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 life enjoyment necessary? Necessary for what? Vegans have turned this into an issue because they recognize that buying vegan food and products—and even just existing—causes suffering and death to animals, so to distinguish themselves from the omnivores they criticize for causing suffering and death to animals, they say the key difference is that vegans cause necessary harm, whereas omnivores cause unnecessary harm.
What exactly is “necessary harm”? For vegans, as far as I can tell, this means harms that vegans cause. The way they often try to justify this unabashedly self-serving definition is by saying that vegans reduce their harm “as much as is possible and practicable.” By this they do not mean that they follow a subsistence lifestyle or a freegan lifestyle that maximizes harm reduction. “As much as is possible and practicable” usually means a consumerist vegan lifestyle, with no limitations on air travel, car travel or technology purchases. Whatever harm each vegan consumer causes, which is impossible to measure, is “necessary.” But eat bone marrow from a grass-fed cow, and no matter how much harm you cause elsewhere in your life, that constitutes unnecessary harm.
Why is the harm that vegans cause necessary? The implication is that it is necessary for survival, but since vegans don’t consume as little as they can get away with in order to merely survive, this can’t be right. What vegans have to argue to differentiate their morally acceptable harms from immoral omnivore harms is either that their vegan harms are in a separate and lesser category of harms, or that the harms are the same kind but that vegans cause far less of them. Or both.
I think most vegans would argue that it’s a mixture of the two, while placing their emphasis on the harms being categorically different. This is when vegans pull out the anti-exploitation argument. Vegans may kill animals and cause them suffering though their consumer purchases and just by existing, but at least they don’t raise domesticated animals and then intentionally kill them in order to eat them. Vegans kill and maim, yes. They do not, however, exploit, and that makes all the difference.
The anti-exploitation slant creates opportunities for non-vegans to justify animal consumption. If it’s okay to thresh animals up alive, or kill them with starvation by destroying their homes and food supplies, or even by poisoning or shooting them to protect crops, it should be okay to eat animals as long as they were killed in a similar or nicer manner. Another problem with the anti-exploitation argument is that while many humans may take it for granted that exploitation is in itself always bad, this is not relevant to animals without a conceptual grasp on being used. For them, it would seem that quality of life and suffering avoidance is key. If it is more tolerable to be a cow who is artificially inseminated and milked and eventually sent to slaughter—but has a secure food source and a low-stress life—than it is to be a wild animal who lives free but has to constantly worry about predators and starvation and might die an inadvertent death at the hands of humans, then it makes no sense to object to animal exploitation, since the animal suffering what we think of as exploitation could still be better off than the unexploited animals scurrying around the woods.
To this, vegans might say that all exploitation is connected, so when you make arguments justifying animal exploitation, you are using the same rhetoric that tries to justify exploitation of humans. This is a bit like the omnivore argument that torturing an animal is bad, not because of what happens to the animal, but for what it says about the psychology of that person and the danger they might pose to humans. If animal exploitation is only objectionable because it can lead to human exploitation, it’s fine to exploit animals as long as it doesn’t cross over to us. And to make sure that doesn’t happen, all we have to do is be speciesist, or find some other way to drive a wedge between human and animal exploitation.
Even though suffering reduction can’t work on its own to justify mandatory consumer veganism (because there are non-vegan ways to reduce suffering more), it at least has the advantage of being concerned with a phenomenon that animals can understand. Preach to Wilbur the pig about inherent value, negative rights and widening the moral sphere, and Wilbur’s eyes glaze over. Give him a kick to illustrate the concept of suffering, and he’ll know exactly what you mean. Animals don’t know when their rights are being violated and they don’t realize the injustice of being used as a means to our ends, but they do know when they are in pain or when their lives are horrible. So to make it seem like the anti-exploitation argument is about improving animal lives rather than boosting human self-esteem, vegans have to transform it into a version of the suffering reduction argument. They need to show that the suffering of animals that humans exploit and kill for food is worse than the suffering of animals who die in nature, or who die as an inadvertent consequence of human hustle and bustle.
It is easy for vegans to show this with factory farming and vivisection. But when the comparison is to humane animal farming, it gets trickier, since being an animal on a humane farm is less stressful and probably nicer than life as a wild animal. Some vegans even think that wild animal suffering is more troubling than factory farmed animal suffering.
If humans can treat animals better than nature does, why shouldn’t we allow ourselves to do that? (I mean aside from masochism and self-loathing.)
Vegans who are tempted to exclaim “intent,” and argue that it’s indefensible to kill an animal on purpose but okay to do it as a foreseeable but unintended consequence of your actions, need to remember the origins of veganism. When Donald Watson coined “vegan” in 1944 and started The Vegan Society, he was reacting to what he saw as a fatal flaw in lacto-ovo vegetarianism, a flaw that vegetarians liked to cover up with the exact same intent argument that vegans use today. Watson thought it was hypocritical for vegetarians to avoid meat out of an aversion to killing, and then eat dairy and eggs even though calves of dairy cows become meat, as do the dairy cows and laying hens. These are foreseeable consequences that vegetarians don’t intend, and yet vegans hold vegetarians accountable for them. If dairy eaters are to blame for the deaths of animals whose flesh they don’t consume, vegans are just as much to blame for the animal death and suffering from agriculture, civilization, their consumer purchases and the space they take up. Vegans catch themselves in their own trap.
Of course, even if the suffering of humanely raised animals is roughly equal to the suffering of wild animals in quality, vegans can still try to say that omnivores cause a higher quantity of suffering. It’s difficult to deny this when omnivores eat animals who aren’t hunted, purely pasture-fed or fed on waste—in other words, when they eat animals who are raised on human-grown plants. Does that mean vegans can get away with saying that they cause the exact necessary amount of harm, and omnivores go beyond this and cause unnecessary harm?
Besides that this standard is arbitrary (since freegans, subsistence hunters and invasive species hunters cause even less harm), there’s another snag for this argument.
Vegans may not be bold enough to interpret the avoidance of “unnecessary harm” as a demand for subsistence living, but most of them do suggest that food and survival are more necessary than convenience, habit, taste, tradition, career success and entertainment. We know this because most vegans say it’s okay to eat meat if you’ll otherwise die a second later, but it’s not okay to stab a bull just because you like to see the red gushing.
Vegans do take care to distinguish food for survival from food for pleasure, though, and tend to think that if you’re eating animal products as a wealthy inhabitant of civilization, food has lost its necessity and is now all fun and games.
Even here, however, vegans are often forced to give in. They’re more forgiving of omnivores who have food allergies to typical vegan staples like soy, wheat and nuts, have fructose malabsorption, have Type O blood (just kidding – vegans don’t believe in that shit), need to be on a low oxalate diet or have a piece of their colon removed. And there are plenty of people who can’t seem to thrive on a vegan diet for no specific reason, and while vegans typically dismiss this as psychological or due to laziness or stupidity, the vegans who do accept that this can happen sometimes think it’s okay for these people to eat minimal amounts of animal products.
In contrast, vegans never think it is okay to train a tiger to tap dance.
All of this would seem to suggest that using animals as food is the most justifiable possible reason for killing them. Which is where the snag comes in. Because if food is the best reason for killing animals, how can vegans criticize omnivores for killing animals for food when vegans kill animals for iphones, gasoline, transportation, houses, roads and other animal-habitat-destroying consequences of civilization? Why is it okay to kill animals to play virtual tennis, but not to eat meat, a source of energy and nutrients that a lot of people say they need in order to feel happy and healthy? Why do vegans who drive and have kids and meat-eating pets think there’s something wrong with me for biking to the farmers market and buying liver?
This problem with the nebulous nature of “unnecessary” doesn’t mean that vegans can’t critique a single thing meat eaters do. Vegans probably can’t say that the existence of an animal raised in good conditions and killed for human food is worse than the fate of wild animals who die because of predators or gas-guzzling, coltan-reliant, breeding vegans with good intentions. And they can’t say that a Wii is more inherently necessary than food. Nevertheless, vegans can say that buying factory farmed animal products when you can afford humanely raised animal products promotes a more brutal suffering than unnecessary vegan entertainment expenses do.
Veganism would become a lot more attractive if vegans lost the idea that eating meat is in itself bad, and focused on areas where the animal suffering is categorically worse than wild animal suffering, especially when the suffering is for pursuits that are especially hard to pass off as “necessary.” If vegans focused on truly frivolous animal use, no exceptions would be required and their moral rules could reasonably be universalized.
If you say that eating meat is wrong, you’ll have to admit that, well, okay, sometimes it isn’t. But if you say that milking bile from bears is wrong, you’re not going to have too many defensive bear bile users coming up with plausible scenarios in which someone desperately needs to cage a bear and siphon its bile at regularly scheduled intervals. Other animal uses that everyone could do without and not die include rodeos (sorry rodeo clowns), zoos, circuses, dog fights, pigeon racing and cockfights. Some vegans might want to include draught animals on that list, but maybe they would change their minds if they saw Old Partner. (Or if they thought about whether they would want to take draught animals from farmers who can’t afford gas-powered tractors.)
Compare the effects of globally banning meat and globally banning rape. The first rule would have to contain a lot of exceptions to avoid messing up and even ending a lot of nice people’s lives. The second rule wouldn’t need a single caveat. If there is no survival exemption that allows racism, sexism or homophobia, why should there be so many exceptions for speciesism? Well, there wouldn’t have to be if vegans admitted that eating animal products was not immoral per se.
