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WillowOne's Positions

Veganism

My Positions

  1. The ethical case against industrial animal farming is strong, and I do not have a good answer to it.
  2. The suffering of animals counts morally. On my own account of morality, moral claims are grounded in the interests of those affected, and an animal that can suffer has an interest in not suffering. Nothing in that account restricts it to humans.
  3. I eat meat which is the result of industrial farming. This is a contradiction between what I conclude and what I do, not a position, and I record it as such rather than construct a justification for it.
  4. I reject the claim that eating meat is objectively wrong, for the same reason I reject every other claim of objective morality. That does not help me, because once the sentence is completed ("wrong, because it causes suffering that serves no interest a reasonable person would weigh above it") it still comes out against the practice.
  5. I do not support prohibition. Meat should not be banned, any more than cannabis or prostitution should be. The appropriate levers are welfare regulation, honest pricing that stops hiding the cost of the industry in subsidies and externalities, and investment in alternatives.
  6. Similar reason persists with regards to egg and milk production.
  7. I do not consume cow milk and enjoy/prefer soy, almond or oat milk depending use. I would argue that for my use cases these alternatives are objectivly better than cow milk.
  8. Animal milk still appears necessary for cheese production but I would argue should be produced soley for this purpose; and the framing be given over to the new "milk" alternatives for other use cases.

Clarification / Notes

  1. The argument in its strongest form is short. Causing suffering is bad unless it is outweighed by a greater interest. Animals raised for food suffer, in most cases considerably. The interest that outweighs it is, for most people in rich countries, the pleasure of a particular taste and the inconvenience of changing habit. Stated that plainly, the trade is hard to defend, and I notice that I only ever defend it before the sentence has been completed. See Moral claims are incomplete assertions.
  2. The usual rebuttals are weak, and I have used most of them. "Animals eat other animals" is an appeal to nature; lions are not moral agents and do not set the standard for those who are. "Humans evolved as omnivores" is true and irrelevant, since what we evolved to do is not what we ought to do (Is–ought problem). "Plants feel pain too" is false on any evidence we have, and if it were true it would argue for eating fewer animals, since animals are fed on plants. "My one meal makes no difference" is the argument of every voter who stays at home; demand is the sum of individual meals and nothing else.
  3. The line is drawn by the capacity to suffer, not by species. Whether a being can reason or speak is beside the point; the question is whether it can suffer. This is Peter Singer's argument in Animal Liberation (1975), and it follows directly from an ethic that takes empathy as the engine of moral concern. That criterion places a pig, which is at least as cognitively capable as a dog, firmly inside the circle of moral concern, and the fact that we treat the two so differently is a matter of custom, not argument.
  4. The environmental case is independent of the ethical one and I find it equally persuasive. Livestock is one of the largest sources of greenhouse gas emissions, deforestation, and freshwater use, and a diet lower in animal products is one of the few changes an individual can make that measurably reduces their contribution to climate change.
  5. What this does not commit me to. It does not commit me to the view that an animal's life is worth the same as a human's, nor to the view that there is no morally relevant difference between a battery hen and a well-kept flock. The harm-reduction framing is a gradient, not a switch, and reduction counts even where elimination does not happen. To dismiss eating less meat because it is not eating none is the Nirvana Fallacy.
  6. I am suspicious of veganism as an identity rather than as a conclusion, for the same reason I am suspicious of every moral identity: it tends to shift the aim from reducing harm to belonging to the group that opposes it. But the conclusion stands regardless of who holds it or how annoyingly.

Personal Context

I eat meat while acknowledging the suffering and environmental harm of the industry that produces it. Recording a contradiction honestly is better than resolving it dishonestly, and my aim is to reduce rather than to be consistent on paper. This is the position I hold most loosely in the sense that it is the one I expect to move.

Also see