If there is no God to create and mandate morality, infusing ethics into the universe as something actual that humans must obey, where does morality come from? That’s the question posed to atheist Animal Liberation author Peter Singer in this clip from his debate with Dinesh D’Souza, and at least in this excerpt, he has trouble answering the question.

Actually, he doesn’t answer it at all. Instead, he imagines a more banal question and answers that one: “Who comes up with ethical rules if not people who believe in God?” His answer to this is Confucianists, Buddhists and The Stoics. He neglected to mention himself.

But what about the more interesting question? Does Singer not know where morality comes from if not from God? It’s not that hard to figure this one out. What do Stoics, Confucianists and Buddhists have in common? They’re humans. Without a God or some other all-encompassing force determining right and wrong in the universe, morality comes from humans. Where else could it come from?

This raises another question that Singer didn’t answer, although this time he has the excuse that nobody asked it. If morality is something that comes from us because there is no God to judge our actions, why should humans turn morality against ourselves in the form of animal rights — extending consensual agreements between humans to creatures who have no way to reciprocate — when doing so is nothing but a disadvantage to humans? Without a God wagging his finger at us for eating animals, what’s the point of not eating them? Who are we trying to impress? (I know, I know… ourselves.)

The official vegan objection to selfishly devising a morality that permits animal use is two-pronged: speciesism is no different from racism/sexism/homophobia, and The Argument From Marginal Cases says that if we don’t want to raise and kill babies and the intellectually handicapped for food, then to be consistent, we can’t raise and kill animals for food either.

The first part of that objection depends on the second. The reason we know speciesism is no different than racism is that The Argument From Marginal Cases teaches us that there is no morally relevant difference between humans and other animals. Babies and the extremely mentally impaired don’t have any of the qualities that we say makes humans special, so only sentience can explain why we don’t eat babies, and animals have that too. If you reject the sentience basis for equal consideration and say that humans are special by virtue of their arbitrary biological basis of being human, there is no difference between you and George Wallace except that your form of prejudice is almost universally accepted.

The Argument From Marginal Cases does not make an exception for health, which means that if humans were obligate omnivores and needed some amount of animal product to thrive, we would have to eat human babies and the intellectually handicapped once a week for the sake of consistency. Luckily, most advocates of this argument are vegans who don’t believe we need any amount of animal product to thrive. And if they did decide they needed some animal products to feel healthy, they would probably reconsider The Argument From Marginal Cases.  

Another problem with the AMC is that it’s reductive. As Jean Kazez wrote in her entry about this, the fact that babies and the intellectually handicapped have sentience is not the actual reason we don’t kill and eat them. There are a lot of good reasons not to raise babies and the extremely intellectually impaired for food. For one thing, we don’t need to — we have other animals for that. Also, turning babies into food would upset their parents. And that’s one way around the AMC for non-vegans: babies don’t have direct rights, but their parents do, and one of these rights is the safety of their babies.

In the same way, you could say that a dog doesn’t have direct rights, but when there are humans with a direct emotional attachment to her, the dog has protections because it would harm the owners (who have rights) if you killed and ate their dog. A dog without owners, however, can be euthanized (which many vegans are okay with, and which People For the Ethical Treatment of Animals actively perpetrates). A pig would be protected if she was someone’s pet, but not if her only connection to a moral agent was the farmer who wanted to sell her as food.

So if babies don’t have direct rights but we have to respect the rights of the parents who love their babies, what about parents who have a twisted taste for exotic cuisine and don’t love their babies? Should we let them raise and kill their babies for food since they are the only moral agents who could be harmed by the death of their babies?

Though this scenario could arise in real life, most parents don’t want to eat their babies because that’s not why people have kids. They have kids because they want to raise them and see them grow up — they want people who approximate their looks and thinking to live on after they die. Still, it is possible for parents to want to eat their babies or intellectually impaired offspring, so if we’re going to insist on consistency, then we have to say yes, it’s okay for parents to eat their babies because babies (like dogs and pigs) do not have rights — it is only a direct connection to moral agents that gives them protections.

But there’s still no God, right? So why this obsession with consistency? Without a logic-keen deity dropping lightning bolts on us for inconsistently eating animals but not letting parents eat their babies, what’s stopping us from protecting babies from their nihilistic gourmand parents at the same time we eat a calf liver? If consistency compels us to give up all animal products if we are to have any morality at all, yet we like both morality and eating animal products, why not lose the consistency? Because we’re afraid this would give us seven years bad luck? 

The mutual obligations and protections that come from a rights exchange between humans helps all of us (except for sociopaths who feel the need to kill humans to avoid crushing boredom, but screw ‘em). It is to our advantage to protect our babies and other humans. We lose nothing by saying, “Don’t kill babies for food.” But we lose a lot by saying, “Don’t kill animals for food.” And since humans create morality, what possible reason could we have to use morality to make life worse for all of us? 

This is the part where vegans say that if it’s okay for us to exclude animals from our moral sphere if that benefits us, then white people can do the same with black people, men can do the same with women and straights can do the same with gays. The long history and present cases of groups of humans using a selfish approach to morality against other humans confirms that yes, they can and will do this.

Some vegans act like anti-speciesism is a buffer protecting us from slipping into oppression against humans, but the issues aren’t inevitably intertwined. Being anti-speciesism might mean you are the sort of person who is less likely to be racist, sexist or homophobic, but anti-specisism does not make racism, sexism or homophobia impossible. There are plenty of openly speciesist anti-racists, just as Morrisey demonstrates the opposite, that it’s possible to be pro-animal and racist. And as PETA shows, being against speciesism is no guarantee of being anti-sexism. The best way to stop racism, sexism and homophobia is to fight those things. Eating tempeh has nothing to do with protecting the rights of moral agents.

One reason the Holocaust caused so many people to lose their faith was that it seemed to show that morality was not ingrained in the cosmos. The Nazis lost, but not because the earth opened up and swallowed them all — it was other humans operating under a competing moral code that stopped them. Nazi Germany made it obvious that if most of the world chose to gang up on one group and obliterate or enslave them, there would be nothing to stop them. (And vegans can see that this is what’s happening to animals now.)

Peter Singer’s inability to answer the question and admit that in a Godless universe humans invent morality could have been an honest mistake, or it might have been a squeamishness at acknowledging the subjectiveness of morality. The weird contradiction at the heart of an atheistic veganism is that it imposes a stricter ethical code in a world with nothing to stop us from doing what we want than most religions do in a world where God is watching our every move and might send us to hell for behaving badly.

Atheist vegans want the illusion of an objective moral code like religions have, but without God. It’s just not possible. A subjective, human-contrived morality is an intimidating thing, but with no God, that’s what we have to work with. You can’t say morality is not coded into the universe and then pretend that morality rules us and not the other way around. Yet vegans try anyway, insisting on consistency as the objective and unalterable basis of morality — we merely have to start with a basic, agreed-upon moral law (something akin to The Golden Rule), let everything else logically follow from that and then never tinker with any aspect of it even in the spots where this consistent morality scheme makes the lives of all humans worse.

I think it’s better to admit that morality is a subjective human construct and do the best we can to make sure it used for the equal benefit of all humans. If Peter Singer says this gives me seven years bad luck, so be it.