Let Them Eat Meat

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

Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:59:00 +0000

“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?

Consider the following passages from pro-animal philosophers, which supposedly do not undermine anti-speciesism ideals…

Practical Ethics by Peter Singer, p. 122:

If cows, pigs, chickens and the other animals we usually eat are self-aware, they are still not self-aware to anything like the extent that humans normally are. I agree with Varner and Scruton that the more one thinks of one’s life as a story that has chapters still to be written, and the more one hopes for achievements yet to come, the more one has to lose by being killed. For this reason, when there is an irreconcilable conflict between the basic survival needs of animals and of normal humans, it is not speciesist to give priority to the lives of those with a geographical sense of their life and a stronger orientation toward the future.

The Case for Animal Rights by Tom Regan, p. 351:

There are five survivors, four normal adult human beings and a dog. The boat will support only four. All will perish if one is not sacrificed. Which one ought to be cast overboard? The rights view’s answer is: the dog. The magnitude of the harm that death is, it has been argued, is a function of the number and variety of opportunities for satisfaction it forecloses for a given individual, and it is not speciesist to claim that the death of any of these humans would be a prima facie greater harm in their case than the harm death would be in the case of the dog. Indeed, numbers make no difference in this case. A million dogs ought to be cast overboard if that is necessary to save the four normal humans, the aggregate of the lesser harms of the individual animals harming no one in a way that is prima facie comparable to the harm death would be to any of these humans. But suppose, a critic may conjecture, it is not a question of having enough room on the boat. Imagine it is a question of which individual to eat if four others are to survive. Who should be eaten? The rights view’s answer, once again, is: the dog. And it is the dog who should be eaten because the harm that death is in the case of that animal is not as great a harm as the harm that death would be in the case of any of these humans. In lifeboat cases, in short, the obligation to be vegetarian can be justifiably overridden, according to the rights view. The survivors would be acting within their rights, justified by appeal to the liberty principle, if they chose to kill and eat the dog in these dire circumstances.

Introduction to Animal Rights by Gary Lawrence Francione, p. 159:

[In] the case of animals, we may well decide that although animals are similar to us in that they are sentient—the only characteristic that is relevant for the purpose of having a right not to be treated as a resource—there may be other characteristics of humans that cause us to tip the balance in their favor in these extreme and unusual cases. For example, I have absolutely no doubt that dogs are self-aware, intelligent beings who have a sense of the future and an interest in continuing life. Although I am certain that death is a harm for the dog, I do not know exactly what goes on in the mind of the dog and, therefore, I cannot fully appreciate what is at stake for a dog were she to die. I also lack direct access to the minds of other humans, but I am more confident that I understand better the harm of death to humans and what is at stake for them. I may, then, in these true emergency situations, in which I am forced to choose between a human and a dog, choose the human simply because I better understand what is at stake for the human than I do for the dog. But this is a matter of my own cognitive limitation and how that plays out in these extreme circumstances in which my decision will necessarily be arbitrary to some degree and in which no decision will be perfectly satisfactory. I do not think that death is a greater harm to the human than it is to the dog, but I understand (or think I do) the harm to the human in a clearer sense than I understand the harm to the dog; it is on this admittedly arbitrary and unsatisfactory basis that I break the tie between the two beings, both of whom hold a basic right not to be treated as resources.

Altering these quotes by substituting references to human groups, however, makes it pretty obvious that there’s some sort of othering going on here:

If [women] are self-aware, they are still not self-aware to anything like the extent that [men] normally are. I agree with Varner and Scruton that the more one thinks of one’s life as a story that has chapters still to be written, and the more one hopes for achievements yet to come, the more one has to lose by being killed. For this reason, when there is an irreconcilable conflict between the basic survival needs of [women] and of [men], it is not [sexist] to give priority to the lives of [men, who have] a geographical sense of their life and a stronger orientation toward the future. …

There are five survivors, four normal [straight] human beings and [a gay man]. The boat will support only four. All will perish if one is not sacrificed. Which one ought to be cast overboard? The rights view’s answer is: the [gay man]. The magnitude of the harm that death is, it has been argued, is a function of the number and variety of opportunities for satisfaction it forecloses for a given individual, and it is not [heterosexist] to claim that the death of any of these normal [straight] humans would be a prima facie greater harm in their case than the harm death would be in the case of the [guy dude]. Indeed, numbers make no difference in this case. A million [gay men] ought to be cast overboard if that is necessary to save the four normal [straight] humans, the aggregate of the lesser harms of the individual [gay guys] harming no one in a way that is prima facie comparable to the harm death would be to any of these [straight] humans. But suppose, a critic may conjecture, it is not a question of having enough room on the boat. Imagine it is a question of which individual to eat if four others are to survive. Who should be eaten? The rights view’s answer, once again, is: the [gay man]. And it is the [gay man] who should be eaten because the harm that death is in the case of that [gay man] is not as great a harm as the harm that death would be in the case of any of these [straight] humans. …

[In] the case of [brown people], we may well decide that although [brown people] are similar to us in that they are sentient—the only characteristic that is relevant for the purpose of having a right not to be treated as a resource—there may be other characteristics of [white people] that cause us to tip the balance in their favor in these extreme and unusual cases. For example, I have absolutely no doubt that [brown people] are self-aware, intelligent beings who have a sense of the future and an interest in continuing life. Although I am certain that death is a harm for the [brown person], I do not know exactly what goes on in the mind of the [brown person] and, therefore, I cannot fully appreciate what is at stake for a [brown person] were she to die. I also lack direct access to the minds of other [white people], but I am more confident that I understand better the harm of death to [white people] and what is at stake for them. I may, then, in these true emergency situations, in which I am forced to choose between a [brown person] and a [white person], choose the [white person] simply because I better understand what is at stake for the [white person] than I do for the [brown person]. But this is a matter of my own cognitive limitation and how that plays out in these extreme circumstances in which my decision will necessarily be arbitrary to some degree and in which no decision will be perfectly satisfactory. I do not think that death is a greater harm to the [white person] than it is to the [brown person], but I understand (or think I do) the harm to the [white person] in a clearer sense than I understand the harm to the [brown person]; it is on this admittedly arbitrary and unsatisfactory basis that I break the tie between the two beings, both of whom hold a basic right not to be treated as resources.

It would sound strange if an opponent of racism, sexism and homophobia said that people of different races, genders or sexualities should be treated equally most of the time, but that these other lives were ultimately worth less when it came down to it and so it makes sense to favor people of their own race, gender or sexuality in a pinch.

So why do vegans get to call themselves anti-speciesist while saying that they put more value on human lives than animal lives? Is speciesism so inevitable that even those who spend their careers propagandizing against it can’t avoid succumbing to a preference for their own species, in apparent violation of their own ideology?

Not necessarily. You can call yourself an anti-speciesist and still say that human lives are more valuable than animal lives if you want, but this comes at a price: you need to accept another prejudice to explain this discrepancy. As the above quotes from animal philosophers suggest, the form of discrimination that almost inevitably arises in speciesism’s place is discrimination based on cognitive abilities: “cognitivism,” you could call it.

You may be a speciesist if you would always choose to save an anonymous human over an anonymous dog, but you might also be a cognitivist. Answering a couple of hypotheticals could help determine which:

1. Imagine that dogs had the same cognitive abilities of normal humans and were just as social and communicative, being able to interact with humans in most of the same ways that humans interact with each other, except mating. In the sinking lifeboat, would you still definitely save humans over dogs? If so, you’re probably a speciesist. If not, you might be a cognitivist.

2. Many vegans tend to see some animal lives as fairly expendable. In particular, they can be flippant about the mammals, birds, lizards, gastropods, amphibians and fish killed due to civilization and agriculture, mostly treating that daily massacre of wildlife as a nuisance threatening to poke a hole in their doctrine. Would these vegans be equally as cavalier about the same number of mentally impaired humans being ground up, shot, poisoned and suffocated for agriculture? If so, they’re probably cognitivists. But if they would find the latter to be a bigger ethical quandary, they could well be speciesists.

It may be that the majority of vegans would still be able to call themselves non-speciesists after honestly answering those hypotheticals. For that matter, it’s possible that meat eaters would also find themselves to not be speciesist; just because they eat steak doesn’t mean they would oppose the admission of genius apes into universities or eat bacon from pigs who can speak Latin. However, vegans who might save a talking dog over a human but wouldn’t do the same for a typical golden retriever almost definitely discriminate on the basis of cognitive ability. Presumably, Tom Regan would throw a million cognitively disabled humans off the boat rather than sacrifice a few cognitively normal humans, despite how grotesque that pile-up would begin to look.

The reason hypotheticals can be useful – even though they often are based on absurd, impossible situations – is that they can root out prejudice that has no real-life occasion to show itself. This is probably the major reason that so many vegans don’t like them.

One of the presumptions of “the argument from marginal cases” is that most people think it’s unethical to discriminate based on cognitive ability, and so treating other animals worse than we treat severely mentally impaired humans can only be due to speciesism. Putting aside that there is more to our favored treatment of cognitively impaired humans than species membership per se, there’s also the possibility that many people actually do care less about severely mentally impaired people, but that there is almost never a reason for them to admit this.

Most people never meet an adult human whose cognitive abilities are on par with those of a squirrel, and since cannibalism repulses the majority of us and humans are inefficient sources of energy anyway, almost nobody feels the loss if we do not raise cognitively impaired humans for food. Perhaps scientific studies could benefit from using cognitively impaired humans instead of animals to do initial tests of a drug, but it’s unclear how much that would actually help since all medicines that might reach the market go through voluntary human trials already.

Just as there are plenty of racists who never admit their racist beliefs because there is no advantage for them to do so in modern societies that largely discourage overt displays of race-based prejudice (notice that it’s often people ranting drunkenly who get in trouble for hate speech), discrimination based upon cognitive ability is often hidden because there’s just no reason for people to say that we should withhold rights from humans who will never be smarter than a pig, since granting those rights isn’t that big a sacrifice. But when there is such a sacrifice involved, the interests of the mentally impaired often get overruled. Consider a recent case involving a young girl who was refused a kidney implant because she was mentally impaired. From Janice D’Arcy’s article:

I also asked Arthur Caplan, the head of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania (which is affiliated with the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia), about the ethical framework involved in these decisions [over allocations of organ transplants].

He walked me through all the reasons doctors may decide to deny a child the opportunity to receive an organ, including medical issues, quality of life considerations and life expectancy.

He said that doctors might debate the issue when a child is in a vegetative state or if the child is institutionalized — a situation that increases chances for life-threatening infections after transplants and where medications cannot be as effectively monitored. But, he said, when a child is not institutionalized and is being cared for by parents, those issues do not exist.

Magnus said that teens with intellectual disabilities who are cared for by parents are actually more likely to follow medication protocols than typical teens who might rebel.

Of all the considerations Caplan said are ethically valid, intellectual abilities alone were not among them. Though that has not led to a reliable ethical standard.

“I do know many centers take it into account when they are putting a value judgment to quality of life,” Caplan said. But, “in my opinion, that’s bias.”

It would be frowned upon to have an abortion because your baby was going to be female, but few people would question why someone might want to abort a severely mentally impaired fetus. In fact, many would encourage it.

Nevertheless, we claim that we don’t discriminate based upon cognitive ability because we can claim that, since our actions – not using severely mentally impaired humans as resources – imply that we treat all humans the same. Similarly, vegans claim not to discriminate based upon species membership because weaning themselves off their desire to consume animal products looks like anti-speciesism might. (Then again, an anti-speciesist might also eat animals of every species, including their own.) Why should vegans admit to being speciesists if they don’t have to?

Not that this helps them, since there’s still the lingering charge of cognitive bias.

The confusion between cognitivism and speciesism arises because — “marginal cases” aside — differing cognitive abilities track reliably along species line. You cannot honestly say, “The smartest man in the world is obviously smarter than the most intelligent woman” or vice versa, but it’s not merely stereotyping to say, “The smartest human is smarter than the most intelligent pig.”

It’s not surprising that vegans and vegetarians try to get us to be more empathetic toward animals by showing us they’re not as dumb as we think.

According to Skinny Bitch, by Rory Freedman and Kim Barnouin:

Animals are intelligent, emotional, social creatures. Researches at Bristol University in Britain discovered that cows actually nurture friendships and bear grudges. One study showed cows displaying excitement while solving intellectual challenges.

Chickens are as smart as mammals, including some primates, claims animal behaviorist Dr. Chris Evans of Macquarie University in Australia. They are apt pupils and can learn by watching the mistakes of others. One researcher conducted a study that demonstrated chickens’ ability to use switches and levers to change the temperature of their surroundings. A PBS documentary revealed chickens’ love for television and music.

Pigs can play video games! They’ve been labelled as more intelligent than dogs and three-year-old humans. They too can indicate their temperature preferences. (74–75).

According to Joshua Katcher at The Discerning Brute:

Pigeons are commonly seen as dumb pests. People call them “rats with wings”. But according to a new study, these birds are much more intelligent than we may think. Their brains have the ability to use facial recognition in the same way that we humans do…

And on pages 64–66 of Eating Animals, Jonathan Safran Foer says pigs are smart enough to open the latches of gates, play video games, have favorite toys, come when called and have a documented language “of sorts.” Of fish, Foer raves about their nest building skills, their monogamous relationships, tool use and ability to cooperatively hunt with other species. They are “Machiavellian,” have long-term memory, can spread information across generations and have cultural traditions. As for chickens, Foer also quotes an animal physiologist who says they are as intelligent as some mammals and even primates, and discovers that they have memories that are “written down according to some sort of chronological sequence that becomes a unique autobiography,” and can also pass on information, deceive one another and delay satisfaction for bigger rewards.

Funny that what many humans consider vices -– deceit, Machiavellian behavior, playing video games and hunting with other species –- become virtues when other animals do them because it shows how much they resemble us.

Of course the major animal philosophers are savvy enough to reject the animal intelligence approach, each saying that their own definition of sentience is enough to qualify for consideration of interests. Even though Regan and Singer still both say that cognitive ability has a bearing on quality of life (and thus how much harm a death is to a given being), Francione seemingly refuses to accept even this caveat. In his entry “A Note on Humanlike Intelligence and Moral Value,” Francione argues against the animal intelligence outreach strategy, correctly pointing out that the smarts game is one that other animals cannot win. Who cares that pigs can play video games when we already have plenty of humans who can do that without needing a treat after every right move?

Francione writes that humans attaching moral importance to intelligence would be like a bird seeing moral significance in the ability to fly, and says that “subjective awareness” is the only relevant factor in whether a being’s interests should be considered. This would seem to make Francione both anti-speciesist and anti-cognitivist, but despite often treating choices between humans and animals as Sophie’s Choice-esque impossible decisions, Francione can’t quite stomach the radical equality that true anti-speciesism requires. As quoted above, Francione admits that he doesn’t really know what the subjective awareness of other animals is like and how valuable the lives of other animals are to them, and so would tend to favor humans in an emergency. Also in Introduction to Animal Rights, Francione says:

What about the situation in which we have no choice but to eat an animal or starve? Assume that Simon is stranded on a remote, snow-covered mountain after a plane crash. He is starving and there is neither a reasonable hope of rescue nor any vegetables available. When a rabbit happens by, Simon is confronted with the choice of killing the rabbit or starving. Just as we would be inclined to excuse Simon if, under these extreme circumstances, he killed and ate a human—which has in fact happened more than once—his killing the rabbit would also be excusable and completely consistent with the animal rights position.

Francione again strikes the pose of an anti-speciesist/anti-cognitivist by saying it would be equally excusable for Simon to kill a human for survival as it would be for him to kill a rabbit, but as I pointed out in “The Survival Exemption: Great for Vegans Stranded on an Island… Horrible for Veganism,” the two examples Francione cites of humans killing other humans for survival don’t parallel his Simon on the mountain with the rabbit because the human cases are both lifeboat scenarios in which the choice was between some people dying and everyone dying. With Simon vs. the rabbit, it’s either Simon survives or the rabbit survives, and Francione does not explain why he thinks it should be Simon.

If this has nothing to do with Simon’s superior intelligence (since Francione argues that it’s self-serving for humans to see intelligence as morally important), all that’s left is either an appeal to might makes right or a belief that anyone who is on the verge of death can take whatever they need from someone else in order to save themselves, including their lives. If Simon can kill a rabbit or a human wandering by simply because Simon is starving – even though the rabbit or other human are at no risk of harm otherwise – this excuses all manner of moral non-sequiturs such as forced organ donations, even if the person being forced to give up their insides to a sick person is perfectly healthy. Such a rule would lead to a healthy-organ hot potato as doctors would have to keep switching organs between the forced donor and sick recipient, since as soon as they take the healthy guts from the forced donor and put them in the sick person, the original donor would now be the one most in need of organs, so they would have to go back, and then come out again, etc.

I doubt that Francione would defend such an awkward and invasive obligation, and he certainly wouldn’t claim to believe in might making right, which means that he obfuscates his true feelings about why humans should come before other animals in certain situations, so it’s impossible to say if he’s a speciesist or a cognitivist. Nevertheless, it certainly does not seem that he is as prejudice-free as he claims.

It’s smart of Francione to try to dodge this issue and avoid saying that human life has more value by virtue of greater cognitive abilities. As Speciesist Vegan points out in the comments of one of his entries, it’s embarrassingly convenient how the “morally relevant” features that supposedly anti-speciesist vegans credit for adding extra value to certain lives are only held by humans:

WHO decides what is and isn’t a morally relevant feature? If humans decide that humans just happen to have more morally relevant features, on average, than essentially all other animals, what does this say about us? What does it say about our (im)partiality? Your example of the chimp and the baby born with extremely severe mental impairments only proves this: that in order for the scales to be tipped in favor of the non-human, the human basically has to be really, really messed up i.e. they need to lack some sort of ability or capacity that we normally think of as being uniquely human. Can you give a situation in which a normal human deserves less moral consideration than a normal animal? If so, what qualities or attributes justify this? Don’t you find it interesting that in the vast majority of cases, humans deserve more moral consideration? That’s just a coincidence, though, right? Wow, lucky for Singer (and you), because otherwise, he would sound like a psychotic misanthrope!

Only humans can appreciate certain high-level concepts such as existential dread and the inevitability of death, and only humans are capable of complex communication, deep connections with others, “future orientation,” ethics and creating the illusion of meaning. Luckily, these happen to be the things that matter, and it’s not speciesist to say so! As Speciesist Vegan points out in a different comment, vegans favoring humans over animals and calling it non-speciesist by labeling the traits only humans have as “morally relevant” is like saying, “I didn’t save the baby instead of the dog because it’s human. I saved it because it has an opposable thumb.”

Thus anti-speciesism becomes the most convoluted, self-serving and seemingly self-contradictory of all anti-prejudice doctrines, all to hide the fact that in rejecting one form of discrimination – that based on species classification – vegans more often than not accept another.

The cognitivism or speciesism trap is certainly one vegans would avoid if they could. After all, vegans are saying that because of cognitive differences, animal lives matter less than human lives. Most vegans say that difference in life value only justifies killing animals in emergency situations, but that’s just how they personally choose to weigh human interests against other animal interests. Once you declare that animals don’t care as much about their lives for whatever reasons, and so that gives us the upper hand, there is little to no ideological leap between “tear down the forests so we can plant crops and build cities because we like having a reliable food supply and civilization” and “let’s eat meat because we like it.”

This is why vegans feel the desperate need to bust out “the argument from marginal cases” every chance they get. The problem is, if they already want to say that cognitive differences actually are morally significant, all the amc does is try to get meat eaters to agree with vegans that saving an “orphaned an-encephalitic human infant whose existence is a secret” over a chimpanzee would be speciesist. They might as well whip us with a limp strip of kombu.

But what else can vegans do? Abolishing both cognitivism and speciesism would lead to consequences too radical for even for the most hardcore animal supporters to accept because it would demand true equality between the species and a selflessness that would — if consistently applied — lead to voluntary human extinction. (Which I’ll discuss in my next entry.)

So most people could be labelled either speciesists or cognitivists (the latter perhaps only to hide that they are the former). The challenge for cognitivists is that despite so many vegans attaching moral significance to cognitive ability and arguing that human life has more value because of its richness, there is no proof of this other than cocky, human-biased assertions such as “it is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied.”

I’d love to believe that, but this appears to be nothing but wishful conjecture. Where’s the proof? Is such proof even possible? As I argued in “Why the Top Priority of Vegans Should be Human Extinction, Not Veganism,” the additional richness of human life includes plenty of added suffering, and it’s quite possible that life becomes worse the more complicated a being you are.

What Tom Regan leaves out of his calculation that human life has more value than animal life because humans have more avenues for satisfaction is that more often than not, these avenues are gridlocked. David Benatar skilfully argues in “Better Never to Have Been” that a desire you don’t have is as good as a desire satisfied. And he’s not alone:

Old age, Seneca argues, has its benefits: ‘Let us cherish and love old age; for it is full of pleasure if one knows how to use it.’ Indeed, he claims that the most delightful time of life is ‘when it is on the downward slope, but has not yet reached the abrupt decline.’ He adds that even the time of ‘abrupt decline’ has pleasures of its own. Most significantly, as one loses the ability to experience certain pleasures, one loses the desire to experience them: “How comforting it is,” he says, “to have tired out one’s appetites, and to have done with them!” …

As we age…our feelings of lust and the state of distraction that accompanies them diminish. Some would argue that this is a bad thing, that it is yet another example of one of the pleasures of youth that is lost to us. But the Greek dramatist Sophocles offered another viewpoint. When he had grown old and someone asked whether, despite his years, he could still make love to a woman, he replied, “I am very glad to have escaped from this, like a slave who has escaped from a mad and cruel master.” (A Guide to the Good Life by William B. Irvine, 192 – 193)

Rather than seeing our complex natures and rich lives as an advantage, the Stoics and Epicureans saw this as a sort of curse that we needed to overcome – something other animals need not worry about because their limited desires and expectations come naturally to them. Dogs may not be able to appreciate refined, heady conversation, but then they also don’t suffer the inane banter that generally dominates instead. Fewer opportunities for satisfaction means fewer opportunities for dissatisfaction, and dissatisfaction is arguably the more common state.

In The Consolations of Philosophy, Alain de Botton quotes philosopher Michel de Montaigne:

Dare we conclude that the benefit of reason (which we praise so highly and on account of which we esteem ourselves to be lords and masters of all creation) was placed in us for our torment? What use is knowledge if, for its sake, we lose the calm and repose which we should enjoy without it…? … We have been allotted inconstancy, hesitation, doubt, pain, superstition, worries about what will happen (even after we are dead), ambition, greed, jealousy, envy, unruly, insane and untameable appetites, war, lies, disloyalty, backbiting and curiosity. We take pride in our fair, discursive reason and our capacity to judge and to know, but we have bought them at a price which is strangely excessive. (The Consolations of Philosophy by Alain de Botton, 120 – 121, quoting The Complete Essays by Michel de Montaigne, 1.14.57 & 11.12.541)

It’s hard to say for sure, but there is at least a strong case that it’s the simpler beings who have it good, because they have fewer needs to satisfy and are prone to fewer anxieties and disappointments. It’s even possible that the placid and unconscious life of a plant, which is likely no experience at all, would be preferable to the experience of a wild animal who is always battling to survive. If philosophers like David Benatar and Arthur Schopenhauer are right and life is more pain and hassle than it’s worth, maybe the priority should be on killing the sentient beings before the non-sentient, since the non-sentient state of existence is as close as life can get to the peaceful serenity of nirvana.

The reality is that we don’t know how attached to life other animals are, and so it’s nothing but self-serving speculation to say that other animals don’t get as much out of life as we do. Veganism, then, does not crush the last remaining prejudice. At best veganism — as practiced now — crushes the second to last one. But even if cognitivism could be destroyed too, odds are a new prejudice would materialize that “objectively” put humans above other animals. That’s because human domination is not about species discrimination or even cognitive discrimination. In my next entry, I’ll elaborate.

Do Animals Have Inherent Value? (abridged)

Fri, 20 Jan 2012 14:55:45 +0000

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:

The inherent value of individual moral agents is to be understood as being conceptually distinct from the intrinsic value that attaches to the experiences they have (e.g., their pleasures or preference satisfactions), as not being reducible to values of this latter kind, and as being incommensurate with these values. To say that inherent value is not reducible to the intrinsic values of an individual’s experiences means that we cannot determine the inherent value of individual moral agents by totaling the intrinsic values of their experiences. Those who have a more pleasant or happier life do not therefore have greater inherent value than those whose lives are less pleasant or happy. Nor do those who have more “cultivated” preferences (say, for arts and letters) therefore have greater inherent value.

To say that the inherent value of individual moral agents is incommensurate with the intrinsic value of their (or anyone else’s) experiences means that the two kinds of value are not comparable and cannot be exchanged one for the other. Like proverbial apples and oranges, the two kinds of value do not fall within the same scale of comparison. One cannot ask, How much intrinsic value is the inherent value of this individual worth—how much is it equal to? The inherent value of any given moral agent isn’t equal to any sum of intrinsic values, neither the intrinsic value of that individual’s experiences nor the total of the intrinsic value of the experiences of all other moral agents. To view moral agents as having inherent value is thus to view them as something different from, and something more than, mere receptacles of what has intrinsic value. They have value in their own right, a value that is distinct from, not reducible to, and incommensurate with the values of those experiences which, as receptacles, they have or undergo. …

Two options present themselves concerning the possession by moral agents of inherent value. First, moral agents might be viewed as having this value to varying degrees, so that some may have more of it than others. Second, moral agents might be viewed as having this value equally. The latter view is rationally preferable. If moral agents are viewed as having inherent value to varying degrees, then there would have to be some basis for determining how much inherent value any given moral agent has. Theoretically, the basis could be claimed to be anything—such as wealth or belonging to the “right” race or sex. … All moral agents are equal in inherent value, if moral agents have inherent value. (235 – 237)

Before I get to my own quibbles with Regan’s fantasy, I want to quote a comment that Joel Marks made on Tom Regan’s blog, since I think it deftly gets at the main problem with inherent value (that it doesn’t really exist):

Tom Regan’s argument has always been the rock on which a thoroughgoing animal liberation movement could be built. I certainly embraced it wholeheartedly … until a few years ago, when I suddenly realized that the notion of inherent value did not jibe with my otherwise materialist worldview. The so-called Argument to the Best Explanation of the world as we know it simply does not have room for any such “animal.” There are quarks and gluons and maybe even trees and rabbits and human beings and beliefs and desires, but it does not seem plausible to the scientific-minded to suppose that there are also inherent values (among many other mythological beasts).

What there are are subjective values, and also, let us grant, valuers — the “subjects” of those values. A distinction that is often lost on folks who discuss these things is between inherent value and intrinsic value. The latter is quite subjective and contingent; it is distinguished only from instrumental or “extrinsic” value. For example, you value your cat extrinsically if you like her for ridding your house of mice; but you value your cat intrinsically if you simply find her lovable and wonderful and wish only her good “for her own sake.”

Inherent value is quite different from either of these. And Regan certainly recognizes this in Chapter 7 of his book. But it leaves me wondering, now that I have taken a skeptical turn regarding objective value, just what basis Regan thinks inherent value has. It is a distinct concept, yes. But is it instantiated in reality? If so, how? …

Without some spelled-out basis for fitting inherent value into the universe we accept on nonmoral grounds, where is that rock for us to stand on when we affirm the truth of animal rights (in a non-derivative and merely utilitarian sense)?

I think Marks is correct that “inherent value” is a supernatural concept that Regan does not (nor could ever) properly defend. For something to have value, there must be someone valuing it. Otherwise, what the hell are we talking about? What is an inherent value that is independent of any valuator making a value judgment upon something?

The only way I can make sense of a concept such as “inherent value” is to interpret it as “self-valuation” – an individual’s assessment of their own worth – but Regan insists that this isn’t it. (“Those who have a more pleasant or happier life do not therefore have greater inherent value than those whose lives are less pleasant or happy.”) I don’t see how this can be logically supported.

Regan says it is subjects-of-a-life who have inherent value. And he also says that what distinguishes subjects-of-a-life from other living creatures is that we are aware of our lives and value them. The reason subjects-of-a-life have value even when no one else cares about us is that we care about ourselves. Self-valuing beings provide their own guaranteed worth. (In contrast, since non-sentient things cannot value themselves, there must be someone else valuing them if they are to be worth anything.) And if the reason we subjects-of-a-life have inherent value is that we are aware of our own lives and value them, how can Regan then say that this value that appears only in beings who value their own lives is independent of how we personally value our own lives (“Those who have a more pleasant or happier life do not therefore have greater inherent value than those whose lives are less pleasant or happy.”)? If inherent value only comes about through consciousness, how can the quality of that conscious experience not affect the quality of that inherent value?

I can see why Regan goes this route. Otherwise, suffering and suicidal people would have little to no inherent value, no matter how beloved they were (sorry Kurt), and deluded, conceited, self-important pricks would have the most inherent value, even if everyone hated them. Arrogant idiots and psychopaths would be due more respect than depressed, world-saving geniuses.

But just because that seems like a sad state of affairs doesn’t mean that Regan’s answer makes sense. If self-valuation is not germane to inherent value, a life characterized by near-constant pain from birth to death has the same inherent value as a life characterized primarily by pleasure and joy. The person enduring ceaseless, excruciating suffering who never wants to leave bed is no doubt less pleased with her own life than is her neighbor who experiences mostly happiness and races to the shower every morning, yet Regan says these self-assessments cannot contradict that their lives are equally inherently valuable.

So let’s imagine a pre-existence, as philosophers are wont to do. And let’s say the pre-born get some say in the lives they are going to assume on Earth, but there is fierce competition and the pre-born have to squabble over the lives that are most in demand. Wouldn’t they all be fighting to secure the more pleasurable future lives for themselves? And wouldn’t they all shy away from the lives of mostly agony, boredom, gloom and defeat? If there were money in the pre-existence, wouldn’t the richest pre-born buy the most desirable future lives? And if so, wouldn’t it seem that the lives of agony have less value, and the lives of ease and pleasantness have more value?

Since Regan says inherent value doesn’t have to do with self-valuation or the assessment of outsiders, this inevitably raises a question that Regan never answers: where does inherent value come from if it’s not dependent on a valuator? If I don’t value myself, and no one else values me, how do I have value?

By the power of Regan’s wishful thinking, it would seem:

To view certain individuals (e.g., moral agents) as having equal inherent value is a postulate—that is, a theoretical assumption. As befits any theoretical assumption, however, it is not one made without reason. On the contrary, it is an assumption that vies with alternative theories about the value of moral agents, in particular the views that they lack value in their own right and are only receptacles of experiences that are valuable in themselves (the utilitarian view) or that they have value in their own right but a kind of value that varies from individual to individual, depending upon the possession of favored virtues (the perfectionist view).

And there are reasons for accepting [the equal inherent value] postulate. To postulate that moral agents have equal inherent value provides a theoretical basis for avoiding the wildly inegalitarian implications of perfectionist theories, on the one hand, and, on the other, the counterintuitive implications of all forms of act utilitarianism (e.g., that secret killings that optimize the aggregate consequences for all affected by the outcome are justified). (247)

In other words, Regan doesn’t like what happens if we don’t accept inherent value, so let’s all believe in inherent value even though it doesn’t appear to have any basis in fact.

Many people are not opposed to believing a myth if it makes their lives better, so inherent value could be defensible if it worked in that regard, but Regan seems to have overlooked that accepting a sourceless valuation on our heads that is independent of even what we think of ourselves leads to some strange results.

For instance, even if your life were horrible and no one loved you and you wished for nothing more than to be dead, suicide would be wrong because it would violate your own inherent value, that mysterious value which is inextricable from yourself and out of your own control and everyone else’s. In fact, it would be just as bad to self-murder as it would be to murder someone who loved her life and was loved by many people, since you both have this same inextricable value. Inherent value traps us in a secular version of the religious view that suicide is immoral because even if we don’t value our lives, God does, and so killing ourselves is an affront to God and a harm to his creation. Except it makes even less sense here, because at least in the religious version we know where this value is coming from.

If Regan explicitly discusses suicide in the book, I missed that part, but he does talk about euthanasia in an earlier chapter; unfortunately, he appears to have written this section before the concept of inherent value occurred to him, because he comes out in favor of euthanasia in certain conditions, seemingly unaware of its obvious conflict with his ideal of equal inherent value no matter what anyone thinks of a sentient life, including the one living it. If inherent value exists whether or not anyone values a given life, there can never be a justification to intentionally end any life that could otherwise persist—not even your own miserable one.

It’s not just suicide that is on par with murder if we all have equal inherent value no matter what. Another unusual development is that killing someone in self-defense or hunting an animal for survival are both as bad as premeditated, cold-blooded murder. Like with suicide, Regan doesn’t come right out and say this — in fact, he says self-defense can be justified in certain instances — but the implication is hard to miss:

Though this is not the occasion to work out the full implications, it is worth noting in passing that the rights view could not sanction any form of punishment that failed to treat the convicted criminal with that respect to which he or she is due as one who possesses inherent value. For no one can gain or lose this value by anything that person does or fails to do. (290-291)

If you don’t lose your inherent value by being an aggressor with murderous intent, then no matter who dies in a fight to the death –- the one who started it or the one acting in self-defense -– either survivor is equally guilty of snuffing out someone with inherent value. And since animals don’t lose their inherent value just because you’re on the verge of starvation, eating one would be an instrumental use of animals (and thus wrong), even if you were about to die.

In an earlier version of this entry, I questioned the consistency of Regan’s “lifeboat scenario,” in which he argues that human lives have more value than other animal lives, but at the same time have equal inherent value. Equal inherent value, it turns out, has nothing to do with lives being equally worthy, but rather with equality of respect. We have to give due respect to beings for the sort of lives they have, and in the case of animals, this means sometimes treating their lives as less precious because they have simpler, less rich experiences.

I still don’t think that works for Regan because it leaves the value of animal lives and the respect due to them open to subjective interpretation; if you are willing to acknowledge a hierarchy in life value, there’s nothing — aside from the argument from marginal cases — to prevent us from saying that we can respect animals and yet also eat them. For instance, you could say that because animal lives are so basic, all it takes to respect them is to raise them humanely and attempt to kill them painlessly. Since their lives are not as valuable as ours, we are under no obligation to treat their lives as we do human lives.

But I took this section out because the lifeboat scenario has been attacked so often that it’s hard to say anything new about it, and it’s what everyone focuses on, even though there are plenty of other problems with inherent value. I do still want to quote the lifeboat scenario anyway, but for another reason. Here is Regan:

There are five survivors: four normal adults and a dog. The boat has room enough only for four. Someone must go or else all will perish. Who should it be? Our initial belief is: the dog. Can the rights view illuminate and justify this prereflective intuition? The preceding discussion of prevention cases shows how it can. All on board have equal inherent value and an equal prima facie right not to be harmed. Now, the harm that death is, is a function of the opportunities for satisfaction it forecloses, and no reasonable person would deny that the death of any of the four humans would be a greater prima facie loss, and thus a greater prima facie harm, than would be true in the case of the dog. Death for the dog, in short, though a harm, is not comparable to the harm that death would be for any of the humans. To throw any one of the humans overboard, to face certain death, would be to make that individual worse off (i.e., would cause that individual a greater harm) than the harm that would be done to the dog if the animal were thrown overboard. (324)

All I want to say about this now is that since Regan claims that death is a harm because it forecloses all opportunities — and so we should not intentionally kill anyone except in an emergency — anything we do that forecloses even some opportunities should be considered an inexcusable harm, as it is a kind of partial death. Inherent value, then, would ban the spaying and neutering of companion animals, since that forecloses the opportunities these animals have for the satisfaction of sex. And euthanasia and suicide are on the cutting room floor again because even if a life is awful on the whole, it still has an opportunity for at least one or two satisfactions, and death would foreclose the opportunity to experience those meager joys.

An even greater problem comes from Regan’s implication that in a choice between something with inherent value and something with instrumental value, the one with merely instrumental value must always be sacrificed. Since plants are not subjects-of-a-life and have only instrumental value (we like to eat them), equality of respect means plants get none. Therefore, we should never sacrifice an animal for a plant. Accidental and “unintentional but foreseen” killing of animals for agriculture might not upset Regan too much, but intentionally killing rodents, birds or deer to protect crops could not be allowed if we accepted Regan’s views. Even though the crops we plant make our lives possible by giving us sustenance, they still only function instrumentally — unlike all the animals that we now have to let devour our cherished food supply.

And yet, to make this even more non-sensical and confusing, Regan doesn’t discount the possibility that non-sentient life may have inherent value!:

It may be that there are individuals, or possibly collections of individuals, that, though they are not subjects of a life in the sense explained, nevertheless have inherent value—have, that is, a kind of value that is conceptually distinct from, is not reducible to, and is incommensurate with such values as pleasure or preference satisfaction. The issues here are extremely complicated. As I have argued elsewhere, the very possibility of developing a genuine ethic of the environment, as distinct from an ethic for its use, turns on the possibility of making the case that natural objects, though they do not meet the subject-of-a-life criterion, can nonetheless have inherent value. Attempts to show that this is conceptually absurd are inconclusive at best, while attempts to show that postulating inherent value in natural objects or collections of such objects, though intelligible, is unnecessary, suffer from a similar fate. Nevertheless, it is extraordinarily difficult to give an intelligent account of inherent value in this connection. …

Those who would work out a genuine ethic of the environment in terms of the inherent value of natural objects (trees, rivers, rocks, etc.) or of collections of such objects are not logically debarred from undertaking the task by anything said or implied in these pages, since the subject-of-a-life criterion is set forth as a sufficient, not as a necessary, condition of making the attribution of inherent value intelligible and non-arbitrary. While no one is denied the possibility of working out such an ethic, however, those who aspire to do it certainly have their work cut out for them. (245 – 246)

I am amazed that Regan left this issue unresolved. Adherents of his philosophy don’t eat animals because they believe them to have inherent value by virtue of being born subjects-of-a-life, and here’s Regan saying that plants may have inherent value too, despite not being subjects-of-a-life. Dear lord, what are vegans supposed to eat?! True, Regan mentions “trees, rivers, rocks, etc.” and doesn’t say anything about soybeans and earns of corn possibly having inherent value, but if frickin’ rocks might deserve equal respect, who knows? It’s not like we get to choose what has inherent value, right Regan?

Regan is skeptical that anyone could reveal inherent value in non-SOALs, but all it would take is a minor tweak of his own theory. He says that all beings deserve equal respect if they care about their own lives. A more lax (but no less plausible) way to put this is that all beings deserve respect if they have a survival instinct, which is a sort of caring about one’s life, even if an unconscious one. Plants have a survival instinct (or Wille zum Leben), despite not being aware of their own lives, so they could have inherent value too.

What a mess it would be if inherent value actually existed! It’s kind of nice to know that it’s all just a figment of Regan’s imagination.

The (Mostly Anecdotal) Evidence for a Vegan Diet

Wed, 18 Jan 2012 20:24:00 +0000

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)

Why Veganism Should Move Beyond "No Animal Products Ever"

Sun, 15 Jan 2012 15:58:51 +0000

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?

To the more repressed and heterodox vegans, there is something unseemly about experimenting with animal products, even if those animals don’t care whether or not they are eaten. Veganism should be about accepting your lot and eating your veggies, not looking for delicious exceptions! These killjoys are prone to saying that vegans shouldn’t eat non-sentient animals because all animals deserve “the benefit of the doubt” in case they might magically be sentient through some non-central-nervous-system means that science doesn’t yet understand. On top of that, it’s unbecoming of vegans to hungrily scour the lands and seas for animals who don’t have feelings so they can gobble them up. Part of being vegan is representing that “animals are not ours to eat,” say these dreary nags, and slurping oysters supposedly blurs that message. But then, if non-sentient animals are not “ours to eat,” neither are the photosynthesizing bounties of the earth, and we should all starve as punishment for being born in a world we can never own.

I say it’s the exception-seekers who do the most for veganism. If vegans want to spread their lifestyle far and wide, they’d be wise to think, “How can we achieve our goals while making the fewest demands possible?” Not, as now: “Let’s overshoot on restrictions and err on the side of self-punishment, just in case.”

Humans like to achieve the maximum possible gain through the smallest possible effort. How have vegans failed to notice this? Every time you put up an additional hurdle, you shrink the crowd willing to follow you. Why else would there be far more lacto-ovo vegetarians than vegans even though veganism makes marginally more sense?

This doesn’t mean that blindly smashing rules and regulations is guaranteed to draw a cheering crowd. You still need hindrances to create meaning, but going overboard doesn’t help anything. Just maintain the minimum required to satisfy your core point. Imagine if veganism could somehow allow cheese. That would destroy the most clichéd objection to it! Of course, there’s no way to make cheese without animals – unless you count tapioca flour and canola oil shreds – but vegans can eat cheese without violating the vegan idea: any cheese about to be in the garbage will do. And let’s not forget new human mothers with weaning babies and milk to spare.

Either veganism is about sentience and complicity, or it’s a baseless division between plant and animal products. Since a lifestyle grounded on an unexplained “just because” aversion to animals is about as philosophically intriguing as a low-oxalate diet, I have to assume that veganism is concerned with sentience, exploitation and logical consistency rather than just the shape of a food’s cells.

Which means vegans get to eat some animal products! Here are the ones I can think of:

* Any animal products that are in the trash or on their way there.

* Road kill.

* Insects.

* Bivalves (oysters, clams, mussels and scallops).

* Jellyfish and most other aquatic invertebrates, except for cephalopods.

* Human dairy products.

* Human placenta.

* Humans in irreversible comas.

Forget what the Vegan Society tells you. If veganism is to make any sense whatsoever, the above foods are vegan.

Now it’s true that researchers haven’t settled the issue of whether or not insects have feelings or first-person experiences. That doesn’t matter, however, if veganism cares about logical consistency. Vegans simply cannot believe that insects are sentient, because if they do that, they have to abandon sentience as the standard dividing ethical from unethical foods. That’s because, as a practical matter, any philosophy that respects the interests of insects cannot work.

Vegans buy plants that are laced with anti-insect poison and which are often pollinated by bees who are shipped there without their consent and are in many cases gassed after their uncompensated exploitation. Saying that it’s wrong to eat honey but okay to eat the fruits and nuts that exploited bees labored to grow is a bit like saying it’s ethically fine to buy the products of slave labor so long as you don’t steal the sandwiches from the slaves’ lunchboxes. Vegans better hope insects aren’t sentient, because if they are, the number of rights violations contained in a single jar of almond butter blows away the comparatively paltry ethical transgressions in even the most succulent cuts of grass-fed beef. “Benefit of the doubt” indeed!

Whether or not vegans neutralize the insect question by proclaiming their non-sentience, there’s still the issue of mammals who are killed (often intentionally) to protect and harvest the crops vegans eat. But vegans can at least try to wash that from their consciences by telling themselves, “Technically I don’t know for sure that animals are being hunted and poisoned for this veggie burger; maybe I got lucky and this all came from farms that have figured out how to peacefully shoo away pest animals.”

That could never work with insects, though. How could you delude yourself that your leafy greens are insect-friendly when you have to remember to wash the anti-insect death powder off them every time you want to toss a salad? Vegans could re-define veganism to mandate organic, pesticide-free produce, but that wouldn’t necessarily free them from reliance on bee slavery, and raises another problem: unless they are buying from a veganic farm (which they aren’t), their organic produce is fertilized with the excrement and bodies of exploited and possibly tortured animals.

Better to accept that insect lives don’t matter and grow your plants with petroleum.

For the bivalve skeptical, Christopher Cox does a good job of defending oyster veganism here. I’d just add that if logical consistency forces vegans to say that insects don’t have interests, then they are definitely free to eat bivalves, most of which are simpler organisms than bugs. Cox tells vegans to restrict their bivalve consumption to elevation-raised oysters because he says digging clams, mussels and scallops out of the ocean floor may cause environmental damage and kill other fish, but since plenty of land-based vegan foods hurt nature and all the animals who get in the way, I don’t see why vegans should limit themselves to only the most ethically bulletproof bivalves.

Octopodes, cuttlefish and the like appear to be an exception, but for the most part, aquatic invertebrates are not sentient in any sense that vegans need to worry about. That includes jellyfish, who are becoming an overpopulated scourge of the seas, and taste kind of like salted nothing, but have a nice texture. Why don’t vegans eat or at least promote the consumption of jellyfish? Jonathan Safran Foer makes a big stink about bycatch in Eating Animals and might lament all the other fish who could accidentally be killed as we chased after the see-through, flavorless, tentacled ones. The problem with this argument is that it means vegans shouldn’t eat plants, since there are unintentional deaths in agriculture. Mammals are the bycatch of the land and some of them even have to be killed on purpose to protect crops. No sentient animals have to be killed purposely to capture mindless jellyfish.

As for all the human-based products, I don’t think it would be wise from a tactical perspective for vegans to spend much time campaigning for a reversal in the cannibalism taboo whilst cruising hospital wards for human vegetables that nobody wants. But I do think that vegans’ silence on the matter of consuming non-sentient humans, and lack of interest in ethically sourced human breast cheese, does illustrate that vegans are not as iconoclastic and anti-tradition as they like to claim. Their aversion to promoting the consumption of insects, aquatic invertebrates, dumpster food and human milk isn’t due just to doctrinal confusion. A big chunk of it comes down to “convenience, habit, tradition and taste,” the four sins that vegans like to say are the only excuses for meat eating.

Vegans might protest that they are working within the situation they’ve inherited, a sorry state where people aren’t open to entomophagy outside of reality game shows, think jellyfish will sting their tongue and gag at the thought of milk made from a human even though that’s all they ate when they really had it good. But vegans are already asking people to forget tradition and give up lots of delicious foods. If they’re going to demand that we reject everything grandma ever cooked for us, why not tell us to add weird new foods to our diets to make up for it? And I don’t just mean previously overlooked grains and greens, nutritional yeast flakes and soy formulations. The novelty of millet wears off quickly, and as good as quinoa is, using it to break up the monotony of your nightly white rice ration is not as interesting a change as growing mealworms in your backyard. Don’t just add new taboos, vegans. Rip some away!

But vegans are just as beholden to cultural conditioning as the rest of us, the main difference being that they want to make us even more queasy than we already are. If there were a vegan revolution, it would be one of the sorriest revolutions in history, led by an army of out-of-step, meek do-gooders chanting “eww, yuckie!” in unison.

If vegans wanted, they could combine their Spartan self-discipline with a fearless embrace of some of the allegedly grossest foods on the planet. They could be among the most compassionate and most hardcore. Unfortunately, vegans would rather direct our attention to the vital wheat gluten powder (which contains insects parts, by the way, but at least you can’t see them).

This is more than a personal failing on the part of individual vegans. It’s a fault with veganism itself. The Vegan Society defined veganism in terms of self-restriction and aversion to animal molecules, and there veganism remains.

You’d think vegans would care more about sentience and animals than anyone, and yet they’re either too afraid or incurious to investigate where sentience and animals don’t overlap and how that could accelerate the spread of veganism. It’s bizarre when vegans are treated as heretics for admitting that they eat non-sentient or dumpstered animal products, when it’s the outraged “no animal products ever” vegans who don’t seem to understand their own ethics.

And then there are the vegans who hear about vegan-appropriate animal products and shrug them off with an indifferent “fine, but gross, I wouldn’t eat that” and never address the subject again. But that’s just damning oysters with faint acknowledgment and does nothing to reconceptualize veganism as an idea based on an actual principle rather than an arbitrary division between categories of food. If vegans really want to save sentient animals, they should be at the forefront of making insects more palatable. The Loving Hut vegan restaurant chain should have an actual seafood menu. Vegans should raise their next generation on peanut butter and jellyfish sandwiches, with human breast milk soft serve ice cream for dessert. They should be petitioning for the green “V” to appear on boxes of frozen New Zealand mussels. And they should be mass-marketing bivalve sausages. Hell, those would actually be good!

But no, they’re still obsessed with soy and dream of the day when scientists will make meat in a lab.

Lab meat is a fine enough idea if it can ever be financially feasible, but why is PETA offering $1,000,000 to the lab geeks who can develop a market-friendly lab-cultured chicken flesh when the oceans are already growing unconscious flesh for free and anybody can raise non-sentient animals in cardboard boxes in their backyards?

Many vegans hate Anthony Bourdain for going around the world, eating the weirdest animals he can find and chastising vegans for rudely turning down the food of other cultures, but what Bourdain is advocating here (amongst selfish hedonism) is adaptability – an admirable trait that vegans tend to utterly lack. Some relatively freewheeling vegans retort, “Okay, so why not just eat animal products that one time a poor Korean farmer offers you a piece of duck in a loving gesture of friendship, and then be vegan for every other meal?” But by the time most vegans find themselves on a farm in Korea without the language skills to adequately explain the tenants of their quasi-religion, they’ve demonized all animal products for so long that the thought of eating any makes them feel ill.

Veganism breeds rigidity – it’s about as maladaptive as it gets. Some vegans like to think that humanity would be forced into animal-free living in the event of a societal or environmental collapse, but how does that make sense? The looming threat of starvation certainly didn’t lead to community soy gardens in Leningrad: first they ate their pets and then they became cannibals. Not that that is a future that most of us want to strive for, but it shows that flexibility can come in handy. And a diet that gets us used to eating insects would satisfy vegan ethics while preparing us for just about anything – unlike a lifestyle that forbids us from eating everything that ever moved.

More aversions may not be what the world needs.

I can see no advantage of veganism outlawing more food than it must. Simplicity and ease of explanation? That could justify an abridged “no animal products ever” speech to confused waiters, but not making it the actual definition of veganism. Some vegans explain their objection to freegan and non-sentient animal products by arguing that inoculating disgust to all animal bits makes you less likely to stray from the truly unvegan ones. But if you really believe in not hurting animals, is it necessary to feel an urge to puke every time you see a pepperoni pizza? And what a waste if that pizza is about to go in the garbage! All these aversions do is make it harder to be vegan. And that makes it harder to recruit.

Despite vegan implications that animal foods are, at best, flavor tabs with no special nutritional benefits, health seems to be the primary reason people quit vegetarianism. Unless you’re including an array of supplements that cover even the animal-based nutrients that are deemed nonessential, it’s inaccurate to say that vegan food provides all the same nutrients as a well-planned omnivorous diet. But it doesn’t have to be. Vegans can’t honestly say that plants give you all the same nutrients as animals, but they could say it’s possible to get all the nutrients you need without buying the products of sentient beings. Why don’t vegans want to be able to say that? Why are supplementation-adverse vegans desperately seeking B12 in seaweed when it actually exists in animal foods that their ethics cannot logically prohibit?

A lot of vegans seem to think that the more they limit their food options, the better people they become. But if their motivating principle is sentience, what’s the ethical benefit of adding rules that have nothing to do with that? Why teach an avoidance of all animal products when allowing some of them would be more consistent, less restrictive, would draw more followers and yet still meet the same ethical goals?

Just because the Vegan Society said so?

The Non-Vegan Pet Loophole

Sat, 24 Dec 2011 21:01:57 +0000

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?

It’s no good to say simply that cats are carnivores and dogs are omnivores and that’s why it’s okay to feed them meat. That’s the naturalistic fallacy, a fallacy that vegans call out whenever humans say that they eat meat because they are omnivores. Most vegans know they have to do better than this.

Some vegans might say that it doesn’t make sense to impose vegan beliefs on animals who don’t know what veganism is and can’t reap the psychological rewards of it. Vegan dogs and cats are forced to make the same sacrifice as vegan humans without reaping one of the few selfish benefits that veganism offers – the pleasure of being ethical.

This, however, is the same argument that meat eaters make against vegans raising babies and toddlers without animal parts. And vegans have an easy answer for this: babies are helpless and under our care and any way we decide to raise them will be imposing some kind of belief on them. Vegans may be imposing vegan ethics on their babies, but meat eaters are just as surely imposing their (perhaps unconsciously-accepted) carnist philosophy on their own spawns. To say that humans must be raised on omnivorous diets because humans are categorized as omnivores is a belief, as is the vegan supposition that humans do not need to be raised on omnivorous diets even though they are omnivores.

Vegans who feed their dogs and cats meat are endorsing carnism for their pets (and the other animals who must die for them) rather than veganism.

Besides, vegans who shield their dogs and cats from the temptations of flesh aren’t necessarily imposing ethics on their pets so much as imposing ethics on themselves. The goal of vegan pet owners seems to be less about purity for their pets and more about not undercutting their own veganism. If they purchased meat for their pets, they would be contributing directly to the meat industry, and isn’t the whole point of veganism not to do that?

Vegans who do buy canned meat for their cats or dogs clearly don’t object to directly funding the meat industry per se. Their objection to buying meat, then, has to be based on the kind of product being purchased, or the circumstances of the being for whom the meat is purchased.

It’s unlikely to be the former, because that would mean that vegans with non-vegan pets are okay with anyone buying meat for themselves, as long as it’s the sort of meat you might find marketed to pets: euthanized cats and dogs, organ meats, odd cuts and other spare or unpopular animal bits. When I purchase meat for myself, this is the sort of stuff I tend to buy (excluding the euthanized cats and dogs). Vegans with pets who eat meat either have to say that this is okay, or they need to focus on the differences between humans and their companion animals, and why these make it appropriate for vegans to buy meat for their dogs or cats, but ask humans not to do the same for themselves.

The strongest argument I can think of for vegans with non-vegan pets would go like this: “My understanding is that humans can thrive – and might even be healthier – on a diet with no animal products. If it turned out that this wasn’t true, I would start eating animal products again and wouldn’t begrudge other people doing the same. My understanding is also that cats and maybe dogs do not thrive on a diet with no animal products. If I found out that I was wrong about this, I would feed my pets a vegan diet. For now, I don’t want to risk their health to be consistent with my ideology, so I am feeding them what I believe to be the most suitable diet for them.”

The basic idea is that for humans, meat is an expendable luxury that we only consume for reasons of taste, tradition, habit and convenience, while meat is vital for the health of cats and maybe dogs. The (former) American Dietetic Association says that a vegan diet is appropriate for all stages of the human lifecycle, but neglects to mention how Fido and Patches fare.

What it comes down to for these vegans is that cats and maybe need meat, and humans don’t.

But need meat for what? To be as happy as possible? There are plenty of meat-loving humans who could testify that they need meat to have as good a life as they can possibly have. Many could even say their livelihoods depend on making, serving or eating meat.

To survive? It can’t be this, since vegan food isn’t known to kill dogs and cats on the spot, and many vegan pets have long, apparently healthy lives. True, some eventually develop complications that could be due to a vegan diet and die earlier than they otherwise would have, but even they manage to survive as vegans for a while. So then are vegans who feed meat to their pets saying that their aspiration is to give their pets the diet that makes them live as long as they possibly can? If so, this would mean that any studies indicating that pescetarian humans live longer than vegan humans (or any other study indicating that veganism isn’t the healthiest possible diet) give ethical license for humans to eat at least some animal products.

Anyway, if the goal of vegans with meat-eating pets is to provide the healthiest food they can offer, they’re falling short by giving them canned meats. At least for cats, the healthiest diet seems to be a raw meat diet that includes bones and possibly a supplement.

It could be, then, that these vegans aren’t saying they want to give their pets the healthiest diet conceivable, but that they want to give their pets a reasonably healthy diet, and they think vegan kibble falls short of even that more modest goal. Sounds rational enough, but when vegans feed their dogs or cats meat because they don’t trust supplemented vegan pellets to fully nourish them, they are implying one of two possible failings that could tarnish veganism overall.

One of the possible implications is that there is more to satisfactory nutrition than eating plant products and supplementing for the missing nutrients. Yes, cats cannot last long without taurine, calcium and thiamin, but that’s why vegan cat food is supplemented with them. Why isn’t this good enough?

Surely these vegans don’t want to say that there is some vital aspect to eating meat that can’t be artificially replicated by mixing amino acids and vitamins and minerals in grain pellets. Because if there’s some special attribute about a meat-inclusive diet that a purely vegan diet can never have, that could suggest that having a well-planned vegan diet and taking B12, essential fatty acids, zinc and calcium pills may not be adequate for omnivorous humans.

What these vegans might prefer to say is that humans are omnivores, which means we can digest just about any plant or animal, but cats are obligate carnivores, which means they have to eat only meat. But this is too literal a reading of these taxonomic classifications. Just as this herbivorous deer and cow can eat meat, carnivorous cats can certainly eat plants. Even specialized diabetic dry cat food has cereals in it.

The other possible implication of vegans saying that vegan cat and dog food isn’t good enough is that supplementation is theoretically fine, but nutrition science is too young for us to know everything that must be supplemented to keep vegan pets healthy.

But if we don’t know enough about feline and canine nutrition to supplement everything vegan cats and dogs might be missing, why do vegans think we know enough about human nutrition to expect humans to be vegan and fill the holes with all the right pills?

I suspect that vegans with meat-eating pets would respond to this by re-emphasizing that most humans are just fine on a vegan diet, but veganism may prove ruinous for dogs and especially cats; meat is nothing but a frivolous flavor transmitter for humans and a vital necessity for the most basic well-being for pets, and it is their responsibility not to send their trusting companions to an early grave.

However, this dichotomy overplays how badly many cats and dogs need animal products, and underplays the difficulties of many humans who go animal-free.

In Obligate Carnivore, Jed Gillen argued that vegan cats are sometimes healthier than carnivorous cats because meat-based pet food often contains the poisonous remains of euthanized dogs and cats. And in the article “Can My Cat Be Healthy on a Vegan Diet?”, Armaiti May describes the potential challenges of raising cats as vegans, but thinks it can be done. She suggests monitoring vegan cats’ urine to make sure it stays acidic enough so that the cats don’t develop urinary crystals (though female cats can usually pass these without pain), and recommends plants that can be added to a vegan cat’s diet to lower their urine pH.

Raising a healthy vegan cat sounds like a hassle, but since vegans think convenience is not a good reason for humans to eat meat, it’s hard to see why convenience should be a reason for them to feed their cats meat.

Nevertheless, it’s uncontroversial to say that cats are usually healthier eating animal products than supplemented corn discs, and that putting companion animals on a vegan diet may be risking their health. And given these facts, it’s not unreasonable for vegans to choose to do the most responsible thing for the animals under their care by feeding them other animals.

But this doesn’t get vegans with non-vegan pets entirely off the hook. For one thing, it raises the question of why vegans rescue pets from shelters in the first place, when they know they’ll be sustaining them with the corpses of other animals.

They certainly can’t claim that they are doing so in order to save animal lives. Now, it could make sense for meat-eating speciesists to consider only the heroism of saving a cat when they adopt a rescue, since they don’t put as much value on farm animal lives, so it’s easy for them to overlook that other animals are now going to have to die to sustain the cat who was just about to be put down. But for a vegan who believes that lions and lambs have an equal interest in living, the act of saving a shelter cat whom they plan on feeding meat is a selfish one. They know that other animals will have to die for their own more favored animal, but they save the carnivore anyway.

At least meat-eating humans didn’t ask to be born and grow up to be people who feel they need to eat animal products to maintain a good quality of life. Vegans who save shelter dogs and cats and then feed them meat, on the other hand, are essentially securing the release of an unrepentant serial killer on death row and then agreeing to collaborate with them on future killings. Meat eaters kill for the pleasure of taste and nourishment. Vegans with meat-eating pets kill for the pleasure of having a warm, cuddly carnivore purring at their feet.

It seems like it would be fair to say that humans could just not get a cat and then eat the amount of meat they would have fed the cat. Or — since vegans with meat-eating pets don’t say there is a limit to how many meat-eating pets they are allowed to rescue — couldn’t I get one cat instead of eight cats, and then eat the amount of animals I would have killed for the other seven?

An easy way around this problem would be for vegans to feed their pets only freegan meat. Butchers and fish mongers can often sell or give you scraps of meat that will otherwise be thrown out, such as odd cuts of liver, kidney and heart, fish guts, bones and lamb lungs. Most dogs and cats could be happy and healthy on a well-planned freegan diet (though you would have to be careful not to feed them a diet too rich in organs), and at no additional cost to other animals. Why don’t all vegans with non-vegan pets do this?

I suspect that it’s either convenience (which, again, would be scandalous since vegans disparage humans for eating meat out of convenience), thoughtlessness or queasiness at handling the body parts of other animals.

No matter the reasoning, when vegans feed the bodies of other animals to their cats and dogs without taking freegan precautions, their actions say that the quality of life of the animals under their care is more important than the lives of animals they don’t know.

Which is good news for humans, since each of us is an animal under our own care, and many of us benefit from having animal products in our lives.

The “fuck it, I’m going to do what’s best for my pets,” resolution some vegans must have after overcoming their reservations and deciding to feed their dogs and cats a meat-based diet is not much different than the “fuck it, I’m going to do what’s best for myself” epiphany many ex-vegans have upon deciding to eat meat again.

So why are many vegans giving their dogs and cats better treatment than they expect us to give ourselves?

Dr. Joel Marks on his Amoral Veganism

Tue, 06 Dec 2011 13:56:06 +0000

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.

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.

Some ex-vegans use amoralism to escape vegan moralizing. For them, the lack of proof of right or wrong is the best argument against giving rights to animals, and doesn’t preclude human rights, since we all selfishly benefit from rules against murder and so on. But you don’t believe in moralism, yet you remain a vegan and would like to convince more people to go vegan. However, there appears to be no human benefit to giving rights to animals, so if there’s no right or wrong, why should we do it?

The main difference between a moralist and an amoralist such as myself is not at all about altruism versus egoism or hedonism. Most of the reasons that a moralist has for treating other animals with caring and respect are also reasons for an amoralist. The only difference is that the moralist treats these things as matters of duty incumbent on both him- or herself and all other human beings. But that is a big difference because of the consequences of having that sort of attitude about one’s own preferences, namely, that it is wrong for anyone not to have them. It leads to a way of interacting among human beings that, I would argue, is contrary to our considered desires. A very good source on this is Ian Hinckfuss’s The Moral Society.

As to our treatment of nonhuman animals, then, I would expect – perhaps I should acknowledge that this is my faith – that once we become fully aware of the nature of other animals as revealed to us through evolutionary theory and ethology, as well as of their actual treatment in animal agriculture (not to mention the clothing industry, animal circuses, biomedical research, etc.), and of the facts of human nutrition and the huge variety of non-animal culinary (and other) options, we will be moved by our natural compassion to adopt a vegan diet.

This was certainly my own story. And it is also another reason for my opposition to moralism. For I had become convinced of the moral wrongness of eating animals long before I became a vegan. But it was only when I had the opportunity (which came about largely by chance) to immerse myself in information about all of the above that I just spontaneously found myself motivated to make the final leap to veganism. So it’s really just cause and effect, I believe.

And that’s why I am also motivated to try to educate as many people as possible about the facts about other animals and how we treat them. The truth shall make the animals free, you might say. My peculiar angle on that project as a philosopher is to help those facts “sink in” for people through logical dialogue and reflection on them.

My main objection to veganism is that it is often preached as a mandate, the so-called “moral baseline.” A lot of vegans who are not particularly moralistic about other issues slip into moralism when it comes to human treatment of other animals, to the point that animal rights outrage sometimes reminds me of fervent, religious anti-abortion activism. Why has veganism become so wrapped up in moralism, is this ultimately bad for animals and is there any hope of extricating veganism from moralism?

One reason, I would surmise, there has been such an emphasis on morality in veganism (or vegetarianism more generally) is that so many people who become vegetarian, probably the vast majority in fact, do so for reasons that have nothing to do with concern about the animals who are being abused and slaughtered for our food, but instead for dietary reasons. Meanwhile, in the minds not only of animal advocates but of just about everyone, being caring and respectful of others is associated with being a good person and doing the morally right thing (and not being so or doing so is morally wrong). Therefore, especially if you want not only to be morally pure yourself but also to help the animals as much as possible by spreading the good word about not exploiting them, it seems incumbent on you to emphasize your moral motives. For if other people assume you are vegetarian or vegan because you are only concerned about your own health or fitness or weight, they may be less likely to become vegetarian themselves if they happen not to care about “dieting” for such reasons. So morality may seem to be the only alternative to (human) health (and possibly environmental) appeals for getting people to stop aiding and abetting cruelty and disrespect to nonhuman animals.

Of course my role as a philosopher would be to disabuse folks of the idea that there is a necessary dependence of caring about and respecting animals (human or otherwise) on being moral. You can have the former without the latter. This is very similar to the equally mistaken notion that without the belief in God, everybody would just go around raping and pillaging and murdering. If anything, I would say, it works the other way: Religion and even morality cause more such behavior than would their absence.

As for what hope there is to turn this around: I haven’t a clue. The human (and animal) condition in general strikes me as hopeless. But my preference would be to rid veganism (and everything else) of its moralism, and my hunch is that doing so could only help the animal cause by removing yet another barrier between animal-consumers and their giving up the habit – that barrier being the defensiveness that inevitably arises from being labeled immoral or bad.

I would expect an amoralist veganism to be relatively understanding of animal users, since it rejects dogma. However, an amoralist can be just as appalled at Nazism as a moralist is, despite refusing to call Nazism objectively wrong. Do you think amoralism would soften the judgment of most moralist vegans, making them generally more accepting of meat eaters, or might it have no discernable effect other than cutting out the “right and wrong,” “immoral and bad” phraseology?

If it were only a matter of using a different terminology, it would not be very interesting or important and hardly worth the effort to “convert” everyone to the amoralist way of speaking. So my belief, or as I put it before, faith, is that changing the way we talk about things we are used to thinking of as moral matters – whether it be meat-eating or genocide – would also change the way we think about them and hence feel about them and ultimately how we behave. Now on the face of it that would seem to count against the switch I favor since who among us would want to lessen the outrage against Hitler and his ilk? And who among us ethical vegans would want to lessen the outrage against the abuse and slaughter of nonhuman animals?

But as I have suggested, the moral outrage against the practices we don’t like really has two quite distinct components: an extreme and universal aversion on the one hand, and a moral judgment on the other. It seems to me pretty clear that we can retain the former while relinquishing the latter. And the point of doing this, I have further maintained, is that it would enable us to be more rational in our attitude toward those with whom we disagree, and perhaps even, as a consequence, more effective in achieving what we desire. We would cease to see the others as evil or evil-doers and instead as people who are for the most part just like ourselves but perhaps with a very different background or in very different circumstances or even with some very different inborn tendencies. Isn’t this likely to inspire in us greater tolerance, greater willingness to give the benefit of the doubt, to negotiate, to compromise, etc.?

Now that may sound rather appealing in the abstract, but a further worry implicit in your question is that this transformation of the moral psyche into an amoral one could lessen our commitment to causes that we are used to deeming of the utmost urgency and importance, like stopping Hitler or bin Laden (if we are not their acolytes!) and ending the exploitation of nonhuman animals (if we are animal advocates). I think my only response can be that in life there are always tradeoffs. So on the one hand the amoralist program would indeed tend to remove a certain ferocity from one’s advocacy, a certain self-assurance and judgmentalism that can give one all sorts of motivational and rhetorical advantages in the struggle against opponents. On the other hand this kind of attitude, besides being based on sheer falsehood (that is, the belief that there is such a thing as objective value in the universe), has well-known tendencies to take people over-the-top in their characterizations of others and what they do, resulting in both figurative and literal overkill. Indeed, Hitler and bin Laden themselves could be prime examples of this phenomenon: moralists to the nth degree.

So which kind of effect is more aversive to our considered opinion: a somewhat lessened, because less fanatical, allegiance to our causes, or the world as it is? I hope this is not just the grass is greener phenomenon, but all I can say is that from my present outlook – surrounded as I and we are by people who are forever berating and slaughtering one another out of moral conviction – the former looks more attractive. Especially when, as I must keep reminding folks, we would still be fully susceptible to appeals to our compassion and allied motivations. When the victims of Hitler cry out to us, when the animals in factory farms cry out to us, there is something quite natural in us that will respond (other things equal). But at the same time we need not vilify those who are responsible for these things. The only rational question is: What is the most effective way to address the situation in keeping with one’s own considered desires? In the case of Hitler this could mean killing him. In the case of factory farms it means, I believe (following Gary Francione), promoting veganism.

I will add one more thing with respect to the plight of other animals at human hands (or mouths). If the animals themselves had the mental and physical means to do so, they might well mount a violent rebellion against humanity. More power to them, I say in the abstract. But given that I am a human being, and even one who is fully committed to so-called abolitionism or animal liberation, my strongest desires are human-centered. And so I have no sympathy for mounting any kind of violent overthrow of the tyrannical human regime. I possess a strong desire to live in a peaceful community with my human neighbors and friends and relatives, the majority of whom eat animals and animal products, and, further, to be on friendly, respectful, even loving terms with them; and to live in a society where major decisions are taken on a democratic basis in an environment of maximal, informed dialogue. So I will cheer for the chimps in the movie theatre as they wrest control of the world from human hands; and I most certainly admire intelligent animal-rescuers and undercover videotapers. But I do not support violence against animal-users, nor their demonization, nor even an attitude of contempt, nor intimidation, vandalism, arson, etc., in the cause of the animals. Fortunately the more extreme acts are rare, and in fact many animal advocates have explicitly ruled them out on moral grounds. But mine is not a moral statement; it’s just how my personal desires pan out in light of reflection on relevant information and experience.

The issue here is not even specific to the human/animal situation, I suspect, but has generally to do with our subjective allegiances. Furthermore, these things need have nothing to do with judgments of “inherent worth,” another item from the moralist’s toolkit. Thus, we all show various preferences to our own children; but does this rest on a belief in the lesser value of other children? Of course not. This is also why I would not consider it necessarily speciesist to refuse to take certain steps on behalf of nonhuman animals that one would take or support as a matter of course on behalf of other human beings. For there need not be a judgment of superior worth of the humans in order to have stronger bonds of commitment to them. As things stand, I believe inherent worth is a myth anyway; but if I believed in it, I would probably attribute equal worth to all sentient beings. This still would not eliminate my having preferences.

I don’t see why amoralism should force anyone into total consequentialism, but does amoralism tend to encourage a more consequentialist attitude, and could this have implications for how an amoralist animal advocate promotes veganism?

For instance, there are subsistence hunters who believe they are responsible for less animal suffering than vegans; they sometimes argue that by hunting wild animals for food (sometimes singling out destructive invasive species for bonus ethical points) rather than purchasing, let’s say, vegan meat replacements, they have less of a harmful impact on wild animal habitats than vegans and are less responsible for the exploitation of factory farmed animals in the form of factory farmed manure that goes to agricultural crops. Someone who believed in right and wrong might focus on intent and say that it’s always wrong to intentionally kill an animal for food outside of extreme hypotheticals, and so fail to see anything positive about the hunting, even if it helps animals overall. In contrast, would an amoralist vegan be more likely to see the potential defensibility of intentional harm in order to avoid greater foreseen (but unintentional) harm?

Basically, are amoralist vegans more likely to be concerned with suffering reduction than “animal rights”, and thus be more likely to think that non-vegan behaviors are sometimes the most preferable?

That is a brilliant question. But I don’t necessarily agree with the implication. I see the point that morality is often preoccupied with motives, so that these motives could lose a great deal of their significance if we were not concerned about their moral quality. But I don’t think that the features of motives that interest the moralist would necessarily be a matter of indifference to an amoralist. Take your example. It is true that an amoralist would not be bothered by any supposed immorality of intentionally killing animals for food when there were vegetarian alternatives available. But what is to prevent someone from “simply” disliking the killing of animals for food when there are other options? Nor do I think this is only a logical point. It strikes me as quite plausible that many people just don’t like to see human beings killing other animals (or any animals, including humans) unless there is a clear and present necessity to do so. And this is so even if, as in your example, the net outcome may be the deaths of still more animals.

In other words, your suggestion seems to presume that human beings are natural utilitarians, or would be in the absence of moral considerations. But I doubt that this is true. I think human responses tend to be nonutilitarian. We love our family and our pets, then our friends, then our country, our religion, and on and on, without regard to how it all plays out for “the greatest good for the greatest number.” Just so when it comes to specific phenomena, such as killing (versus letting die or inadvertently causing death), and so on. The practice of utilitarianism requires focused effort, which is why somebody like Peter Singer has to keep trying to convince everyone to behave in accordance with the results of utilitarian calculations.

The approach I would therefore recommend (and which Singer does employ in fact, along with his arguing) is to try to engage people’s nonmoral and, indeed, nonutilitarian feelings … even if it turns out that this is in the cause of some utilitarian objective. So for instance, to get the ex-moralist animal protectionist to condone hunting under the conditions you describe, you might want to portray (by verbal portrait or photographs or video or cartoon or imaginative novel or theatre or whatever) the suffering and death of wild animals via loss of habitat for vegetable farming versus their relatively quick and less numerous demise by subsistence hunting. This could work. But in the end it’s an appeal to emotion, not a utilitarian argument. I would only comment on behalf of the anti-hunter that such examples may be (for better or worse) relatively rare in the modern world.

Amoralism doesn’t undermine compassion for animals, but does it undermine the specific logical arguments that the major animal rights philosophers make, such as the argument from marginal cases and inherent value? Are either Singer, Francione or Regan at all equipped to argue with those who don’t believe in an objective morality?

Honestly, I don’t think it makes much difference one way or the other. This is because the belief in objective morality does not guarantee that one will subscribe to any particular moral theory. A moralist could be a utilitarian or a deontologist or an egoist or a virtue theorist or a feminist or whatever. From my amoralist point of view, all those theories simply manifest some strongly held desire or “intuition,” which the moralist then – due to the very strength of the desire – wants to impose on everyone as if it were a law of the universe. “Thou shalt” (or “shalt not”) do x in morals as in logic (as opposed to “obeying” a physical law, where one has no choice in the matter).

When I say it makes no or little difference, however, I mean that, without morality, we would still be left with our strong desires that the world be a certain way and that people behave in certain ways. So: a nonmoralist Singer would presumably still desire that the capacity for pain, even absent certain cognitive abilities, determine how we treat other sentient beings; and Regan would still desire that we treat all subjects of a life with a certain type of fundamental respect; and Francione would still desire that everyone refrain from eating any animal products (whenever it is feasible so to do) and from owning animals, because of the detrimental impact such practices and institutions have on nonhuman animals; and so forth. It’s just that their desires would no longer be supported by certain metaphysical underpinnings, such as inherent value or objective good. But such fictions are not necessary, are they? Is not compassion sufficient to motivate the same desires? Do we really suppose that Singer, Regan, and Francione do not care about other animals but only about certain abstract values and Ultimate Reality?

Furthermore, Singer, Regan and Francione will still be able to adduce all of the evidence they are accustomed to do. Singer can still point to the painful procedures employed in animal agriculture; Regan can still point to the psychological lives of other animals; Francione can still point to the counter-productivity of welfarist schemes of using other animals “humanely.” All of these things and more are available to influence the beliefs, feelings and behaviors of animal users.

The only things denied by amorality to Singer, Regan and Francione are these: some presumed objective truth or categorical imperative that requires everyone to leave off using or abusing other animals, and the attribution of wrong-doing or evil to those people who do not leave off doing those things. Neither of these has any basis in reality according to our best theory of the world, it seems to me.

I should also mention that some would argue that morality is not only not necessary to motivate people but it is also not sufficient to motivate people. An excellent article that makes this very point is Maxim Fetissenko’s “Beyond Morality: Developing a new Rhetorical Strategy for the Animal Rights Movement” in the Journal of Animal Ethics (Vol. 1, No. 2, Fall 2011, pages 150-175). (Alas, Fetissenko argues that compassion is not very effective either and suggests instead a focus on self-interested motives such as concern about health and the environment.)

Vegans don’t often talk about illegalizing animal use, perhaps because that idea is too far off to consider seriously (and it would make them look bad), but a lot of vegans do see that as a goal, ideally. Is that, however, not the case for amoralist vegans?

Even people who believe in morality sometimes say “you shouldn’t legislate morality,” usually in reference to rules with a religious taint, since people have conflicting religious beliefs. So if the issue of ethics were openly acknowledged as unsettleable because there is no right or wrong, wouldn’t this encourage a relatively ethics-agnostic governance that wouldn’t want to ban too many behaviors that didn’t violate social stability? And assuming there are always some humans who want to eat meat, wouldn’t that leave out animals from major legal protections?

If animal advocates were undogmatic and recognized that their desires to protect animals were based on subjective feelings - subjective feelings that many humans do not share - would they feel less justified than moralist vegans would in legally overruling the desires of meat-loving, animal-indifferent humans, given that banning animal use can’t be justified for practical reasons like mutual self-interest and keeping order?

This is just another of the infinity of practical questions that one could only have more-or-less educated hunches about. Also, there may not be one-answer-fits-all. As a philosopher I am not professionally in the business of judging things like this, although I often have my personal opinions (but likely based more on desire than knowledge). But I can say that the moralism/amoralism divide is not necessarily the most relevant consideration. As you point out, even moralists can be political libertarians, or selective libertarians. And when they are so, they are as often as not being pragmatic about the most effective way to bring society ‘round to their particular moral ideal. (And recall also that an amoralist could have the same ideal as a moralist, the sole difference being that the amoralist does not believe there is any obligation to achieve or live that ideal but simply desires it to hold sway.) So while your question is a very interesting one, my answer is boring: “It depends.”

But to say something a little more specific: The desirist form of amoralism I have espoused holds that we have desires regarding means as well as ends. Thus, in my own case, while I desire (as an end) that there be no use of nonhuman animals for human purposes, I also desire (as a means) that coercion be minimal. Therefore I would want to avoid legislating the abolition of animal use not only because that might be an inefficient means of achieving that goal but also because I find that means to be intrinsically aversive because coercive. Someone else, however, might find the horror of animal use to be so compelling that any means whatever, even if likely futile, would be desired by that person as a means of eliminating animal use (or, perhaps more correctly to say, as a form of expression of their strong opposition to what they are nevertheless unable to eliminate). So that person and I could end up being opponents regarding means even though we shared the goal of animal liberation.

There seem to be a lot of atheist vegans. One theory for this is that without religion, we don’t have the concept of Dominion to soothe our consciences. Believing in evolution instead of God could make us feel less superior to other animals - though it could also make some of us more prone to use blood-drenched nature as our guide. Some people say that those willing to question religion are more likely to question other traditions, like meat eating. Others say that humans have a need to believe in something, and the atheist who doesn’t have a personified higher power will seek substitute meaning devices, like veganism. Does it seem to you that vegans are often atheist? What’s your take on it?

I am becoming repetitive since mainly what I have to say is that I’m a philosopher and hence not professionally knowledgeable about the religious or irreligious tendencies of vegans as a matter of empirical fact. Like you I can lay out the logical possibilities, and surely there are reasons both for and against veganism being allied with religion (all the more so of course because religion is hardly monolithic). But as it happens I have taken personal note of a certain phenomenon that is relevant to your question, but I put this down as no more than an impression based on my limited experience. I have been struck by the opposite tendency from what you suggest: I see much of veganism as having a religious flavor (and fervor), even among those who make no explicitly religious references. (I here take veganism to be shorthand for animal advocacy or animal liberation, both because I find Gary Francione’s brief persuasive that dietary veganism is the royal road to animal liberation and because I find Lee Hall’s brief persuasive that veganism, conceived broadly as the non-use of animals, is the very expression of the ultimate goal of respect for all animals.)

Now this should not be surprising if my general amoralist critique of morality is correct, namely, that morality even in its secular form is just another form of theism (see for example my “Confessions of an Ex-Moralist”). But the association of veganism with religion is even more specific than that. To take the most obvious example: Who among animal advocates in the West can resist the comparison of animal liberation to the Garden of Eden? The images that the Biblical narrative brings to mind are the very model of the abolitionist goal:

And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat. And to every beast of the earth, and to every fowl of the air, and to every thing that creepeth upon the earth, wherein there is life, I have given every green herb for meat: and it was so.

Even the animals are vegan! Indeed, I suspect (even if only generalizing from introspecting my own ideals) that a certain romanticized – and surely false — view of animals in nature derives from the pleasant idyll of the wolf dwelling with the lamb and so forth in Isaiah’s prophecy of the new Eden. Also, I find it quite natural to recoil at the abuse of animals as a violation of their God-given life and preciousness – even though I fancy myself an atheist.

But religion, being a pervasive influence in any culture, will offer us “grounds” for whatever position on anything. It has worked the way it has in my personal journey to veganism due purely to contingent features of my life, no doubt, such as having gone to a Quaker school for 12 years. But religion could function in someone else’s life as the foundation of their carnivorism (“Every moving thing that liveth shall be meat for you” says God to Noah after the Flood), in which case embracing atheism could become that person’s route to veganism.

In Beyond Morality, Richard Garner argues against morality and then discusses amoral approaches to living that he thinks may lead to more pleasant lives for most people. He cites Stoicism, Epicureanism and aspects of Buddhism as useful philosophies that may reduce suffering by encouraging adherents to temper their desires and not fret about things they cannot control. Has your approach to living changed since you gave up a belief in morality? Did anything arise in morality’s place? And do you find that you are happier in a “post moralist state of mind”?

Garner and I are pretty much twins about this, although I see moralist thinking and attitudes as more pervasive and ingrained than he and hence am perhaps less optimistic about the prospects for an amoral regime. But I am much happier now, indeed. Let me only begin to count the ways. A great weight of “guilt” and second-guessing is falling from my shoulders, slowly but surely. Life is so much simpler, now that, besides figuring out what I most informedly and reflectively and deeply want and how to get it, I need not also try to figure out what is the right (i.e., obligatory or permissible) thing to do (which is not only a difficult task but an impossible one, as thousands of years of inconclusive moral argumentation attest). I also thereby avoid making my own life and other people’s lives unnecessarily more difficult by opposing strong desires with mythical injunctions and prohibitions. I also am lowering the moral chip from off my shoulder; thus, I avoid countless pointless hassles with people. In fact I can now say that I hate no one, and I respect everyone; and I wish everyone well.

When I come up against a person who is doing something that I had hitherto considered wrong, even an outrage, I will now likely react only with some combination of aversion, sadness and puzzlement, but also rational reflection on how to turn the situation around to my liking. So I certainly have not become any kind of quietist. And neither have I become an egoist, a common misconception of the amoralist (or what I call the desirist) position. Although my desires are the only basis for whatever I do, my desires are just as other-directed as any moralist’s – the case in point being my unadulterated desire for the well-being of all nonhuman animals.

So I would recommend the amoralist way of life to anyone and everyone, but it is also not for me to say if everyone else will take to it as I have. For those who reject it, at least if we agree on all relevant factual matters, I would seek to live on tolerant terms to the greatest degree that is compatible with my considered desires regarding both ends and means. But therefore if my contrary desires were strong enough, as in cases where my opponent’s desires adversely affect third parties (such as animals) about whom I care, I might strive to circumvent or even overpower my adversary. I have already spoken about how this plays out (for me) with respect to veganism.

I close my remarks with a friendly request that my interlocutor and readers reconsider any resistance they may still harbor toward veganism. For people who, like myself of yore, are daunted by the apparent difficulty of becoming vegan, I have put together a dedicated Website: www.TheEasyVegan.com. For people who are skeptical about the amoralist approach to veganism (and ethics in general), I recommend the follow-up article I wrote in reply to objections that readers posted to my “Confessions” article (cited above): Atheism, Amorlity and Animals: A Response.

Thank you for this opportunity to reflect further on and share these ideas. I look forward to additional dialogue.

"Testimony from a defense psychologist had suggested that Schuler’s medical and physical..."

Fri, 28 Oct 2011 18:49:23 +0100

“Testimony from a defense psychologist had suggested that Schuler’s medical and physical ailments, combined with her vegan diet and use of alcohol and an antidepressant, helped impair her ability to tell right from wrong.”

- “Stacy Schuler, Ex-Ohio Teacher, Convicted Of Having Sex With 5 Students”

Confessions of a Vegan Meat Eater

Wed, 26 Oct 2011 18:24:00 +0100

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 outspoken? Accepting the premise that animals suffer, and realising how many we slaughter daily, our society becomes much more atrocious than that of Nazi Germany. Debating with people, I explained how vegetarianism was healthier for them, humane for the animals, and more ethical for society. I described how the diet was not so hard once getting used to it, and how much happier I was since changing. Their silence, lack of satisfactory rebuttal, and frustrated anger proved I was right.

I was wrong.

Via reddit/vegan.

Interview With a Vegan: Speciesist Vegan

Wed, 12 Oct 2011 11:00:05 +0100

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 to humans because of their gender or sexual orientation. We’re not nature’s most impressive creation — we’re just nature’s most arrogant, our delusional sense of self-importance blinding us to the reality that we’re just one of many kinds of sentient creatures who happen to inhabit this planet, none more or less valuable than the rest.

Many who go vegan for ethical reasons believe that anti-speciesism is a key component of any serious vegan philosophy, and that vegans who don’t accept it are vegan for the wrong reasons and are part of the problem. For this reason, vegans who can’t quite get into the idea that species is a meaningless division which shouldn’t really be considered at all tend to be private about this view.

But not Speciesist Vegan, the anonymous vegan writer who uses his blog — also named Speciesist Vegan — to discuss why he thinks anti-speciesism doesn’t make sense, as well as why there is still an argument for veganism anyway.

The blog is only about a month old but is already one of the most fascinating vegan blogs I’ve read. Which is why I did this interview.

And in case you prefer your speciesist veganism in small doses and can’t commit to the full interview just yet, CarpeVegan has the abridged version.

Many vegans say that speciesism is a form of discrimination akin to racism, sexism, anti-Semitism, ableism, classism and heterosexism. You, however, are speciesist, yet maintain an opposition to prejudice against different groups of humans. What makes speciesism different than those others?

Well, to state the obvious, all the -isms you mentioned in the first sentence concern intraspecies relations and speciesism deals with interspecies relations.

Basically, for various reasons, but largely because I AM a human and not some other type of animal, I feel that humans have more moral worth than other animals. I hope it will be more clear why by the end of this interview.

And just to be clear, it’s not like I don’t see any similarities between how some people treat animals and how some people treat (or used to treat) other humans who are different from them. There are plenty of analogies to be drawn. I just have a general distaste for moral argumentation by analogy. Even if there are some legitimate parallels that can be made between dairy farms and slave plantations, the analogy is offensive to me (and almost all non-vegans). If I have to explain to you why the analogy is offensive, you’re definitely a vegan and your name might be Gary.

Yet you’re vegan. Doesn’t accepting speciesism allow for an anything-goes treatment of animals?

It doesn’t preclude such a course of action, but it certainly doesn’t demand it or even encourage it. The vast majority of people are already speciesist and most of them are in favor of at least some measure of protection for animals. I just don’t think that something has to be like humans for me to respect it and choose to leave it alone rather than destroy it.

This is something I find problematic with the idea of species equality being the reason for animals having “rights.” A rigid anti-speciesism seems to make the case that animals deserve rights/protection because they are like us. Why do we feel that only beings who are like us have value? In the same way that we say the differences don’t warrant poor treatment, isn’t it also folly to argue that the similarities are what should warrant good treatment/rights?

Why can’t we just decide that animals have value because they have their own interests and just leave similarities and differences out of it? I think it’s enough to say that it’s wrong to regard sentient beings as objects or property simply because they are sentient and especially because using/regarding them as property is unnecessary the majority of the time.

So, no, I don’t think that admitting that you’re speciesist is the gateway to puppy punching. I think it’s actually a more honest, acceptable position to most non-vegans and therefore it is potentially a position that is more likely to win converts to veganism.

I was once debating with an abolitionist vegan in the comments of one of my blog entries, and I admitted to being a speciesist. She then said that further discussion would be impossible and left the debate. Is disagreement over speciesism so wide a gulf that it makes arguing about other animal issues a waste of time?

I got kicked off of the Vegan Freaks Forum for openly admitting that I’m speciesist. For some people, there are certain philosophical differences that simply preclude further debate, and I think that’s terrible. But that’s how some of these hard-liners see it: since animals and humans are coequals, denying this supposed equality is tantamount to making claims of racial superiority, and they just won’t stand for it. These are the types of positions that a rigid anti-speciesism, taken to its logical extreme, can force people into. They see no point in arguing with someone who actually cares about the issue and who they might actually have a lot in common with philosophically. I fail to see how that makes for good activism.

On that same forum I requested on one thread that people stop making arguments formed on analogies to racism, sexism etc. and one prominent user there got quite mad that I would try to tell other people how to argue. But that wasn’t the reason it upset him, in my opinion. So much of Francione/abolitionist logic and argumentation is predicated on being able to equate speciesism to all the other -isms, so if you take away that rhetorical device, they feel like you’ve taken away their ammo.

How sad is that? Argument by analogy is just one way to make an ethical argument, so one shouldn’t feel disarmed if someone requests that they talk about the thing at hand. Analogies can sometimes illuminate, but analogies always shift focus AWAY from the thing at hand. There is no such thing as a perfect analogy because the moment two things become perfectly analogous, they’re the same thing and you’re just comparing something to itself. So analogies are always imperfect and it’s not unreasonable for a participant in an argument to request that the focus stay on the thing actually being discussed. But this is lost on certain AR/abolitionist types. If they can’t compare Dean Foods to Auschwitz, they just don’t want to talk to you.

I’d rather spend my time discussing issues with people who can build bridges rather than burn them or preempt them being built. The vast majority of people who profess a belief in anti-speciesism really don’t believe it as much as they claim to, and they are willing to discuss things with people who show good faith and a genuine interest in the issues. Let the hardliners try to impress each other with their intolerance for other views. It’s what they do best anyway.

Are a lot of vegans secretly speciesist, but deny it because they think it contradicts veganism?

Absolutely, except most of the denial is to themselves. Most of them are telling others “the truth” insofar as they basically believe that they are truly anti-speciesist. They basically have to proclaim it to be a “good vegan.” There are certain abolitionist types who simply brook no deviation from the anti-speciesist dogma. They would oust a dissenter or terminate an otherwise productive conversation before they would allow anti-speciesism to be seriously questioned. And I think that the more prominent you get in the abolitionist world, the more you feel pressured to display and enforce a rigid anti-speciesist view (and the more you internalize the sentiments and arguments).

And what is all this dissent quashing and self-censorship done for? Veganism can exist without belief in human/nonhuman equality. Maybe I’m the minority, but I suspect there are more people who think like me than many in the “vegan establishment” would guess. Some are probably reading what I’m saying right now and finding, possibly to their surprise, that they agree with a lot of it. I hope they do something about it. The problems associated with this are too big to dismiss this as a petty squabble between vegan factions.

What’s the problem with using anti-speciesism as a litmus test for being a real vegan?

The problem is that it inevitably turns the focus away from what people do to what they think. It turns vegans who don’t have AR as their primary motivation into “fake vegans.” It’s beyond me why vegans want to turn their already small group into an even smaller group by raising the bar for entry. It limits the pool of potential vegans to only those who will accept the idea that their life is only as valuable as a rat’s life. Most people will NEVER accept such a premise. Learn to work with it or fight it. I choose to work with it.

Is it even possible to be truly anti-speciesist?

I think maybe it is possible, but to be truly anti-speciesist, you would need to have some opinions that would disgust your fellow humans. You would have to say that you’d just flip a coin to see if you’d save the baby or the puppy. You’d have to say that killing a child to feed your starving dogs is morally equivalent to killing a dog to feed your starving kids. So, yes, I think technically one could be truly anti-speciesist, but that would make you a total psycho in most people’s eyes.

And consider that even the most extreme, radical, reckless animal rights activists, the ones who blow shit up and burn shit down, still go to great lengths to make sure that they don’t harm humans. If all life really is equal, why wouldn’t killing an animal researcher or hog farmer be justified? Answer: because humans have more moral worth than animals. Even the hardest of the hardcores acknowledge this through their actions if not their words. If a crazy AR activist ends up killing or even hurting a fellow human (intentionally or accidentally), they will be reviled by 99.9% of vegans and 99.9999% of humans. I think for all intents and purposes, most vegans are actually on the same page as non-vegans on this one. Some of them are just loathe to admit it.

Do you think the animal rights movement will eventually become violent against humans? And if so, will it be because of anti-speciesism?

I think it’s inevitable that part of the AR movement will eventually become violent against humans, sure. But I don’t see it becoming widespread. And, yes, if it does occur (especially if it’s intentional), I think it’s likely that the perpetrators would consider themselves anti-speciesist. One would need to have a way to rationalize why killing a person is okay. Anti-speciesism, plus either some kind of utilitarian logic or Old Testament “eye for an eye” reasoning could get you there. But I want to emphasize that I do NOT think that anti-speciesists are inherently anti-human or prone to violence.

Pretty much the only problem I have with veganism, philosophically, is that it claims to be a moral obligation for everyone who is capable of surviving as a vegan. But you don’t think veganism is a moral obligation. Why not?

While I was an abolitionist in training, I was told (over and over and over) that veganism is the “moral baseline.” But I could never really internalize it. I just didn’t think that my friends and family were being immoral when they ate meat. I thought that I was making the ethically better choice (and I still think it), but I stopped short of thinking of meat eating as being straight up immoral. Moral and immoral are such stark opposites of each other and I never felt like such a dichotomized understanding of the ethics of meat-eating described my actual feelings.

I really started to rethink it all after reading your posts on how vegans still contribute to animal death and how veganism is ultimately an arbitrary line. I had given plenty of thought to the former (and found ways to explain why it was just unintended, collateral damage, and therefore okay), but I had a mental roadblock about the latter. How can one have a moral obligation to achieve one arbitrary point along a continuum? How does that make sense? It doesn’t.

So I eventually did come to see that what I had previously thought of as a totally logical line in the sand was actually an arbitrary line (but that’s not necessarily a bad thing). It was around this time that I became okay with admitting my own speciesism. So when I read about the concept of supererogation on your site, all this started to click for me (although it took me a while to sort through it all).

I view being vegan not as a moral obligation, but as an act of supererogation. But I also believe that one should really always be striving to make the best choices available to them. So, I think that there is still a way to make an ethical argument for why one should be vegan (or veganish, or vegetarian, or whatever). And that argument is pretty simple: “being vegan causes less harm, causing less harm is good, so go vegan or at least try to reduce your animal consumption.”

I know that lacks the emotional, prescriptive thrust of “go vegan or you’re a fucking murdering scumbag!” but what can I say? It’s more in line with the way I actually think about these things. I am still unequivocal in my assertion that being vegan is ethically better than not being vegan, but I’m not saying that not being vegan is immoral. Hence, one does not have a moral obligation to be vegan.

As you’ve mentioned on your blog, one of the reasons that a lot of vegans say they don’t eat non-vegan freegan food (NVFF) is because of representation. They say that eating NVFF demonstrates that animals can be food (as if most people aren’t already aware of this), and also that someone might see them eating meat and not know it’s from a dumpster and then be confused about what veganism is. What do you think of the excuses vegans make to avoid freeganism?

It’s well known that some non-vegans are always on the lookout for signs of inconsistency in vegans, so I can understand why, given the predominant definition of veganism, some would view eating NVFF as inconsistent or hypocritical. What I am proposing is that we should have a new kind of veganism (or veganishism, or call it what you want) where the ability to eat NVFF is part of the “rules.” Eating NVFF doesn’t violate the ethics of veganism as I understand them, so we should give non-vegans the benefit of the doubt and assume that they’re intelligent enough to grasp this. Some won’t, but we shouldn’t design a movement around people who will never understand something that makes sense.

I don’t have a problem with vegans not wanting to practice elements of freeganism. For the same reason I don’t argue that anyone has a moral obligation to be vegan, I don’t argue that anyone has a moral obligation to go further than veganism. If some vegans just can’t or don’t want to get on board with it personally, that’s fine. Just don’t look down your nose at me if I choose to eat the end of a slice of pizza that my friend is about to throw in the garbage.

How does your speciesism change your attitude toward meat eaters?

When I was freshly vegan, I kinda tried to make myself buy the whole “meat is murder” line because once you do, all these other things fall into place, all this supposed consistency. And during that time I did have more antipathy toward meat eaters. But I always viewed it as a personal choice that everyone has to make for themselves, even when I (sort of) believed that it was immoral to eat meat. Maybe it was the libertarian part of my brain that made me think this way, but I never was on board with the idea of forcing anyone not to eat meat.

Now that I’ve come a long way in figuring out my philosophy (veganism as supererogation, admitting my speciesism, allowing for freeganism etc.), my attitude allows me to get along with people of all dietary persuasions much more easily. And life really is better this way. It can be draining to feel like you’re surrounded by sinners while you’re a martyr nailed to a tofu cross and no one gives a shit.

What do you think of the anti-speciesist “Why Love One But Eat the Other?” campaign, which tries to make us see the similarity between farm animals and pets?

I don’t know much about Mercy For Animals, so I don’t want to comment specifically on that organization or campaign, so I’ll just give my reaction to this poster and the idea itself. I like it. It probably makes some people question if there really is much difference between puppies and piglets, or chicks and kittens. I think their choice of animals indicates that they’re trying to manipulate the cutetarian sentiments that many people have, but overall, I like the idea.

But what I think you’re getting at is this: if I’m a speciesist, how can I make a case that the puppy and the piglet deserve the same treatment and protection? Well, I can’t really do that as a speciesist. I can only say that treating animals with respect is almost always the more ethical choice.

I don’t view the embracing of speciesism as a panacea, an all-encompassing ideological shift that will make everything better. I’m just trying to work within current reality. Anti-speciesists, on the other hand, view anti-speciesism (an idea that is embraced by an embarrassingly small percentage of people) as the linchpin that will usher in the Vegan Utopia. I just think this is naive.

It’s easier to convince people to take steps toward the vegan end of the spectrum than it is to convince them that all forms of animal life are equal. In four years of being vegan, I’ve seen one person become vegan, one become vegetarian, one become “freegan” vegetarian, two people become pescetarian, and a whole slew of people dabbling in making more veg*an choices. I’m not saying that I take credit for all of these, but I am saying that not ONE of these people would consider themselves anti-speciesist.

How does a speciesist veganism differ from an anti-speciesism veganism, in practice and theory?

I won’t pretend to have the right to define what speciesist veganism is, because I know there are other speciesist vegans out there (and a lot of them are probably afraid to be open about it, like I was). But I do have some ideas about things that could help veganism (or veganishism) find a wider audience and have a greater long-term retention rate. Only some of these points are a natural conclusion drawn from approaching veganism from a speciesist perspective.

The following list (which is in no particular order) is just an abbreviated list of the maxims on my blog. It is a work in progress. If any like-minded individuals want to help me hash out some new ideas (or even tweak or argue with me about existing ones), I’d love to have the added brainwaves:

*buy only vegan food

*eat any food (vegan or not) that can be obtained by freegan means

*one needn’t believe that animals have rights equal to or even similar to the rights of humans to be vegan

*acknowledge that not all forms of speciesism are bad

*avoidance of animal foods is supererogatory, not morally obligatory

*approach all debates and info with an open mind. The case for veganism is not absolute

*take nutrition, and critiques of veganism based on nutrition, seriously

*avoid analogies to slavery, rape and genocide

*be vocal about the fact that no one should have to sacrifice their health to be vegan

*promote the idea that veganism (and freegan veganism) is the ideal, but that near-veganism (or being veganish) is a laudable goal and may even be the end goal for a particular person

*take seriously the critiques of locavores, animal welfare activists, fair trade activists, anti-corporatists etc

*veganism is not, and needn’t be, globally applicable to be the right choice for the majority of people

*be realistic and honest about the dietary/culinary/taste/nutritional/lifestyle advantages and disadvantages of being vegan

*recognize that vegetarians, near-vega*ans and “conscientious omnivores” are allies, not enemies to be either converted or denounced as weak-willed

*Admit that veganism is an arbitrary line in the sand

One point that I want to stress (especially since this is appearing on the blog of a person who left veganism for health reasons) is that a speciesist vegan would be okay with someone eating non-vegan food if they were having health problems that they felt were due to nutrition. No one should have to sacrifice their health to be vegan. A speciesist vegan can admit that their life and well-being is more important than the well-being (or even the life) of a chicken or a cow. Instead of having a definition of veganism that forces someone with health problems to abandon veganism so that they can eat the food that makes them feel better without feeling like a murderer (and then start an anti-vegan website - ha!), why not have a definition of veganism that allows them to “stay in the club” while eating whatever they need to eat to feel right? I think speciesist veganism has the potential to do that.

Many vegans will feel very adamant that what I’m describing here is unequivocally NOT veganism, and that’s fine, because I never did and never will have interest in those types of arguments. I eat the way I do because it’s what I’ve found to be a good balance between my ideals and my own comfort and health, not because I want to maintain my membership in some elite group of hypermoralistic, specialized eaters. I advocate for a “big tent” type of veganism because I see that having a much better chance for growth than the culty, puritanical version now in vogue. If vegans object to me calling it speciesist veganism, they can offer alternatives.

In one of your early entries, you mentioned that discovering CarpeVegan inspired you to start your blog. How did that get you going?

I live a pretty lonely existence as a vegan. I have a pretty fulfilling social life, but my curious “mix” of beliefs often makes me feel like I have no real home when it comes to what I eat. So whenever I find a blog or a person who is thinking in a somewhat different way about all these issues that I care about, I get excited by the possibility that there are people out there who think like me.

I just want to talk to (and read posts from) people who are trying to do something different with veganism (or any kind of philosophy that takes issues of animal use seriously), like CarpeVegan is doing. PCrank is cool too. He seems to be attacking the anti-science “woo” in veganism, while I am exploring the problems of theory, argumentation and rhetoric. I think that veganism (or something substantially like it) really could have an increased role to play in our future (out of necessity, because of changing mores, or both), but I have really come to dislike most vegan rhetoric.

I specifically dislike the Francione / “veganism is the moral baseline” crowd. I feel they have exerted undue influence on what it means to be vegan. I think a lot of vegans are attracted to that camp because the ideas seem so radical, but the more I engage with their ideas, the more I realize that they’re really just the most simplistic - they keep repeating the same things over and over again. Lack of nuance is a good thing to them. I have debated many abolitionist types and I don’t think there is any winning with a lot of them. I just hope that some of us newer vegan bloggers will expose some cracks to the rank-and-file abolitionists and fence-sitters and that they’ll slowly start peeling off from that camp.

And it wasn’t just CarpeVegan that inspired me. More inspiring than that, oddly enough, was Let Them Eat Meat. One thing that reading LTEM has opened my eyes to is the number of ex-vegans out there. It seems that a lot of the more vocal ones became ex-vegan for health reasons, which makes sense, because leaving for health reasons gives you better cover than just saying “I just got sick of all the idiots.” Not that all vegans respect when people leave for health reasons, though. Some are the asshole types who say “you didn’t do this right, you didn’t do that right.” But what does that do? All they are doing is being an apologist for something that is imperfect. I think there has got to be a less vocal contingent of people who left veganism for other reasons. I would really like to talk with them and find out why.

What I think about when I ponder ex-vegans is: what KIND of veganism might have allowed this person to want to continue to be vegan? What KIND of veganism would have allowed this person to address their health concerns without feeling like they were questioning the sanctity of an inviolable concept? What KIND of vegan community could help foster and support such a new concept of veganism? It certainly isn’t one that shuts down debate and parrots decades-old dogma.

Veganism as we currently know it is flawed. If I can play even a small part in helping people to find “A New Way” then I will feel like my effort is worth it. That’s why I started my blog.

Factory Farming That Even Vegans Could Support

Sat, 08 Oct 2011 18:12:53 +0100

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 wrong.

If it were inherently wrong to intentionally kill a gazelle, I theorized, then it would be wrong to do so even if you weren’t aware that it was wrong to kill a gazelle. Otherwise, there would be nothing wrong with eating meat if you weren’t aware of its wrongness — a stance that vegans admittedly do sort of lean toward when they say that eating meat is less immoral before you’ve seen Earthlings.

If zero moral rules apply to creatures who experience zero sensations of right and wrong, then wouldn’t only one moral rule apply someone who experiences only one sensation of right and wrong? In other words, if animals are off the hook because they don’t experience any morality, it would seem to follow that individual moral rules only apply to people who feel those particular rules. You can’t say that everyone who is capable of feeling right and wrong is obligated to follow every plausible moral rule, because there are just too many of them, most of which are compelling to some people but not others. Which would mean that it is not immoral for us to eat meat as long as we do not personally feel that it is immoral to do so.

Arguably.

The reason I’m dusting off this oldie is that a commenter who recently barraged it with comments disagreeing with my conclusions (wtf?!) did concede one of the points I made: if it is not morally wrong for animals to commit violence because they are not guided by moral considerations, then the actions of amoral human psychopaths also cannot be judged wrong.

Through experience, observation and training, psychopaths do know what is popularly accepted as right and wrong, and they realize they’ll be punished for behavior deemed wrong if they are caught. However, this obedience to rules they do not believe in is no morally different from a dog who is trained, through fear of punishment or through positive rewards, to behave in ways humans like. In both cases, if the amoral being violates the training, they cannot be said to have committed an objective moral wrong, since they have no conscience, do not experience the sensation of wrongness, and so operate outside of morality.

And abolitionist-esque vegans agree!

The commenter wrote:

To the extent that a psychopath isn’t guided or motivated by moral considerations (whether by themselves or in conjunction with other beliefs and desires), and if this is a necessary condition for moral agency (which seems likely), then the psychopath is not doing something that is morally wrong - no objective moral principle applies to her. That would be so, even if she were to meet the already mentioned necessary condition for moral agency - ability to conceive of and think about moral issues. Fulfillment of these two conditions probably comes as a package deal in people who are ‘hooked up right’ (to use the jargon of moral psychiatry/psychology).

Of course, the dog under the envisaged circumstances isn’t doing anything wrong (no objective moral principles apply to him) since he doesn’t meet either of the alleged necessary conditions for moral agency thus mentioned - he can’t grasp right or wrong, nor be motivated to act by moral considerations. Neither the dog nor the psychopath you describe are objectively morally wrong, since neither are moral agents.

And it does seem clear that psychopaths are generally not motivated by internal moral considerations. As someone wrote on an anti-social personality board:

my problem is i cannot comprehend morals. i wouldn’t mind having them but i really cannot understand them. there are other social things i cannot understand either. sometimes i wonder if my frontal lobe functions normally bc ive really honestly tried to understand certain things (like morals) and cannot get it.

If an inability to understand morals frees other animals from rules rules rules, it should do the same for humans. To suggest otherwise would be the basest form of specieisism, treating psychopaths as moral agents just because they belong to a species dominated by moral agents, even though they — like other animals — lack the brain functioning required for morality.

Of course, even if we can’t say that vicious, destructive actions by psychopaths are either good or bad, we’d still want to punish psychopaths who violate the rules of morality, just as we would want to keep lions from eating our children; it’s no consolation that a loved one was killed by a being who lacks a moral compass and thus didn’t technically do anything immoral.

This troubling condition may not be all bad, however. Psychopathic humans, if used properly, could offer valuable services to members of the moral community who want some things that moral feelings prevent them from taking. Most relevant for this blog, humans for whom the rules of morality do not apply open up the possibility of morally neutral animal use.

For vegans who believe that there’s nothing inherently wrong with amoral beings committing what we would consider atrocities if morally functioning humans performed them, animal use should be okay if amoral humans were responsible for every immoral aspect of it (exploitation, suffering and death). If animal rights vegans cannot object to slaughterhouses created and run by grizzly bears, they cannot object if amoral humans run them.

These amoral animal handlers would function like Shabbos goys who can do forbidden work for observant Jews on Shabbat by being exempt from the religious rules preventing them from laboring on the day of rest. What is immoral for those of us with a conscience becomes morally neutral in the gruff amoral hands of psychopaths - even Tyson Chicken.

On humane farms, amoral humans could artificially inseminate cows, separate calves from their mothers, dehorn and castrate steers, and drive animals to the slaughterhouse, where everyone involved with the killing would also be a confirmed amoral sociopath. All the remaining farm tasks would be similar to farm sanctuary work, which vegans don’t find to be immoral.

You could even have a morally neutral factory farming if you managed to staff all the cruel positions with those exempt from the laws of morality.

There would still need to be debate over procedure. The commenter I quoted earlier asserted that it would be wrong to train a psychopath to kill pest animals to protect crops, even if the actual killing of the animals is not wrong for the psychopath. This strikes me as too stringent. Isn’t it okay to train someone to do something that would be wrong for the trainer, but not wrong for the person being trained, as long as the trainer doesn’t teach through demonstration? Would it be wrong to use a rubber mouse to train an inept cat to hunt mice?

To be on the safe side, you could take a page out of the Shabbos goy playbook and use savvy indirectness to make sure the hands of the moral are not sullied. Farm owners could “hint” to the confirmed psychopath that they might like to be castrating that steer. The training could be an “innocent” conversation about what castration entails, never explicitly acknowledging that the psychopath is being taught how to do this so they can really do it. And payment could be in advance, presented as a gift, so that the psychopath’s amoral interventions could qualify as friendly favors rather than paid labor.

Or, to make it simple, you could have a farm run and staffed entirely by amoral humans. There may already be a few factory farms like that.

And if it’s not wrong for psychopaths to raise animals in cruel, confined conditions, how could it be wrong to purchase the products of such a farm incapable of either right or wrong? It would be the moral equivalent of eating the remains of another animal’s kill.

Unless, of course, you’re vegan for suffering reduction reasons. But then you should probably get to work on phasing out carnivores.

Interview With an Anti-Veganism Vegan: Dave D

Sat, 08 Oct 2011 00:04:37 +0100

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 the hook - I should have used charts.

Also, since this review is nothing but links… in England, you can’t be fired for your animal rights views. Hopefully this applies equally to people who don’t believe in animal rights. I would hate to move there and then find out I can’t hold down a job because of my controversial pro-animal-use views.

Forget Sentience: Here’s the Real Reason We Grant Rights

Thu, 01 Sep 2011 05:10:20 +0100

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 and Ginny Messina’s take on it from Vegan For Life:

A human rights ethic suggest that no human—not just intelligent humans, but also babies, infants, and those who are mentally challenged—should be abused and used by others for whatever purpose they like. This raises the question about whether rights should be extended to animals. The idea that if we grant rights to humans of lesser intelligence or ability, we should also grant rights to animals is sometimes referred to as the argument from marginal cases. If intelligence and capability are not criteria for the possession of rights, why would animals—who have the capacity to feel fear and pain—be excluded from moral consideration? Some philosophers may reject the argument from marginal cases, but we have never known any of them to provide a compelling reason for doing so. (234 - 235)

Jeez, okay, I’ll try to do better this time.

First, for nostalgia’s sake, let’s look at the points I made in that earlier entry:

1) The argument from marginal cases seems to rely on a situation that has nothing to do with animals: the existence of humans with poor cognitive functioning. If it became possible to detect and correct the genetic combination that gave rise to that condition, and the means for doing so became widespread enough, it would theoretically be possible to end the existence of severely cognitively impaired humans. And then, since babies don’t belong in the argument from marginal cases, there would be no argument from marginal cases and it would become okay to eat meat again. Even though technology isn’t quite there yet, the fact that it is theoretically possible makes the argument from marginal cases look absurd — why should something that is entirely to do with humans affect what we can do with other animals?

After an email exchange with animal rights professor Jean Kazez, I accepted that this point wasn’t that strong. Abolishing human marginal cases would not in itself render the argument from marginal cases moot, since you could still use imaginary cognitively impaired humans as a thought experiment. Humans in a world with no cognitively impaired humans who want to say that rights are based on cognitive ability would still have to say, “And if there were humans at the cognitive level of other animals, we would treat them the same as we treat other animals at that cognitive level.” It would be much easier to say that in a world where there aren’t cognitively handicapped humans to call your bluff, but future people – being as compassionate and enlightened as everyone suspects imaginary future will be – would likely feel uncomfortable saying this nevertheless.

2) Vegans insist that there is no need for humans to eat animal products in order to thrive. But let’s say that we did. Surely that’s not an impossible fantasy, especially when you consider people who have various conditions limiting the kinds of plants they can eat. The argument from marginal cases, if accepted by humans who had a nutritional requirement for animal products, would either force them to sacrifice their health and maybe their lives in order to avoid speciesism, or it would require them to eat every existing species of animal, including cognitively impaired humans, in order to be logically consistent.

This is an interesting glitch, but doesn’t actually take us anywhere. It doesn’t debunk the argument so much as show that it is purely academic and potentially masochistic.

3) The argument from marginal cases requires us to “treat like cases alike,” yet babies, the intellectually impaired and the senile currently have more rights than vegans are willing to give animals; this means we either have to give human marginal cases fewer rights than most people (including vegans) are comfortable giving them, or we have to give animals more rights than even vegans are comfortable giving them. For instance, most vegans are okay with spaying and neutering companion animals, even though we would not do this to severely cognitively impaired humans. Also, if parents were unable to take care of a cognitively impaired human, society would feel a responsibility to step in and take care of that person. Would vegans say that society has a responsibility to take care of all animals who cannot take care of themselves? If so, are we obligated to take care of all companion animals without a home? Do we need to take care of all injured wild animals? If not, how is this not speciesism?

I believe that at the very least, the companion animal aspect of this point holds up. The argument from marginal cases is very clear that we are not to see a significant moral difference between cognitively impaired humans and other animals. While discussing the argument from marginal cases in Introduction to Animal Rights, Gary L. Francione writes:

There is no characteristic that serves to distinguish humans from all other animals. Whatever attribute we may think makes all humans ‘special’ and thereby different from other animals is shared by some group of nonhumans. Whatever ‘defect’ we may think makes animals inferior to us is shared by some group of us. In the end, the only difference between them and us is species, and species alone is not a morally relevant criterion for excluding animals from the moral community any more than is race a justification for human slavery or sex a justification for making women the property of their husbands. The use of species to justify the property status of animals is speciesism just as the use of race or sex to justify the property status of humans is racism or sexism. If we want animal interests to have moral significance, then we have to treat like cases like, and we cannot treat animals in ways in which we would not be willing to treat any human. (xxix)

Whatever you think of Francione, this is not an unusual interpretation of the argument from marginal cases. So if “we cannot treat animals in ways in which we would not be willing to treat any human,” why are most vegans okay with the widely accepted practice of spaying and neutering companion animals who have an interest in having sex, even though we wouldn’t do the same thing to cognitively impaired humans?

The vegan responses I’ve heard to this are that other animals are different from us because they are more easily prone to over-population, and that it’s good for the animals’ health to have their sex organs removed. The first of those two objections introduces a morally relevant difference into the mix: a particular breeding capacity means you have fewer rights and can be sterilized against your interests. Sentience, then, wouldn’t be the only issue when considering interests.

The second objection re-frames spaying and neutering as in the interest of companion animals. If we accept that, then the question becomes whether there is a moral difference between euthanizing companion animals and euthanizing severely cognitively impaired humans. If not, the argument from marginal cases wins this point. Quick poll: vegans, do you think parents euthanizing their adult cognitively impaired offspring is morally equivalent to pet owners taking their animals to a shelter to be euthanized?

My point about our needing to foster wild animals to avoid speciesism if society would take care of orphaned cognitively disabled humans is on shakier ground, as one vegan commenter pointed out recently, but the reason for this puts the argument from marginal cases in even greater jeopardy, which is what the rest of this entry is about.

4) The argument from marginal cases arrives at a false conclusion; as Jean Kazez argues, sentience is not actually what we have on our minds when we don’t kill and eat the intellectually impaired.

I still agree with this one, fortunately, because that’s also what this entry is about.

I do have to give the argument from marginal cases some credit: it is correct that cognitive ability is not the only factor that determines the distribution of rights. However, that doesn’t mean that sentience is the right explanation. Here are some reasons why I think sentience does not work as a coherent unifying explanation for the distribution of rights/consideration of interests:

* Vegans often use “sentience” as shorthand for “an ability to experience pain.” But if pain is what’s at issue, there shouldn’t be anything in itself wrong with killing an animal, as long as you do it painlessly. It doesn’t seem like a disservice to take a being out of the world simply because it was able to suffer torture and agony. If the morally relevant aspect of sentience is pain experience, we need to devise better ways to raise and kill animals painlessly, or breed animals who don’t experience pain. However, vegans generally do not concede that this would make meat eating okay.

* Sometimes vegans say that it’s not just pain that counts in sentience – pleasure counts too. When we kill animals, even if painlessly, that wrongs them by depriving them of future pleasure. But if potential for future pleasure is the basis for rights, that means that we need to give rights to zygotes at conception, a policy that tends to displease vegans. It also smacks into most of the other problems that pain-centered sentience slams against, such as all the other problems I’m about to list.

* Some people, such as animal rights philosopher Tom Regan, say that sentience is just one trait in a litany of others such as “perception, memory, desire, belief, self-consciousness, intention, a sense of the future” that determine who deserves basic rights. Vegan blogger Tim Gier says Gary Francione uses sentience to encompass all those traits, even if he doesn’t admit it.

Clearly this doesn’t vindicate the sentience explanation, because it rejects sentience as sufficient for interest consideration by itself. But this “subject-of-a-life” standard is so stringent that it excludes many animals from rights, and could even exclude severely mentally impaired humans from rights/interest consideration. Certainly it would exclude unconscious humans from rights. It also runs into a lot of the same problems as the sentience explanation.

* If sentience or “subject-of-a-life” status grants a basic right to life, why are we allowed to kill someone in self-defense? Just because they are threatening our lives does not mean that they have lost their capacity for pain or pleasure, or that they aren’t subjectively experiencing life.

* Similarly, most animal rights advocates say it is okay to kill animals when immediate human survival is at stake. Since animals do not lose their sentience just because you are about to starve, sentience being the basis for a right to life cannot explain why this seems okay.

* According to the book Heart and Blood, as quoted by Melissa McEwen:

A few years back, a government agency promoting the American agrarian ideal shipped baby chickens and piglets to Koyukon Indian villagers- people who have been hunters, trappers, and fishers all their lives. Some folks took to the notion, built pens, raised healthy pigs and successful flocks, and eventually found eggs under their hens. That’s when things started going awry. After watching the chickens grow, many couldn’t bring themselves to eat the eggs, and it was even worse to think of dining on the birds or pigs. ‘People felt like they’d be eating their own children,’ a Koyukon woman told me. ‘A lot of them said, from now on they would only eat wild game they got by hunting. It felt a lot better that way.’

Farm animals and wild animals are equally sentient. Why would lifelong hunters suddenly feel bad about killing animals raised for food?

* Why are vegans accepting of agriculture and civilization when human expansion steals land from wild animals and kills them? Killing inhabitants for land grabs would be seen as a blatant rights violations if done to indigenous humans; if sentience explains considerations of interests such as life, why don’t we have to avoid killing these sentient wild animals?

“Intent” – saying that it’s okay to kill animals if killing them is not the end goal – does not work because the reasons that make intent an important concept for humans (getting revenge on societal menaces and attempting to prevent future offenses) mean nothing to animals killed by agriculture and civilization. Plus, vegans don’t let vegetarians get away with the intent argument when lacto-ovo vegetarians say that they don’t intend for laying hens and milk cows to die for meat. Also, few vegans would accept good intent as an excuse for killing indigenous humans for agricultural land; how can this be explained aside from speciesism?

Intuitively, something does feel different about killing a wild animal with a wheat thresher than killing a goat by knocking him out and then slitting his throat, even if both can be done with the same amount of pain. But what makes it feel different if both are sentient and intent doesn’t have any practical application for animals?

* In a burning house scenario, most people would choose to save their baby over their dog, and their friend over a stranger. Francione writes in Introduction to Animal Rights:

[M]ost of us would save our own child even if the other being in the burning house were someone else’s child, or Mother Teresa, or some other human whom we valued. Indeed, if we are willing to be honest about it, most of us would choose to save our own child over a dozen other people’s children.

If we protect life because of sentience, shouldn’t these decisions be a complete toss-up? Is anything else besides selfishness being considered in such hypothetical decisions?

* It is socially acceptable among the pro-choice to say that you would abort a fetus if you knew that it was going to be severely cognitively impaired, but it is far less socially acceptable to say that you would abort a fetus if you knew it was female, going to be gay, or racially mixed. It does seem that many people are at least a little more prone to discriminate against the severely mentally impaired than other human groups. Clearly many people do appear to think less of them, or think that their lives are less worth living. Nevertheless, we do extend rights to them once they’re here. Why the mixed feelings if sentience is all we need to consider?

* In The Great Starvation Experiment: Ancel Keys and the Men Who Starved for Science, Todd Tucker describes the hierarchy of life value that was exposed when the Nazis attempted to starve Leningrad into submission. First to go were zoo animals, followed by household pets, then wallpaper paste that was made of potatoes, then boiled leather, then corpses of humans who had already died, then children, and then people finally resorted to murdering adults or eating their own body parts. What informed this hierarchy if everyone – aside from the leather and potato paste – was equally sentient?

* Vegans say that the argument from marginal cases proves that we are speciesist, because it shows that the only difference between all humans and all other animals is species category. But if we met intelligent aliens who could communicate with us as humans can communicate with each other, would we capture them and raise them for food and clothing? Unless we saw them as a threat, I don’t think it’s so sure that we would. Doesn’t that suggest that cognitive ability and communication is a more decisive factor for rights than species? On the other hand, if we don’t raise cognitively impaired humans for food and clothing, we also can’t say that cognitive level is the only consideration here. What could explain this apparent contradiction?

* Most meat eaters believe that animals are sentient. Why is there so much agreement about sentience, but so little agreement about rights? If sentience is the reason we give basic rights, why do we give rights to the severely mentally impaired but not to other animals? Vegans see this as a problem in our own logical consistency, but given the incongruities with the sentience explanation for rights I already mentioned, the real mistake appears to be with the argument itself, and hanging onto sentience as the only criterion for rights despite all the exceptions it fails to explain. Clearly there’s something wrong with the argument from marginal cases because the conclusion it arrives at – that sentience alone provides the justification for a basic right to life – doesn’t mesh with reality.

But if it’s not sentience, what is it?

Selfishness and prejudice are other possibilities—we respect the rights of others only so that they will respect ours, and refuse to give rights to groups we don’t like—and those are often significant, but like cognitive ability and sentience, they leave too much unexplained to be the main explanations. A purely selfish humanity with a fetish for smarts wouldn’t have much patience for humans with severe cognitive disabilities, nor would it ever have concern for other animals.

It might be that there is not a unifying explanation for how rights play out the way they do, and that it turns out to be emotive and arbitrary. But that’s no fun. So if I were going to come up with an alternative to sentience to explain the guiding concepts behind how we distribute rights, I would say it’s a mixture of responsibility (both altruistic and reciprocal) and attachment.

Sorry, I know, it would be catchier if I’d boiled it down to a single word, but that’s what I’ve got.

I started thinking about this because of an objection that vegan commenter Rob W. made to my third point against the argument from marginal cases. Rob took exception to my suggestion that if we were to follow the argument from marginal cases literally, human society would need to take care of all animals that cannot take care of themselves – domesticated animals as well as wild animals – because it would be speciesist to say that humans had an obligation to take care of orphaned mentally impaired humans but not other animals who were similarly unable to fend for themselves. To paraphrase Rob, he said I was overlooking the question of responsibility, and that we’re not responsible for aiding helpless wild animals in the same way that we are for aiding humans who are unable to take care of themselves.

In other words, it’s our job to take care of our children, no matter their cognitive abilities. It’s not our job to rescue wild animals.

If that’s true, and it certainly sounds reasonable, it explains a lot.

If sentience and cognitive ability are out and it’s a sense of responsibility that explains why parents and institutions take care of severely mentally impaired humans when we aren’t obligated to take care of wild animals, we now have a non-speciesist explanation for why we can give severely mentally impaired people rights that we don’t give to animals. It’s not that the cognitively impaired are H. sapiens, it’s that we brought them into this world—that they are of us—and so we feel like we need to protect them.

If this makes sense, it’s not wrong or inconsistent to feel more responsible for severely mentally impaired humans than we feel for domesticated animals. Which means that it can be a legitimate position to raise animals for food, even though we wouldn’t do the same to severely mentally impaired humans.

If you deny the responsibility explanation, then you’re back to human society being obligated to take care of all animals, wild and domestic, who cannot fend for themselves. As a practical matter, human society will be unable to do this to any serious extent, but that obligation will still exist and will need to be pursued as much as possible.

Even if you’re willing to accept human responsibility for wild animals, what about all those other scenarios where sentience struggles? Since responsibility does a fine job of explaining why we take care of the severely mentally impaired without giving rights to animals, let’s see how it fares elsewhere.

The sentience explanation and Tom Regan’s “inherent value” theory can’t make sense of the hierarchy of life value that becomes so stark in extreme cases like mass starvation. Decisions between who to eat in Leningrad or who to save in burning houses should be arbitrary if all that matters is sentience, but they’re not.

Responsibility/attachment explains why.

We feel most responsible for and attached to those closest to us. The more we care about someone, or feel responsible for them, the more value their safety and lives have for us. As beings become further removed from our inner circle, our responsibility for them and attachment to them weakens. Usually this puts husbands, wives, children, parents and tribe members at the top of the life value hierarchy, though of course this can change depending on how much you like all of them.

And a child raised by wolves will feel more loyalty and sense of duty to that pack of wolves – and probably all wolves everywhere – than they will to human society.

The very top responsibility for most people is themselves; because we are the ones with the most control over own lives, are the only ones who directly experience them and are most affected when something goes wrong in them, we usually feel most responsible for ourselves and most attached to our own continued existences. But that’s not inevitable either, as plenty of people are willing to sacrifice themselves to save a larger number of people, the president, their romantic partner, their best friend or their child.

This is not to say that sentience, species and cognitive ability are never factors. But those are mostly significant as traits that can play on our sense of responsibility and attachment.

In Introduction to Animal Rights, Francione relays a number of burning house scenarios that seem believable enough. According to Francione, we would most likely save our friend over a stranger, our own child over multiple other children, and we might even save a dog over a human if we knew that the human were a mass murderer. If cognitive ability and speciesism were the basis of concern, these are not the patterns that would arise, and if sentience were the basis of concern, there wouldn’t be a pattern at all, except that we would want to save the dog over the Chia Pet.

The sentience focus can’t explain why you would kill a bear to save your child, but wouldn’t kill a bear to save a squirrel. Responsibility and attachment can. When your child is in danger, you are driven to action, not because the child has a capacity for pain and pleasure, but because you brought her into the world and owe it to her to do all you can to defend her. You of course have selfish motives too. Your child is an emotional investment that you want to see pay off; you want all your love and effort to amount to something, so you want to see this child grow up and have a good life.

Your sense of responsibility might be of a more reciprocal nature with friends. They’ve done favors for you in the past, and you would expect them to rush straight for you in a burning house, so you better have their backs. On top of that, you like hanging out with them, and who knows how well you’d get along with that random dude who is already pretty badly burned anyway.

So why do you (hopefully) save a random human over your own dog? In general we tend to be more loyal to other humans than animals because you would want them to do the same for you, and because you know there are other people wanting their loved ones to survive and you’d be letting them down by rescuing the dog instead. We can feel responsible to people we haven’t met yet and may never meet. If you love your dog enough to forget all that and save the dog instead, keep in mind, you will be shunned for the rest of your life. (Although there might be some crazy dog people who would be really into that.)

Do you have a responsibility to save a drowning human, even if you didn’t push her into the water? Yes, you are responsible to that person and the people who love her, at least if you and your loved ones would expect her to do the same for you.

Even people we don’t like benefit from the reciprocity aspect of responsibility; if they don’t hit us, we won’t hit them (if we’re smart).

As for the murderer begging you to save him over the far more adorable golden retriever, “for the sake of humanity,” who cares that he is human, sentient and has higher cognitive abilities than the dog? You have no responsibility for the human life of someone who doesn’t respect the lives of other humans. (Which is also why no one seems to have a moral problem with violent self-defense against sentient, cognitively capable attackers. Stop taking responsibility for others and they will stop taking responsibility for you.)

Even the starving can be discerning, if given options. With the choice between someone’s dog and a wild animal who offers the same quality of sustenance, most starving westerners would pick the wild animal, even though both are sentient, not human and have around the same level of cognition. There are a number of potential factors. Maybe it feels wrong to exploit the trust of an animal who grew up around humans, maybe it’s cultural repulsion to eating dogs, or maybe concern for the dog owner. Also important is that wild animals are the furthest removed from most of our senses of responsibility and attachment because they have no part in our society, we have little to nothing to do with their being in this world, and we know them the least well.

Though vegans don’t like to admit it, even they cannot believe that wild animals have rights, because then civilization and agriculture become impossible. When wild animals threaten our vegetables, or they inhabit land that we want to develop, they are in the way of our responsibility to ourselves. And when human-introduced invasive species threaten the ecosystem, killing them just to get rid of them could feel like a duty.

Vegans should be happy. This responsibility explanation gets rid of the anti-vegan objection that if vegans really cared about suffering reduction, they would be more worried about wild animal suffering than factory farms.

It makes sense that the zoo animals went before the companion animals in Leningrad. They’re exotic and neat looking and all, but they’re strangers. Companion animals live with us, they reduce our stress and in return we feel responsible to care for their lives and safety. Defenders of the sentience explanation for rights don’t have a very good answer for why even vegans are okay with spaying and neutering sentient pets — or why PETA euthanizes them — as removing their sex organs or killing them would seem to infringe on their interests. If responsibility is the standard, however, there is no contradiction; sentience be damned, it is our responsibility to not let these animals we have domesticated breed at unsustainable rates.

Farm animals are not from us and they don’t live in our homes and provide us with friendship, but humans breed them and raise them. For this reason, farm animals raised for food fall somewhere between wild animals and companion animals on the responsibility radar of most people. This explains the intuition that vegans and even many omnivores have that killing a wild animal for agriculture and civilization is different than raising and killing an animal for food.

Farm animals hover in a gray zone which causes a lot of people to disagree about whether it is okay to kill them or not, like those hunters who had no problem killing sentient animals when they were in the wild, but balked at killing their family-like domesticated animals. It’s not that it’s necessarily worse to be the farm animal who is raised for food and killed in a slaughterhouse than it is to be the wild animal who is hunted. What’s different is our own feelings about it; there are more responsibility cues with the domesticated animal, which makes many of us conflicted.

Being the ones who actually interact with the animals, farmers have the greatest potential to get attached to individual animals (though vegans are better at getting attached to farm animals in the abstract). I’ve never been a farmer, nor have I talked to many of them in depth about farming. My guess, though, is that — at least with the good farmers — they feel responsible for raising the animals well, but they don’t feel responsible for keeping them alive as long as possible because the animals’ early deaths serve what they see as a greater responsibility: providing food and a living for themselves and their families, and providing sustenance to other humans.

Okay, so maybe responsibility and attachment explain why the hierarchy of life value exists, but can’t we shove it under the surface, only to be revealed in desperate situations? We feel more responsibility and attachment to domesticated farm animals than we do to agricultural plants and the wild animals who die for them, so shouldn’t we eat only the plants if we can?

Well, yes, if the responsibility for and attachment to farm animals you feel is enough to outweigh the responsibility you feel to yourself to be happy, to be healthy, enjoy convenience or taste, or whatever it is that appeals to you about animal products. If these are trivial advantages to you, or you don’t experience any advantages to animal products at all, concern for farm animals might possibly win out. If you feel miserable as a vegan, or you just don’t care about other animals at all, responsibility to yourself will probably win out. Both approaches are in line with the reasons we give rights. Neither is “wrong.”

One of the revelations I had as I was quitting veganism was that for me, veganism was a sacrifice. I hadn’t ever thought of it that way and excitedly announced this insight to one of my roommates at the time. She was an ex-vegan too, and her response was something along the lines of “duh.” But it was news to me, and once I realized that being vegan was abdicating responsibility to my own well-being and happiness, I felt much better about quitting it.

There is no contradiction between liking animals and eating them if rights come from responsibility and you feel a greater responsibility for yourself and have found that you cannot thrive or be happy without animal products. The same values that make us concerned about animals can make us more concerned about ourselves.

Many vegans want to say this murky issue is crystal clear, that animals have rights whether we like it or not, even if using them makes our lives significantly better. But the only clear-cut way to give rights is through reciprocal agreements, which animals cannot consciously enter with us. For this reason, animal rights will always be controversial. We can still feel responsible for animals, and we can feel attached to them, but there’s no objective destination for those feelings.

In response to a comment I wrote saying that responsibility rather than sentience could be the explanation for why we protect the severely mentally impaired, Rob W. wrote:

Do you think there’s only one basis for moral consideration? What would it be? I like responsibility because it’s relational, it’s social. It’s not about either the capacities of the human or the capacities of the animal, but defining the proper relationship between them.

The reason he and I can agree on the basis of rights and not agree on what the conclusion of that should be is that responsibility and attachment are more subjective than sentience. Emotion is just as important as rationality. That doesn’t make all of this random, but it does make it impossible to design a single code of morality that everyone can support.

It’s likely that we will never agree about how we should co-exist with other animals.

Case For a Baby-Free Argument From Marginal Cases

Sat, 27 Aug 2011 22:40:51 +0100

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 don’t think is so bad. If you’ve ever heard a vegan say something about how if you eat animals, you should be cool with eating babies, lurking in the background is the argument from marginal cases.

Welp, time for yet another argument from marginal cases summary. (Skip this paragraph if you already know what it is.) The argument from marginal cases is an attempt to thwart the meat eater desire to draw a solid line between humans and other animals, that line which permits people to think it’s okay to kill and eat other animals even though they wouldn’t do the same thing to humans. The main philosophical excuses meat eaters make for this line is that other animals operate on a basic cognitive level that often doesn’t go much beyond survival, these animals aren’t living out a story because they can’t really make plans or have ambitious goals, they can’t function as equal members in our society, and they cannot enter moral exchanges with us. To this, marginal-case-thumping vegans say, “But we give rights to babies and the severely mentally impaired, and they operate on a basic cognitive level, don’t have ambitions, can’t function as equal members in our society and cannot enter moral exchanges with us. Therefore, not giving rights to animals too is speciesist.”

I don’t think the argument from marginal cases works overall (I explain why in this entry, and I’ll take another swing at it in my next entry), but I believe the example of babies is especially problematic. My reasoning for this is somewhat obscure and only applies to a subset of vegan beliefs, but unless you don’t like nitpicky minutiae for some reason, I’m sure you want to know it anyway.

In my entry “The Moral Schizophrenia of Farm Sanctuaries,” I wrote this aside:

What Francione objects to in domesticated animal life is that it constitutes a perpetual parasitical babyhood. The problem he sees with domesticated animals — unlike self-supporting humans and wild animals — is that they cannot pull themselves up by their bootstraps and succeed without no help from nobody. Essentially, domesticated animals are in the same position as the human “marginal cases” (babies, the comatose and the severely mentally impaired) that vegans rely on to give animals rights. A side effect of Francione’s opposition to domesticated animal lives, then, is to also condemn the lives of human marginal cases as worse than no lives at all. Well, baby life can be justified, he insists, because the baby has potential to grow up and take care of itself. (This is an “argument from potential,” which some other vegans reject for the sake of strengthening the argument from marginal cases.) In other words, Francione believes that temporary parasitism is okay. But since all life is temporary, that means the parasitism of domesticated animals is temporary too, which would seem to justify bringing domesticated animals into the world as well. More important, Francione’s stance on the inherent harm of domesticated animal life implies that the lives of severely mentally impaired adults cannot be justified, and such people should not be perpetuated. Since vegans cite the value of severely mentally impaired human lives as proof of the value of animal lives, this might cause more problems with the argument from marginal cases, but I’ll worry about that another day. [Emphasis mine, obviously. But me of the present, not me when I originally wrote this entry.]

It’s another day, so I’ll worry about it.

Some but not all vegans believe that domesticated animals should not be bred into existence — even if they won’t be killed for food — because it is wrong to create beings who are helpless and dependent on humans for their survival. Francione is not alone in this opposition, but it runs into an immediate problem. Babies are even more helpless and dependent on humans than domesticated animals are, as are severely cognitively impaired humans. If we shouldn’t allow dogs to breed (even if we love them and treat them well and let them live out their lives to the end) because their lives will be slavish and reliant on humans for sustenance and shelter, and thus rubbish and not worth living, how can vegans justify bringing babies into existence?

Vegans who cite the standard argument from marginal cases are not allowed to say “because babies will grow up and stop being utterly dependent on their parents,” since that would mean vegans can treat babies as special because of how they will change in the future, something vegans don’t let omnivores do when they try to say that we give babies rights because they will grow up to be moral agents.

And what about cognitively impaired humans who will never grow out of their dependence? From the non-speciesist vegan perspective, that’s no different than bringing domesticated animals into the world.

Another blow is that if we’re not allowed to consider the future development of beings while assigning rights, then we can’t be against domesticated animal breeding or wild animal breeding (which could be annoying for vegans who want to stop the spread of destructive species through birth control). The reason for this is that we would not be able to consider the consequence of domesticated animals having sex — that a dependent baby animal is born. We could only look at the action in this moment, which is two animals having sex, something that vegans do not object to.

Good thing pickles are vegan!

Is there way out of this? Yes, five of them that I can see, but they each require some ideological compromises that many vegans won’t want to make.

1. Be against domesticated animal breeding, as well as the creation of all new sentient life, including humans.

The simplest solution is for vegans who are against domestic animal breeding to become anti-natalists and turn against human breeding as it begets slavish babies who are dependent on us for shelter and sustenance. But they have to make sure they accept the argument from potential here, since rejecting it means they cannot oppose the actions that lead to babies, unless they devise a moral reason to oppose sex itself. That’s not a big deal, though. Just accept that future consequences of actions do matter, and then you can be against all procreative sex. This solves the marginal cases problem. And every other problem in the world, actually, since no one would exist to experience problems.

2. Be against domesticated animal breeding, but okay with human breeding. To make this work, take babies out of the argument from marginal cases and call for the abortion of all fetuses that are going to become cognitively impaired humans.

For vegans who don’t want to advocate the end the human race, another answer is for them to accept the argument from potential — that babies are special because they will grow up into non-dependent moral agents — and then take babies out of the argument from marginal cases. That still leaves the mentally impaired who have no potential to grow out of their severe cognitive disability safely in place as a force requiring veganism.

However, because these vegans are against animal domestication for propagating creatures who are perpetual dependents, they also have to be against the creation of severely cognitively impaired humans who are perpetual dependents, since a non-speciesist would see that as no different from breeding domesticated animals.

It’s not enough to take babies out of the argument from marginal cases, then. These vegans also have to say that all fetuses who are going to be cognitively impaired humans need to be aborted, because being a cognitively impaired human is just as undesirable as being a companion animal. The danger here is that if it became possible to abort every human fetus that was going to develop into a cognitively impaired human, and everyone did this, there would be no more cognitively impaired humans, and thus no more argument from marginal cases making veganism morally obligatory.

But that won’t be a concern for a long time.

3. Be okay with animal breeding and leave babies in the argument from marginal cases, but be unable to consider future consequences of present behavior, and thus only oppose things that are bad in this very moment. Smoke on, vegan teens!

Vegans can reject the argument from potential and leave babies in the argument from marginal cases as long as they are in favor of animal breeding. As I mentioned earlier, you can’t be against animal breeding and reject the argument from potential at the same time, because that would mean you have to be against sex, since you cannot consider the potential that sex has to lead to a new domesticated being. Tolerating animal breeding is an easy way out of this.

Also, by permitting animal breeding, these vegans are saying that it’s okay to bring beings into this world who are dependent on us, which now makes it okay to have babies without having to admit that they will eventually become independent moral agents. Babies can thus stay in the argument from marginal cases because vegans are now allowed to see them only for the dependent beings they are that very moment. It’s also okay to bring severely mentally impaired humans in the world, just as long as you don’t plan on killing them for food. So these vegans don’t need to be clamoring for mandatory natal tests and abortions.

Rejecting the argument from potential creates an odd quirk for these vegans, though. They essentially have to stop considering the future consequences of everything. By refusing to let us treat babies differently now because they will be moral agents in the future, these vegans have trapped themselves into seeing everything only as it is at that moment and ignoring what it will become, forcing them to judge every action only on its instantaneous consequences. This means that harms only count if they are bad right now. These vegans would have no basis for encouraging women to breastfeed their babies because the fact that this could help them grow up into a fitter adults is irrelevant. As long as the baby could do just fine on formula now, there’s nothing to say. Better IQ down the road? Hush, that implies an eventual moral agent!

It wouldn’t make sense to use protection during sex, because that would be admitting that a baby or an STD could arise in the future. You also couldn’t look at the accumulative harm of smoking and poor diet, and the additional risk to heart attacks and cancer these might have. As long as you didn’t get heartburn from each individual burger, you would have no health reason not to eat them. This would, of course, make the vegan health argument impossible. But that’s no big loss.

4. Be okay with animal breeding and the argument from potential, and so take babies out of the argument from marginal cases.

Vegans could accept animal breeding and also accept the argument from potential. This would mean they have to take babies out of the argument from marginal cases (because omnivores could now point out that they are going to grow up to become moral agents and these vegans couldn’t pretend that this doesn’t matter), but cognitively impaired humans could still be in there. And again, vegans wouldn’t have to wish for every future cognitively impaired human to be aborted. Even better, vegans could consider the future when making decisions and so could encourage breastfeeding.

I foresee this one being the most popular, which is why I called the entry what I did.

5. Become a non-dogmatic vegan who cops to ideological inconsistency. (But if you do this, you cannot criticize omnivores simply for being inconsistent.)

Five is my favorite.

Personally, though, I think the best thing for vegans to do is to drop this argument from marginal cases mess entirely. I’ve already written about this, but my next (long) entry will go after it from another angle.

PS: I’ll delete those last two sentences if that prophesied entry doesn’t come together, so enjoy them while they last.

Why Not Buy Some Snake Oil With Your Animal Millions? (On CarpeVegan)

Fri, 26 Aug 2011 18:00:18 +0100

Why Not Buy Some Snake Oil With Your Animal Millions? (On CarpeVegan):

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 reality, which would have made his book the perfect reference for an entry I was thinking of doing on vegan pets. Vegan cats!

But the book was not what I expected. I thought it would be unintentionally hilarious and absurd. Instead it was intentionally hilarious and even persuasive. I was almost left thinking that if I had a pet, I would want to make that little omnivore or carnivore vegan. The book also made me feel a little nostalgic for my vegan days. I abandoned my vegan pet entry idea and contacted Jed for an interview instead.

I’ve met up with Jed a number of times since then, and a few months ago he told me that he and his friend Joe Haptas were developing a vegan culture site called CarpeVegan; Jed asked if I wanted to contribute. Of course I did. My first post, “Why Not Buy Some Snake Oil With Your Animal Millions?”, went up today. It takes a look at Erik Marcus’ “Animal Millionaire” concept, a motivating device he invented to inspire vegan activists, which would be fine except that it’s a quasi-pyramid scheme. Fortunately it’s an imaginary one.

Someone commented on my CarpeVegan bio to ask why they wanted me to contribute when people looking for a dose of anti-veganism could just come to my blog. Well, for one thing, some people who read CarpeVegan aren’t looking for a dose of anti-veganism and will be tricked into taking one now. But also, my blog has strayed a bit from its origins of poking fun of vegan leaders and the cultural aspects of veganism. I’ll be doing more of that on CarpeVegan.

Plus my posts there will be a lot shorter.

Why Vegans Should Strike Meat Off the Agenda

Tue, 23 Aug 2011 20:10:35 +0100

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.

Michael Greger MD is sort of in the Jack Norris/Ginny Messina...

Tue, 23 Aug 2011 17:52:51 +0100

Michael Greger MD is sort of in the Jack Norris/Ginny Messina camp of science-based vegan nutrition experts, but he’s a doctor rather than a dietitian; he also appears to be convinced that veganism (especially if low fat) is the healthiest possible diet.

Norris and Messina, who wrote the recent Vegan For Life, are optimistic about the health benefits of veganism, and I get the feeling that they think it’s possible that a properly supplemented vegan diet could turn out to be the healthiest way to eat. But their approach is more akin to making the best of a bad situation. Morality shackles give vegans less flexibility in their diets and Messina and Norris try to help them work around nutritional challenges so they never have to go back to immoral foods. Greger, however, promotes nutritionally informed veganism as the best way to eat for health reasons, even if you think animal lives are a complete joke.

Until now, Greger has mostly been known to vegans for his lectures at veg fests, where he would talk about about the latest in nutrition. His schtick was to list vegan foods—white potatoes, tofu, wheat gluten, raw mushrooms, blue-green algae, olive oil, coconut milk, etc.— and ask the audience whether they thought the food was “helpful, neutral or harmful.” Vegans are always devastated to learn that he believes coconut milk, raw mushrooms, blue-green algae and white potatoes are harmful (unless they follow a form of veganism that already restricts some of those foods, in which case they feel vindicated), but Greger ends his lectures on an optimistic note, proclaiming that vegans who supplement B12 and avoid harmful vegan foods are the healthiest people in the world. Vegans really love that part.

Now Greger has started a blog on his website, Nutrition Facts. Like the pro-vegan Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, Nutrition Facts is a very sciencey, authoritative, unbiased sounding name that gives no hint that the goal is to promote a complete avoidance of animal products. Even the about page doesn’t mention veganism or Greger’s ethical commitment to ending human use of animals, though it does say that he’s the Director of Public Health and Animal Agriculture at the Humane Society.

To draw attention to the blog, Greger is posting a new video on it every single day for a year. Today’s video is called “Antioxidant power of plant foods versus animal foods.” If this video happens to be your only exposure to nutrition science, you might come away thinking that antioxidant content is the most and possibly only important consideration when selecting your food sources.

Just be sure not to eat coconut milk.

Confessions of an Ex-Moralist

Mon, 22 Aug 2011 14:29:41 +0100

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 agriculture? On the contrary, I find myself in a far better position than before to change minds – and, what is more important, hearts. For to argue that people who use animals for food and other purposes are doing something terribly wrong is hardly the way to win them over. That is more likely to elicit their defensive resistance.

Instead I now focus on conveying information: about the state of affairs on factory farms and elsewhere, the environmental devastation that results and, especially, the sentient, intelligent, gentle and noble natures of the animals who are being brutalized and slaughtered. It is also important to spread knowledge of alternatives, like how to adopt a healthy and appetizing vegan diet. If such efforts will not cause people to alter their eating and buying habits, support the passage of various laws and so forth, I don’t know what will.

So nothing has changed, and everything has changed. For while my desires are the same, my manner of trying to implement them has altered radically. I now acknowledge that I cannot count on either God or morality to back up my personal preferences or clinch the case in any argument. I am simply no longer in the business of trying to derive an ought from an is. I must accept that other people sometimes have opposed preferences, even when we are agreed on all the relevant facts and are reasoning correctly.

— Via Melissa McEwen

Vegan identity building has never been more adorable. —...

Fri, 12 Aug 2011 19:52:26 +0100

Vegan identity building has never been more adorable.

— Via Vegan Poet

Why the Top Priority of Vegans Should be Human Extinction, Not Veganism

Sat, 30 Jul 2011 02:42:56 +0100

“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 never outweighs the bad. And even if it does, it’s still a harm to be born, because life will inevitably contain some suffering, whereas non-existence contains no suffering and yet the lack of pleasures cannot be missed by the non-existent. It is always wrong, then, to bring harm-experiencing beings into existence. If pregnant, please abort.

The problem and solution, as Benatar sees them, are clear-cut:

Although sentience is a later evolutionary development and is a more complex state of being than insentience, it is far from clear that it is a better state of being. This is because sentient existence comes at a significant cost. In being able to experience, sentient beings are able to, and do, experience unpleasantness. (2) …

In the ordinary course of events [parents] will experience only some of the bad in their children’s and possibly grandchildren’s lives (because these offspring usually survive their progenitors), but beneath the surface of the current generations lurk increasingly larger numbers of descendents and their misfortunes. Assuming that each couple has three children, an original pair’s cumulative descendants over ten generations amounts to 88,572 people. That constitutes a lot of pointless and avoidable suffering. (6 - 7)

Is existence really so bad? In case you’re not convinced, Benatar succinctly describes the mundane tortures that inevitably befall any unwitting human thrust into life on this overrated, loathsome orb:

As a matter of fact, bad things happen to all of us. No life is without hardship. It is easy to think of the millions who live a life of poverty or of those who live much of their lives with some disability. Some of us are lucky enough to be spared these fates, but most of us who are, nonetheless suffer ill-health at some stage during our lives. Often the suffering is excruciating, even if it is in our final days. Some are condemned by nature to years of frailty. We all face death. We infrequently contemplate the harms that await any newborn child—pain, disappointment, anxiety, grief, and death. For any given child we cannot predict what form these harms will take or how severe they will be, but we can be sure that at least some of them will occur. None of this befalls the non-existent. Only existers suffer harm. (29) …

[W]e tend to ignore just how much of our lives is characterized by negative mental states, even if often only relatively mildly negative ones. Consider, for example, conditions causing negative mental states daily or more often. These include hunger, thirst, bowel and bladder distension (as these organs become filled), tiredness, stress, thermal discomfort (that is, feeling either too hot or too cold), and itch. For billions of people, at least some of these discomforts are chronic. These people cannot relieve their hunger, escape the cold, or avoid the stress. However, even those who can find some relief do not do so immediately or perfectly, and thus experience them to some extent every day. In fact, if we think about it, significant periods of each day are marked by some or other of these states. For example, unless one is eating and drinking so regularly as to prevent hunger and thirst or countering them as they arise, one is likely hungry and thirsty for a few hours a day. Unless one is lying about all day, one is probably tired for a substantial portion of one’s waking life. How often does one feel neither too hot nor too cold, but exactly right? (71 – 72).

Boy he sure left out a lot. Nevertheless, it’s safe to say that Benatar does not look on the bright side of life.

Benetar believes that even an impossibly charmed life in which everything is orgasmic pleasure save for a single pinprick is worse than never coming into existence, because the non-existent can neither experience pain nor lament lost pleasure. What intrigues me about his “anti-natalism,” besides that it’s outrageous and I love his chutzpah, is that this is the exact argument vegans make when they criticize humane animal farming on suffering reduction grounds. Veganism seeks to reduce demand for animal products so that fewer (and ideally zero) farm animals are born. The idea is that we do a disservice to these animals by bringing them into existence — even if it’s the best kind of humane farming and the animals are treated well and killed painlessly — since their lives include suffering and then death.

When vegans talk about humanely raised animal products, they may admit that it is at least slightly better than factory farming, but they tend to be like Benatar and focus on the harms. Even if the animals get to wander around, play and eat a natural diet, and are eventually killed painlessly, such a life is worse than never coming into being. While humane farm life may be relatively pleasant overall, the incidents of suffering farm animals often face — branding, dehorning, the separation of the calf from the mother, castration, artificial insemination, and early death — hopelessly taint the life beyond justifiability. As HumaneMyth.org says in “Happy Cows: Behind the Myth”:

The truth of the matter is that each purchase of dairy products or veal directly contributes to more individuals brought into existence who will endure confinement, social deprivation, mutilation, reproductive manipulation, indignity and premature death. (41)

The sufferings can be minimized and some can be eliminated, but even if these animals are going to suffer only a little then be killed before their natural lifespan is up, they just shouldn’t have been born.

Fair enough, but when vegans use any amount of suffering to disqualify the legitimacy of bringing a life into existence, this creates some unintended philosophical consequences. If they are going to be so strict about any amount of suffering ruling out the desirability of starting a life, their priority shouldn’t be merely the end of animal farming — their priority should be ending humans.

There are a few reasons for this. One is that even the self-proclaimed ethical humans cause more suffering than even the most unrepentant carnivore species. As Benatar says:

Although the arguments I have advanced have not been misanthropic, there is a superb misanthropic argument against having children and in favour of human extinction. This argument rests on the indisputable premiss that humans cause colossal amounts of suffering—both for humans and for non-human animals. In Chapter 3, I provided a brief sketch of the kind of suffering humans inflict on one another. In addition to this, they are the cause of untold suffering to other species. Each year, humans inflict suffering on billions of animals that are reared and killed for food and other commodities or used in scientific research. Then there is the suffering inflicted on those animals whose habitat is destroyed by encroaching humans, the suffering caused to animals by pollution and other environmental degradation, and the gratuitous suffering inflicted out of pure malice.

Although there are many non-human species—especially carnivores—that also cause a lot of suffering, humans have the unfortunate distinction of being the most destructive and harmful species on earth. The amount of suffering in the world could be radically reduced if there were no more humans. (223 – 224)

Some vegans already agree with Benatar here and wish for the extinction of humans for the sake of other animals. But even these vegans are overlooking another reason for wanting the end of humans; it’s not just that humans cause more suffering than other animals — they also suffer more. If vegans believe that the life of a humanely raised farm animal is not worth living because of the sufferings endured, then we especially shouldn’t be bringing humans to life, since we suffer even more.

Most vegan philosophers provide a survival exemption to veganism, allowing for the consumption of animal products when human life immediately depends on it. Their justification for this apparent discrepancy is that human lives are richer than the lives of other animals, since we have a greater appreciation for nuance and a wider variety of pleasures. In other words, our lives are more complicated and thus better. The problem with this is the flipside: due to our complexity and wider range of potential experiences, humans also endure a greater variety of sufferings than other animals do.

So why do vegans generally believe that the pleasures humans experience outweigh our sufferings and make our lives worth starting, but the same is not true for animals humanely raised for food? Clearly there comes a point when life has too much suffering to be worth experiencing, but if life and death on a humane farm goes beyond the tolerable suffering threshold, then life as a modern human must too.

Is life worthwhile if it includes suffering and ends in death? If the answer is no, we shouldn’t be raising animals for food, but then we shouldn’t be raising humans either.

No doubt it hurts like hell to be castrated as a young pig. But is it that much more painful and scary than being circumcised or getting vaccinations? Maybe so, but after that early agony, pigs on humanely raised farms are likely to have a relatively tranquil life that is free of major pains and anxieties, and then they’re ideally killed before they know what is happening to them, without ever having to suffer much — if any — stress about their mortality.

Humans don’t have it so easy. An oyster doesn’t suffer because it is so simple an organism; humans suffer the most because we are perhaps the most complex animal organism. From a suffering reduction paradigm, the more complex you are, the greater your suffering — and the harder it is to justify your existence.

Benatar provides the general outlines of human misery, but I’m surprised he didn’t devote an entire chapter to all the bad things most lives contain. Sit down and think about your past for a minute or two and a chapter like that writes itself. Here are just a few of the standard unpleasantries I can think of that even the most privileged humans face, some of them shared by other animals, but many of them unique to humans:

Work suffering. Being out of work, having a job you hate, tedium, stress, lamenting disregarded ambitions, wasted time, fears of not being productive or good enough and being fired, identity suppression to fit in the work culture, resenting others for getting away with doing less than you, the drive to be successful and impress your peers, irritating assignments you’d rather not do or which go against your beliefs, getting fired.

Farm animals often have to work too. Depending on their species, they may have to lay eggs, have their wool sheared, or be milked. But none of that has to take very long — it’s certainly not an eight-hour work day — and on a humane farm it shouldn’t be that painful.

Relationship suffering. Unrequited love or lust, the passion paradox, sexual frustration or disappointment, being stuck in an unhappy relationship, STDs, long distance woes, jealousy, fears that the person you love will leave you or cheat on you, discovering lies, mutually waning love, getting dumped, feeling guilty for dumping someone, unwanted pregnancies, depression over miscarriages, post-partum depression, sleepless nights as parents, terror that something will happen to your child or that your child will misbehave, getting divorced, having parents who get divorced.

Most other animals experience sexual frustration, and cats sometimes fall prey to the passion paradox, becoming more clingy and desperate the more you ignore them. And sometimes dogs can develop separation anxiety. But the rest of these are more or less human problems.

Pain. Minor injuries like slamming your finger in a door, severe injuries from accidents or attacks, throwing up, colds, chronic sicknesses, menstrual cramps, headaches, migraines, cluster headaches, burns, puncture wounds, the emergencies that bring you to the doctor, the treatments themselves, going to the dentist, the pain of growing a baby inside of you, having the baby, passing a kidney stone, fracturing limbs, bruising your tailbone, aging, paper cuts.

It’s likely that animals are about even with us on this one, except that they are less likely to have psychological scars from especially traumatic pain experiences.

Violence. Rape, murder, assault and fear of all of these.

Animals certainly experience violence, but for them violence would go under the heading of pain, because for humanely raised farm animals, violence is most relevant as a visceral unpleasant momentary experience. Vegans sometimes call it rape when animals such as cows are artificially inseminated, but cows hardly seem to notice this as it is happening, and it certainly does not cause the long-lasting trauma that rape does for humans. Animals experience fear too, but they are less likely to experience chronic fear at the contemplation of something disturbing. Fear for animals usually means reacting to immediate threatening stimuli that they need to escape. On humane farms, this should not be a common occurrence.

Self-esteem suffering. Feeling inadequate, ugly, unloved, stupid or worthless; regrets about decisions you made in the past and worries about the future.

Animals can feel unloved, but probably don’t experience the rest of these.

Self-determination infringement suffering. Structural injustice, inequality, oppression, patriarchy, racism, sexism, homophobia, ableism, dirty subversives threatening straight marriage and Christmas (j/k), immigration restrictions, addiction, bullying, the freedom curtailments that come with voluntary responsibilities such as parenthood, feeling a need to conform to society’s expectations, fear that the wrong people are in power and will restrict your freedoms, prison, religious demands, onerous societal or governmental restrictions, over-controlling parents, ideological summer camps, compulsory education.

Just because there is not a visible fence around most of us most of the time does not mean that humans feel freer than animals on humane farms do. Other animals don’t need as much freedom as we usually require to be happy because they have simpler and fewer needs. The typical humanely raised animal is probably more content with their level of freedom than the typical human living in a country such as The United States or The Netherlands. At least animals don’t torture themselves by reading news stories about ideological opponents making laws they don’t like, or by contemplating freer animals elsewhere.

Vegans point to calves sent to auction or slaughter, and the stress they feel while being transported to a new location. But what human has not felt the stress of an uncomfortable transportation experience to a location that fills them with anxiety?

Vegans don’t like that cows are impregnated every year to keep them lactating. But is that any worse than being a woman in a religious community who is expected to produce as many children as she possibly can?

Vegans also don’t like that calves are separated from their mothers and confined while they are being weaned. But this is a minor inconvenience compared to separating human children from their parents on the first day of Kindergarten or, god forbid, pre-school, to initiate the next 12 years of their lives confined to a desk, in which they will be forced to memorize and re-hash information they care little about, with summers being the only reprieves, since homework keeps them chained to their desks at night.

The suffering unto death. Losing a pet, losing a loved one, losing yourself; also, contemplating all these inevitable future instances of death, and the related existential angst of feeling alone in a meaningless universe.

Even if every moment of suffering and discomfort could be extricated from humane animal farming, most vegans could not get behind it because it involves death. Specifically, it requires inducing death before the animal’s natural lifespan is up. (Aka, murder). But death is just as inevitable for humans as it is for farm animals. And even though the cause of death is less predictable for most humans than it is for animals raised on a humane farm, and humans often get to live to the natural end of their lives — which vegans take as the gold standard for the best possible death — it’s far from clear that death by murder is worse for other animals than death by all means (including natural causes) is for humans.

When vegans are disturbed by an animal’s early demise, they’re projecting their fears about human death onto animals who don’t have the same neurosis about non-existence. Even though most humans aren’t murdered, every aspect of death is more brutal for us. Animals don’t know what their natural lifespan is, and they don’t have to worry about living long enough to accomplish their goals. Surely death by common non-murderous causes like cancer or heart attacks is worse for humans than it is for an animal to die of slaughter. Even a human dying of old age has more to fret about than a slaughtered animal who has no concept of death or desire to see their great grandchildren grow up.

Living long as a human means seeing loved ones die, an experience that hits humans harder than it does other animals. We never know how we are going to die, so even if it will be of old age, we still spend plenty of time worrying that we will die another way, or that someone we love will die before us. Even though farm animals are the ones guaranteed to die at the hands of someone else, humans stress themselves about this possibility far more than other animals do.

Entering the slaughterhouse can be frightening for animals because they are in strange new surroundings, and sometimes they realize that something bad is going to happen, but this is nothing compared to the lifetime humans spend dreading the end.

Keep this in mind before you have kids, vegans — you are bringing a being into this world whose confrontation with the inevitability of death will be far worse than what any animal experiences at slaughter.

Humans do at least have religion to counter the sense of existential despair that often accompanies mortality and living in an apparently meaningless world, but this is an imperfect solution to a problem that other animals simply don’t have.

It’s not only that humans have to endure more kinds of suffering than humanely raised farm animals do. Even worse is that the bad things that happen to us linger longer. Humans are nature’s most neurotic creations. We may have invented Buddhism, but we’re not the most natural practitioners of it. Mother cows are said to moo sadly when their calves are taken from them, but this only lasts for a few days. Human parents suffer more by sending their children to college; if parents were to actually lose a child, they might be wrecked for the rest of their lives.

Some may object that I’m overlooking the cheerier aspects of human life. Well of course I am, but vegans do the same thing when they condemn humane animal farming by focusing on the worst bits.

However, even if it’s agreed that humans suffer more and in more ways than humanely raised farm animals, there is still the question of whether humans have a greater and richer variety of pleasures to enjoy and whether this high-end pleasure explains why it’s okay to bring humans but not domesticated animals into existence.

Even though humans have potential to enjoy a greater variety of pleasures than animals do, in many cases it is other animals who are better positioned to enjoy the pleasures of life. Humans often undercut the nice things they have through contemplation of the transitory nature of good things. Sex and food are overloaded with caveats for humans; it’s unlikely that other animals worry about getting fat or unhealthy because of what they eat, or feel moral guilt or regret about their food choices or who they sleep with. What animal other than a human would watch a gorgeous sunset and worry about an email they need to write?

Vegans say that the pleasure of eating animal products is fleeting, and not nearly sustained enough to compensate for the suffering that animals endure. If all pleasure were ranked against suffering in that way, it would all fall short of defeating the avalanche of suffering in the world. By this standard, even love, with its comforting, slow, relatively consistent release of joy, isn’t enough to make up for all the heartbreak, unhappy relationships, sexual frustration, jealousy, betrayals, dissatisfaction, boredom and waning passion we face on the way to love or after it. It seems highly implausible, then, that the balance is tipped toward suffering for humanely raised animals and toward pleasure for humans.

The vegan suffering reduction argument also has major implications for wild animals. In “The Importance of Wild-Animal Suffering,” an anonymous utilitarian writes:

The number of wild animals vastly exceeds that of animals on factory farms, in laboratories, or kept as pets. … The agony endured by, say, a frog while being eaten alive by a snake is probably at least as great as anything that a battery-cage hen or factory-farmed turkey experiences, as terrible as their treatment often is. … While death may often constitute the peak of suffering during an animal’s life, day-to-day existence isn’t necessarily pleasant either. Unlike most humans in the industrialized world, wild animals don’t have immediate access to food whenever they become hungry. They must constantly seek out water and shelter while remaining on the lookout for predators. Unlike us, most animals can’t go inside when it rains or turn on the heat when winter temperatures drop far below their usual levels. …

It is often assumed that wild animals live in a kind of natural paradise and that it is only the appearance and intervention of human agencies that bring about suffering. This essentially Rousseauian view is at odds with the wealth of information derived from field studies of animal populations. Scarcity of food and water, predation, disease and intraspecific aggression are some of the factors which have been identified as normal parts of a wild environment which cause suffering in wild animals on a regular basis. …

When we think about nature, we may picture chirping songbirds or frolicking gazelles, rather than deer having their flesh chewed off while conscious or immobilized raccoons afflicted by roundworms, waiting pleadingly for death to come.

Fish and other wild animals suffer immensely even if humans aren’t to blame. If vegans long for the extinction of domesticated farm animals because they suffer, vegans should root even more loudly for the extinction of wild animals. An impending fish supply collapse should be considered progress – with so many breeds of fish going extinct forever, there is less suffering in the oceans. Death is painful, but any premature death of a wild animal spares it from future suffering. If humanely raised animals ought not have been born, then the same must hold true for wild animals, who usually suffer even more than the animals we raise on humane farms.

Many vegans believe in not having children, but many others praise the land-use efficiency of vegan food and tout how many more humans a vegan world could feed. If vegans are concerned with suffering, it does not make sense for them to regret the birth of a calf on a humane farm and not regret the birth of a human even more. By any sane suffering reduction standards, the birth of a human (even in the best possible circumstances) brings more harm to the world, especially when you look at the suffering humans cause as well as endure. Vegans concerned with suffering should not waste time passing out pro-vegan pamphlets to meat eaters — they should be passing out anti-natalism pamphlets to married couples and pregnant women. (It does, however, make sense to end factory farming if suffering reduction is your goal, but human extinction takes care of that as well.)

Animals don’t consent to being born into a humane farming scenario, but humans don’t consent to being born either. If it is wrong to bring animals into a situation with disagreeable aspects, why is it not wrong to do the same for humans, when there are so many more disagreeable aspects to being human?

Do suffering reduction vegans think human pleasure outweighs human suffering, even with the whirlpool of unpleasantness all of us experience every single day? If vegans believe that human existence with all its agonies is better than non-existence, why is this not the case for other animals, who have a purer experience of pleasure and fewer unavoidable sufferings?

Since humans suffer and cause suffering, and since it is not necessary to create more people, creating people causes unnecessary suffering. If a vegan is okay with humans having kids, that means they are okay with causing unnecessary (and extreme) harms. And so they cannot object to someone eating animal products on the grounds that this is an unnecessary harm. Therefore, they should be able to accept humanely raised animal products.

Otherwise, their first priority should be hastening the end of humanity.

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Sat, 30 Jul 2011 02:15:26 +0100