# Your Positions

- We should all be vegan. Animals should never be exploited, because they are sentient and have the capacity to suffer. ([Start over](/Vegan Philosophy Adventure))

- 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](A))

# Things to Consider

It's impossible to completely avoid harming others just by existing. But being vegan does not require that you never harm others, just that you avoid it when it is unnecessary. Just by walking outside or growing plants to live, you are inevitably going to accidentally hurt or kill some insects. However, these are necessary to prevent your own suffering: starving yourself to death staying inside your own home to avoid accidentally stepping on insects would hurt you immensely, and your life matters as well. However, if you were actively seeking out and killing insects who aren't bothering you and just trying to live your life, those deaths would not be necessary, and you should be held accountable for that. Intentionally stepping on an ant while walking down the sidewalk is unnecessary cruelty. 

When you consider whether or not you should engage in certain behaviors as vegan, you should always be asking yourself: are behaviors like these necessary, what harm might they cause, and what is the level of harm to others relative to the personal benefit I receive from engaging in these behaviors? To be clear, there are many tough decisions here. If you are growing plants for your own food, you might ponder whether it is consistent with the vegan philosophy to put down slug traps to prevent them from eating your plants. This is a tough question, because every piece of food you manage to grow yourself means one less piece of produce you have to buy from the grocery store, which likely uses much more intense and destructive forms of pest control. It gets more complicated: there is an argument to be made that such traps are not necessary: you could always move slugs away by hand, it would just be much more time intensive. The further along the path of minimizing the harm your cause you go, the tougher these problems get.

However, there is a dis-analogy between deciding the best way to deal with slugs in your garden and things like eating honey or backyard eggs or buying second-hand leather: dealing with the slugs doesn't bring you direct pleasure, but eating honey, backyard eggs, or wearing second-hand leather presumably do, and this is the main reason you are drawn to do those things in the first place. Often people will come up with elaborate excuse why these activities are actually for the greater good: buying honest supports bee keeping, which combats the looming extinction of bee populations; second-hand leather prevents resources from being used and eco-terrible plastics being produced to make new clothing; eating abandoned backyard eggs from rescued hens reduces the need to buy food from elsewhere, decreasing your environmental footprint. But would you still do these things if all second-hand leather looked really ugly and uncool (but still provided good protection from the elements), or if eggs and honey tasted off-putting (but still provided some sustenance)? If your answer is no, then you should take this as evidence that your own personal pursuit of pleasure is biasing your reasoning here, and perhaps you aren't being completely honest with yourself about your reasons for wanting to do these things. 

The fact of the matter is that the harms of honey production, second-hand leather, and backyard eggs are among the least widely known, because they require some specialized knowledge to understand in a way that not wanting cows to be slaughtered or raped does not. Freeganism (which is the usual philosophy behind eating dumpster meat) is perhaps the most complicated position to address, but there are legitimate reason to question the practice.

# Select a Position You Want to Explore (you can go back and explore more than one)

(A) [Eating honey is OK, because it doesn't really hurt the bees to harvest their honey with modern techniques, and bee-keeping provides a lot of ecological benefit which buying honey supports.](ACA)

(B) [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.](ACB)

(C) [Eating abandoned backyard eggs from rescued chickens is OK, because those chickens are not being used *just for* their eggs, they are treated quite well, and eating those eggs prevents food waste and helps the environment by reducing demand on our already strained food systems.](ACC)

(D) [Eating meat/dairy abandoned in a dumpster (or perhaps stealing it from an unethical company) is OK, because you are not contributing financially at all from the companies producing it, in fact you may even be hurting them. In addition, you are withdrawing support from capitalist food systems, which is a good thing.](ACD)