If you care about animals and you get to know a little bit about animal advocacy circles you would immediately realize that being vegan is considered as a moral threshold for the community. Not every animal advocate is vegan, in fact many of them are not, but it is viewed and to a significant extent accepted as a focal point. Any reasonable book or blog or article on animal rights at least mentions veganism at some point, most farmed animal advocacy organizations at least have some form of a vegan outreach program.
Thanks for the well informed article. One thing I find interesting here is the underlying and undiscussed belief that life has more value when the living thing is bigger or further up the food chain. Ie a hump back whale has more inherate value than a mouse. Or a vertebrate more than an invertebrate, and clearly an animal more than a plant. While at the same time there is another unspoken moral impression that human life shouldn't matter more than other life.
Without the above two assumptions or underlying beliefs veganism starts to fall apart pretty quickly and the discussion must become much more nuanced, as perhaps it should...
Perhaps more about quality of life, levels of chemical interference or how far from the natural biocycle that life is live. Or maybe more about levels of pain, suffering and death in differing farming systems. Or about energetics, bound energy, carbon footprints, and/or the efficiency of eating autotrophes not heterotrophs.
As it stands now a lack of willingness to openly explore and confront these (mostly) unspoken assumptions, leaves many non-vegans unconvinced of the true ethical credibility of veganism, unless your founding principle is that you only care about vertebrates, preferably fluffy and cute. Which may simply be the less rationalised truth for many in the animal advocacy movement.
This is a really great article! One other thing that is worth noting is that veganism sets a nice threshold that should be in accordance with the values of animal rights activists. If you set the threshold at 'donate some amount' you get weird problems of arbitrariness of animal products consumed. But veganism is a threshold that you can hold everyone to. Additionally, I think that animal rights people -- myself included -- would say that, if you're really on board with animal rights, that would entail you being vegan, just like if you appreciated the plights of black people in 1830 in the U.S. you would not own slaves. (I use animal rights advocacy as roughly identical to animal advocacy -- I'm a utilitarian, for the record).
Thanks for the well informed article. One thing I find interesting here is the underlying and undiscussed belief that life has more value when the living thing is bigger or further up the food chain. Ie a hump back whale has more inherate value than a mouse. Or a vertebrate more than an invertebrate, and clearly an animal more than a plant. While at the same time there is another unspoken moral impression that human life shouldn't matter more than other life.
Without the above two assumptions or underlying beliefs veganism starts to fall apart pretty quickly and the discussion must become much more nuanced, as perhaps it should...
Perhaps more about quality of life, levels of chemical interference or how far from the natural biocycle that life is live. Or maybe more about levels of pain, suffering and death in differing farming systems. Or about energetics, bound energy, carbon footprints, and/or the efficiency of eating autotrophes not heterotrophs.
As it stands now a lack of willingness to openly explore and confront these (mostly) unspoken assumptions, leaves many non-vegans unconvinced of the true ethical credibility of veganism, unless your founding principle is that you only care about vertebrates, preferably fluffy and cute. Which may simply be the less rationalised truth for many in the animal advocacy movement.
This is a really great article! One other thing that is worth noting is that veganism sets a nice threshold that should be in accordance with the values of animal rights activists. If you set the threshold at 'donate some amount' you get weird problems of arbitrariness of animal products consumed. But veganism is a threshold that you can hold everyone to. Additionally, I think that animal rights people -- myself included -- would say that, if you're really on board with animal rights, that would entail you being vegan, just like if you appreciated the plights of black people in 1830 in the U.S. you would not own slaves. (I use animal rights advocacy as roughly identical to animal advocacy -- I'm a utilitarian, for the record).