Vegan Philosophy Adventure/AB
Your Positions
We should all be vegan. Animals should never be exploited, because they are sentient and have the capacity to suffer. (Start over)
Buying meat or dairy is never OK and sweatshop-produced goods is never OK. Paying to go to a circus or zoo for the purpose of entertainment is never OK. We can advocate for other people to go vegan, but we shouldn’t be annoying or go too hard on other people who aren’t vegan: it’s a personal choice. (Go back)
Things to Consider
Is it really a personal choice though? It’s one thing to say it’s a personal choice how committed you are to recycling or reducing energy consumption or whatever. The harm there is pretty diffuse. Sure, every time you get in a car and drive you have the potential to kill someone, but the chance of you driving ending up killing someone is pretty low, so we’re OK with people driving. Likewise, your own lack of recycling or your own excess energy consumption is unlikely to push an ecosystem or the planet over the teetering edge in complete chaos. It’s bad, it’s not OK, but it’s better that we let people make bad choices. It’s important that society in general does these things less, but not as important that any given individual does them less. Cool, you can believe that if you want. But it’s much harder to justify when there is a direct causal connection between your actions and someone being harmed, as their is in the case of eating meat and dairy. There are victims here! When you pay for these things, the money you spend is going directly the company that exploits those animals. They use that money to buy/raise more animals to exploit. Of course, a large company may not even notice if you do or don’t buy a single carton of eggs: it’s not as granular as that. But we can make the analogy to drunk driving: sure, many times you will drive drunk and nothing will happen. But there’s a really high chance that something will eventually happen. If you keep buying eggs, there is a decent chance that eventually your consumption will eventually lead the grocery store to place a larger order. Most large grocery stores have very detailed computer-based inventory tracking, and they will notice if they see an increase in sales. And companies raising animals will respond to a change like that: it is trivial to buy more chicks from the breeder, and well worth the extra profit from sales. But even if you think that these companies are too sloppy in their accounting to really respond to changes from an individual consumer, do you think they are too sloppy to respond to changes from a hundred or a thousand consumers? Do you think they will really continue their same level of production if they overproduce and end up with a lot of excess stock going to waste, hitting their wallet? When we say it’s a personal choice, and we shouldn’t be convincing others around us to change their behavior, we are essentially letting a mob run unchecked: a mob of consumers who almost will lead to lives being lost. To hold the position, “I am not personally buying animal products, I don’t have a responsibility to convince others” is tantamount to “I am not personally driving drunk, I don’t have a responsibility to convince others” or “I am not personally a part of lynch mob, I don’t have a responsibility to convince others not to join”.
A good exercise here is: replace “pigs, cows and chickens” with “dogs, cats, and hamsters”. You find out your friend is buying dog meat, raised in atrocious conditions, abused, has their tail cut off, teeth cut with anesthesia, confined to a tiny crate lying in its own shit. Or maybe they are starving their hamster for weeks at a time (as egg farmers do to chickens to stimulate egg production). Do you view it as a personal choice? Would it really change things if your friend was simply paying someone else to do these things instead of doing it themselves? The fact of the matter is if most people saw these things in person outside the context of “farming”, they would feel an obligation to intervene. So why not feel an obligation in this case?