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, but some activities possibly including eating abandoned backyard eggs from rescued chickens, buying second-hand leather or honey, going to zoos that use some of their profits towards conservation efforts, or eating dumpster meat are OK. (Go back)

• Buying second-hand leather is OK, because it doesn’t contribute money to cow farmers, and it is more ecological and socially responsible than buying new clothes. (Go back)

Things to Consider

It’s time for a brief economics lesson. Imagine you walk into a car dealership. You have the money to spend. There is a used car for $6,999, and a new car for $13,499, both the same model and year. The used car is in good condition and has relatively low mileage. Which do you take? Many people would take the former in this situation: you can put whatever savings you have towards future repair costs, and it won’t really affect you (other than not being able to indulge in that vapid consumerist “new car” feeling). Now imagine the same scenario, but the used car is $12,999. The choice is now not so simple: the potential benefit of buying new (not having to worry as much about repairs) seems to justify it. This kind of reasoning is the basis behind an economic theory which posits that secondary markets have an influence on primary markets. In a free market, if demand in the secondary market rises (all else being equal), this causes prices to rise in that secondary market, which incentivizes people who would otherwise buy in the secondary market to buy in the primary market instead.

If you think this is irrelevant to thrift stores, think again. Thrift stores such as Goodwill have recently been pricing certain goods higher, because of organized “pickers” (also known as “flippers”) who buy from thrift stores and re-sell to others at a high mark up. Even though this activity is in the secondary market, it means people who would otherwise buy something from a thrift store may not be able to find what they want for an affordable price, leading them to buy new instead.

When it comes to leather, when you pick out that nice leather jacket or cool pair of leather boots at a thrift store, an omnivore who is less scrupulous than you (but still cares enough to try to shop second hand) is going to walk into that store, not find what they are looking for, and think, “Screw it, may as well just buy a new leather jacket/boots”, and that money will eventually end up in the pocket of a cow farmer. The fact that you likely select for the most fashionable items actually makes your impact worse, not better here.

Of course, the chain of causation is somewhat indirect here: your money didn’t end up in the pocket of the cow farmer, someone else’s did. But this does not absolve you of responsibility. Buying second-hand leather is similar in moral status to taking a bunch of free needles from a heroin safety outreach group when you are not addicted to heroin: sure you aren’t directly giving someone else HIV, but you sure are contributing to the problem by making it harder for other people still enslaved by their passions to practice harm reduction.

But let’s engage in a hypothetical for a moment. Suppose you are hanging out near an active volcano, and a leather jacket falls from sky, and is either going to be burned into ashes in the molten lava, or else you can grab it and save it from destruction. Would it be OK to wear that leather jacket then, knowing for sure there is no conceivable way that your means of obtaining it led to more money flowing to cow farmers. Many vegans would still say no. Their reasoning is basically the same reason they would view it as not OK to wear a jacket obtained in this hypothetical way that were made out of the skin of a Vietnamese child laborer. Of course, the Vietnamese child laborer is already dead, they aren’t going to suffer any more by you wearing their skin. But what attitudes are you endorsing by choosing to wear their skin, rather than, say, giving it a respectful burial? We respect the dead not because of how it affects the dead person, but because of how it affects those still alive. It sends the message that this person’s life did not really matter, that their flesh is something to be used. Such actions contribute to the de-valuing of everyone. If you are ever in question about whether the use of a product of the exploitation of a sentient being is right or wrong, ask yourself the question: would I think it were proper and respectful if that sentient being were a Vietnamese child laborer? If the answer is “no”, then it probably isn’t proper and respectful if that sentient being is a cow or a bird or a rabbit either.

Of course, many people would not find it disrespectful to keep a human skull around, for example in a science classroom. But there’s an important point to be made: we expect that those skulls were obtained with the consent of the deceased, or else were collected during anthropological research and were not obtained from people who were killed against their will for that purpose. An early 2000s exhibition known as “Bodies: The Exhibition” put on display real human bodies which had been preserved in order to show the inner workings of the human body. However, investigation revealed that these bodies, obtained from unspecified partners in China, were possibly those of Falun Gong practitioners who had been executed by the Chinese government for their religious beliefs. This caused widespread controversy, and for good reason. There is of course a good case to be made that the body snatching of the early 19th century was ethical, since it progressed our understanding of human anatomy to such a profound degree, ultimately helping millions, and was the only option to obtain this knowledge in a society that had many dogmatic religious beliefs enforced by law which prevented consensual donation of bodies to science. But if we do end up believing this was ethical, it does not excuse other practices which were not done out of necessity. For the “Bodies” exhibit in particular, the public knowledge gained by such a display was nothing that couldn’t be delivered to the public in another way. Similar objections can be launched against classroom dissections in primary and secondary schools: the vast majority of those kids are not going to become doctors, and they aren’t really learning anything they couldn’t learn from watching a video, so those animals are being killed completely unnecessarily.

When it comes to rare or antique leather works for which there may be a legitimate historical reason to preserve them, they can be donated to museums. But using them for fashion is really disrespectful.

And for the ecological argument? Just buy something else at the thrift store. Let an omni who would otherwise buy new get that leather jacket. It’s a false dichotomy to suggest that you have a choice either of buying used leather or buying a new synthetic jacket.