Let Them Eat Meat

2 notes January 20, 2012 2 55 PM

Do Animals Have Inherent Value? (abridged)

Angus Taylor’s Animals & Ethics: An Overview of the Philosophical Debate delivers on its title’s promise: it summarizes the philosophical debate over animals, often phrasing points more clearly than the philosophers did themselves. One of the key figures in this debate is Tom Regan, author of The Case for Animal Rights, and Taylor applauds him for his main contribution to the animal rights debate, “inherent value”:

The key concept in Regan’s philosophy is inherent value. Inherent value is a quality that Regan attributes to every creature that (to put it briefly for the moment) has a life that matters to it. To say that a being has inherent value is to say that it has a value that is independent of any use that it may have for others. Inherent value, then is to be contrasted with instrumental value. To have inherent value, in Regan’s view, is to have the fundamental right never to be treated merely as an instrument, or means, for others. …

The kind of autonomy that Regan says many animals possess is preference autonomy. To have preference autonomy, as he defines it, is to have preferences and the ability to initiate action with a view to satisfying them. In Regan’s view, preference autonomy is the key to having a life that matters to oneself, to being what he calls the subject-of-a-life. Those who are subjects-of-a-life are those who ‘have beliefs and desires; perception, memory, and a sense of the future, including their own future; an emotional life together with feelings of pleasure and pain; preference- and welfare-interests; the ability to initiate action in pursuit of their desires and goals; a psychophysical identity over time; and an individual welfare in the sense that their experiential life fares well or ill for them, logically independently of their being the object of anyone else’s interests (Regan 2004a, p.243). Regan believes that normal mammalian animals of at least a year in age meet this criterion and thus have inherent value and hence moral rights. Birds are probably subjects-of-a-life, and some other creatures may be too (Regan 2003). …

Now, asks Regan, what is it that accounts for our ascription of inherent value to someone, regardless of whether that individual is a genius or a moron, regardless of whether that individual is a morally responsible agent? What relevant similarity can we point to among individuals who have inherent value? Regan answers that what plausibly accounts for our ascription of inherent value to them is the fact that the individuals in question have lives that matter to them, that fare well or ill for them, independently of their usefulness for others…

Further, in Regan’s opinion, this inherent value that we ascribe to persons depends neither on the quality of their experiences nor on whether they are saints or sinners. All who have inherent value have it equally, he says, and it does not matter whether someone is Mother Teresa or an unscrupulous used-car salesperson. (67 – 70)

Taylor does a good job of summing it up, but I thought I’d better consult the original. At the beginning of Chapter 7 of The Case for Animal Rights, Regan unveils his core concept, using slightly more obscure terminology than Taylor:

--Tagged under: Ethics--

--Tagged under: Vegan Leaders--

7 notes June 14, 2011 6 59 AM

Why Stun One But Shoot the Other?

After seeing an agricultural scientist shove his arm into a fistulated cow, Marianne Thieme went vegan and founded Party for the Animals, a Dutch political party devoted to advancing animal welfare. They won two seats in Dutch parliament, which is now on the verge of passing Party for the Animals’ law to rescind the legal exemption allowing Jews and Muslims to kill animals for food without stunning them first. Vegans have often said that Kosher and Halal slaughter methods are worse because animals prefer to be knocked unconscious before they die. William Wallace animals aren’t.

In her defense of the law, Thieme hinted at the vegan trope that animal rights is the natural conclusion of the ever-expanding march for equality:

“Here in our society we no longer accept that animals must suffer,” says Ms Thieme. Religious groups have often opposed progressive social change, she adds. “We saw the same thing with women’s rights.”

The animals are justifiably a little pissed that Thieme didn’t just ban slaughter altogether, but hopefully they’ll understand that these things take time.

An interesting implication of this law, which the meat-eating supporters of it might be overlooking, is that if it should be illegal to kill an animal for food without stunning the animal first, then hunting ought to be illegal too.

Of course many meat eaters find hunting to be barbaric, so maybe they won’t mind if that eventually has to go too.

--Tagged under: Vegan Leaders--

--Tagged under: Ethics--

20 notes April 30, 2011 11 45 PM

Abolitionist vegan Eric Prescott has added a new interview to his documentary series on vegans in North America, this one with his puppet master Gary L. Francione. Francione used the opportunity to rehash all of his usual talking points, but I still found a couple of interesting moments. At one point Francione says:

The predicate for veganism is already set. Most of us already accept all of the moral views that are the predicate for becoming a vegan. We all believe it’s wrong to inflict unnecessary suffering and death on animals. Alright, so, now the next question becomes ‘what do we mean by necessity?’ Well, whatever it means, whatever abstract meaning it has, if it has any meaning whatsoever, its minimal meaning has to be that it’s wrong to inflict suffering and death on animals for reasons of pleasure, amusement or convenience. Because if it’s alright to inflict suffering and death on animals for reasons of pleasure, amusement or convenience, then you’ve got a loophole that’s now so large you can drive a truck through it. … We have no choice. Veganism is the only rational, logical response to accepting that it is morally wrong to inflict unnecessary suffering and death on animals.

I like this quote because it is such a classic logical vegan thing to say. The reason to not make animals suffer is to avoid logical errors! But Francione is incorrect if he thinks there are no loopholes in vegan logic. The survival exemption to veganism, for instance, opens the exact same loophole that Francione says we open by allowing animal use for pleasure/amusement/convenience.

It’s also good to know that “we have no choice” but to accept veganism. Does this not render the idea of being a “moral agent” meaningless? How much agency do we moral agents have if our beliefs are pre-determined and inescapable? If a moral agent has no choice but to accept veganism, we don’t have moral free will. And if we don’t have moral free will, how are we any different from animals who are morally permitted to eat other animals because they don’t have a capacity for morality?

Of course Francione talked about veganism versus humane animal products. That’s his jam:

I’m often asked, what do you do if somebody says, ‘I understand what you’re saying. But I’m not ready to go vegan right away. Should I eat cage free or, you know…’ I say ‘No no no. You can go vegan right away. It’s not difficult. Trust me. It’s not difficult. It’s easy.’ ‘Well, but I’m not sure…’ ‘Okay, look. We’ve had this conversation. You’ve acknowledged that you think that eating animals and animal products is not morally justifiable. Okay. Then that’s your conscience. If you’re going to continue to eat ‘em. That’s a decision you’re making in the face of your assessment that it’s not morally justifiable. However, let me say this to you. If you feel you can’t do it right away, and I would disagree with you — you can. If you feel you can’t, then go vegan in stages. Go vegan for breakfast for three weeks. You’ll see that you’re not going to die. Your arms and legs don’t fall off. You know, you don’t go blind. And then you go vegan for lunch for a couple of weeks. And then you go vegan for dinner. And boom! There you are, you’re a vegan. …

Rather than spending several hours tabling at your local community college about why kids should be eating cage-free eggs, try to explain to those kids why they shouldn’t be eating eggs at all, or any other animal products. Are you going to convince them all? No. But you know what, you’ll convince some… And it will grow. It’s a zero sum game. Every dollar of resource, every minute of labor that we spend focused on welfarist regulation is a dollar less and a minute less of labor than we’re spending on promoting veganism and abolition. ‘Wha, but well what about the people who are never going to become vegan?’ You know what? Let’s worry about those people once we’ve gotten everyone who will become vegan. … Once we do that, then we’ll worry about the people who aren’t going to change.

I’m not sure why Francione thinks it is okay to tell someone to go vegan in increments if they think they can’t do it right away, but it is not okay to suggest they use animal products from small farms while they make the transition. His aversion to admitting a difference between factory farmed and humanely raised animal products is especially perplexing when someone who absolutely refuses to become vegan but would consider consuming humane animal products asks what to do. The way Francione deals with this is to refuse to grant the premise of the question. “I am not going to go vegan, so should I eat humane animal products?” “Just go vegan.” “I’m not going to.” “Go vegan in stages.” “I already said that I don’t want to go vegan. At all. Ever. No matter what. So should I get my raw lamb testicles from a farmers ma…” “GO VEGAN!”

Francione says we will deal with these stubborn lamb testicle addicts later because until every potential vegan is vegan, the opportunity cost of talking to die-hard meat eaters about humane animal products is too great. He gives no indication of what his game plan will be once that day arrives, maybe because thinking about that for even one second would steal a thought that he could have expended on veganism.

Interestingly, this concern with opportunity costs gives strength to the otherwise useless defensive omnivore critique that animal activism detracts from human activism. If Francione can’t say a word in favor of humane animal products no matter the context because that would take time from his vegan work, then holding vegan bake sales for animal shelters or donating to farm sanctuaries really does take financial resources and time from human causes. Why do you love animals and hate humans, vegans?

In the example Francione gives, however, there is zero opportunity cost to recommending humane animal products over factory farmed products. There is no potential vegan behind this person who Francione could be converting to veganism instead. Hypothetical Stubborn Meat-Eating Woman is telling Francione that nothing will stop her from eating animal products, but she would consider buying humanely raised animal products if Francione thinks that’s better. Francione’s abolitionist dogma has him so straight-jacketed that it impossible for him to do anything other than act like a malfunctioning “go vegan” bot who sputters “go vegan” in response to every input.

The reason Francione is so opposed to acknowledging anything even remotely better about animal products from small farms is his focus on animal rights rather than suffering reduction, and his belief that the property status of animals makes it impossible to improve their treatment in significant ways.

Francione is right that the property status of animals and their poor treatment are linked, but his conclusion that there can be no difference between factory farms and small humane farms doesn’t match reality. Since animals do not appear to have a concept of property rights, their property status is relevant to them only as far as it affects how they are treated. So a humane farm would be better for animals if the farmers did manage to treat their unsuspecting herd with kindness even while drooling in anticipation of slaughter day. This isn’t fantasy — there are indeed farms where animals are treated better than in intensive operations.

If property status were all that mattered, beings seen as resources would always be tortured, and beings seen as ends in themselves would never be tortured. But there are counterexamples on both sides. By insisting that property status settles everything and thus there is no moral difference whatsoever between factory farms and humane farms, Francione is implying that treatment of animals never matters as long as they aren’t thought of as resources. This logic would allow Francione to torture his rescue dogs since he calls them companion animals instead of pets. It would also be okay for farm sanctuaries to torture the animals under their care because they don’t see the animals as resources to be killed and used for food.

One response Francione might try is to say that to torture a being is in itself a form of self-gratification, an exploitative use of that being for your own ends. And thus, torture automatically signifies that you think of the victim as property. Let’s say it’s true that punching someone means you think of them as your property. This doesn’t help Francione’s case; all it does is suggest that there can be multiple levels of property status. If torture is an indication of property status, then animals who are made to suffer before dying are treated more like property than those who are treated well before dying. Isn’t the latter still better even though it also includes property status?

In Introduction to Animal Rights: Your Child or The Dog?, Francione gives permission to a hypothetical guy trapped on a mountain to kill and eat rabbits in order to survive. If using an animal for food means you think of him or her as property, these rabbits now have property status in the eyes of the starving plane crash survivor. In Francione’s view, that puts the mountain’s rabbits in the same position as animals raised for food. Would Francione see no difference between this guy trying to kill the rabbits as painlessly as possible, and intentionally torturing them before killing and eating them? Since Francione has allowed the starving man to eat the rabbits, and since Francione has said there’s no moral difference between varying amounts of suffering when it comes to using animals for food, he then has to be okay with the gratuitous torture of the wild bunnies!

If someone had me cornered and said he could either torture and then kill me or just kill me, would I say, “It makes no difference because either way you are treating me as property”? No! I would say, “I choose painless death!” If someone kidnapped Francione’s dogs and said, “I can either kill your dogs painlessly or I can torture them for days before killing them — which do choose? By the way, if you say, ‘Just don’t kill them,’ I will take that to mean that you want me to torture them first,” would Francione still be incapable of making the distinction between better and worse treatment of animals?

--Tagged under: Vegan Leaders--

--Tagged under: Ethics--

February 1, 2011 6 32 PM

Vegan Deaths and Their Non-Diet-Related Causes

One of the hazards of achieving meaning through diet is that your legacy is heavily dependent on how long you live. If you say your diet is the best, and then you die young of a health failure, it messes up everything. Your opponents will quietly cheer your death as a validation of their nutritional and moral worldview and your followers will either abandon you or strain to explain why your death had nothing to do with what you ate.

Not all vegans claim that veganism is the healthiest diet, or that it makes you immune to chronic disease and early death. Yet most vegans can’t help but associate meat, dairy and eggs with heart attacks and cancer, so if a vegan does die early of one of those red meat diseases, it can’t be due to nutrition. A better explanation is that they were doomed from the start.

Leslie Cross

Leslie Cross, who founded the Plant Milk Society, was a great friend of mine. He died comparatively early, well, in his early 70s, I think, and, in a letter he sent me, shortly before he died, he mentioned that, as a child, he’d fallen heavily from a gate and the authorities thought he might not recover and, I think, if he had an early death for a vegan, it may have been the consequence of that.

— “Interview With Donald Watson on Sunday 15 December 2002”

Frey Ellis (1918 - 1978)

The [Vegan] Society was grateful to add to its membership Dr. Frey Ellis, who took a special interest in vegan health. He educated vegans about the health benefits of vegan diets, about the care necessary in bringing up children as vegans, and about B12, which had been discovered in 1949. … Dr. Ellis became a council member and vice president of the Vegan Society in 1961 and was its president from 1964 until he died in 1978 [at the age of 59 - pdf]. This gentle man worked to show the scientific world that a vegan diet could be nutritionally adequate.

[No explanation is given for the early death, but his obituary (linked to in the above pdf) says, “He bore his last illness with great courage and with unfailing courtesy.”]

— “Becoming Vegan”

H. Jay Dinshah (1933 - 2000)

H. Jay Dinshah, 66, who as the leader of the American Vegan Society was an advocate for life without violence toward animals or humans, died on June 8, apparently from a heart attack while working in his office in Malaga, New Jersey [after 43 years of veganism]. Both sides of his family had a history of congenital heart problems, relatives said. …

Mr. Dinshah was raised as lacto-vegetarian from birth by his parents, the late Dinshah P. Ghadiali and Irene Grace Hoger Dinshah. His diet in later years consisted of fruits, salads, vegetables, grains, legumes, nuts and seeds.

— “Jay Dinshah, 66, American Vegan Society Leader”

George Ohsawa (1893 - 1966)

Macrobiotics founder George Ohsawa died of a heart attack at the age of 73. Macrobiotics allows for the eating of fish occasionally but Ohsawa believed brown rice was the ideal food and that the best diet was one consisting entirely of grains.

According to macrobiotic advocate Kaare Bursell, the seeds for Ohsawa’s premature demise were planted ten years earlier in West Africa when Ohsawa demonstrated the dangers of consuming too much “yin” by drinking alcohol and excess water and walking around barefoot. This extreme behavior gave him a deadly blood condition (“African Sickness”), which he cured by abruptly turning his blood yang with a meal of brown rice, aduki beans and sea salt. Unfortunately, this merely sent the blood parasite into hiding — waiting until Ohsawa’s next dietary slip-up.

This dietary misstep occurred 10 years later when Ohsawa was attempting to create a macrobiotic beer. As some of you may know, beer is dangerously yin. Ohsawa hoped to correct this of course, but first he had to taste-test his experimental batches, which hadn’t yet arrived at the perfect yin/yang balance. These sips created the yin condition in Ohsawa’s blood that the dormant parasites had been waiting for. This killed one of the world’s foremost authorities on nutrition, and now beer is doomed to be yin forever.

— Paraphrased from “The Alchemycal Pages”

Michio and Avaline Kushi

[Michio and Aveline Kushi] wrote books on Japanese macrobiotics back in the 60’s and have been at the forefront of the macrobiotic movement. Aveline died after nine years of cervical cancer at the young age of only 78.

Japanese women have a very long lifespan generally. She got radiation and possibly other medical treatments. Michio now has colon cancer at 81. These two are not good inspirations for health and longevity, yet they held themselves up as role models for a diet and lifestyle in harmony with the universe. …

It is no secret Michio smoked cigarettes and drank coffee for decades. We don’t know what, if any, bad habits Aveline had because Japanese people are generally secretive and keep their affairs close to the chest. Chances are Avenline had her own bad habits she didn’t reveal.

We will never know if they were under heavy stress or had an unhappy marriage. Divorce is considered “bad form” in Japan, and it is far better to stay together in an unhappy marriage than get divorced. We will never know what really went on, or didn’t go on, in the Kushi household. Aveline is gone, and Michio isn’t talking. …

I am very thankful to the Ohsawas, Kushis and other traditionalists who brought macrobiotics to America decades ago.

— “Why the Kushi’s Have Cancer”

Notice how I conveniently left out that Vegan Society founder Donald Watson lived to the age of 95 after 60 years of veganism, and “forgot” to mention all the meat eaters in the history of the world who died even earlier than Frey Ellis. Do I really think I can fool you guys so easily?

--Tagged under: Health--

--Tagged under: Vegan Leaders--

4 notes December 22, 2010 10 03 AM

"Exciting news, I’ve been asked to work for the T. Colin Campbell Foundation as the rebuttal guy. Colin read my rebuttal to the now infamous recent critique of the China Study. He was so impressed, particularly with my understanding of the etiology of cancer, that he asked to meet me in person. So I did, twice. Colin was thrilled to meet me. I was rather astonished how impressed he was with what I wrote, considering that I don’t have any background in science. I was a music major in college and grad school. To put things into perspective, he actually sent what I wrote to the director of Forks Over Knives (the upcoming documentary about him and Caldwell Esselstyn) to explain the science behind the book. He said my understanding was ‘perfect’ and that I explained the subject better than he could. This guy has been active in the field for 5 decades and has been involved in making highest level health policy decisions in the US."

— “B” at 30 Bananas A Day

--Tagged under: Health--

--Tagged under: Vegan Quotes--

--Tagged under: Vegan Leaders--

6 notes December 16, 2010 6 29 AM

The Shocking Truth About Vitamin D That The Vegan RD Doesn’t Want You to Know

In her most recent entry New Vitamin D and Calcium RDAs: What They Mean for Vegans, The Vegan RD Virginia Messina writes:

Vegans get their vitamin D the same way that omnivores do—from fortified foods and sunshine. The evidence suggests that vitamin D2 is as effective as D3 in raising blood levels of 25OHD, so there is no particular issue here regarding vegan nutrition.

This echos what she said about vitamin D in an earlier entry, Recommended Supplements for Vegans:

If you live where it’s sunny and warm all year and you spend time outdoors without sunscreen, you can make enough. The rest of us need a supplement or fortified foods (just like omnivores do) supplying 1,000 I.U.s of vitamin D.”

If your primary source for nutrition information is The Vegan RD (and whose isn’t?), your only possible conclusion from this is that vitamin D does not occur naturally in any foods. The only sources of vitamin D are supplements and the sun, and both of those are vegan, which means omnivores and vegans are in the exact same boat on this one. You are missing out on absolutely no unsupplemented sources of vitamin D by being vegan, vegans, because you know that D omnis are getting in dairy? Totally fortified.

That, however, would be a faulty conclusion. Some foods do contain vitamin D and most of them (except for certain mushrooms) are animal products.

As I type this I’m eating a salad that contains raw eggs, raw cow heart, raw cow blood, sardines, anchovies, butternut squash and salad greens. This salad is known as “The Ex-Vegan Special,” and I know exactly what you’re thinking — “That salad doesn’t contain vitamin D.” But it does. I am getting Vitamin D by eating this salad and none of it is fortified. And I’m not cheating by eating this outside while I sunbathe either. (It’s night.) How is this possible?

VeganHealth.org knows why:

The only significant, natural sources of vitamin D in foods are fatty fish (e.g. cod liver oil, mackerel, salmon, sardines), eggs (if chickens have been fed vitamin D), and mushrooms (if treated with UVB rays)

Reed Mangels knew why when she co-wrote a book with Virginia and Mark Messina, evidently sneaking this passage past the two of them:

[Vitamin D] is found primarily in fish oils and the flesh of fatty fish and in eggs from hens that have been fed vitamin D. Cholecalciferol (D3) is the form of vitamin D found in animal foods.

Chris Masterjohn knows why:

Vitamin D was originally associated with cod liver oil and exposure to ultraviolet light. It is found in the highest amounts in fish livers, the flesh of fatty fish, and the blood of land animals; and in smaller amounts in butter and lard from animals raised with plenty of exposure to sunshine.

And strangely, even Virgina Messina circa a year ago knew why:

Research suggests that low intakes of vitamin D, vitamin B12, and omega-3 fatty acids might lead to depression. For everyone—omnivores included—the only sources of vitamin D are supplements, fortified foods and sun exposure. (Actually, there are a few animal sources of vitamin D, but it is very unlikely that omnivores can eat enough of them to meet needs; that’s why cow’s milk is fortified.)

If Messina knows that vitamin D exists in some animal products, why does she gloss over this now? Because these sources are “few”? Vitamin D isn’t in every animal product, but this chart (via Chris Masterjohn) shows there are some significant sources:

Vitamin D

Congrats to vegan silver ear fungus for topping the list, by the way, albeit with D2.

It’s true that my salad isn’t something many omnivores typically eat in these parts. Most Americans would reach for the ranch before squeezing a bloody heart over their salad bowl. But plenty of “normal” omnivores eat salmon, mackerel, halibut, tuna and sardines. These are not weird foods. One-hundred grams of herring provides 1,100 IUs of vitamin D, says the chart. I used to put Trader Joe’s canned smoked herring on my salads all the time. If only I’d known I barely needed to go outside those days — imagine how many more vegan message board posts I could’ve read. But guess who would never have told me this? The Vegan RD, that’s who.

This doesn’t mean omnivores don’t have to worry about vitamin D. Many omnivores aren’t doing cod liver oil shots every day, or even eating fish at all, and could benefit from supplementation, especially if they’re computer-addicted shut-ins who live in the Pacific Northwest. But even the occasional herring or salmon would give shade-dwelling omnivores who don’t supplement an advantage over a vegan who got the same amount of sun and also didn’t supplement.

Vitamin D is not an even playing field for all diets and it could be helpful to Messina’s readership if she were more clear about this. Especially since Messina is an opponent of the health argument for veganism, presenting herself as science-based source of nutritional advice for vegans who want facts and not vegan wishful thinking. When she says “Vegans get their vitamin D the same way that omnivores do—from fortified foods and sunshine,” she betrays a subtle tendency to present veganism in a more favorable light than the facts may warrant.

Furthermore, Messina needs to remember her audience. Vegans aren’t just vegans — many of them are also future ex-vegans. And upon breaking away from the less is more philosophy of veganism, it’s quite common for ex-vegans to experiment with a variety of “weird foods” like The Ex-Vegan Special and anglerfish liver pâté. For them, especially, it’s a real disservice for their trusted nutrition source to say that animal foods don’t provide vitamin D. Today’s vegan may very well need to know tomorrow that a cup of cow’s blood contains 4,000 IUs of vitamin D3. Don’t hold out on us, vegan dietitians.

--Tagged under: Health--

--Tagged under: Vegan Leaders--

--Tagged under: Ex-Vegans--

15 notes December 14, 2010 7 29 AM

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.

--Tagged under: Ethics--

--Tagged under: Vegan Leaders--

--Tagged under: Loopholes in Vegan Logic--

21 notes November 29, 2010 10 52 PM

Why Ex-Vegans Eat More Meat Than They Must

Dan Cudahy of “Unpopular Vegan Essays” — a popular essay blog amongst the abolitionist-leaning “logical vegan” crowd — has written a generally ignored and ostracized essay addressing the excitement over “A Vegan No More”. In “On Ex-Vegans”, Cudahy writes that ex-vegans don’t exist, by definition, because the definition of true veganism includes the word “lifelong”:

For some of us, “vegan” means a strong, lifelong, and morally internalized commitment to avoiding the use of animals and animal products as much as is reasonably possible in an extremely speciesist society that uses animal products ubiquitously. … There may be a lot of “ex-vegans”, but when they were “vegans”, what did that mean? Did they go without animal products for several hours daily (“vegan before 6pm”)? Did they go on a “vegan health diet” for a few weeks, months, or years only as a fad diet right after their Atkins diet? If they were vegan for “animal rights” reasons, what did they mean by that? Are they referring to a concern about animal welfare?

If you aren’t vegan for life, you never had the commitment that true veganism entails, which means you were never vegan. So much for the ex-vegan problem. Although this may create a new problem if “lifelong” is taken to mean “covering the entirety of one’s life,” since that would exclude everyone except for vegans from birth to death at an old age, which so far is no one. Hopefully Cudahy doesn’t mean that.

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