, and writes:

I don’t think that individual health is necessarily a reason to become vegetarian, but certainly if it were unhealthy to stop eating animals, that might be a reason not to be vegetarian. It would most certainly be a reason to feed my son animals. (145)

In Animal Liberation, Peter Singer writes:

Apart from the tastiness of their meals, people contemplating vegetarianism are most likely to worry about whether they will be adequately nourished. These worries are entirely groundless. … Nutritional experts no longer dispute about whether animal flesh is essential; they now agree that it is not. If ordinary people still have misgivings about doing without it, these misgivings are based on ignorance. (179 – 182)

And later in Practical Ethics, Singer persisted:

If animals count in their own right, our use of animals for food becomes questionable. Inuit living a traditional lifestyle in the far north where they must eat animals or starve can reasonably claim that their interest in surviving overrides that of the animals they kill. Most of us cannot defend our diet in this way. People living in industrialized societies can easily obtain an adequate diet without the use of animal flesh. Meat is not necessary for good health or longevity. Indeed, humans can live healthy lives without eating any animal products at all… (54)

In “Vegan Power: Anecdotes of Inspiration”, James McWilliams writes:

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.

Whether you are convinced by a book such as The China Study or not, there’s no disputing the fact that a diet rich in plant-based, unprocessed food is a smart diet. My point here isn’t to suggest that a diet including modest amounts of lean meat can’t be healthy. It surely can be. Instead, I want to reiterate the equally healthful consequences of a healthy vegan diet. I can brook a million excuses for why a person simply cannot go vegan — cheese! yogurt! cream in my coffee! — but the assertion that veganism, when done right, isn’t healthy is just plain bunk.

In Introduction to Animal Rights: Your Child or the Dog, Gary Francione writes:

It is in no way necessary for human beings to eat meat or other animal products. Indeed, voices as mainstream as the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the American Dietetic Association have now recognized that a completely plant-based diet, supplemented by vitamin B-12, can provide the human body with sufficient protein, vitamins, minerals and other nutrients to maintain excellent health. For health-related reasons, animal foods have been coming under greater suspicion within the mainstream scientific community. Even the most traditional health care professionals are urging a reduction in our consumption of meat and other animal products; others are calling for the elimination of such products from our diet. It is an uncontested fact that vegetarians have lower rates of many forms of cancer, heart disease, diabetes, hypertension, gallstones and kidney stones, and other diseases. And we seem to hear on an almost daily basis of illnesses—ranging from simple food poisoning to more exotic maladies such as Creutzfeldt-Jakob (“mad cow” disease)—connected with eating meat. Countries that have shifted from plant-based diets to meat-based diets have experienced increased rates of obesity, heart diseases, and cancer. So not only are animal food unnecessary for our health; they may very well be detrimental to it. (14)

Finally, here’s Francione in an article called “Veganism: Morality, Health, and the Environment”:

We have a moral obligation that we owe to ourselves to be healthy; ingesting products that cause us harm is a form of violence we inflict on ourselves. The empirical evidence becomes stronger each day that animal products are not only not needed for health; they actually cause harm to our bodies in all sorts of ways. Even small amounts of animal products can be harmful. Just as we have a moral obligation not to smoke cigarettes (even a “few”), we have an obligation to make sure that the things we put in and on our bodies (remember that what you put on your skin gets into your body!) do not cause harm. We owe this obligation not only to ourselves, but to the humans and nonhumans who love us and who depend on us. … So, in the end, although I maintain that the moral argument in favor of animal rights and the spiritual argument in favor of nonviolence are the most important notions, we also have moral obligations to ourselves (and to the humans and nonhumans who depend on us) to maintain and improve our health.

Francione doesn’t provide a citation for his assertion that we have moral obligations to maintain and improve our health; but if he’s sticking to that, he’s committed himself to a strange position for someone who philosophizes for soy milk. Not only is meat immoral… so are vegan cupcakes! Even better, if it turned out that a diet with animal products was healthier than one without one, we wouldn’t only have the option to give up veganism: we’d be morally obligated to eat meat!

But of course Francione is convinced that animal products don’t need to be part of anyone’s healthy diet. So are Regan, Singer, Foer, McWilliams, Norris, Messina, Paleovegan and just about every other well-known advocate of veganism.

So what if they changed their minds on this issue and decided that humans, or a lot of them at least, were healthier when their diet included animal products? Apparently, they’d be fine with these humans eating meat. Even vegan leaders allow a health exception to veganism: it’s just that they see this exception as almost entirely theoretical. Notice that when ex-vegans quit veganism for health reasons, most vegans don’t say, “You should have sacrificed your health if you truly cared about animals.” Instead they say, “You did veganism wrong.”

The difference between many vegans and meat eaters, then, is empirical rather than philosophical. No one is saying that animals are worth making big sacrifices over. One side just thinks that veganism is a big sacrifice, and the other side thinks it isn’t.

Yeah, there are plenty of meat eaters who think that meat is unhealthy or unnecessary for health, and yet eat it anyway. And there are also some vegans who would stay vegan even if they started to suspect that it was causing them health difficulties. Those few martyrs aside, though, if vegans were a character in The Wire, they’d be Dante—not Brandon. Vegans are cool with giving up animal products when they think all they’re losing is some measure of habit, convenience, tradition and taste. But if their health starts to nosedive and they don’t think they can fix it without animal products, they’re suffocating salmon and chucking baby chicks into grinders in no time.

Hey, what about the fucking animals, guys? What’s a little brain fog and fatigue when we’re talking about animal lives?

Vegans rarely tire of citing The China Study’s case against animal products or the ADA’s claim that a vegan diet is appropriate for all stages of the lifecycle. But why should it matter whether or not veganism is healthy? It’s not like it would be worth killing hundreds of animals a year just to live longer or have a spring in your step, would it?

Harish at Counting Animals recently crunched some numbers and determined that going vegetarian “saves more than 406 animals each year—a vegetarian saves at least an animal a day!” And that’s just udder-sucking, chicken-period-thieving lacto-ovos. No doubt Harish would find that vegans “save” even more.

Granted, “saves” is a stretch in this context, since what vegans are actually doing is preventing animals from being born through their inaction, something vegans would have been much better at doing by never being born. As for the specific numbers, meat eaters clearly eat less than an animal a day if they’re mostly eating bigger ones like cows, pigs and lambs. Still, meat eating obviously creates a demand for killing animals, whether the motive is taste or health. And if it’s anything like 406 a year, per person—a number Harish says is conservative—that’s a lot of animals to kill just because you feel miserable without a daily dose of flesh to improve your mood. Sure, a lifetime with severe depression sucks, but could that justify taking an animal’s life every day?

For vegans, the answer to this seems to be “yes.”

If veganism were guaranteed to kill you within three months, almost no one would go vegan. If it merely shaved a minute off your life, this probably wouldn’t be much of a deterrent at all. But what if veganism tended to reduce human lifespans by 50 years? At first that seems like a big chunk of your own life to give up for any cause. But look at the trade-off: if you live to 100 instead of 50 because you ate meat every day instead of never, you’ve (arguably) killed at least 40,600 extra animals just to selfishly enjoy a bonus half century. Even if all those animals were killed only a year before the end of their average lifespans, which they almost certainly weren’t, this would imply that 50 years of your life is worth more than 40,600 years of the lives of other animals. Harsh, man. It’s not like it would be these animals’ fault if humans had a nutritional need for animal products.

Yet none of the major animal rights advocates is willing to say that everyone should go vegan even if it kills us.

In veganism, human health comes before the lives of other animals. Vegans just happen to think you don’t need animal products to be healthy. If they thought otherwise, most of them would eat animals… no matter how many animal lives it took to cure their brain fog.

--Tagged under: Vegan Leaders--

--Tagged under: Health--

--Tagged under: Ethics--

How to Make Animals Go Extinct: The Vegan Way

Veganism prohibits humans from exploiting and murdering animals in order to use their bodies as material goods, but there are still plenty of ways for humans to eliminate animals without a single amendment to the vegan constitution. Though most vegans wouldn’t want to do this, it would even be theoretically possible—problems of practicality aside—for a vegan humanity to get rid of almost every sentient animal on the planet other than humans without doing anything that veganism considers unethical.

Here are some of the weapons that vegans would have in their arsenal if for some reason they wanted to vanquish other animals and have the planet to themselves:

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--Tagged under: Ethics--

A Vegan World Means Less Food For Humans (maybe)

“A vegan world can feed more humans,” is one of those absurd less = more vegan arguments — like that “veganism increases dietary variety” — that only makes sense when you consider a certain kind of omnivorism. There’s a good chance that someone who eats nothing but chicken nuggets and french fries will develop a more varied diet if she becomes vegan, since she would have no choice but to dabble in the fruit and vegetable aisles, if only to survive. But dream up the most diverse plant-only diet conceivable and it’s not going to have more variety than the most diverse omnivorous diet conceivable. It’s a physical impossibility. All you need to do is take that vegan diet and add a dash of smoked salmon to it and suddenly you have even more variety.

In “Universal Veganism?,” Jean Kazez makes a similarly obvious point that is lost on many who see veganism as the solution to world hunger: if humans reduce the number of foods they allow themselves to eat, there will be less food for humans.

Kazez writes:

71% of earth is covered with ocean, and seafood provides 20% of animal protein, world wide — 50% in some countries.  In a vegan world, the ocean simply stops being used as source of nutrition.  Land gets wasted too. Only 10% of the earth’s land surface is arable—used to grow for crops.  26% of the land surface is used as grazing land.  Most of that grazing land is not convertible to cropland, so if animals weren’t being raised on it, it would simply be lost to food production.  The total lost to food production: about 79% of the planet’s surface.

Some vegans might say that Kazez has unfairly overlooked seaweed, and a few vegans might even say that vegans can eat bivalves and jellyfish; nevertheless, it would be difficult to credibly argue that a vegan humanity has more food available to it than an otherwise vegan humanity that eats just about every kind of animal from the sea.

It’s probably impossible to figure out the exact percentage of grazing land that cannot be used as cropland, but there’s certainly some, and if you raise animals on it instead of using that land for nothing, that’s more food for humans. On top of that, eating insects and wild land animals increases the human food supply, as would repealing the taboos against eating dead pets and family members. The latter is unlikely to happen outside of mass starving scenarios, but still, the point is that this particular argument for veganism makes no logical sense. 

A lot of vegans see it differently because they only consider animals that are fed on foods that humans can eat. Yes, there’s plenty of that going on, but you could abolish that without abolishing all animal product consumption. And if you did, you’d have a world with more food for humans than a vegan world would.

Or maybe not.

Devin, a commenter, made this point:

If it truly is most calorie-efficient to eat plants directly than it is to eat other animals that eat plants, if humans were to convert the entire biosphere to food production for humans and make every other animal (non-autotroph, anyway) go extinct, then it could in theory provide the most possible food for humans. After all, if every other animal is extinct, they’re not consuming any part of our potential food supply.

Ethics-centric veganism does not oppose humans taking over land for homes, agriculture, entertainment facilities, general civilization business or anything else we want to use it for, as long as our purpose is anything other than intentionally killing animals in order to use their products for ourselves. It doesn’t go against veganism to knock over a forest filled with animals and turn it into cropland for humans. Vegans know that would kill a lot of animals for our own selfish ends, but that’s okay as long it’s a side consequence of our territorial expansion rather than the primary objective. Similarly, it wouldn’t go against veganism to transform the oceans into algae factories, even though that would kill off the sentient sea creatures, since the foreseen fish deaths would be a side-effect rather than the primary goal.

Theoretically, then, a vegan world might provide the most food—but only if humans were to achieve this world by exterminating all other animals and planting highly efficient crops on their graves. So long as other animals exist, humans who eat animals will always have a greater potential food supply than humans who don’t. But maybe a world without other animals (and is thus vegan by default) is one that could be maximally exploited for human sustenance.

Even here, however, veganism doesn’t necessarily rule. Any animals who eat food that humans cannot — such as grass or waste — could still add to the human food supply if they only ate grass on land that could not be used for crops and were successfully kept away from human food. And of course the cannibalism taboo also reduces the potential food supply for humans in a vegan world.

It’s likely that the world with the largest possible food supply for humans would be one where the oceans were turned to edible algae, the forests were knocked down for soybeans, only the grass- and waste-eating animals were spared extinction and human funerals were barbecues instead of burials.

Any takers?

--Tagged under: Environment--

Vegetables: What Big Agriculture and James McWilliams Have In Common

James McWilliams has written another anti-meat column for The Atlantic. That’s his beat after all. Let’s see if it contains any fallacies.

Here’s McWilliams:

I’ve repeatedly argued that supporting alternatives to the industrial production of animal products serves the ultimate interest of industrial producers. The decision to eat animal products sourced from small, local, and sustainable farms might seem like a fundamental rejection of big business as usual. It is, however, an implicit but powerful confirmation of the single most critical behavior necessary to the perpetuation of factory farming: eating animals. So long as consumers continue to eat meat, eggs, and dairy — even if they are sourced from small farms practicing the highest welfare and safety standards — they’re providing, however implicitly, an endorsement of the products that big agriculture will always be able to produce more efficiently and cheaply. And thus dominate.

The logic of this argument — that you shouldn’t buy more ethically acceptable versions of items that are usually produced unethically because this could be seen as endorsing the unethical version — could be used against purchasing everything from shirts to soy beans. Should we not buy clothing from manufacturers paying their employees a living wage because wearing ethical clothing could be seen as an endorsement of clothing on the whole, which is more often than not made by underpaid workers? Should we not buy tomatoes from the farmers market because that would endorse tomatoes, which are most efficiently produced by slave migrant labor?

Just because McWilliams has “repeatedly argued” this point doesn’t mean it makes sense.

He continues:

Until the act of eating animals itself is made problematic, “voting with our forks” will be little more than a vacuous slogan. Critics claim that it’s unrealistic to expect a substantial transition to veganism, and advocate the support of small-scale animal farms as a more achievable alternative. What’s truly unrealistic, however, is the expectation that small, more eco-friendly and “humane” farms will permanently defy economic logic and convince a meaningful percentage of meat and dairy eaters to spend substantially more money to buy a nobler egg or pork chop. I’d bet on a massive transition to veganism before a massive transition to economic irrationality.

How is it irrational to spend more money on animal products from farms you approve of because you don’t like animal torture, but rational to never eat animal products again for similar reasons? Becoming an “ethical omnivore” does have its costs. You usually have to pay more for animal products, though if you’re not afraid of offal or less popular animals, you can often get meat on the cheap. At a farmers market near me, you can get a whole wild rabbit for £4, and half a pig’s head for a little more than that: about a week’s ration of meat for two people for around £10. True, so-called “ethical omnivores” often can’t eat meat when they’re at restaurants or in other situations where they don’t have control over the ingredients, and thus they have to eat like vegans sometimes (or take the bivalve option if there is one). But unless vegans practice freeganism or are cool with eating bivalves, insects and other animal products that fit vegan ethics, they always have to eat like vegans, making “convenience, habit and taste” even harder to satisfy for them than for ethics-minded omnivores. After all, ethical omnivores can eat the vegan option but vegans can’t eat the humane meat option. So how is veganism less of a sacrifice and thus less irrational than eating only humane meat?

It’s irrational to knowingly pay more for something that doesn’t contain any additional value. It’s not irrational to pay more for humane meat because if you care about animal treatment, it’s a much better product than factory farmed meat. As long as there are people who care about animal suffering but don’t see anything wrong with intentionally killing animals for food, there will be a market for humane meat.

And really, McWilliams doesn’t think people behave in economically irrational ways? How would he explain the existence of name brand cereals when the generic store versions are so much cheaper (just to give one of endless possible examples)? And unlike humane meat vs. factory farmed meat, there’s not even a discernible difference between Rice Krispies and Crisp Ricies.

McWilliams again:

A point that’s germane to this issue, but frequently muted, is how the preexisting power and amorality of industrial animal agriculture enables it to manipulate the rhetoric of alternative animal-based systems to its profitable advantage. Agribusiness has been conspicuously nonplussed by the rise of the food movement, shrugging its shoulders as it markets itself as “sustainable,” “supporting family farms,” and steadfastly oriented toward the “welfare” of animals. Industry grasps, then thrills in manipulating, the axiom that language is both cheap and powerful. Industrial machinations are helped along by the fact that the food movement’s buzzwords are slackened catchphrases that allow the largest pig farm on the planet to advertise itself as “humane” and “sustainable.” This fungible verbal lexicon, with every well-meaning new term appropriated by the marketers at Big Ag, is the food movement’s Achilles’ heel.

Translation: never trust labels. If you care about the conditions of the farm you’re buying from, research it. Just because corporations co-opt buzzwords doesn’t mean that the original idea behind “humane” no longer exists.

McWilliams writes:

A recent confirmation of this point is the emergence of an organization called humanewatch.org. Contrary to how it sounds, HumaneWatch is the self-appointed watchdog — think Cujo — of a group that actually does watch out for dogs, and many other animals, with admirable dedication: the Humane Society of the United States. Calling HSUS a “stealth animal rights organization” that’s stealing money from the public to promote secret agendas, humanewatch.com is a propaganda tool of the Center for Consumer Freedom. According to Source Watch, CCF is “a front group for the restaurant, alcohol, tobacco, and other industries” that “run media campaigns which oppose the efforts of scientists, health advocates, doctors, animal advocates, [and] environmentalists.” Its website offers a sordid example of how the pursuit of sustainable animal agriculture, so long as the consumption of animal products is encouraged, easily plays into the hands of influential industrial interests.

If we are to take any tangible point from McWilliams’ paragraph before this one, it would have to be that we shouldn’t support small-scale animal farms because corporations that don’t care about animal welfare can easily steal and distort the language of humane meat suppliers. Yet to illustrate this point, McWilliams says that the Humane Society of the United States (a pro-animal organization that McWilliams seems to support) has had its name co-opted and distorted by the odious pro-meat group the Center for Consumer Freedom. So if we can’t trust humane meat suppliers because cruel corporations have taken their language, shouldn’t we not support the Humane Society of the United States now that their language has been co-opted too?

Right now industry is merely stealing words, concepts, and websites. In the unlikely event that mass economic irrationality prevails, and there is in fact a statistically meaningful transition to supporting the non-industrial production of animal products, what’s to stop industrial agriculture from building a few token sustainable farms where the animals are pastured, pampered, and publicized? Most of the small-scale animal farmers I know are literally living hand to mouth. Tyson’s or Smithfield wouldn’t suffer such hardships.

So if there is a massive change toward supporting non-industrial animal farming, this will actually be worse for non-industrial farmers because large agriculture corporations will act like the best non-industrial farmers and raise some of their animals humanely, thus competing with them more directly? Interesting.

If it were the case that Smithfield and Tyson decided to get in on some of the humane animal action, ethical omnivores would then face the dilemma that vegans face now: should they buy food that fits their ethics from a company that otherwise doesn’t? If the answer is yes, then - like vegans who buy vegan food produced by non-vegan companies - they will consider buying humane meat from Smithfield or Tyson. If not, they’ll continue to buy from the small-scale farmer. And they might still choose the small farmer for other reasons anyway, perhaps because they’d rather support them than a corporation, even though both produce meat from non-tortured animals.

If there were more ethical omnivores and this prompted big companies to try to satisfy that demand by meeting ethical omnivore standards, they could siphon off some of the dollars that would have gone to small-scale farmers. But with more ethical omnivores on the whole, there would still be plenty left to support small farmers. Either way, there would be more humane farming, so I’m not sure I see the problem.

We’ll never beat Big Ag at its own game. Those of us concerned with the myriad problems of industrial agriculture will make genuine progress toward creating agricultural systems that are ethical, ecologically sound, and supportive of human health only when we pursue alternatives that are truly alternative. The most immediate and direct way to take a step in this direction is to stop eating animals.

“Big Ag” makes vegetables, fruits and grains as well as animal products. If buying meat directly from farmers or raising animals for food in your backyard doesn’t accomplish anything because big corporations also raise animals for food, then growing your own vegetables or buying vegan food also will fail because it too is trying to beat Big Ag at its own game. Why is McWilliams selectively lashing out at meat when all his arguments apply equally to vegan food?

Oh right. Because he’s vegan.

--Tagged under: James McWilliams--

--Tagged under: Vegan Leaders--

Vegans May Not Be Speciesist, But That Doesn’t Mean They Don’t Discriminate

“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 we choose to save an orphaned an-encephalitic human infant whose existence is a secret over a chimpanzee.”

– UrConfused

Some vegans like to think of veganism as the final frontier in ethical equality, the movement that could finally put an end to the discrimination and violence that humans have practiced since splitting into tribes. It’s a common enough view that sexism, ableism, racism, religious discrimination, classism and heterosexism have to go. All this leaves, say some vegans, is speciesism: and worldwide veganism would crush that.

But does it really?

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--Tagged under: Ethics--

--Tagged under: Featured Entries--

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)

--Tagged under: James McWilliams--

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--

--Tagged under: Featured Entries--

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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--Tagged under: Ethics--

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--

--Tagged under: Featured Entries--

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