“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 heard this line a million times and they have a few stock answers for it:

1. “We can’t look to nature for moral guidance.”

2. “Animals that eat animals need to do so in order to survive, and veganism makes an exception for survival.”

3. “Animals can eat other animals because they don’t have a conscience and thus don’t grasp the moral implications of their actions. Unlike us.”

Point 1, a naturalistic fallacy accusation, only applies when the question is worded along the lines of, “Animals eat each other, so why shouldn’t we eat them?” That’s a little different. “Why is it okay for animals to eat animals if it’s wrong for us to eat animals?” isn’t saying that it is right for us to eat meat because animals do. It is instead asking why animal suffering is only wrong when humans cause it.

Point 2 conflicts with points 1 and 3 because it implies that the vegan code of morality does indeed apply to other animals. It’s just that wild animals are taking advantage of veganism’s survival exemption clause, which states that it’s okay to kill animals when your life depends on it.

The problem with this second one is that it glosses over wild animals who are classified as omnivores or even herbivores but eat meat anyway. Vegans like to say that omnivorism makes humans adaptable, giving us the option of thriving on a vegan diet. As omnivores, we can choose to act as herbivores and still survive, which means the only reasons for us to eat animal products are taste, convenience, habit and tradition. So if vegan morality applies to wild animals, as point two is assuming it does, omnivorous animals who haven’t run out of plant food sources have no excuse for ever eating animals. Chimpanzees who can thrive on a vegan diet but occasionally go on an “unnecessary” joy hunt for the pleasure of eating flesh have committed a moral wrong. And so have carnivores who eat more than they absolutely need to survive. After all, vegans tell ex-vegans who betray the animals for health reasons that they should eat only the bare minimum of animal products required to get by. If vegan morality applies to animals, then carnivores ought to kill only what they must to live, of course making sure to tear apart their prey as painlessly and humanely as possible. If wild carnivores kill any more than that, according to point two, they have committed a wrong. Wild carnivores would also need to indulge in cannibalism now and again, as per the argument from marginal cases, to avoid speciesism. 

Most vegans will drop point two if you put it that way. However, there are a few vegans who will say that wild carnivores and omnivores are wrong and must be stopped. This is the most consistent approach for vegans to take, but it is also untenable because it is a utilitarian stance that puts suffering reduction above all else, which leads to all sorts of mayhem. For instance, the surest way to abolish suffering is to wipe out all life, so this argument would have us kill all beings with a capacity to suffer. At the very least, humans — who cause more suffering than any other animal — would have to go. Most vegans, then, prefer to avoid committing to point two. 

Points 1 and 2 are just time killers anyway. The headliner here is point 3. In his 1979 book Practical Ethics, Peter Singer wrote:

The decisive point, however, is that nonhuman animals are not capable of considering the alternatives open to them or of reflecting on the ethics of their diet. Hence it is impossible to hold the animals responsible for what they do, or to judge that because of their killing they ‘deserve’ to be treated in a similar way. Those who read these lines, on the other hand, must consider the justifiability of their dietary habits. You cannot evade responsibility by imitating beings who are incapable of making this choice.

There we have it from “the father of the animal rights movement”: it’s only wrong to cause animal suffering if you know that it’s wrong to cause animal suffering.

This is what vegans mean when they call animals “innocents.” Vegans are more likely to say that about fluffy herbivores like sheep, but technically wolves, sharks and lions qualify as innocents too. No matter how gruesome and appalling the actions of animals, their lack of a moral compass means they cannot be held culpable. They aren’t guilty because they don’t have an inner mechanism to make them feel guilty. How can they violate moral laws when they have no concept of morality? It is okay for animals to rape, murder and steal because they don’t know any better. Even ducks who rape other ducks are still “innocents.” But most humans have a conscience and morality, and thus they ought to know that eating animals and raping ducks is wrong.

That’s usually where the argument ends, leaving vegans to believe that the issue is settled. But actually this stock vegan retort has a fatal flaw that undermines the very foundation of veganism. “It’s not wrong for animals to eat animals because they don’t know it’s wrong” is an appeal to moral relativism — and nothing is deadlier to veganism than moral relativism.

Ignorance of the law is no excuse for breaking it. Unless, that is, ignorance of the law leads to the law’s non-existence, as point three says is the case with the law against animal suffering. If animals eating animals aren’t committing a wrong because they don’t know there is a wrong to commit, vegans are claiming that it is belief in a wrong that creates that wrong. If there is no objective right and wrong that animals disobey by eating each other, that’s because wrongs only come into existence with the ability to conceive of them. Right and wrong, vegans say, are inventions of our consciences. We make morality up based on our feelings or what we want to see happen.

I have to agree with vegans here, but the bad news for them is that this defense of animal-on-animal murder destroys the claim that veganism is an obligatory stance, an objective “moral baseline.” If our conscience and the beliefs derived from it are what create right and wrong, and our conscience doesn’t inform us that eating animals is wrong… it’s not wrong.

Point three could easily be reworded in defense of humans who guiltlessly eat animals:

“Guiltless meat eaters can eat animals because their conscience doesn’t try to stop them and thus they don’t grasp the moral implications of that action. Unlike us.”

Well clearly vegans don’t want to say that. Most meat eaters don’t feel guilty about eating meat; if they did, they would stop. So how can vegans maneuver out of this and continue to proclaim that meat is wrong no matter what anyone else thinks about it?

One option is for vegans to take the moral realist approach and say “Sometimes things are wrong even when we don’t feel or think they are wrong. That is the case with meat. It’s wrong even if your conscience doesn’t realize it.” But then vegans would be contradicting themselves on the wild animal issue, since that would mean it’s wrong for all animals to eat each other even though they don’t know it’s wrong. On top of that, vegans would have to prove that morality is something independent of us that we can somehow discover, and then show us how to uncover all the objectively correct moral rules hidden in the universe, including the one about it being wrong to eat animals.

So that doesn’t work, unless vegans want to embrace point two and preach about the evils of chimpanzees on joy hunts.

If they don’t want to do this, and instead wish to maintain their notion of animals as innocent beings no matter what they do because they lack a conscience, they will need to apply this notion of innocence to humans as well — particularly human psychopaths. If we go along with the vegan defense of animal-on-animal murder, psychopaths are the most innocent humans of all.

Like non-human animals, human psychopaths lack any internal moral guidance. When a violence-prone psychopath tortures and murders a human being, they feel no more remorse than a coyote does for eating your pet cat and leaving her heart on your porch. Similar to a dog trained not to pee inside, psychopaths get that they are not supposed to push people in front of subway trains, but any restraint they exercise is due to the the threat of external repercussions. They do not know murdering is wrong — they do not feel or believe in the wrongness — they just don’t want to go to jail.

Thus the vegan justification excusing animals for eating each other because they lack a capacity for empathy also has to say that no wrong has been committed when a psychopath guiltlessly decapitates a kid on the bus and holds his head to the window for everyone to see. Like the shark who knows not what he does, the human psychopath is an innocent. Ted Bundy is no worse than a dog chasing squirrels.

Unless we want to be speciesist about it. But that would make us as bad as racists, sexists and homophobes, now wouldn’t it? 

There is one difference between savvy human psychopaths and uneducated wild animals that might be worth noting. Unlike psychopaths who understand that killing will get them in trouble and unlike dogs who don’t want their face shoved in a puddle of their own urine, wild animals haven’t been trained at all. They don’t even have the threat of external punishment to keep them in line. Is this what excuses wild animal immorality?

But if morality comes from what powerful people are telling you to do, all this does is rip right and wrong out of the conscience and plop it into the legal system and established social norms. That doesn’t help vegans, at least at the moment, because eating meat is currently legal and socially accepted.

Anyway, vegans hate any sort of “might makes right” philosophy, which still leaves us with individual conscience. And if individual conscience creates morality, meat is okay as long as long as we don’t feel bad about it. 

“But you should feel bad about it!” vegans exclaim. “We feel bad about it! Why don’t you?!”

Could it be because we’re all psychopaths? Some vegans do think so. As “Daniel K. Vegan” writes in “Homo Sapiens or Homo Psychopathiens?”:

[W]hat I saw in Earthlings was so vile and so overwhelming that it truly disgusted me to be associated with the rest of humanity. … I believe our society, hell, our whole damn species, is psychopathic. I can’t think of any sane reason for what we do to the animals. We know they feel pain. We know they suffer and bleed and fear death. We know that when they’re beaten they cry out in agony.

We know they can sense when they’re about to be slaughtered and we know they try to avoid it with every fiber of their being. We know they experience terror and we know that their screams are screams of terror and not of indifference. We know it but that knowledge doesn’t stop most of us from doing it.

Yet some meat eaters make a similar plea for unborn humans. Does this make pro-choice vegans psychopathic? Someone might not feel guilty about eating animals but will feel guilty about driving a car or flying in a plane. Does that mean the vegan with a car is a psychopath for not feeling guilted into biking?

Most of us have a conscience. It’s just that each conscience has its own particular nuances. What activates one may not activate another. Our consciences are polka-dotted with indifference to issues that set others into a passionate rage. This is inconvenient when you want to establish a single morality and yet you’ve already admitted that morality comes from subjective beliefs about right and wrong. But what can ya do?

Arguably we are all partial psychopaths in those areas that bother someone else but not us. A true psychopath, like most non-human animals, simply unifies all those moral blind spots into one brain. Vegans say that in animals this lack of moral feeling is a state of innocence. If they are consistent, they would have to admit that the same is true of a lack of moral feeling in humans. If an overarching moral absence means that you are not responsible for the consequences of any of your actions, scattered moral absences mean that you are not responsible for whatever selected actions don’t inspire your internal guilt-o-meter. Your conscience may as well not exist at the times it doesn’t speak up, and vegans say that a non-existent conscience frees you of immorality. By this logic, which vegans confirm by saying that animals eating each other aren’t committing a wrong, anyone who eats meat without alarming their conscience has done nothing wrong.

This could be why vegans are so insistent on calling meat eaters secretly guilt-ridden, or saying that ex-vegans who critique veganism do so in an attempt to repress their guilt feelings. Without that supposed guilt, vegans have no argument against non-vegans.

So maybe vegans could say that it’s wrong for people who feel guilty about eating meat to eat meat? That might work, but the overtly guilty meat eaters are a niche group that tends to sort itself out anyway. Few can go on feeling like a terrible person every time they open their mouths and put food inside; cognitive dissonance eventually gets the best of those folks, forcing them to become guilt-free flexitarians, humane meat eaters, pescatarians, vegetarians or vegans. That still permits the majority to continue their shameless corpse munching.

But I don’t want to leave vegans flapping in the breeze. Maybe there’s a more effective way to interpret their argument. Perhaps they’re saying that because animals don’t have a conscience at all, because they have zero capacity for moral thinking, it is simply impossible for them to think that eating animals is wrong. Therefore, it’s okay for animals to eat animals. And it’s wrong for humans to eat animals because even if they don’t currently feel guilty about eating animals, the possibility for guilt is there.

We can see the faulty logic operating here if we imagine a group of non-human animals who all have limited consciences that only apply to members of their own species. As far as eating animals from another species, they are just as morally blind as animals who have no sense of morality whatsoever. Yes, these hypothetical animals have consciences, but if their guilt doesn’t kick in when they eat other animals, how can we hold them responsible for this immorality that they cannot see?

Humans who eat meat and feel no guilt about it because non-human animals don’t pluck their heart strings are like the hypothetical animals with a limited moral sense that only prevents them from harming members of their own species. If we can’t hold wolves responsible for their gratuitous flesh eating because they only care about other wolves, how can we hold humans responsible for their gratuitous flesh eating if their consciences can’t be bothered by the slow suffocation of mountains of fish?

Wait. It gets even worse. If vegans argue that potential for thinking that something is wrong is what makes it wrong, there is no limit to the wrongness in this world. What a moral clusterfuck it would be if we accepted this line of thinking! If something is immoral because we have the capacity to think of it as immoral, independent of whether we actually feel any wrongness about it, we would no longer be allowed to use our consciences selectively. Every one of us with a conscience at all would have to think that everything which is, will be or has ever been considered immoral is immoral.

Literally everything would become “wrong.” We would all have to reject science because science goes against religion. We would also all have to reject religion because religion goes against science. And those are only two out of an infinite number of examples. It would be impossible to live like this. Our only escape would be suicide, which would be appropriate since we would have to treat living as wrong; unfortunately we would also have to treat suicide as wrong.

Vegans cannot want to take us down this road. It wouldn’t help the animals anyway, since we would have to think that letting animals live was just as wrong as killing them.

So having a capacity for believing that animal use is wrong is not enough to make it wrong. You have to know it’s wrong for it to be wrong. 

And how does this knowledge come about?

Vegans might want to say that once they’ve told us about factory farming and the importance of animal lives and suffering, we now know that eating meat is wrong. Mere exposure to a viewpoint, however, does not mean that we’ve accepted it. Pro-life activists tell us that abortion is wrong, and they have the gory photos to prove it. But it’s possible to see all that and still have no empathy for fetuses, or have a greater empathy for unwillingly pregnant women. If you watch Earthlings and then take the train to Queens and order a live octopus, which you then chop up and devour as it squirms on your plate, Earthlings has failed to convince you that eating animals is immoral. Which vegans have to say makes it okay.

It doesn’t matter how much animal torture porn vegans throw at us or how many intellectual appeals to consistency they make. To know something, you have to feel it, or have been intellectually convinced of its truth. So if you don’t feel that causing animal suffering is wrong, nor have the arguments convinced you, then — like the morally oblivious fox in the hen house — you don’t know that causing animal suffering is wrong. And by vegan logic that makes it not wrong.

So we’re back to where Peter Singer left us. It’s wrong to eat meat if you know that it’s wrong, and it’s not wrong if you don’t.

Works for me.