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Arguments For and Against Veganism

For veganism.

• ANIMAL WELFARE: Eating meat requires the death of a living being. Eating dairy usually involves animals being separated from their children, causing distress to both mother and calf. Dairy cattle frequently develop bovine mastitis (a painful infection and inflammation of the udders), and factory farmed animals are kept in cramped conditions and pumped full of antibiotics and growth hormones in order to maximise profit. Unlike wild animals, humans do not require meat to survive (and definitely not dairy products from other animals). Eating meat is a choice and, as moral actors, the correct choice is surely to give up meat and dairy.
• ENVIRONMENT: When cows eat grass, microbes in their gut break down their meal and produce methane. This methane (a greenhouse gas) is released into the atmosphere via the magic of cow burps and farts, making livestock farming one of the biggest contributors to global warming. Factor in deforestation from land clearance, biodiversity loss, and air and water pollution, and animal agriculture is terrible for the environment.
• HEALTH: Vegan diets tend to be rich in foods that have proven health benefits: fresh fruit, vegetables, seeds, nuts, beans and pulses. A vegan diet is typically higher in fibre, and  lower  in cholesterol, protein, calcium and salt compared to a non-vegan diet. Research suggests that vegans may have a lower risk of heart disease than non-vegans. It is true that vegans need to supplement their diets with B12, but this is easy to do (e.g. via yeast extracts such as Marmite).

AGAINST Veganism

• NATURE: Humans (and our ancestors) have eaten meat for an estimated  2.6 million years . In fact, scientists argue that animal protein was vital for helping early hominids develop larger brains, meaning that humans likely wouldn’t even exist if it weren’t for eating meat. We evolved to have meat as part of our diets. Animals eat meat and it would be cruel to prevent them from doing so. Well, guess what? Humans are animals too, and meat is a natural part of our diets.
• CULTURE: Food is a central part of all human cultures. And, around the world, people celebrate their cultures by cooking meat dishes. If the world went vegan, we would lose iconic cultural traditions such as bolognese sauce, tandoori chicken, sashimi, currywurst, and Peking duck.
• HEALTH: A balanced diet is a healthy diet. Eating moderate amounts of fish, meat, and dairy alongside fruit, vegetables and pulses gives us all the vitamins, minerals, fatty acids, and other things we need to stay healthy. Research does suggest that vegans have a lower risk of heart disease, but that same research also indicates they have a higher risk of strokes (possibly due to B12 deficiency), and it’s unclear whether the supposed health benefits of veganism are anyway less about diet and more about broader lifestyle (e.g. vegans tend to exercise more, be non-smokers, not drink to excess, be more moderate in what they consume, etc.).

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10 The Ethical Basis for Veganism

Tristram McPherson is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Ohio State University.

• Published: 11 January 2018
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This chapter aims to clearly explain the current state of the ethical case for veganism, to orient readers to (some of) the relevant philosophical literature, and to focus attention on important outstanding questions on this topic. The chapter examines different variants of ethical veganism, and different types of reasons that can be used to support it. It then spells out the core argument for the wrongness of making animals suffer and die. The chapter then considers three ways of arguing from this conclusion to an ethical defense of the vegan lifestyle, which appeal respectively to the ethical significance of the effects of individual use of animal products, of group efficacy, and of complicity with wrongdoing. The chapter concludes by examining several neglected complications facing the ethical case for veganism.

Introduction

On one natural gloss, veganism is a pattern of living: roughly, to be vegan is to avoid eating or otherwise using products made from or by animals. At least in our cultural context, few people are likely to just find themselves becoming vegans, in the way that one might find oneself eating too much saturated fat, or possessing an alarming quantity of paisley clothing. Rather, people are likely to become vegan as a result of (more or less explicit) ethical reflection. This chapter examines the ethical case that can be mounted for veganism. While I take the ethical case for veganism to be very promising, my aim in this chapter is not polemical. Because there has been comparatively little discussion in ethics focused directly on veganism, my central hope in this chapter is instead to help foster substantive progress in that discussion. I aim to do this by: (1) orienting readers to (some of) the most important literature relevant to the topic, (2) providing a clear explanation of the current state of the ethical case for veganism, and (3) focusing attention on the most important outstanding or underexplored questions in this domain.

I begin by examining and organizing the range of positions that deserve to be called ethical veganism. I then discuss (some of) the range of types of reasons that philosophers can potentially appeal to in making a case for veganism. In my view, the most promising case for veganism begins by arguing directly for the wrongness of making animals suffer and die. There are several important and different potential strategies for connecting this conclusion to the defense of a vegan lifestyle. Here I consider three such strategies, which appeal respectively to the ethical significance of the effects of individual use of animal products, of group efficacy, and of complicity with wrongdoing. I conclude by examining several relatively neglected complications facing the ethical case for veganism.

What Is Ethical Veganism?

I began by glossing veganism as a kind of lifestyle: one that rejects the use of products made from or by animals (hereinafter animal products ). It is worth noting that one might also think of veganism as a commitment to this sort of lifestyle: this would permit us to understand someone with such a commitment, who occasionally succumbed to omnivorous temptation, as a weak-willed vegan .

Ethical veganism is the class of ethical views that ascribe some positive ethical evaluation to that lifestyle. In what follows, I will understand ethical evaluation quite broadly, for example, I will take self-interest to be an ethical consideration. In order to focus on what is distinctive of ethical veganism, it is useful to contrast it with two paradigmatically contrasting views. Ethical vegetarianism makes a strong distinction between using products made from animals (e.g., meat), and products made by animals (e.g., milk), characteristically objecting to use of the former but not the latter. Ethical omnivorism permits the use of some animal products, but restricts the acceptable sources of such products, to those that satisfy some ethical criterion.

There are many possible versions of ethical veganism. To begin, it will be useful to consider a very strong version:

Broad Absolutist Veganism: It is always wrong to use any product made from or by any member of the animal kingdom.

Broad Absolutist Veganism contrasts with vegetarianism and omnivorism, but it is also implausible, for several reasons. One reason is its absolutism : the claim that it is always wrong to use animal products. This entails that it would be wrong to press a leather button, even if doing so were necessary in order to avert global nuclear war. A second reason is the broad scope of this principle across the animal kingdom, which entails that it is wrong to use sponges (members of the animal kingdom which wholly lack a nervous system). The thesis can be modified to avoid each of these problems.

The scope problem is especially potent because many arguments for veganism appeal to properties—such as the ability to suffer—that are not shared by all animals. It is not clear whether there are any ethically significant properties that are shared by all members of the animal kingdom but not by plants. 1 It is thus natural to restrict ethical veganism to focus on those animals that have the proposed ethically relevant property or properties. Ethical veganism could also be restricted in other ways, for example, one can imagine a thesis that prohibits dietary consumption of animal products, as opposed to their use more broadly. In what follows, I will in general neglect this latter sort of restriction.

The implausibility that arises from absolutism can be avoided by a defeasible form of ethical veganism, which allows that there are circumstances in which using animal products is permissible. A defeasible veganism might suggest that the ethical objection to using animal products can be outweighed by competing ethical considerations. Several philosophers have argued that ethical principles can also be defeasible in another way: by having exceptions in which they do not count at all against a relevant action. 2 For example, one might think that if there is an ethical requirement not to use animal products, it simply does not apply to consuming human breastmilk with the consent of the producer.

Elsewhere 3 I defend a form of restricted and defeasible veganism that I call:

Modest Ethical Veganism : It is typically wrong to use products made from or by a range of animals that includes: cats, dogs, cows, pigs, deer, and chickens.

This is a defeasible form of veganism because it explicitly signals that using animal products is only typically wrong. It is also restricted, governing our use of only some animals. In virtue of these features, Modest Ethical Veganism will be much easier to defend than Broad Absolutist Veganism. However, it is also strong enough to be a recognizably vegan thesis. For example, in typical circumstances, it rules out the use of products made from or by the most commonly farmed animals. Weakening the thesis further (e.g., by prohibiting only the use of great apes, or claiming that using animal products was only occasionally wrong) would arguably result in a thesis too weak to deserve the name veganism.

One could weaken the vegan’s thesis in a different way, by replacing the core idea that failure to be vegan is wrong. For example, it could be argued that practicing veganism is ordinarily virtuous but supererogatory: above and beyond the call of ethical duty. 4 Notice, however, that if combined with the view that vegetarianism or ethical omnivorism is obligatory, it might seem odd to call this view a version of ethical veganism. Alternatively, one could argue that veganism is a required aspiration, as opposed to a required practice. 5

Another dimension along which ethical theses concerning veganism can vary might be glossed as their modal fragility . For example, one can imagine an argument for veganism which claimed that using animal products is essentially wrong. This sort of argument would entail that using animal products could not have easily been typically permissible. By contrast, imagine a case for ethical veganism that grounded the requirement to be vegan crucially in putatively unjust FDA policies. The requirement to be vegan would be modally fragile on the second view: using animal products could easily be permissible, on this view, if the FDA were to change its policies. This dimension of the issue is rarely discussed, and I will largely ignore it in what follows.

The principles discussed so far focus on the use of animal products. While we have some grip on this notion, a rigorous characterization of veganism would need to make precise which relationships to animals counted as use in the ethically significant sense. However, one might think that however use is understood, characterizing ethical veganism solely in terms of use is objectionably limited: one might claim that the core ethical concerns that mitigate against using animal products should also orient our lives as social and political beings.

One way into the social dimension of this issue begins by noting that when someone knowingly and freely performs an action that we judge to be wrong—especially as a consistent pattern—we typically take it to be appropriate to blame that agent, and to feel various negative emotions toward them. We also typically take it to be appropriate to curtail our interactions with such agents in various ways. If eating meat is typically wrong, we might also expect it to be blameworthy. And this raises the question of whether vegans should refuse to be friends with omnivores, or otherwise share their lives with them. 6

Veganism also raises important questions in political philosophy. Generally, we can ask: Should the status of nonhuman animals be a central dimension by which we evaluate polities? 7 In the context of ideal theory, we can ask: Would the use of nonhuman animals be absent from, outlawed, or punished in an ideal polity? 8 Or are certain uses of nonhuman animals examples of ethically objectionable behavior that should nonetheless be tolerated in a well-functioning society characterized by reasonable ethical disagreement? In our nonideal circumstances, we can ask whether various forms of conventional or radical political action on behalf of animals are required or supererogatory on the basis of the considerations that support veganism. 9

This section has surveyed a range of dimensions on which variants of ethical veganism might be organized. No one of these views is the obvious candidate to be the privileged characterization of ethical veganism. Because of this, keeping the range of possible variants of the view in mind is important: some of the issues raised by differences between these views are badly in need of careful exploration. Further, these views vary widely in plausibility, and very different sorts of arguments would be required to support or rebut them.

Arguing for Veganism: Resources

One might argue for veganism in a wide variety of ways. In order to orient the reader, I begin by sketching a rough taxonomy of the sorts of reasons that a vegan might appeal to.

Self-Interested Reasons

Adopting a vegan lifestyle can potentially impose significant burdens on an individual, ranging from inconvenience, to being cut off from valuable traditions, to the risk of ostracism or malnutrition. Nonetheless, it is possible to mount a prudential case that many of us should adopt a vegan diet. The core reason is this: the overwhelming majority of North Americans have diets that are unhealthy in large part because they involve eating too many calories and too much saturated fat, and too few vegetables and whole grains. 10 One reason to choose a vegan diet is that it will tend to be a much healthier alternative to this status quo. Of course, one can be an unhealthy vegan. However, many of the most problematic foods in the North American diet are ruled out by veganism.

This way of supporting veganism appears to face three limitations. First, it at best supports adopting a vegan diet. It does nothing to rule out non-dietary uses of animal products (wearing a leather jacket is not going to clog anyone’s arteries). Second, it is most clearly a case for preferring a vegan diet to currently typical diets. It is not obviously a case for preferring a vegan diet over (for example) a largely plant-based diet that includes modest amounts of lean meat. This issue is controversial. For example, T. Colin Campbell and Thomas Campbell claim that the nutritional evidence provides some support for completely eliminating animal products from one’s diet. 11 However, even Campbell and Campbell grant that they have a very modest case for the superiority of eliminating consumption of animal products entirely, as opposed to substantially limiting it.

The significance of this issue likely depends in part on one’s capacity for self-control. For some people, the case for going vegan on health grounds, rather than attempting a healthy omnivorous diet, may be analogous to the alcoholic’s reasons to quit “cold turkey” rather than attempting to drink moderately. For others, however, a healthy omnivorous diet, like moderate drinking, may be easily implemented. And others may even find that making infrequent exceptions is crucial to maintaining their motivation to remain vegan the rest of the time. 12

Third, it is likely that even if these sorts of prudential considerations can provide reasons to become a vegan, they cannot support the deontic claim that eating animal products is wrong. Compare: most of us have good reasons to get more exercise, but it is implausible that we act wrongly when we fail to do so. 13

Environmental Reasons

Another important way of arguing for veganism appeals to the environmental consequences of animal agriculture. This sort of argument could be developed anthropocentrically, focusing on environmental consequences that affect human beings generally. Or it could appeal to the intrinsic ethical significance of, for example, species or ecosystems. The starting point for such arguments is the idea that the vegan lifestyle and diet makes fewer demands upon our shared environmental resources than the typical North American diet. Consider three points. First, it typically takes far more arable land and water to produce grain to feed to nonhuman animals to produce a calorie of meat than it does to produce a calorie of plant-based food. Animal agriculture thus puts pressure on increasingly scarce and vulnerable cropland and water resources. Second, economic pressures on animal agriculture have led to increasingly industrialized farming practices. This has increased the amount of environmentally toxic byproducts generated by farming, which in turn further damages land and water systems. 14 Of course, these dynamics apply to the production of vegan foods as well. This consideration thus supports a vegan diet only in conjunction with the first point. Third, animal agriculture is a significant contributor to global warming, which is arguably the most dramatic environmental threat we now face. 15

These environmental considerations support a slightly broader conclusion than the self-interested reasons. 16 For example, if the environmental cost of animal agriculture gives us reasons to stop eating animal products, it also gives us reasons to avoid using animal products in other ways.

A central complication facing such environmentally based arguments, however, is that it is implausible that all animal agriculture is environmentally damaging. For example, farm animal manure can increase the agricultural productivity of farmland without the use of industrially produced fertilizers, and animals can forage on land that is not otherwise agriculturally productive. Considerations like these could be used to argue that there is a nonzero level of animal agriculture that is optimal (at least from the point of view of overall human well-being). 17 This suggests several complications for an environmental case for veganism. This is especially true if the relevant foil is a lifestyle that significantly reduces, but does not eliminate, the use of animal products, or one which focuses on supporting farms that use animal products in environmentally friendlier ways.

Religious Reasons

Religious traditions provide ethical guidance for many people. It is possible to develop arguments for veganism that appeal to the distinctive ethical resources of certain religious traditions. The most straightforward way of making such arguments would appeal directly to religious prescriptions. For example, Jainism and some variants of Buddhism enjoin some version of vegetarianism. In most cases, however, religiously based arguments for veganism will have to address significant arguments against ethical veganism from within their religious tradition and will not have such direct doctrinal support. Here, the metaphysical principles of a religion can be relevant, for example, the Buddhist doctrine of transmigration entails that humans and animals all have souls and, indeed, that many animals were humans in past lives. 18 This metaphysical thesis makes the case for ethical similarity between humans and animals easier to argue for, compared to views on which humans are distinctive among animals in having souls. 19 The Christian tradition is similar in this respect. Would-be ethical vegans have an uphill battle against explicit biblical discussion of food. But they can also appeal to the ethical significance of certain ethical precepts that are widely accepted within the Christian tradition. For example, one might seek to make a case for ethical veganism that appealed centrally to the ethical importance of reverence, mercy, or stewardship. 20 This, of course, only scratches the surface of potential avenues for religiously based arguments in food ethics. 21

Animal-Focused Arguments

Each of the classes of considerations just briefly sketched is potentially important, and each might be developed to make a case that we have reasons to move in the direction of a vegan lifestyle. However, they leave out what I take to be the most significant reasons to become vegan: reasons that focus on nonhuman animals themselves, rather than focusing on human interests, considered either individually or collectively. The range of relevant animal-focused arguments in the literature is vast, 22 and I will not do it justice.

Theoretical Commitment and Naïveté

One central division among arguments in animal ethics is whether the author presupposes a systematic normative ethical theory or hopes to proceed without one. Approaches that begin from commitment to a systematic normative ethics are legion. For example, there are discussions of animal ethics that are embedded within utilitarian, Kantian, virtue theoretic, and various contractarian and contractualist theoretical structures. 23

One influential and powerful example of the theoretically committed approach is Tom Regan’s case for animal rights. 24 Regan argues that individuals possess various moral rights, which directly reflect the inherent moral worth of those individuals. By proposing to ground rights directly in moral worth, Regan raises a pressing question. On any plausible view of rights, some things (e.g., you and I) possess moral rights (and hence inherent moral worth), while others (e.g., a shard of broken plastic) do not. What explains the difference? Regan argues that many initially plausible answers to this question are indefensible. For example, consider the idea that inherent moral worth requires capacities for ethical agency or sophisticated rational thought. This would entail that nonhuman animals lack rights. However, it would also entail that many humans (e.g., young children and severely mentally handicapped adults) lack rights. And this is implausible. Or consider the idea that having moral worth requires being a member of the species Homo sapiens . This avoids the problems facing the rational capacity idea, but it looks like an attempt to explain a fundamental ethical property by appeal to something ethically irrelevant. To see this, imagine that we discovered an alien species with capacities to think, feel, love, and act that are very like our own. Mere difference in their genetic code surely cannot deprive them of rights. According to Regan, the only defensible alternative is that a sufficient criterion for having intrinsic worth is being the experiencing subject of a life. 25 Since many of the animals that humans eat and otherwise use are experiencing subjects of lives, Regan concludes that these animals have moral rights that are just as strong as ours. 26 Just as farming humans would violate our rights, so, on this view, animal agriculture violates the rights of nonhuman animals.

Arguments like Regan’s make an important contribution to the ethical evaluation of veganism. At the very least, such arguments can help us to better understand some of the implications of promising systematic views in ethics. However, the strategy of appealing to a systematic ethical theory faces at least two significant limitations. The first is that there is an ongoing fierce and reasonable dispute between proponents of various systematic options to normative ethics. The second limitation—obscured by my breezy exposition of Regan’s view—is that each of the central organizing ideas in systematic normative ethics can be implemented in many ways. The forest of structural options is perhaps most familiar from discussions of consequentialism, but the issue generalizes. 27 Together, these points may limit how confident we can reasonably be in any systematic ethical theory determinate enough to guide our thinking about veganism.

The alternative to such approaches is to offer a theoretically naïve argument for veganism. On this approach, one appeals to intuitively compelling judgments about clear cases and seeks to construct local ethical principles capable of explaining the truth of those judgments, without appeal to systematic normative theory. 28 Even for philosophers committed to a systematic normative theory, exploring the issue from a theoretically naïve perspective may be illuminating, as it may help to reveal issues that will make a given theoretically committed approach more or less plausible or dialectically compelling.

The Naïve Argument from Suffering

Jeremy Bentham famously said of animals that “the question is not, Can they reason ? nor, Can they talk ? but, Can they suffer ?” 29 The line of argument for ethical veganism that I find most plausible begins from this question, answering that—at least for a wide range of animals—the answer is: Yes, they can suffer . 30

The first virtue of this approach is that it seems evident to almost everyone that many nonhuman animals can suffer. There are many phenomena that might be grouped together under the heading “suffering.” Two examples of what I have in mind are intense pain, such as a piglet experiences when castrated without anesthetic, and intense distress, such as a cow or a sow experiences when separated from her young.

The second virtue of the approach is that the following ethical principle appears hard to reasonably resist:

Suffering : Other things being equal, it is wrong to cause suffering.

The plausibility of Suffering can be brought out in several ways. 31 First, it seems true when restricted to humans. So to claim that it is not wrong to cause suffering to animals may seem like a case of ethically objectionable speciesism. Second, many cases of causing suffering to nonhuman animals seem obviously wrong. For example, it would be wrong to catch a stray rabbit, take it home, and torture it with electric shocks. Third, in many cases like this one, the wrongness of the action seems directly explained by the fact that it is a case of causing suffering to an animal. Fourth, Suffering is modest, in at least two respects. First, Suffering is a defeasible principle, so it does not imply that causing suffering to nonhuman animals is always wrong. Second, Suffering does not imply parity between the moral significance of human and nonhuman suffering. It is compatible with there being many reasons why it is typically wrong to cause suffering to an adult human being that do not apply to nonhuman animals. (For example, causing an adult human to suffer may express disrespect for their autonomy.)

Most arguments for veganism (especially those which seek less modally fragile conclusions) will defend a further principle prohibiting the killing of animals, such as:

Killing : Other things being equal, it is wrong to kill an animal.

This principle, however, is not as immediately intuitive as Suffering. The intuitive contrast is well-expressed by Michael Tooley:

It seems plausible to say it is worse to kill an adult human being than it is to torture him for an hour. In contrast, it seems to me that while it is not seriously wrong to kill a newborn kitten, it is seriously wrong to torture one for an hour. 32

Tooley’s wording is careful here: his claim is cast in terms of what “seems plausible” about “serious wrongness.” We can helpfully distinguish two ways of making the suggested ethical claim more precise. Weak Asymmetry is the view that, other things being equal, causing substantial suffering to an animal is more seriously wrong than killing that animal. Strong Asymmetry is the view that other things being equal it is wrong to cause animals to suffer and not wrong to kill them.

Strong Asymmetry has sometimes been endorsed. 33 However, I suspect that its appeal does not survive reflection. In evaluating Strong Asymmetry, it is crucial to screen off cases in which other relevant things may not be equal. For example, there are many ordinary cases of killing animals for (at least arguably) ethically legitimate reasons. Think, for example, of overburdened animal shelters euthanizing some of their wards, or of culling a deer population to a level that its food sources can support. By contrast, there are very few ordinary cases in which there are good ethical reasons to torture an animal. These facts can potentially mislead us when we consider principles like this one; we may unconsciously “fill in” extraneous assumptions about the motives or character of the agents involved, and these assumptions may then guide our judgments about the cases. 34 In light of this point, consider a case in which, simply for the sake of doing so, someone catches a healthy stray kitten, takes it home, and then kills it by adding a fast-acting and painless poison to its meal. This seems clearly wrong, which casts substantial doubt on Strong Asymmetry.

What about Weak Asymmetry? Here again, it is important to screen off distracting assumptions about the agent’s motivations. So consider a case where we screen off these distractions. Suppose that you are given a terrible choice at gunpoint: Kill this kitten with a painless drug or torture it for an hour. Suppose further that you somehow know that if you torture the kitten, it will go on to live a long and happy cat life. It would certainly be easier for a decent person to kill the kitten than to make herself torture the kitten. But it is hard to see why torturing is not the ethically better of two awful options. After all, it seems plausible that torturing the kitten in this case would be better overall for the kitten. Focusing only on the kitten’s welfare, this case is not much different from that of someone administering a painful lifesaving medical treatment to an animal, which seems obviously okay, if doing so is the only way to allow the animal to have a long and flourishing life. In light of points like these, it is not surprising that several philosophers have argued against Tooley-style asymmetry claims. 35

It is worth emphasizing that rejecting Weak Asymmetry is compatible with granting that killing humans is ordinarily much more seriously wrong than killing nonhuman animals. The best explanation of why torturing the kitten is ethically preferable to killing it adverts to something like the ethical significance of well-being or of the value of an entity’s future. 36 Such considerations are surely important in thinking about killing humans. 37 If human lives are typically far richer than nonhuman animal lives, an account of the wrongness of killing that appealed to the value of futures would partially explain why it is ordinarily worse to kill humans. Further, in many cases of killing humans other considerations—especially considerations grounded in the agent’s autonomy—may also be significant, or even paramount. For example, consider a version of the gunpoint dilemma with a human victim. Here—as Tooley’s quote suggests—torturing would ordinarily seem like the lesser evil. But now suppose that the victim requests—on the basis of substantively reasonable and reflectively stable values—that you kill him rather than torture him. In this case, respecting his autonomous preference may be ethically more important than maximizing his net expected welfare.

One might object to the line of argument proposed in this section by arguing that the ethical asymmetry between humans and nonhuman animals runs deeper than I have granted thus far. The most familiar way to develop this objection would appeal to the explanatory role of moral status . For example, it might be claimed that the core explanation of why it is wrong to make a human suffer needs to appeal to humans’ distinctive moral status as well as what human suffering is like. Animals, it might be insisted, lack moral status (or have some sort of second-class moral status), and so the badness of their suffering cannot render wrongful an action that makes them suffer.

This objection should be rejected. 38 To begin, notice that the objection threatens to deprive us of the most natural explanation of the wrongness of torturing nonhuman animals. A theoretical argument would need to be extremely powerful to warrant this. But the idea that animals lack moral status is most plausible if we understand moral status as the bundle of ethical powers and protections characteristically possessed by adult humans (in a helpful introduction to moral status, Agnieszka Jaworska and Julie Tannenbaum call this “full moral status”). 39 A two-year-old child lacks full moral status: she has no right to self-government, for example, or political participation. But I still owe it directly to such a child that I not torture her. It is natural to assume that the wrongness of making the child suffer is grounded in her individual capacities. But if so, then the objection collapses, because many nonhuman animals have similar capacities. One could repair the objection, for example, by insisting that the child has moral status simply in virtue of being human. 40 But it is deeply puzzling why bare genetic facts like this one should have such striking ethical significance.

Supposing that it is sound, the case for the wrongness of killing animals and making them suffer has profound ethical consequences. Consider the institutions most directly involved in raising and slaughtering animals for use in making animal products: the farms, animal factories, feedlots and slaughterhouses. These institutions inflict extraordinary amounts of suffering, and then very early death, on the billions of animals they raise and kill. 41 If killing animals and making them suffer is wrong, then these institutions (or the people who compose them) act wrongly on a truly horrifying scale. Stuart Rachels gives us a sense of the scope of the issue, estimating the amount of suffering inflicted by these institutions as orders of magnitude greater than that inflicted by the holocaust. 42 Further, our governments arguably act wrongly as well, in virtue of creating a legal and regulatory framework within which these institutions are permitted to treat animals wrongfully, and in virtue of providing economic incentives—and in many cases direct subsidies 43 —for these institutions to harm animals. However, the case for the wrongness of killing animals and causing them to suffer does not yet constitute an argument for veganism. The next section explains the gap remaining in the argument, and explores how it might be filled.

Completing the Naïve Argument for Veganism: Some Options

One could grant that it is wrong to kill animals or to make them suffer, but deny that this gives one reasons to be vegan. After all—as is vividly obvious in the contemporary world—eating animal products does not require that one kill animals or cause them to suffer. As a defense of omnivorism, this may initially smack of rationalization. However, facing it squarely helps to illuminate several of the most difficult challenges for constructing a rigorous ethical argument for veganism.

We can begin by schematically representing the gap left by the argument of the preceding section, as follows:

1. The institutions that produce our animal products act wrongly in a massive and systematic way. 2. Veganism bears relation R to those institutions. 3. It is typically wrong (or . . .) to fail to bear R to those institutions. C. It is typically wrong (or . . .) to fail to be vegan.

The parenthetical possibilities in premise 3 and the conclusion are intended to remind readers of the range of possible forms ethical veganism might take (discussed in the first section). Different arguments will, of course, be required to support weaker or stronger vegan theses. The central question is whether there is some relation that we can substitute for variable R to produce a sound version of the schematic argument just given. This section discusses some important possibilities.

One might claim that the gap suggested by this argument is easily filled. For example, Rosalind Hursthouse suggests that a truly compassionate person could not be aware of the cruelty of contemporary animal agriculture and continue to be “party” to such cruelty by eating meat. 44 Such self-aware omnivorism may indeed feel uncomfortable: witness Michael Pollan’s description of reading Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation in a steakhouse. 45 At best, however, this reply appears to support a very weak form of ethical veganism, according to which omnivorism is some sort of ethical imperfection. But even this is not so clear. Absent further argument of the sort to be considered, it is not clear that one must lack compassion to any degree if, for example, one followed the Buddhist teaching that permits a monk to eat meat, provided that he does not suspect the relevant animal has been killed specifically to feed him. 46

This section focuses on three candidate proposals for explaining how ethical requirements on individuals can be generated indirectly, in virtue of relations between their actions and some other bad or wrongful act or state of affairs. These proposals appeal, respectively, to individual value-promotion, group efficacy , and complicity . The aim is to assess whether these proposals can provide intrinsically plausible principles that—when combined with the naïve argument of the preceding section—support some form of ethical veganism. The proposals that I discuss are far from exhaustive, but they strike me as the most promising. 47

For simplicity, I treat these proposals as ways of completing the preceding naïve argument. However, these proposals have broader theoretical significance for the ethics of veganism. For example, many broadly environmental arguments for veganism (briefly discussed in the second section) will face the same sort of gap as the argument just sketched: they are most directly arguments from the wrongness of status quo animal agriculture, not for the wrongness of individual acts of using animals. In light of this, most attempts to defend ethical veganism will need to appeal to some theory like the ones to be considered here, that propose ethical links between individuals’ use of animal products and the objectionable practices that create those products.

Individual Efficacy

I begin by considering the attempt to cross the gap by appeal to the idea that the individual vegan can promote something ethically important: expected animal welfare. The canonical presentation of this idea by Peter Singer begins by granting that it is highly unlikely that one’s own food choices will ever make a difference to actual animal welfare. 48 However, Singer suggests this is not the end of the story. He suggests there must be some (unknown) threshold, at which, for example, increased numbers of vegetarians or vegans will reduce demand for chicken sufficiently to reduce the number of chickens made to suffer in factory farms. For example, “Perhaps for every 10,000 vegetarians there is one fewer 20,000 bird chicken unit than there would otherwise be.” 49 However, we are ignorant of where the relevant threshold is. Perhaps we are away from the threshold, in which case the individual vegan makes no difference to the chicken suffering. But given our ignorance of where the threshold is, we should take there to be a 1/10,000 chance that we are at the threshold. And if we are at the threshold, an individual vegan’s refraining from consuming chicken will save 20,000 chickens from a short life of suffering. 50 The expected utility of this chance for each vegan is the same as the expected utility of certainty that one will save two chickens from suffering. In a slogan: it is vanishingly unlikely that one will make a difference by being vegan, but if one does, it will be a correspondingly massive difference. One might then argue that this is enough to entail that one is required to be vegan. 51

This sort of argument faces several types of objection. Some of these are empirical in nature. 52 For example, some have argued that we have empirical reasons for believing that we are more than proportionally likely to be stably between thresholds of the imagined sort. Others have argued that we should be skeptical of the ability of individual buying decisions to produce any economic signals whatsoever in a large market.

Another type of objection begins by querying the trajectory of aggregate demand for animal products. Assume for simplicity that aggregate demand trends are stable, without a lot of random variation. Suppose first that demand is stably increasing. Other things being equal, this will lead to rising prices and (eventually) to new animal factories being built, as increased supply becomes profitable. My veganism cannot prevent a broiler factory from being built, under such assumptions. At best, it might conceivably delay its construction. But for how long? Seconds? Minutes? 53 Or suppose that aggregate demand is stably decreasing. Then prices will typically fall, and with it production. Again, at very unlikely best, lack of my demand could hurry closure of a broiler factory by a few minutes. The only (artificially stable) scenario in which my becoming a vegan could make a more marked difference is if aggregate demand is, independent of my choice, stably exactly at a threshold. Only here could my buying behavior possibly make a more than a momentary difference to the welfare of animals. But our credence that we are stably at such a threshold should be much smaller than Singer’s heuristic estimate. It might thus be expected that the expected benefit to animal welfare of my becoming vegan is likely to be extremely small.

The Singer-style argument also makes at least three important assumptions about ethical theory. One (highly plausible) assumption is that welfare outcomes are ethically significant. The second assumption is more controversial: this is that the expected value of consequences plays a role in determining right and wrong. This assumption is controversial because many philosophers think that the actual—as opposed to expected—value of consequences is what contributes to determining right and wrong. 54

The expected value assumption is crucial to Singer’s reasoning. For example, in Singer’s stylized example, it is extremely likely that no one actually makes an objective difference to animal welfare by being vegan. For on Singer’s account, it is very likely that aggregate demand is in fact stably away from a threshold. And this means that for each consumer C , the counterfactual: if C were to be vegan, animal welfare would be improved is very likely false.

The third crucial assumption of Singer’s argument is that the negative expected value of an option can explain why that action is wrong. Notice that this is a stronger claim than the idea that facts about expected value matter ethically. This issue can be illustrated by a familiar style of case: I can choose to either spend $1,000 on a vacation, or to donate this money to the Against Malaria Foundation. The expected value of the donation is saving at least one person from miserable sickness and early death due to malaria, which obviously outweighs the direct and indirect expected benefits of my vacation. It is plausible that this makes donating the money morally better than going on vacation, but it is controversial whether it entails that I would act wrongly by going on vacation. 55

Even if this sort of objection is sound, evaluating the empirical challenges to the Singer-style reasoning might be quite broadly important to the ethics of veganism. On the one hand, it might provide a direct way to argue that veganism is at least ordinarily supererogatory. On the other, some sort of efficacy might be argued to be a necessary—even if not a sufficient—condition for veganism to be required. The worry is that absent a plausible case for efficacy, one’s concern not to eat wrongfully produced meat amounts to an ethically dubious desire to avoid a kind of “moral taint.” 56

Group Efficacy

As we have seen, it is not trivial to establish that an individual omnivore has any effect on animal welfare. By contrast, it is obvious that all of the consumers of animal products together make a difference: their aggregate demand is the raison d’être of the animal agriculture industry. If demand for animal products declined to zero, wrongful farming of animals would likewise decline precipitously. In light of this, one might suggest that the argument for veganism should appeal to the ethical significance of the relationship that an individual vegan bears to this group. For example, one might complete the schematic argument imagined at the beginning of this section in the following way:

1. The institutions that produce our animal products act wrongly in a massive and systematic way. 2. The group consumers of animal products together act wrongly by making the wrongful treatment of animals mentioned in (1) persist. 3. It is typically wrong (or . . .) to be a part of a group that together acts wrongly. C. It is typically wrong (or . . .) to consume animal products (i.e., to fail to be vegan).

As in the schematic argument, the “(or . . .)” marks the fact that one might argue for a variety of ethical statuses for veganism. Premises 2 and 3 of this argument introduce important and controversial ethical ideas. Premise 3 is a general claim about the individual ethical significance of group wrongdoing. Premise 2 is an instance of a principle that tells us that groups can acts wrongly in virtue of making bad things happen. Consider a case that might help to motivate the relevant general claims.

Suppose there are two communities along a river: Upstream and Downstream. The river is the only source of water for both communities. Members of Upstream also dispose of their sewage in the river. (This is not a town policy; it is just the prevailing and accepted practice in Upstream.) As a result, members of Downstream are very often painfully and dangerously ill from drinking the polluted water. Suppose, however, that no individual’s sewage from Upstream makes a difference: the river is so uniformly polluted by Upstream sewage that removing one person’s sewage from the river will make no difference to the number or severity of the painful illnesses suffered in Downstream. Suppose finally that the members of Upstream know about their effects on Downstream and could (either individually or collectively) safely dispose of their sewage elsewhere, at modest cost. It is plausible that the members of Upstream are, collectively, responsible for wrongfully harming the members of Downstream. It may seem plausible that, in virtue of this, an individual member of Upstream acts wrongly by disposing of her sewage in the river, despite the fact that this action produces no marginal harm.

This argumentative strategy takes on several burdens. 57 First, some philosophers think that only individuals can act wrongly. This view must be defeated if the group-mediated account is to work. Second, we can usefully adopt Margaret Gilbert’s useful distinction between “collectives”—like families or sports teams—from looser “aggregates.” 58 It is arguably more plausible that collectives can act wrongfully than mere aggregates. This is relevant because the group consumers of animal products does not coordinate in the systematic ways characteristic of collectives. Third, even if an account of responsibility that applies to aggregates is developed, 59 a clear mapping from group to individual wrongdoing still needs to be provided.

Even if these theoretical questions can be adequately addressed in a way friendly to the argument, 60 one might wonder whether the group-mediated approach supports veganism over certain alternative responses to the evils of animal agriculture. To see the challenge, focus on an individual in Upstream. Suppose she knows that for a modest cost she could install a safe and effective septic system, and thus cease to contribute to polluting Downstream’s drinking water. However, she knows that if she instead donated the same amount of money to help provide water filters in Downstream, this would actually help to prevent some Downstream residents from getting sick. It seems plausible that she has much stronger reasons to donate than to eliminate her own pollution. 61 By analogy, if we suppose that an individual’s being vegan involves some cost to that individual and negligible benefit to animals, it might seem that this cost would be more constructively borne to support direct assistance to animals (human or non-) rather than one’s veganism.

Benefit and Complicity

The group-mediated approach focuses on the relationship between the individual and the consumers of animal products. But this may seem like an implausibly indirect relationship to focus on. After all, as I noted at the end of the previous section, the individuals and institutions most directly responsible for the massive pattern of wrongful treatment of animals are the farms, animal factories, feedlots, and slaughterhouses. So we might want to focus on the relationship of the individual vegan or omnivore to these institutions or wrongful patterns.

Besides making a difference to the extent of the wrongful pattern (the issue we discussed under “Individual Efficacy”), there are at least two ethically relevant relationships that we might want to focus on. First, the omnivore benefits from this wrongdoing: the food she chooses to consume is a product of this wrongdoing and would not be available—or at least, it would be available only in much smaller quantities at much higher prices—absent such wrongdoing. 62 Second, the omnivore is complicit with the wrongdoing, in the sense of cooperating with the wrongful plans of the more immediate wrongdoers. I will briefly explore the prospects of appealing to the ethical significance of one or both of these relationships in defending ethical veganism.

Consider first benefiting. Several philosophers have argued that one can acquire ethical obligations in virtue of benefiting from injustice. 63 One might think that some of these arguments generalize to benefiting from significant wrongdoing of other types. The knowing omnivore chooses to consume products that result from the wrongdoing of the animal industry. This is relevant because it is much easier to motivate the idea of obligations in virtue of voluntarily received benefits. 64 Our central topic here, however, is not the obligations that omnivores might take on in virtue of their behavior (itself an interesting question). Rather, our question is whether omnivorism is itself wrong in virtue of being an instance of voluntary benefit from wrongdoing. One might take such voluntary benefiting to constitute the ethical analogue of the legal status of being an accessory after the fact. 65 However, the ethical significance of such pure benefiting—when shorn of other ethical features—is not clear. For example, suppose that it is wrong to kill deer in your context. And suppose that you witness a reckless driver hit and kill a deer, then leave the scene. If you then take, dress, and ultimately eat what can be salvaged from the abandoned deer carcass, you are benefiting from the driver’s wrongful killing of the deer. But it is far from clear that what you do in this case is wrong. 66 Even this case involves a kind of active receipt of goods. By contrast, suppose that the wrongful killing kept the deer from grazing on your garden. Surely you do not act wrongly by merely receiving this benefit with a wrongful genesis.

Recalling the variety of forms of ethical veganism, one might argue within a virtue-theoretic framework that the willingness to voluntarily benefit from wrongdoing is a significant vice. However, if we again consider the case of the deer salvager, it is again not clear that this willingness is any kind of vice, if limited to the sort of case described. One might insist that virtue in part consists in a way of seeing animals that takes them to be not to be eaten. 67 But one might suspect that this sort of perception is (relatively) virtuous only assuming the inability to make relevantly fine-grained distinctions between more and less ethically problematic cases, and that the perfectly virtuous person could regret the death but salvage and enjoy the resulting food.

It is useful to contrast the case just considered with one where someone intentionally kills a deer in order to sell it, and then sells you some of the resulting venison. In this sort of case, there is not merely wrongful action (as in the recklessness version of the case), but (we will assume) a wrongful plan of action. Further, you are not merely benefiting from that plan (as in the case where killing the deer saves your garden). Rather, you are playing a key role in the execution of the plan: the hunter’s plan requires someone to play the role of venison buyer, and you are voluntarily playing that role. This case seems strikingly ethically different from the case of salvaging venison.

Call knowingly and voluntarily fulfilling a role that needs to be fulfilled in order for a wrongful plan to work being complicit with the plan. One might suggest the following principle:

Complicity : Other things being equal, it is wrong to be complicit with others’ wrongful plans.

This principle could be used to complete the schematic argument in the following way:

1. The institutions that produce our animal products have a wrongful plan. 2. Individual consumers of animal products (non-vegans) are typically complicit with that plan. 3. Other things being equal, it is wrong (or . . .) to be complicit with others’ wrongful plans (Complicity). C. It is typically wrong (or . . .) to fail to be vegan.

As in the schematic argument, the “(or . . .)” marks the fact that one might argue for a variety of ethical statuses for veganism. The controversial core of this argument is Complicity. In order for Complicity to help complete a case for ethical veganism, it would need to be refined in several nontrivial ways. Consider two examples. First, the set of roles relevant to counting as complicit would need to be somehow restricted. For example, it is presumably essential to the success of the hunter’s plan that he not be caught in a Heffalump trap or otherwise prevented from hunting. But failing to take such steps to foil a plan seems different from the sort of active complicity described. As this case brings out, there seems to be a crucial contrast between cooperating with a plan and merely not interfering with it. 68 Second, the contemporary production of animal products is largely implemented by a highly complex system of corporations. The initial model of an individual and his or her plan will need to be extended, to apply to the complex way that plans (or something like them) can be ascribed to corporations, or even loose collections thereof. 69 Third, relatively few consumers purchase meat directly from the corporations that produce the meat. So the argument will need to support some sort of iterability: it will have to be claimed that the consumer is wrongfully complicit with the retailer who is wrongfully complicit with the wholesaler, and so on.

It is also important to clarify how Complicity interacts with questions of individual efficacy. On the one hand, individual efficacy arguably makes the ethical significance of complicity clearer. My complicity with your evil plan may seem especially objectionable where it promotes the success of that plan. 70 However, it seems objectionable even absent this: suppose you know that the hunter in our example always has buyers for his venison; if you don’t buy the venison, someone else will. I find it plausible that complicity with the hunter via buying his venison is wrong even here. 71

Compare a parallel case: the more familiar duty of fair play : this requires that I not benefit from successful cooperative institutions without making a fair contribution to them (i.e., that I not free ride ). 72 In many cases, free riding will not harm anyone, and yet it appears wrong (other things being equal) in these cases. Of course, duties of fair play are controversial, and some of the controversy surrounds just this question of efficacy. 73

As the discussion of this section makes clear, it is far from trivial to explain how to complete the schematic “naïve” argument for veganism sketched at the end of the previous section. Clarifying these issues is thus an important task as we seek to make progress on understanding the ethical status of veganism.

Complications Facing Arguments for Veganism

In this section, I discuss a series of important complications facing arguments for veganism that have not been addressed in this chapter so far. Satisfactory resolution of these issues is crucial to developing a full-fledged case for veganism. This section briefly considers complications arising from considerations of aggregation, the demandingness of the principles needed to argue for the claim that veganism is obligatory, the defeasibility of the ethical principles that support veganism, the specificity of the response required of vegans, and methodological objections to typical “intuitive” arguments for veganism. I begin by considering challenges to the ethical significance of animal suffering and death.

How Bad Is Animal Suffering and Death?

The naïve argument assumed that animals can suffer. However, this assumption has been challenged. In order to properly assess this challenge, we would need to examine several complex questions about the nature and ethical significance of pain and suffering.

One way to develop the challenge begins by noting that it is the qualitative nature of suffering—what it is like for the sufferer—that seems most clearly ethically significant. 74 For example, if we built a robot that was behaviorally very similar to a cat, but which had no phenomenal experiences, it is very unclear whether there would be anything intrinsically wrong with treating the robot in ways that elicited very strong aversive behavioral responses. (Of course, that someone would choose to do this to the robot would be disturbing, but it would be disturbing in roughly the way it would be disturbing for someone to choose to play a video game in which their avatar graphically tortured cats.)

The thesis that ethically significant suffering is a phenomenal state entails significant epistemic difficulties for supporting the claim that nonhuman animals can suffer. First, there is no agreement about what phenomenal experience consists in (is it irreducible, or can it be given a functional characterization, for example?). An empirically informed methodology here will seek to identify functional, evolutionary, and neurological correlates for phenomenal states. But there are many interesting functional and neurological similarities and differences between humans and nonhuman animals. This makes the “problem of nonhuman animals’ minds” an empirically and philosophically complex issue.

Some philosophers have argued on this basis that it is a mistake to think that animals can suffer. 75 However, it is worth noting that this sort of argument can only be as plausible as the underlying philosophical theory of phenomenal consciousness, which at very least counsels caution. If we set aside these challenges, we confront a less radical challenge: the strongest case for the possibility of animal suffering is presumably in those animals that are biologically and evolutionarily closest to humans (i.e., mammals). The question of whether other animals—most saliently birds and fish—can suffer is deeply complicated. 76 This may leave a version of veganism restricted to mammals in a significantly stronger position that those which range more broadly across the animal kingdom.

If we suppose that (certain) animals can suffer, this does not settle how bad that suffering is. Imagine your shoulder is aching. How bad this is for you is in large part a function of its meaning for you: experienced as a reminder of a vigorous workout, it will seem much less unpleasant and significant than if it is understood as a symptom of your developing arthritis. It is difficult to know whether animals can experience their suffering as meaningful in anything like these ways. This might tend to reduce the significance of animal suffering. 77 If animal suffering were systematically not that bad, this might attenuate the badness of contemporary animal agriculture. However, this is not very plausible, for at least two reasons. First, some nonhuman animals do appear to attribute significance to their experiences: witness the extended distress of cows or sows separated early from their young. Second, the idea that perceived meaning affects the badness of pain is perhaps most plausible for relatively mild pains: it is characteristic of agony that it crowds out all such reflective perspective on one’s state.

The naïve argument for the wrongness of killing animals appealed in part to the value of an animal’s future if it were not killed. One might challenge this argument by appealing to philosophical theories about personal identity, or (more broadly) the conditions for ethically significant survival. On a leading cluster of accounts, certain relations of psychological continuity are required for ethically significant survival. 78 On this view, we need to ask: Do many nonhuman animals have rich enough psychological connections to underwrite the intuitive thought that a given cow, for example, is the same moral patient over (much of) its biological lifetime? If not, this view might entail that for ethical purposes, a cow should be treated as constituted by a succession of distinct ethically significant beings. This would in turn mean that painlessly killing the cow would not be depriving it of a significant valuable future, but rather preventing the existence of its many successors. Because many philosophers are skeptical that we have any weighty duties to bring valuable lives into existence, this conclusion would undercut what is otherwise the most plausible argument for the wrongness of killing nonhuman animals.

As with the preceding challenge, I am cautiously optimistic that this challenge can be met, at least in many cases. For example, many animals appear capable of various forms of memory. 79 However, as with questions about animal pain and suffering, answers here are likely to vary substantially across species in ways that require careful empirical work to tease out. Further, as with the case of suffering, this argument takes controversial philosophical theory as an essential premise. For example, on accounts which make continuity of brain or organism essential to ethically significant survival, this objection fails immediately.

Aggregation?

It is often insisted that persons are ethically separate. 80 While it usually seems reasonable for me to impose a cost on myself now in order to attain a greater benefit later, it can seem objectionable to impose a cost on one person in order to benefit others more. The force of this idea is perhaps best dramatized in Judith Thomson’s transplant case, where we are asked to imagine that a doctor could carve up a healthy patient and distribute his organs to five others needing transplants, thereby saving five lives but killing the initial patient. 81

The view that carving up the patient would be very wrong is widely shared. But similar cases involving nonhuman animals are much less clear. Imagine the relevant case: your roving high-tech veterinary clinic finds five young deer in need of organs. The deer population around here is stable, and you know these deer would live a long and happy life if saved from imminent organ failure. As it turns out, you find a sixth, healthy deer with the requisite biological compatibilities to be the “donor.” Would it be wrong to carve this deer up to save the other five? It is at least unclear whether it is. If this point generalizes, it might suggest that there is no “separateness of nonhuman animals”: that there is no moral objection to harming or killing one animal as a means to bringing about an outcome that is best overall. 82

The idea that animal ethics should focus on aggregate effects would have significant implications. For example, consider culling populations of animals that would otherwise—in the absence of nonhuman predators—predictably go through cycles of population explosion and starvation. The most obvious objection to this policy is that it harms the animals culled, but if the culling is best for the population in aggregate, the anti-separateness thesis would undercut the objection. Returning to veganism, if the culling is legitimate, objections to then eating or otherwise using the culled animals will be harder to develop. 83

Demandingness?

Several philosophers have reported to me that they accept the soundness of arguments for veganism but have not become vegan. 84 One explanation for this phenomenon is that—at least for many people—it is very difficult to become vegan: doing so would require abandoning cherished foods, coping with new inconveniences, developing new tastes and learning new skills, not to mention potentially creating conflict in our relationships. While the thesis that veganism is obligatory is thus arguably quite demanding, it may also be that the arguments needed to defend a requirement to be vegan have implications that are far more demanding. Consider two examples that may help to illustrate this idea. First, the appeal to individual causal efficacy is most straightforwardly developed into a case for veganism when combined with a principle that prohibits selecting options that will promote something very bad happening. But—as we saw in the example of choosing between a vacation and a charitable donation—such principles might be otherwise quite demanding, requiring us to sacrifice many pleasures in order to help others avert terrible fates.

Or consider the appeal to a complicity principle, also discussed in the previous section. Thomas Pogge has argued that the causal interconnections in the world are so dense and complex that an ordinary affluent person has likely been involved both in transactions that caused deaths and ones that saved lives. 85 Because it is plausible that many of the nodes in this web of transactions involve unjust rules and wrongful actions, one might worry that one cannot help but be complicit with wrongdoing.

If these sketchy examples reflect a general pattern, then an obligation to be vegan may only be defensible as part of a highly demanding overall ethic. If such demandingness renders an ethical theory implausible, this would in turn pose a clear and relatively neglected challenge to any claim that veganism is more than supererogatory. 86

Defeasibility?

As I noted in the first section, plausible forms of ethical veganism will be defeasible: that is, they will allow that there are a range of possible circumstances in which it is permissible to use animal products. One might argue that demandingness itself can constitute a relevant defeating condition. For example, in many cases, animal products are an essential element of the only available nutritionally adequate human diets. This is true for many hunter-gatherer cultures as well as for many subsistence farmers, for whom having a cow—or even a handful of chickens—can offer crucial protection against certain forms of malnutrition.

Ideally, the proponent of an obligation to be vegan would seek a principled account of defeasibility conditions that (a) granted permissibility in these sorts of cases, and (b) applied more generally, in a way that reduced the force of the demandingness challenge, but (c) did not permit the difficulties involved in becoming vegan to defeat the obligation more generally. It is an open question whether such an account can be developed. If it cannot, the proponent of an obligation to be vegan may be further committed to implausible demandingness in light of too-limited defeating conditions.

Specificity?

The core of veganism involves eschewing use of animal products. As we saw in the first section, one might think that our relationships to nonhuman animals have other ethical implications: implications for how our political lives should be organized, for what our political priorities should be, and for how we interact with other humans. One possibility is that the best case for veganism entails obligations of all of these types. This conclusion would suggest a further way in which arguments for ethical veganism might be highly demanding.

One natural way of mitigating the demandingness of an ethical desideratum is to permit agents options as to how they respond to it. On this sort of view, it might be argued that while the massive wrongdoing in animal agriculture demands some response from each of us, a range of such responses might be permissible. For example, consider someone who reasonably believes that transitioning to veganism would involve significant sacrifices to her well-being. Suppose that this person instead practiced ethical omnivorism, while simultaneously dedicating a significant portion of her political and financial resources to supporting organizations that she reasonably believed would best help to promote animal welfare. Absent a highly demanding ethical theory, it might be argued that such a person would count as meeting her ethical obligations. 87

The Methodological Burdens of Revisionism

An important question about demandingness objections concerns whether they should centrally be understood as targeting the demandingness of a candidate theory, or the fact that the particular demands in question fly in the face of common sense. To see the contrast, consider the claim that one might be required to endure great sacrifices to save one’s child or that a soldier can be required to sacrifice his life for his country. These are theses that make ethics very demanding, at least in certain contexts. But it is not clear that having such implications counts significantly against an ethical theory: intuitively, they simply show that sometimes it is hard to do the right thing. This might suggest that demandingness per se is not a problem. Rather, being demanding in certain respects might simply be one way in which an ethical theory can fly in the face of common sense. Any argument for an obligation to be vegan will arguably be a philosophical argument against common sense. Influential Moorean views in epistemology claim that such arguments are quite generally dubious. 88

One might think that such skepticism is especially powerful against the sorts of arguments for veganism discussed in this chapter, for two reasons. First, as that discussion illustrates, any fully developed ethical argument for an obligation to be vegan will be quite complex. Second, the central arguments discussed were methodologically naïve: they appeal centrally to clear intuitive judgments. But if the permissibility of eating a cheeseburger is also commonsensical, then one might think that the best such arguments can hope to show is that a certain complicated set of our intuitive judgments is inconsistent. One might wonder why, in this case, one should be confident that the permissibility of eating a cheeseburger is the judgment that should be abandoned. 89

One task for the ethical vegan is to rebut such arguments. If this is not possible, one possible way to reply involves being epistemically—but not practically—concessive. For example, one might grant that it is unclear whether the best arguments for veganism put us in a position to know that veganism is obligatory. The epistemically concessive vegan might argue that nonetheless, the arguments are at least strong enough to entail that we ought to suspend judgment concerning the thesis that veganism is obligatory. And here they might advocate an ethical precautionary principle: if we cannot tell whether doing A is wrong, then we ought, other things being equal to refrain from doing A . This is a quite different way of thinking about ethical veganism: on this gloss, we can know that the lifestyle is required, not in virtue of the first-order ethical facts, but as an ethical response to reasonable ethical uncertainty. 90

Another way of replying is to grant that naïve theorizing might not be enough to establish ethical veganism. Perhaps naïve arguments need to be supplemented by methodological arguments that can rebut the Moorean strategy here and provide a principled means of explaining why the permissibility of eating a cheeseburger does not survive the putative conflict imagined. 91

Conclusions

Ethical veganism can be initially motivated by compelling insights: that animals matter ethically, that our collective treatment of nonhuman animals is one of the great contemporary horrors, and that these facts make an ethical demand on each of us. This chapter has sought to illuminate the dialectic that arises when one attempts to develop these and other motivations into a philosophically careful argument. As I have sought to make clear, there are many possible species of ethical veganism worth investigating, there are many philosophical resources that can be levied into arguments for one or another vegan thesis, and there are many deep challenges facing these arguments. I have argued that there is a powerful core case for veganism, but that this case is in several important respects incomplete or poorly developed. I hope that this chapter will enable and encourage others to rigorously address these topics, thereby allowing us all to better understand the ethics of veganism, and—more broadly—the ethics of our relationships to nonhuman animals and to what we consume. 92

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Schweikard, David P. , and Hans Bernhard Schmid . “Collective Intentionality.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2013 Edition), edited by Edward N. Zalta . http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2013/entries/collective-intentionality/ .

Schwitzgebel, Eric , and Joshua Rust . “ The Moral Behavior of Ethics Professors: Relationships among Self-Reported Behavior, Expressed Normative Attitude, and Directly Observed Behavior. ” Philosophical Psychology 27, no. 3 ( 2014 ): 293‒327.

Singer, Peter.   Animal Liberation . New York: Avon, 1977 .

______. “ Famine, Affluence, and Morality. ” Philosophy & Public Affairs 1, no. 3 ( 1972 ): 229‒243.

______. “ Utilitarianism and Vegetarianism. ” Philosophy and Public Affairs 9, no. 4 ( 1980 ): 325‒337.

Singer, Peter , and Jim Mason . 2006 . The Way We Eat: Why Our Food Choices Matter . Emmaus, PA: Rodale, 2006.

Smiley, Marion. “Collective Responsibility.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2011 Edition), edited by Edward N. Zalta . http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2011/entries/collective-responsibility/ .

Smith, M. B. E. “ Is There a Prima Facie Obligation to Obey the Law? ” Yale Law Journal 82, no. 5 (April 1973): 950–976. Reprinted in The Duty to Obey the Law , edited by W. A. Edmundson. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999.

Talbert, Matthew. “ Contractualism and Our Duties to Nonhuman Animals. ” Environmental Ethics 28 (Summer 2006 ): 202‒215.

Thomson, Judith Jarvis. “ Preferential Hiring. ” Philosophy and Public Affairs 2, no. 4 ( 1973 ): 364‒384.

______. “ The Trolley Problem. ” Yale Law Journal 94, no. 6 ( 1985 ): 1395‒1415.

Tooley, Michael. “ Abortion and Infanticide. ” Philosophy and Public Affairs 2, no. 1 ( 1972 ): 37‒65.

Väyrynen, Pekka. “A Theory of Hedged Moral Principles.” In Oxford Studies in Metaethics , edited by Russ Shafer-Landau , 4:91‒132 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009 ).

Walker, Polly , Pamela Rubart-Berg , Shawn McKenzie , Kristin Kelling , and Robert S. Lawrence . “ Public Health Implications of Meat Production and Consumption. ” Public Health Nutrition 8, no. 4 ( 2005 ): 348‒356.

Weatherson, Brian. “ Running Risks Morally. ” Philosophical Studies 167, no. 1 ( 2014 ): 141‒163.

Wenz, Peter S. “ An Ecological Argument for Vegetarianism. ” Ethics and Animals 5 (March 1984): 2‒9.

Wood, Allen. “ Kant on Duties Regarding Non-Rational Nature. ” Supplementary Volume, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 72 ( 1998 ): 189–210.

Zamir, Tzachi.   Ethics and the Beast . Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007 .

______. “ Veganism. ” Journal of Social Philosophy 35, no. 3 (Fall 2004 ): 367–379.

Zimmerman, Michael J.   The Concept of Moral Obligation . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996 .

For a useful discussion of this issue, see Pluhar, “Who Can Be Obligated,” 191–193.

See, e.g., Lance and Little, “Where the Laws Are” ; McKeever and Ridge, Principled Ethics ; Robinson, “Moral Holism” ; and Väyrynen, “Hedged Moral Principles.”

McPherson, “Case for Ethical Veganism” ; McPherson, “Why I Am a Vegan”; McPherson, “How to Argue.”

For a related idea, compare Harman, “Eating Meat.”

See Gruen and Jones, “Veganism as an Aspiration.”

For a vivid depiction of someone struggling with this question, see Coetzee, Lives of Animals .

Nussbaum, Frontiers of Justice , 325–407; Plunkett, “Methodology of Political Philosophy.”

Zamir, “Veganism,” 368–369.

For discussion of some of these social and political questions, see Donaldson and Kymlicka, Zoopolis ; Michaelson, “Accommodator’s Dilemma” ; Rowlands, Animals Like Us , ch. 10.

E.g., Walker et al., “Public Health Implications.”

Campbell and Campbell, China Study , 242.

Singer and Mason, The Way We Eat , 282–283.

However, for an argument that human health-based considerations can play an important role in utilitarian arguments for vegetarianism, see Garrett, “Utilitarianism, Vegetarianism, and Human Health.”

Walker et al., “Public Health Implications.”

Estimates of the climate impact of animal agriculture range wildly, from between a twentieth and a half of all anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. See Goodland and Anhang, “Livestock and Climate Change” ; Fairlie, Benign Extravagance , ch. 13; and Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, “Role of Livestock,” for competing estimates of the climate effects of animal agriculture. Assessing which of these competing estimates is relevant for ethical purposes requires complex empirical and ethical argument.

For a case for vegetarianism that appeals centrally to such considerations, see Fox, “Vegetarianism and Planetary Health.”

See Fairlie, Benign Extravagance , ch. 4, for defense of this idea; Wenz’s “Ecological Argument” is an environmentally based argument for vegetarianism that is concessive on this front.

Goodman, “Indian and Tibetan Buddhism,” sec. 5.

Harvey, Buddhist Ethics , 156, 163.

Cf. Linzey, Animal Theology ; Halteman, Compassionate Eating .

For a useful discussion, see Doggett and Halteman, “Food Ethics and Religion.”

For a useful but incomplete bibliography, see “Vegetarianism and Animals,” The Philosophy of Food Project,

http://www.food.unt.edu/bibliography/#16 .

For an explicit discussion of utilitarianism and vegetarianism, see Singer, “Utilitarianism and Vegetarianism.” Many other important discussions make the most sense if we presuppose the utilitarian framework that their authors accept, although they do not explicitly presuppose utilitarianism; see Singer, Animal Liberation ; Norcross, “Puppies, Pigs, and People”; and S. Rachels, “Vegetarianism.” For Kantianism, see, e.g., Wood, “Kant on Duties” ; Korsgaard, “Fellow Creatures” ; and Calhoun, “But What about the Animals?” For virtue theory, see Hursthouse, “Applying Virtue Ethics.” For various contract approaches, see Baxter, People or Penguins ; Rowlands, Animals Like Us , ch. 3; and Talbert, “Contractualism and Our Duties.”

Regan, Case for Animal Rights . The exegesis in this paragraph largely follows that in McPherson, “Moorean Defense?”

Regan, Case for Animal Rights , sec. 7.5.

Certain elements of Regan’s total view complicate this conclusion. See Pluhar, “Who Can Be Obligated,” 193–197.

For a superb introduction to many of the choice points facing some of the major approaches to systematic normative ethics, see Kagan, Normative Ethics .

This approach to animal ethics is widespread; two exemplary instances are J. Rachels, “Moral Argument,” and DeGrazia, “Moral Vegetarianism.” I take this approach in McPherson, “Why I Am a Vegan.”

Bentham, Works , XVII.IV n. 1, emphasis in original.

For an argument against beginning the case for ethical vegetarianism by appeal to this sort of idea, see Diamond, “Eating Meat.” Diamond suggests that such arguments are too abstract and disconnected from the texture of our lived relationships with animals to form apt bases for ethical arguments.

For one way of developing these points, see McPherson, “Why I Am a Vegan.”

Tooley, “Abortion and Infanticide,” 40.

E.g., by Pollan, Omnivore’s Dilemma , ch. 17.

This is inspired by the analogous point about our judgments about killing and letting die in J. Rachels, “Active and Passive Euthanasia.”

Compare McMahan, “Eating Animals” ; DeGrazia, “Moral Vegetarianism,” 160–164; Harman, “Moral Significance of Animal Pain” ; Norcross, “Significance of Death” ; and McPherson, “Why I Am a Vegan.”

In the sense discussed in Nagel, “Death,” and Marquis, “Why Abortion Is Immoral.”

Compare Lippert-Rasmussen, “Two Puzzles.”

For related skepticism about the usefulness of “moral status” talk, see Zamir, Ethics and the Beast , ch. 2.

Jaworska and Tannenbaum, “Grounds of Moral Status.”

Compare Cohen, “Critique,” 162.

For some of the literally gory details, see Mason and Singer, Animal Factories .

S. Rachels, “Vegetarianism.”

For example, according to the Environmental Working Group, direct US subsidies to dairy and livestock totaled nearly $10 billion in 1995–2012. Other, much larger subsidies—such as on grain used for feed—serve to indirectly subsidize US animal agriculture. “Farm Subsidy Database,” Environmental Working Group, http://farm.ewg.org/ .

Hursthouse, “Applying Virtue Ethics,” 141–142.

Pollan, Omnivore’s Dilemma , 650.

Harvey, Buddhist Ethics , 159.

For criticism of some of the other options, see Budolfson, “Inefficacy Objection to Deontology,” sec. 3–4.

Singer, “Utilitarianism and Vegetarianism.”

Singer, “Utilitarianism and Vegetarianism,” 335.

Broilers spend around six weeks in the chicken unit before being transported for slaughter. Mason and Singer, Animal Factories , 7.

For very similar arguments, see Matheny, “Expected Utility” ; Norcross, “Puppies, Pigs, and People”; and Kagan, “Do I Make a Difference?”

See Frey, Rights, Killing, and Suffering ; Frey, “Utilitarianism and Vegetarianism Again” ; Chartier, “Threshold Argument” ; and Budolfson, “Inefficacy Objection to Consequentialism.”

Compare Chartier, “Threshold Argument,” 240ff.

For discussion, see, e.g., Feldman, “Actual Utility.”

For relevant discussion, see, e.g., Singer, “Famine, Affluence, and Morality” ; and Cullity, Moral Demands .

For relevant discussion, see Appiah, “Racism and Moral Pollution.”

For a helpful introduction to relevant debates, see Smiley, “Collective Responsibility.”

Gilbert, “Who’s to Blame?”

E.g., Held, “Random Collection” ; Bjornsson, “Joint Responsibility” ; and Pinkert, “What We Together.”

E.g., McGary, “Morality and Collective Liability.”

For a parallel case, see Björnsson, “Joint Responsibility,” 108. For relevant discussion, see also Zimmerman, Concept of Moral Obligation , ch. 9.

One complication is that—as mentioned in the discussion of self-interested reasons to be vegan—the omnivore’s dietary choices might in fact be overall bad for her, suggesting a straightforward sense in which they do not benefit her. However, the omnivore—at least immediately—gets what she wants in eating animal products. And I suspect that the argument will be similarly plausible if we simply stipulate that this counts as a benefit.

Thomson, “Preferential Hiring,” 383; Butt, “On Benefitting.”

Pasternak, “Voluntary Benefits.”

Goodin and Barry, “Benefitting from Wrongdoing,” 2.

For further discussion of cases like this one, compare Bruckner, “Strict Vegetarianism.”

E.g., Diamond, “Eating Meat,” sec. 3.

Making this distinction well is far from trivial. For example, if one had a standing obligation to prevent hunting (e.g., one was the local game warden, etc.), then merely turning a blind eye to the hunting would seem objectionable. Or suppose the hunter held you in such esteem that you could prevent the hunt with a single gentle word, perhaps here again you have a duty. Perhaps failing to prevent the hunt in these cases does not count as complicity, but is objectionable on other grounds.

For an introduction to collective intentionality, see Schweikard and Schmid, “Collective Intentionality.”

For an intermediate position, see Lepora and Goodin, Complicity and Compromise , sec. 4.1.1, which appeals to a notion of “potential essentiality,” according to which a relatively weak possibility of difference-making is necessary for complicity.

Mark Budolfson, “The Inefficacy Objection to Deontology,” has argued for a further important variant of a complicity view. He proposes that how essential the wrongness of the production of a product is can affect how wrong it is to consume it. For example, it is worse to purchase the archetypal Nazi-made soap than it is to purchase a watch made in a concentration camp because the fact that the soap is made from human fat makes the wrongful character of its production more essential than the wrongful character of the production of the watch was. This sort of idea might be used to defend the idea that it is wrong to eat beef, where wrongful treatment of animals is relatively essential, but not wrong to drink milk, because while the wrongful treatment of dairy cows is ubiquitous, it is inessential to the production of milk.

Klosko, Principle of Fairness .

E.g., Smith, “Prima Facie Obligation.” For a reply, see Dagger, Civic Virtues , 71.

For a case for potentially ethically significant animal mental states that do not involve phenomenal consciousness, see Carruthers, “Suffering without Subjectivity.”

E.g., Dennett, Brainchildren , 161–168.

For an introduction to the study of animal consciousness, see Allen and Trestman, “Animal Consciousness.”

For an argument that it can also make it worse, see Akhtar, “Animal Pain and Welfare.”

For discussion, see Olson, “Personal Identity,” esp. sec. 4.

Allen and Trestman, “Animal Consciousness,” sec. 7.4.

E.g., Rawls, Theory of Justice , sec. 5–6.

Thomson, “Trolley Problem,” 1396.

For relevant discussion of this hypothesis, see Nozick Anarchy, State and Utopia , 35–42.

The ethical legitimacy of aggregation might also seem to support a controversial objection to veganism: that widespread veganism would tend to lead to the existence of far fewer cows, pigs, chickens, etc. If we assume (controversially) that these animals currently tend to have lives that are worth living, this would entail that veganism was worse overall for animals. And aggregation might seem to bolster this argument. This argument faces severe further difficulties, however. Here are two: first, reduced numbers of farm animals will likely be accompanied by increased numbers of wild animals; second, this argument likely require controversial views about the ethical significance of bringing entities with valuable lives into existence (for the classic discussion of this issue, see Parfit, Reasons and Persons , Part Four).

For non-anecdotal evidence that philosophers’ failing to act on their belief that they should be vegetarian is widespread, see Schwitzgebel and Rust, “Moral Behavior.”

Pogge, “Severe Poverty,” 17.

For a related worry, see Gruen and Jones, “Veganism as an Aspiration.”

For relevant discussion taking Peter Singer as its foil, see Frey, Rights, Killing and Suffering , ch. 16. It is illuminating here that the Animal Liberation Front—a radical group that advocates direct and often illegal action in defense of animals—requires only vegetarianism, and not veganism, as a minimal requirement for association. “Credo and Guidelines,” Animal Liberation Front, http://www.animalliberationfront.com/ALFront/alf_credo.htm .

For discussion, see McPherson, “Moorean Arguments” and “Moorean Defense?”

McPherson, “Case for Ethical Veganism,” sec. 3.

For contrasting assessments of the underlying precautionary idea, see, on the one hand, Guererro, “Don’t Know, Don’t Kill”; and Moller, “Abortion and Moral Risk” ; and, on the other, Weatherson, “Running Risks Morally.”

McPherson, “Moorean Defense?” and “Case for Ethical Veganism.”

I am indebted to the editors of this volume for wonderful feedback on a draft of this chapter. Portions of this chapter draw significantly on my previous work on this topic, including “A Case for Ethical Veganism”; “How to Argue”; “A Moorean Defense”; and “Why I Am a Vegan.”

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Friday essay: on being an ethical vegan for 33 years

Professor of Literature and Environment, Curtin University

Disclosure statement

John Kinsella receives funding from Curtin University under the auspices of a Curtin Research Fellowship.

Curtin University provides funding as a member of The Conversation AU.

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I live in a vegan family situation. I have been a vegan for over 33 years and my partner, poet and novelist Tracy Ryan, has been a vegan for over a quarter of a century; our 16-year-old son Tim was conceived and born a vegan, and remains one.

If you ever doubt it’s his choice, ask him — he’s eloquent on his veganism, and has angles on it we don’t, neither Tracy nor I having been born vegans. Tracy has always had a deep interest in nutrition, and raising children vegan has been a deeply informed life-act — done with respect for their rights as well as animal rights. We don’t use animal products in any way we are aware of. Rather than seeing our food, clothes, shoes, working materials, as animal-product “alternatives”, they are our norms.

Over the decades we have seen and heard it all when it comes to the arguments and attacks on veganism. Really, people find their own way through such things as they do if they hold any committed ethical position that is about principle and not style.

One of the first that vegans encounter is the specious argument about denying children before a certain age a choice in the matter, that veganism is forced on them.

It’s such an obvious reply: Aren’t you forcing your carnivorism (or more accurately, omnivorism) on your children? They are also not given a choice — people make decisions for their children before they are empowered (informed enough) to make decisions for themselves. It is possible to have a balanced vegan diet, and even back in the mid-80s, vegan sources of B12 and other more complex nutritional requirements were available.

But the point of this article is not for the fors and againsts, because these are well attested, and even the most slipshod research skills will reveal what is and isn’t the case. Rather, this is an account of long-term veganism in the context of the recent increase (last five or so years) in vegan consciousness, and availability of vegan foods.

Actually, vegan food has always been available, of course, just in raw and rudimentary and unrefined ways — what we are talking about in the “now” is the mass replacement of mass slaughterhouse products with non-slaughterhouse products that “equate” and move from being “faux” meat (protein), or ersatz, to food definitions and realities in their own terms. That’s what has industry scared and reactive.

Personally, I have a problem with all industrialisations and capital processes of market — the fetishisation of products that increase wealth rather than answer needs — but it is this “mass” that so upsets animal-exploitation, agri-industrialism. Little of it is cultural, outside profit-making. Arguments about what’s best for the planet are placed far down the list of priorities, as the fossil-fuel desire shows.

Casting aside the gun

There are exceptions, and cultural beliefs that do need to be respected. When I began being a vegan, I was outwardly proselytising; now I am only so in my writing and via how I live. I have learnt that respecting others’ journeys is the only way that long-term change comes.

That’s an argument for all ethical issues, and it could be argued that all killing must be stopped immediately or we simply appease our own consciences at the expense of being concerned about our own behaviours — many mass murders have taken place as people let their nation’s military go about its business outside their personal scrutiny, as that scrutiny is confronting to undertake.

Ethical positions are not “cults”; cults are the control of others to remove their capacity for personal choice – but it is a paradox to see veganism called a cult by meat-eaters who have been part of an industrial slaughter-cult all their lives.

Ironically, I come from a background of fishing and hunting (and became a vegan while living in a house on a dairy farm: witnessing). I was obsessed with guns when I was a child and a teenager — I wanted to become an army officer. My turning away from these values was conscious and specific — by my late teens and early 20s, I was a committed vegan, anarchist, and pacifist. I found my way there via the paradox of loving animals (I always have) and exploiting them (to my mind).

My poetry was tracking my concern, so my poetry helped in the decision-making — that old argument of poetic language expressing the inexpressible. When I wrote of casting aside the gun, of leaving animals be, it was because I had – but also to articulate and mark it. To give a sign in word as well as thought and action. A constant reminder of how and why I’d got to that point of change.

This was not easily the case — as an alcoholic in former days, I was aggressive, often in trouble, and confrontational. I got sober 24 years ago so I could better hold the values I believed in. It wasn’t an easy journey, but one in which I knew I had to reduce my own hypocrisies. And that’s it; that’s where a lot of misunderstanding manifests between vegans and non-vegans — it’s not a holier-than-thou situation, but a move towards being less impacting, less damaging, and more respectful of life.

I’ve actually known vegans quite violent (towards people), and I have rejected their positions because of this unresolved hypocrisy; but this has been rare.

And even in these cases, in time if they stayed vegan (they often didn’t), they moved away from their own anger and aggression and lived a life more in tune with their values. I say this because veganism is both an ethical position, and a position that eventually calls on a variety of consistencies with regard to how we treat people, who are, after all, animals too.

Nutmeat, palm oil and an ethics of commitment

A lot of older vegans will talk about the 80s as being a time of Nutmeat, avocados, and bananas, of boiling pulses to make protein patties to add to the steamed veggies, of reading labels carefully because there wasn’t the vegan certification process (or “market” for that to be insisted on) back then.

Sure, it is nice to be able to go out and eat more “cheffed” foods from supermarkets and in restaurants, but it’s not the be-all and end-all, and you still weigh up issues such as processing, origins and cultivation methods, and air-miles.

If we fall into dependence on mass food production processes, then ultimately we will damage animals in other ways. A classic example is that of palm oil — so essential to many processed vegan foods (as indeed non-vegan). The destruction of habitat to increase palm oil production eventually led to a call for palm oil that’s non-exploitative (of people and ecologies) — a regulation.

People survive the best way they can, and as with so many raw food materials, those containing palm oil are sourced in less wealthy zones to feed wealthier ones — capitalist exploitation works fast to adjust to new markets.

So any veganism not in tune with these issues quickly becomes an appeasement of one’s own conscience while hiding from the potential for damaging impacts. The response has to be holistic — vegan food producers need to work with non-vegans and different cultural realities to ensure transitions that don’t damage in other ways.

This is not wisdom from on high; it’s just decades of seeing faddism and change, of people calling themselves vegan when they don’t closely consider what’s in a “product”, or deploying the terms as a social definition while allowing themselves “exceptions to the rule”, or, say, eating honey (an animal product!).

Point is, “vegan” means something, and of course be whatever you are, but let’s let a term represent a value we can share and understand. Play with language by all means (that’s what writers do!), but not with the ethics of commitment.

Mobile phones, whose raw materials destroy whole communities and habitats in their extraction and manufacture, are an example of a contradiction with the new spreading of the message of veganism — we have to find a way to a common understanding of cause and effect. It’s a big and complex picture that tussles with the obvious fact that an animal hurt or killed is an animal hurt or killed.

Mutual respect

Veganism intersects with many cultural attitudes, and diverges from many others, across the globe, but mutual respect is, in my experience, an unassailable value.

I have never tried to force anyone to eat vegan, yet attempts have been made to shame me into not eating vegan, in order not to offend my hosts. I have never compromised my ethical position, but I have gone to great effort to explain my position and my desire not to offend a host.

That was early on — now I carefully have discussions before, say, sharing an eating space with those who have invited me about how and why I eat (and don’t eat) what I do. An intercultural conversation needs to be had. Confronting? Surely, in a pluralistic society we have these conversations to ensure respectful co-awareness all the time? If not, then we probably should. I have no problem in being forward about who and what I am — in fact, I see saying so as a sign of respect for my hosts.

The bottom line in all this, for me, for my family, is animal rights. We live among animals but keep none — they are part of the world around us and we wish to have no control over them.

We deal with “pests” in non-invasive and non-damaging ways, and we work towards a consistency of respectful interaction. That’s to do with seeing no hierarchies of control, no speciesist superiority. Then you get the unthought-out attack-mode on saying such a thing (seriously): Are you saying if a lion was attacking your baby, you’d do nothing? Well, of course I would… What do you expect? Would I be cruel and seek to hurt and exploit the lion? No. Anyway!

Giving a minority report on UK TV

Living in the UK in the late 90s, we were invited to appear on the television program Susan Brooks’s Family Recipes. We went up to Manchester from Cambridge, and the chefs, Susan and her daughter, prepared us a vegan meal on set, and we sampled it and discussed what it was like being a vegan family. It was a fascinating experience because of the warm attitude to how we lived, coming from a “regular” cooking program.

Britain has long been more in tune with vegan living (the term “vegan” was coined by UK Vegan Society co-founder Donald Watson in late 1944), but in the 90s it was still very “minority”. If we were not part of the dissenting opinion, we were still giving a minority report. At the same time I spoke to the Vegan magazine about being a poet and a vegan, and how it informed my writing practice. There was a context. And it was broad in its conception — if you wanted medical research without vivisection or abuse of animals, you could support the Dr Hadwen Trust !

Such contexts are still being created in Australia — the aggressive response from some people to veganism accords with a macho public culture that seeks to manipulate markets to defend old colonial land usage and the machinery of animal pastoralism. In this, I am not commenting on individuals nor even communities, but on the machine of capitalism and its empowered defenders.

A stunning (I use no words carelessly, I think) example is the case of vegan activist James Warden who said he was was provided with no vegan food options while in a Perth prison — this is control, this is oppression, and this is the state protecting its ongoing colonial interests. There is a disconnect between traditional hunter-gatherer societies and the mass consumer, export-import underpinnings of colonial capital. It is the latter that concerns me because I have been part of it.

The New Veganism

There’s a new generation of vegan activists in Australia who have quickly been turned into public enemies — they are targeted by media, police, and government , and seen as interfering with what amounts to an ongoing sell of Australian values. As a poet, I’ve tried to speak through poetry in support of these activists, while also recognising that I come from a very different space through being older and longer-term in my activism.

I live in rural Australia, and co-exist with farmers and people who eat and use animals. Not in the house I share, and not on the Noongar land where I live, and which I acknowledge is not “mine”. But nearby. They know who we are and how we live, and we offer an alternative. Animals find refuge if they look for it. It’s their place, too.

The conversation is ongoing, persistent, and there’s no compromise in our position, but it’s also respectful of other people’s humanity, their free will, and their journeys. They are not us and we are not them. I will stand in front of a bulldozer to save bush, and I will live next to a bulldozer driver.

Each of us can only offer one another examples of alternatives. That’s how real change comes; that’s how fewer and fewer animals will suffer. But in this crisis mode of biospheric collapse, the reason there are more and more vegans is that the time has come to act. And people are acting. Others will too, because they see a need and want to, not because they are told to. Bullying happens in many directions at once.

If I see a problem with the New Veganism it’s a possible connection with presentation and social monitoring. Social media try to direct, but also dilute the commitment of person to person, person to animal, person to real place where animals live.

Veganism doesn’t need “influencers” — though if anything stops animals being exploited, it’s a good thing. But as we — Tracy and I and Tim — see each animal as an individual with their own intact rights, as we see people, we also see the collective, the community, the herd, the hive, the loner, the gregarious… all these “types”… we also see the interconnected fate of the biosphere.

Technology that promotes veganism that consumes the planet is, for us, an irresolvable contradiction. A lot of thinking needs to be done around this — and modes of presentation and discussion need to be considered as well. The slaughterhouse is obvious and hidden; it is literal and a metaphor that can become real for all life in sudden ways.

Just a positive to finish with. I have crossed Australia many times (though not recently) by train, as I avoid flying here (to lessen eco-damage impact), and I have done so with much pre-prepared vegan food.

But the train caterers were always willing to make “bespoke” food for me, to supplement my food stash. The door to a broader veganism in “Western” societies has actually long been open — and if Western capitalism could learn from many non-capitalist, non-Western cultures, not only would they find much precedent sometimes on a very large scale, but also much communal goodwill around the choice of what we eat, and why we do or don’t eat it.

And to reiterate my support for the new generation of vegan activists looking to intervene in non-violent ways to stop the pastoral-factory exploitation of animals, I wrote this poem which appeared through PETA. I am not on social media, but they took it into that realm, the realm of style, influence, but also loss and consumer endgame if people are not wary.

I am here now for the young vegan activists saving animals from slaughter I am here now because a young human interrupted my journey to the slaughtering, hoisted me over their shoulders and carried me towards animation. I am here now my eyes dilating fast to take in this extension to life — and the blood of my kin is a river never divided. I am here now because an intervention drew out the length of my days; the things I have learnt we have taken — we breathe the same air as our dead. I am here now because the young humans are rising peacefully from their screens to step into the killing zones, to bend down and lift us back to the light.

This piece has been corrected. It initially read that the term “vegan” came from postwar UK. In fact, it was coined by UK Vegan Society co-founder Donald Watson in 1944.

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There is a surprising consensus among vegan philosophers that freeganism —eating animal-based foods going to waste—is permissible. Some ethicists even argue that vegans should be freegans. In this paper, we offer a novel challenge to freeganism drawing upon Donaldson and Kymlicka’s ‘zoopolitical’ approach, which supports ‘restricted freeganism’. On this position, it’s prima facie wrong to eat the corpses of domesticated animals, as they are members of a mixed human-animal community, ruling out many freegan practices. This exploration reveals how the ‘political turn’ in animal ethics can offer fertile lenses through which to consider ethical puzzles about eating animals.

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Veganism is immoral. At least, that’s the conclusion that Donald Bruckner ( 2015 ) defends. His argument begins with a standard case against eating products derived from intensive animal agriculture, which he calls the ‘Factory Harm Argument’:

Factory farming causes extensive harm to animals.

This harm is unnecessary.

The practice of factory farming causes extensive, unnecessary harm to animals.

It is wrong (knowingly) to cause, or support practices that cause, extensive, unnecessary harm to animals.

Purchasing and consuming meat originating on factory farms supports the practice of factory farming.

Purchasing and consuming meat from factory farms is wrong. (Adapted from Bruckner, 2015 , pp. 31–2).

So far, so familiar. Bruckner points out, however, that this argument doesn’t entail a duty to be vegan (or, as Bruckner calls it, ‘strict vegetarianism’). Why? ‘The premises of the Factory Harm Argument, I [Bruckner] claim, support eating roadkill at least as much as they support eating vegetables’ ( 2015 , p. 33). The ‘at least’ is worth emphasising. As pointed out by some critics of veganism, including Steven Davis ( 2003 ) and Mike Archer ( 2011 ), arable agriculture involves harm to animals, who are killed in harvesting, have their homes destroyed, are poisoned by farmers, and so on. While the numbers may be disputed (Fischer & Lamey, 2018 ), this doesn’t matter for Bruckner’s argument: ‘Once we see that roadkill is a harm-free source of food and that vegetables are not harm free, we see that the reasons usually given for strict vegetarianism support an obligation not to be strict vegetarians but to eat some roadkill’ ( 2015 , p. 36). So, now it looks as though eating roadkill isn’t simply permissible based on the premises of one of the better arguments for veganism: it’s morally mandatory. Footnote 1

A point that Bruckner doesn’t make—but one noted by others (e.g., Fischer, 2018 )—is that this argument seems to generalise to all non-vegan ‘freegan’ practices, such as ‘dumpster-diving’ for a can of beef stew, or finishing off ham sandwiches about to be thrown away after a departmental meeting. If Bruckner is right, then it’s also wrong to eat a strict vegan diet when you could collect and consume any animal product that would otherwise be wasted, whether it would rot on a road verge or wind up in a landfill. Footnote 2 Let’s call this Bruckner-inspired way of eating the ‘freegan diet’, which involves eating vegan with the exception of any animal products that would go unused. Footnote 3 We can contrast this with the ‘strict vegan diet’, which does not involve the consumption of animal products at all, short of emergencies, because of a concern for harm to animals. Footnote 4 Is it true that strict vegans ought to give up their veganism, becoming freegans instead? Footnote 5

Let’s note that even if we don’t go that far, many philosophers seem comfortable with the conclusion that freeganism is morally permissible. Ted Warfield ( 2016 ), in a paper calling attention to the way that the wrongs of farming don’t straightforwardly lead to the conclusion that meat-eating is immoral, observes that ‘[m]ost writings on this topic remember to include a footnote indicating that [the authors] do not oppose the practice of eating factory farm products found in dumpsters and do not object to eating meat just about to be thrown into the garbage’ ( 2016 , p. 153).

We think that Warfield is right to point to this surprisingly common—and surprisingly underexplored Footnote 6 —acknowledgement of the legitimacy of (some kinds of) meat eating in otherwise pro-vegan arguments. Bruckner ( 2015 , p. 37) notes that David DeGrazia ( 2009 , fn. 14) is open to eating dead animals found in woodlands; that Stuart Rachels ( 2011 , p. 883) has little objection to eating meat about to be thrown away; and that Jordan Curnutt ( 1997 , p. 156) is open to eating animals killed by accident. We can add a number of others to this list. Valéry Giroux ( 2016 ) notes that, even combined with environmental and health reasons, animal-focussed arguments for veganism don’t preclude the restricted consumption of the bodies of certain animals who have died a natural death. Cheryl Abbate ( 2019b ) describes freeganism as ‘the least harmful way to eat’, and, despite defending veganism (see also Abbate, 2019a ), concedes that there is nothing categorically wrong with consuming animal flesh. Alasdair Cochrane ( 2012 , p. 87) proposes a kind of institutionalised freeganism, in which animals are farmed for their corpses: they live a long and happy life, but they are butchered and eaten once they have died from natural causes. And Andrew Chignell ( 2016 ) suggests, though does not explore, that ‘roadkill-itarians’ and freegans may make the economic situation seeing animals harmed for food ‘ better , since they at least prevent the products of the system from going to waste’ ( 2016 , p. 184, emphasis Chignell’s).

What’s more, Peter Singer seems to approve of freeganism. Writing with Jim Mason, he describes freegans as ‘impeccably consequentialist’, adding that if ‘you oppose the abuse of animals, but enjoy eating meat, cheese, or eggs – get it from a dumpster’ ( 2016 , pp. 222–3). Singer and Mason do not make the jump to saying that freeganism should be preferred to strict veganism. They come close, though: freeganism can be motivated, they say, by vegans realising that their approach is not radical enough, as ‘[e]ven products that contain no animal ingredients can hurt animals’ ( 2016 , p. 222). And they hold that agriculture’s negative impact on animals ‘could be reduced if we ate what would otherwise be wasted’ ( 2016 , p. 223). This is not the only time Singer broaches the subject; decades earlier, he apparently conceded ( 1980 , pp. 327–8), in response to Cora Diamond, that he would ‘be perfectly happy to eat the unfortunate lamb that has just been hit by a car’ (Diamond, 1978 , pp. 471–2).

It’s plausible, then, that many of the most compelling arguments for veganism permit freeganism. This is admitted, more or less begrudgingly, by many of their proponents. What’s more, freegans seem to have a good case against strict vegans—that is, freegans seem to have a good case that strict vegans ought to join them, or, at least, shouldn’t condemn them.

This is our starting point. What can the strict vegan say by way of reply? In this paper, we explore several such responses. We begin with some standard moves that, ultimately, don’t seem terribly promising. However, we spend most of the paper exploring the possibility that we can appropriately adopt a relationship with animals such that the eating of their corpses becomes impermissible. This is arguably what many vegans and vegetarians do. What’s more, however, we may have an obligation to adopt such a relationship with certain animals—namely, domesticated animals—meaning that the consumption of their bodies is always prima facie impermissible. To motivate this claim, we turn to political theory, and, in particular, the zoopolitics of Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka ( 2011 ). Our conclusion, to anticipate, is that if we are willing to take seriously the idea that some animals are members of our political community, then we can marshal an interesting argument against some, though not all, freegan practices. It turns out that there are important distinctions to be drawn based upon the nature and origin of the scavenged foodstuff. For instance, found meat and found cheese may not belong in the same category, and some roadkill may not be equivalent to the body of an animal found deep in the backcountry. This is important, as it means that opponents of freeganism must be careful not to jump to conclusions to which they are not entitled. It could be that some critics of freeganism are opposed to particular instances of freeganism, not to freeganism per se. Based on our development of Donaldson and Kymlicka’s zoopolitics, we ultimately describe what we will call a ‘restricted freegan’ position, in which the consumption of some scavenged animal products is permissible, but the consumption of others is prima facie wrong.

Before we begin, it is worth situating the present enquiry. Political-philosophical approaches have been traditionally overlooked in conversations about human-animal relationships. As Kymlicka and Donaldson explain,

Political philosophy has been largely silent on the animal question, viewing it as an issue for ethicists but irrelevant to the core topics of political philosophy, such as theories of political community, democracy, boundaries, citizenship, the public good, civil society, sovereignty, and constitutionalism. Virtually all of the work done in contemporary political philosophy continues to assume that we can theorize these issues without taking animals into account. And, to be fair, this indifference is largely reciprocated. The vast bulk of the work done in animal ethics, whether based on animal welfare or animal rights, has not considered it necessary or helpful to connect animal ethics to the core concepts of political philosophy. ( 2016 , p. 692)

Thankfully, this deficit began to be remedied in the 2010s, with a range of high-quality works at the intersection of animal ethics and political theory. We will not attempt to review such work here, Footnote 7 and acknowledge that other normative approaches adopted by political philosophers to think through human/animal relationships might reach quite different conclusions than the one we draw from Donaldson and Kymlicka. Nonetheless, there is something that is foregrounded by Donaldson and Kymlicka’s argument that is central to many political approaches to animal ethics that is of comparatively little importance to many moral theories: it stresses that some animals are members of a shared human/animal society. This recognition has significant normative clout. For example, it opens the door to thinking of these animals as part of the ‘people’ whose common good must be considered in democratic decision making. And—to pre-empt our own argument somewhat—it makes these animals eligible for the rights (and responsibilities!) of community members. The style of the argument, then, is one instantly recognisable to scholars in this new literature, even if the precise content may be challenged.

As such, our methodological goal is comparatively modest: we aim to show simply that taking political philosophy into account can offer worthwhile lenses through which to consider apparently ‘moral’ questions—questions concerned with individual conduct—about the ethics of eating animals. Political philosophy is not useful solely for thinking about institutional questions, such as (for example) the inclusion of animal ‘voices’ in democratic decision-making procedures.

On the other hand, the practical goals of the present paper are quite ambitious. We aim to show that, in some but not all cases, there is a distinct and potentially action-guiding wrong involved in the consumption of animal products, even if said consumption does not have a causal relationship with any actual harm to animals. (For example, no animals were killed for that act of consumption, and no animals will be killed because of that act of consumption.) And this could show why the strict vegan should be reluctant to embrace freeganism.

False Starts

We begin with several strategies for defending the wrongness of freeganism that are not particularly promising. For instance, someone could maintain that it’s wrong to benefit from wrongdoing, and that principle applies to eating any food produced wrongly, even if it would otherwise go to waste. However, it’s simply implausible that it’s always wrong to benefit from wrongdoing. First, if that were true, then it would apply equally well to many standard vegan practices. Many vegans go to non-vegan restaurants and order vegan meals. However, those restaurants are made profitable, in part, by the sale of animal products. So, the availability of vegan products at those establishments depends, in part, on the availability of (wrongfully acquired) animal products, which means that vegans are benefiting from wrongdoing when they eat at those restaurants, and are thus (according to this argument) acting wrongfully. On the plausible assumption that this is too demanding a standard, we should reject the moral premise. Second, note that, quite apart from any concerns about the ethics of diet, we are constantly in the position of benefiting from historic wrongs. We benefit from all the horrific things that our ancestors did, and so if it’s wrong to benefit from wrongdoing, then we’re all living immoral lives. Although that’s a bullet we can bite, it seems a rather extreme position to take. Third, it’s worth noting that at least some instances of freeganism, such as eating the corpse of an animal killed by a freak accident, don’t involve benefiting from any wrongdoing. Thus, even those willing to accept the general principle don’t have an argument against all freegan practices.

Another possibility, defended by Julia Driver ( 2015 ), is that even if you aren’t complicit in wrongdoing, and even if you don’t in fact endorse the practice of killing and eating animals, you may still seem to endorse the practice of killing and eating animals when you consume scavenged animal products. This sends a signal to others about what’s normal. Driver herself points out that this won’t cover every case: there may be circumstances where everyone is aware that you don’t endorse the killing of animals and appreciates your reasons for being so opposed. And, of course, you could just eat scavenged animal products in secret. So, this isn’t a perfect solution to the problem, but for all that, it may still cover a wide range of cases.

Or, at least, so it seems at first blush. On reflection, though, concerns about causal inefficacy arise. As Julia Nefsky ( 2018 ) observes, even if our behaviour can send signals to others, it doesn’t follow that those signals are detected, much less that they have any appreciable impact on others’ behaviour. Quite often, no one takes any notice of what we do; we operate in the backgrounds of their lives, and we don’t have any impact on them whatsoever. In other circumstances, people notice but simply aren’t affected; they don’t care what we do for one reason or another. In other circumstances still, people notice and care, but simply aren’t affected in any significant way. Someone knows that you are an animal advocate and sees you eating meat. She comes to believe that you’re a hypocrite, and thereby discounts whatever you say about animals in the future. However, since this person was already strongly inclined to discount whatever anyone said about animals, the change doesn’t count as a significant one: you had very little chance of changing her mind to begin with, and your having less now isn’t at all important. Given the low odds that any individual consumer makes a difference, and the low odds that you might influence any individual in such a way that she alters her purchasing behaviour, it seems highly unlikely that an expected utility calculation will come out in favour of abstaining from consuming scavenged animal products on signalling grounds. Footnote 8 So, influencing others is not going to be the way to defend the wrongness of freegan practices. But Driver offers other strategies for criticizing freeganism.

Driver observes that freeganism ‘allows people to bypass norms’ ( 2015 , p. 76). This is because a ‘system is established whereby some people habitually benefit from the misdeed of others, allowing them to reap the benefits without the dirty hands. But this makes the habitual dumpster diver look like he is bypassing norms as well’ ( 2015 , p. 76). However, the concern about bypassing norms falls prey to the same objection that undermines the ‘don’t benefit from wrongdoing’ strategy. If vegans regularly visit non-vegan restaurants, they habitually benefit from the misdeeds of others, allowing them to reap the benefits without the dirty hands. In fact, the point applies just as well to vegan restaurants, which depend on supply chains that would not, at present, be economically viable if they weren’t also distributing animal products. Moreover, to echo a point made earlier, the ‘bypassing norms’ approach would not account for any putative wrongness of freegan practices that don’t rely for their existence on wrongful harms to animals.

Driver makes one additional move. She observes that there may be something amiss in the character of freegans: ‘if the dumpster diver would be disappointed to see everyone become a vegetarian, and thereby also be unable to benefit anymore from the wrongdoing of others, then he does seem to have a character flaw: a failure to exhibit the right attitude toward wrongdoing’ ( 2015 , 76). This seems unfair. First, Driver doesn’t consider the kinds of vices that the strict vegan may display by not consuming freegan foods: e.g., callous disregard for the suffering of animals in plant agriculture, or a self-indulgent obsession with moral purity. So even if freegans are vicious in the ways that Driver suggests, it isn’t obvious that strict vegans have better characters. Second, it’s unclear that freegans must have the wrong attitude toward wrongdoing. In principle, they might desire the end of animal exploitation while still being convinced that, in the interim, they should minimize waste and avoid contributing to animal exploitation by purchasing consumer goods, many of which are, more or less directly, causally connected to animal exploitation. This seems like a commendable motivation and hardly evidence of a character flaw.

So far, the freegan appears to have the upper hand in their debate with the strict vegan. If we want to find reasons to defend the strict vegan from the freegan challenge, we’ll need to look elsewhere.

Meat and Respect Conventions: A Partial Case for Strict Veganism

Animals, with the possible exception of some companions, are not currently perceived as members of our society. So, to go back to our earlier examples of what society membership might mean, animals are not routinely perceived as part of the ‘people’ whose good must be considered in democratic decision making, and nor are they routinely thought to be entitled to the rights that come with community membership. This non-recognition, it might be thought, is an important cause of our disrespect for them. Perhaps, then, a proposal that we open up society’s membership to animals could form the basis of an argument against the freegan on the permissibility of eating meat. After all, if we choose to conceive of animals as co-society-members, then we are opting to have a relationship with them that precludes seeing their dead bodies as resources at our disposal. Footnote 9 When it comes to the corpses of human society members, we have strong intuitions and strongly integrated social practices about respectful treatment. Often, though not always, Footnote 10 the latter are backed up by the threat of legislative censure. Now, it isn’t uncommon to hear talk about the respectful treatment of animal corpses, but this sometimes pans out in a very different way. In particular, one sometimes hears the claim that to use an animal’s corpse—especially for food—is to respect the animal, while to use a human ’s corpse (again, perhaps, especially for food) would be the height of disrespect. To not use an animal’s body is ‘wasting’ it, while we have different intuitions in the human case. As Chloë Taylor observes, ‘the dominant Western worldview is deontological with respect to dead humans and utilitarian with respect to dead animals of other species’ ( 2013 , p. 95).

But might this difference be accounted for by people’s preferences? After all, most of us would prefer for our corpse not to be eaten after we die. Reflection shows that this preference won’t vindicate the difference in intuitions. Some humans don’t have preferences about their corpses, either because they don’t understand the issues, or because they genuinely don’t care. Others might have preferences that go strongly against the intuitions. The late music producer Kim Fowley, for example, ‘contacted the magazine Girls and Corpses with the request that his corpse feature on a centrefold. He said that the models “could mutilate the body, providing real blood & guts and set my bones and blood on fire”’ (Jones, 2017 , p. 618). (We take no stand on whether Girls and Corpses might permissibly use Fowley’s body in that way, and acknowledge that the case raises complicated questions about gender and sexuality. Our point is simply that people can and do give consent and express preferences for all kinds of grotesque things.) While certain kinds of corpse-use are generally considered permissible with the consent of the deceased, other kinds (in broader society, if perhaps not the philosophy seminar) aren’t. Someone could object that using the corpse of the person who doesn’t, or can’t, care—or the corpse of an eccentric music producer—is contrary to the preferences of the late human’s family or friends. Of course, the individual may not have any family or friends, or their family or friends may not mind if the corpse is used in all kinds of unpleasant ways, or else their preferences might not carry the weight that they’re taken to.

If appealing to the preferences of individuals can’t do the theoretical work, what alternatives do we have? One possibility is to point to reverence for corpses as an important societal norm. It’s part of what it means to belong to our society that your corpse is treated in a particular way. It is—and we do not take this to in any way diminish its significance—a convention about what counts as respectful . Footnote 11 The thought is that part of what it is to be a member of a particular society or shared endeavour is to adopt a certain set of conventions for expressing certain fundamental moral values and goals. Obviously, these are culturally and contextually specific conventions; shaking hands need not mean in one context what it means in another. However, the underlying moral significance is stable across those differences—we are looking for ways to express ‘You matter’ or ‘We are equals’, and different communities will find their own ways to accomplish this goal. Accordingly, when we follow these norms, we are expressing something about the value or dignity of others, even if we aren’t consciously trying to express such things.

On the other hand, to fail to extend these forms of respect to certain other members of our community seems to deny the mattering, equality, value, or dignity of these others. Or, at least, it does so if we fail to extend these norms without a very good reason. There is something undignified about sharing intimate photographs of a corpse with strangers. But this is an indignity that we tolerate when, for example, photographs from an autopsy need to be shared with a jury.

Crucially, no individual can simply decide on new rules of respect and reverence. Because they serve to coordinate the behaviour of a wide range of individuals, most of whom are strangers, they must be determined at the group level, not by each individual. So, whatever your preferences regarding your own corpse, it remains the case that there are certain constraints on what counts as respectful treatment; it’s not entirely up to you to decide what would count as showing due respect for you and your body.

Obviously, there are plenty of other reasons why we shouldn’t use the bodies of dead human beings as fuel to produce electricity, or as fertilizer in gardens, or whatever else. As above, people (generally) don’t want their bodies to be used in these ways. Their relatives (generally) don’t want such uses either. We can add that the living might become ill. And so on. But this account helps explain why the norm might be worth following even when these additional kinds of considerations aren’t available, and it explains why the arbitrariness of our norms is a feature, rather than a bug. So, let’s assume that this is a plausible story about how norms about human corpses might be defended.

The strict vegan can thus present the freegan as acting in a morally dubious way by failing to extend these norms of corpse respect to animals, even this failure does not actually harm any animals. The freegan can’t rebut this argument simply by appealing to the benefits of using corpses. Just as there are cases where the norm against using a human corpse may be ‘overly restrictive’—we can imagine cases where it really would be useful to put a human corpse to work in a certain way deemed beyond the pale in our society—the norm doesn’t admit this kind of flexibility. (Again, there is flexibility when it comes to very good reasons speaking against the norm. As we have defined the term, for example, the strict vegan will still allow the eating of animal products in genuine emergencies. Equally, genuine emergencies will permit treatment of human corpses that would normally be beyond the pale.) To treat animals as members of human communities requires complying with these norms even when the stakes are higher, and the considerations that seem to support the norm aren’t salient. This approach seems to fit with a lot of popular vegan rhetoric, much of which takes the form ‘If you wouldn’t do it to a human, you shouldn’t do it to an animal’.

But here’s the problem: even if strict vegans—explicitly or otherwise—want to extend this norm of corpse treatment to include animals, why should freegans care? Is there any reason that the freegan is required to adopt the standards of the strict vegan? We think that there is a way for the strict vegan to insist that there is—but it’s an answer found in political philosophy, not moral philosophy.

Animal Citizenship: The Case for ‘Restricted Freeganism’

Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka ( 2011 ) challenge the exclusion of animals from the demos —the ‘people’ who make up a society. They offer a political account of animal rights in which animals are conceptualised as belonging to one of three categories, with their classification dependent upon the nature of their relationship to a mixed human-animal society. Domesticated animals are offered citizenship, wild animals are offered sovereignty over their own spaces, and ‘liminal’ animals (who are neither fully wild nor fully domesticated) are offered denizenship. While all sentient animals are afforded key basic (negative) rights, the positive entitlements owed to animals vary depending upon their group membership.

On this picture, as earlier, we ought to give the corpses of domesticated animals the same respect that owed to the corpses of humans. This is because domesticated animals are citizens of the same society as humans. Donaldson and Kymlicka do raise the issue of corpse respect, though only in passing, in the context of a discussion about the feeding of carnivorous animals. Footnote 12 They say that some of the ideas people have about the treatment of corpses

are culturally (and religiously) variable, marking the boundaries of community. This could mean that while there are some ways in which we should never treat a corpse – human or animal, citizen or foreigner – there are special obligations we owe to members of the community… Perhaps, then, we ought to treat the bodies of domesticated animals the same way as human bodies in any given society or community, but the same obligation does not apply for corpses of those from outside the community. ( 2011 , p. 151)

So, we get a critique of certain freegan practices (namely, those involving the bodies of domesticated animals) though not of others (namely, those involving the bodies of wild animals and almost-wild ‘liminal’ animals). This seems to solve the most pressing problems facing the last view. First, Donaldson and Kymlicka aren’t simply presenting a relationship that we might choose to have with animals, as was our strict vegan; instead, the relationship is framed as mandatory. Their reasons for this will be discussed shortly. Second, we may be able to block strange implications that could arise from the previous view. For instance, if corpses along the side of the road belong to liminal or wild animals, we don’t necessarily owe them special honour or care. So, for example, burial rites won’t be morally required. They may still be required for domesticated animals, but this isn’t a particularly difficult bullet to bite, and is precisely the kind of thing that Donaldson and Kymlicka would welcome.

Obviously, this won’t be satisfying to someone who wants a perfectly strict veganism. We can borrow from Donaldson and Kymlicka to place limits on freeganism, but not to condemn it altogether. After all, it doesn’t follow from the above that there is anything wrong with dumpster-diving for products made from dairy or eggs. Milk and eggs aren’t corpses, and, to be clear, Donaldson and Kymlicka’s explicitly do not oppose the consumption of these products—only harmful practices associated with it ( 2011 , pp. 134–9). This is consistent with the desire to see co-relationships with animal citizens governed by the same kinds of rules that govern co-relationships with human citizens. It isn’t (and shouldn’t be) seen as disrespectful for humans, such as young infants, to drink human breastmilk, such as the milk of their mothers. In human culture, breastmilk is food (or consumable) in a way that human flesh (almost) invariably isn’t. Footnote 13 And, while humans don’t lay eggs, human placentas are sometimes consumed after the birth of infants. While some might find this distasteful, the thought certainly doesn’t evoke the same horror as the consumption of corpses—and rightly so.

What’s more, and as we’ve noted, Donaldson and Kymlicka’s approach doesn’t obviously provide resources for rejecting the consumption even of all animal flesh. From what we’ve said so far, roadkill—assuming the dead animal wasn’t domesticated—would remain on the table, as it were.

Someone might hope otherwise. The strict vegan might say that if animals killed on the road fall into the category of ‘liminal’ animals, then there are difficult questions to be answered about the kind of community to which they belong, and so about the kinds of norms that should govern respectful treatment of them. In short, do we treat them respectfully when we treat them as members of our own community, or when we treat them as if they are members of sovereign animal communities? The strict vegan might insist that some moral caution is appropriate, according to which we ought to offer liminal animals certain kinds of respect simply to mitigate the risk of misinterpreting our obligations to them. While eating or not eating the corpses would be consistent with respect in a sovereign animal community (insofar as such communities don’t have norms of respectful corpse treatment—more on this in a second), eating it would be the epitome of disrespect in a Western human community. Thus, not eating the corpse seems like the ‘safe’ option.

However, intuitions are going to pull in different directions, here. Consider a feral pig who lives on the outskirts of human society who’s blamelessly hit by a car, in contrast to a wholly wild boar killed by a rival deep in the backcountry. If the strict vegan’s extension of Donaldson and Kymlicka’s argument works, then it should be more objectionable to collect, butcher, cook, and consume the body of the former animal than the latter. But we can imagine environmental ethicists being highly concerned about disturbing a pristine forest while being utterly unconcerned about eating the body of a member of an invasive species, and it isn’t clear that their reaction is mistaken. So, while the ambiguity of the pig’s relationship with us may generate some special reasons to act—humans may be more responsible for the plight of feral pigs than they are for the plight of the wild boar Footnote 14 —these reasons may not be obligation-generating, as they may be outweighed by other considerations.

Finally, it’s implausible that there’s going to be a way to seriously curtail the consumption of bodies of (unambiguously) wild animals on this account, unless they themselves have social practices to which we ought to defer. However, it’s hardly obvious that this is so, even among social and highly intelligent animals: while members of some species engage in ‘mourning’ behaviour, it isn’t obvious how to understand it, especially its significance for corpse consumption. Of course, it’s possible that certain animals have modes of respectful treatment of the dead that are inconsistent with corpse-consumption, so we allow that there may be certain wild-animal bodies that are ‘off-limits’ on this account. However, those would be the exception rather than the rule: there is no reason to think that crocodiles or crickets have such social practices.

A Last-ditch Defence of Strict Veg(etari)anism?

The strict vegan might think that these considerations about community are all beside the point. Why can’t Donaldson and Kymlicka simply reject the consumption of all corpses, whatever their origin? On this view, meat-eating would run up against one of the ‘ways in which we should never treat a corpse’ (Donaldson & Kymlicka, 2011 , p. 151), regardless of societal membership.

This line is indeed available, but we think it ought to be resisted. Presumably, it’s motivated by the idea that there’s something objectively wrong with corpse consumption: not eating corpses isn’t just good ‘manners’; it’s demanded by a universal duty. This is implausible. The consumption of corpses as a part of a funerary rite is uncommon in the twenty-first century, though it was certainly practiced by some human communities into the twentieth century. Footnote 15 There’s no good reason to think that there’s anything inherently wrong with what those people did. What’s more, there’s no good reason to think that attitudes towards the consumption of human flesh couldn’t change, meaning that the consumption of the flesh of nonhuman citizens would become less problematic. Footnote 16 Indeed, perhaps cannibalism isn’t as alien to Western practices as we might assume. The Roman Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation holds that believers eat the literal body and blood of Christ when receiving the Eucharist. If there is nothing wrong with that practice, which is certainly one that occurs in Western culture, then we have no basis for denying that our eating (parts of some) dead humans is perfectly consistent with respecting said humans. Perhaps a change in our attitudes to animals will itself prompt a change in norms about how corpses are treated. The animal ethicist Bernice Bovenkerk, for example, has said that she would prefer for her body to be fed to wild animals after her death (van Dinther, 2020 ). (This is something practiced in certain non-western contexts.) We have no great quarrel with Bovenkerk’s position, and do not envisage that Donaldson and Kymlicka would, either. The point (indeed, Bovenkerk’s own point) is that the corpses of animals and humans should not be treated in some grossly different way purely because of species membership. Whether we should persist with our current norms of corpse treatment or seek to change them is a separate question—though one surely worth asking.

Second, there is something presumptuous about taking our norms of respect and treating them as sacrosanct for interactions with those outside our culture, even if we regard them as sacrosanct for those within. If you come from a culture that buries its dead, and you find the body of a person from a culture that cremates its dead, then it seems very plausible that it’s permissible for you to cremate the body, even if your culture normally condemns such behaviour. Mutatis mutandis , the same applies to bodies of those from communities (including wild animal sovereign communities) where corpse consumption is a considered a respectful or unobjectionable practice. So again, there’s no reason to think that this is something ‘we’ ought always to avoid. As a result, Donaldson and Kymlicka aren’t going to be able to rule out the consumption of all animal flesh.

There is one more strategy that the strict vegan might try to employ here. To see this possibility, it will help to disentangle two lines of reasoning that Kymlicka and Donaldson offer for their view. On the one hand, they think that the political status of animals is one that simply needs to be recognized ; it doesn’t need to be created based on a mixture of practical and moral considerations. Animal ethicists, they argue, have tended to view animals as part of an ‘expanding circles’ model of society, according to which a history of moral inclusion begins with the self, and then expands to the family, the neighbourhood, the nation, humanity, and—eventually—to an ‘interspecies cosmos’ (Kymlicka & Donaldson, 2016 , pp. 693–4). This, they say, is mistaken:

Animals are alongside us at every stage of these expanding circles. The vast majority of people in North America with companion animals insist that their companion dogs and cats are ‘members of the family’: we are born into interspecies families and learn our concept of ‘family’ in this context. ( 2016 , p. 694, emphasis in original)

We might say the same of our wider community. The process of domestication itself is one of humans and animals coming to live together, which Donaldson and Kymlicka compare to the North-Atlantic slave trade. Slavery was unjust, but the solution to that injustice cannot be the extinction of African Americans or their repatriation to Africa: people held as slaves were, effectively, made into marginalized citizens through their enslavement, and are now owed recognition as full citizens (Donaldson & Kymlicka, 2011 , p. 79). Likewise, Donaldson and Kymlicka argue, domesticated animals should be recognized as full citizens.

On the other hand, there is a more interest-oriented line of reasoning. Donaldson and Kymlicka claim that it is in the interests of some animals (particularly domesticated animals) to continue to have a close relationship with humans, though in a heavily modified form. This is complicated, because the close relationships that human communities have had with certain animals have usually been extremely harmful. They’ve involved the confinement of animals, infliction of violence upon them, the exploitation of their labour and bodies, and so forth. Given this history, it’s an open question as to the kinds of connections we should have with animals going forward. Footnote 17

Now, in a standard situation of historical abuse, we might think that it would be the decision of the victim whether a relationship continues once the abuse has been eradicated. And a recognition of animal agency is crucial for Donaldson and Kymlicka: ‘given a range of non-coercive alternatives, animals can express preferences (i.e., “vote with their feet”) about how to live their lives, and under what circumstances, if any, to engage with humans’ ( 2011 , p. 66). But this can only take us so far; at some level, humans must make a choice on animals’ behalf. This is going to include choices on the macro scale between continued co-relationships or extinction, and on the micro scale as to which ‘group’—domestic, wild, liminal—a given animal belongs.

Donaldson and Kymlicka see these two lines of reasoning—historical and interest-based—as two sides of the same coin. Together, they form the basis of their claim about the compulsory nature of our having a certain kind of relationship with domesticated animals. Crucially, for current purposes, this relationship is one that demands that domesticated animals’ bodies be treated with the kind of respect that would be afforded to the bodies of other co-citizens.

How could the strict vegan use these observations to ground a ‘zoopolitical’ case against (restricted) freeganism? First, they might observe that we live in the Anthropocene, an age defined by ubiquitous human influence on the natural world. When we recognize the complex historical relationship that we have with animals, our influence clearly doesn’t end at domesticated beings, or even at the liminal ones. We have done so much to reshape the environment in which animals live that if our influence—particularly our negative influence—is enough to generate a citizenship claim for those animals with whom we are entangled, then (nearly) all wild animals have some such claim. Second, when we consider the degree to which animals have an interest in being treated as citizens, it may not be obvious why denizenship and sovereignty would actually be preferable to citizenship. After all, that could only mean less aid in circumstances where it would be advantageous to have it, and less representation in circumstances where they would benefit from having an advocate in the decision being made. Plainly, there is much more to say here, and we don’t want to suggest that Donaldson and Kymlicka have no resources for replying to these objections. Instead, we simply want to note that the strict vegan has the resources to criticize even a restricted freeganism if she can make these objections stick.

After all, if it’s indeed the case that all animals have a claim to citizenship, then all animal bodies are protected by the ‘respect for corpses’ norm. So rather than our limited critique of freeganism, we get closer to the wide-ranging one that our hypothetical strict vegan wanted. In all likelihood, this means that Donaldson and Kymlicka’s zoopolis has turned into some kind of cosmozoopolis . This is a term we borrow from Cochrane ( 2013 ; cf. Cochrane, 2018 ), with the caveat that it isn’t clear that his cosmozoopolitics carries these consequences. Opening up society this far, however, may come with costs, such as highly implausible implications about our duties concerning the corpses of wild animals. Must all be respectfully buried? Strict veganism may be appealing, but it isn’t worth any cost whatsoever. If we would have to take on such counterintuitive consequences to salvage it, then it may not be worth salvaging.

Concluding Remarks: The Enduring Appeal of Unrestricted Freeganism

If we buy into the claims of Donaldson and Kymlicka about animals and community membership, then we have a principled argument against (certain forms of) freeganism. There are some responses that freegans could make. They could say that the wrong of disrespecting the animal’s corpse pales in comparison to the wrongs that the animal has faced at the hands of the humans who inflicted suffering upon, and killed, her. It might also pale in comparison to the disrespect that the corpse has already faced—butchery, packaging, sale, and perhaps labelling with pictures or claims relating to the happiness of farmed animals. All of this is plausible, but none of it serves to mediate the putative wrong in continuing to disrespect the corpse by eating it. We wouldn’t find similar claims plausible in the human case. At the same time, though, it strongly suggests that vegans should not be tempted to view freegans as the enemy: even if there is some disagreement, it pales in comparison to the disagreement that both have with conventional meat-eaters. Even if there are moral considerations that tell against what freegans are doing, they are much weaker than the reasons that tell against producing and distributing non-vegan foods.

A better reply open to the freegan is to say that even if eating a corpse involves disrespect, the prima facie wrong of this disrespect can be outweighed by the fact that the alternative option is paying for products made from crops harvested in ways that kill animals—precisely the argument with which we began the paper. Put bluntly, better to (in a sense) disrespect an animal already dead than contribute to the killing of more animals. If we follow Donaldson and Kymlicka, however, then we won’t regard this as a knock-down argument. The doctrine of double effect might prove useful, here: we could argue that it’s worse to disrespect an animal corpse as a means to a good end (namely, securing free food) than it is to harvest plants, even though it’s a foreseen but undesired side-effect of such harvesting that it results in the deaths of some animals (on this, see Lamey, 2019 ). One could also observe that, on relational accounts of animal ethics, like that offered by Donaldson and Kymlicka, we may have stronger duties concerning domesticated animals (such as farmed animals) than wild/liminal animals (such as those killed in the harvesting process). Footnote 18 Granted, there are a range of ways to weigh these considerations, but it’s far from clear that the freegan has the upper hand they seemed to have at the start of this exploration.

On that note, let’s return to Bruckner. Have we shown that his argument fails? Not exactly. Instead, what we’ve argued is that if we are willing to build on Donaldson and Kymlicka’s zoopolitics, then Bruckner is too quick, just as it’s too quick to generalize from his argument to cover all freegan practices. Domesticated animals, on Donaldson and Kymlicka’s picture, deserve a form of respect similar to the one we show human members of our society, and so we have reason not to collect and eat their bodies—though, of course, nothing follows from this about it being wrong to eat the bodies of wild animals, especially when doing so can alleviate harm elsewhere. But, when push comes to shove, there aren’t that many freegans picking up roadkill. The more interesting cases are the more familiar ones: dumpster-diving for a can of beef stew or eating a ham sandwich that would go to waste after a faculty meeting. The restricted freegan is committed to saying that this would be to disrespect the corpses of cows and pigs. On the other hand, restricted freeganism can permit dumpster-diving for a block of cheese, or finishing off the egg-salad sandwiches going to waste after the departmental meeting, as these cases don’t involve meat, and thus do not entail (according to the argument here presented, at least) disrespect for a corpse. But rather than a bug of the theory, we regard this as a feature. The approach offers a justification of the intuition, shared by many vegans (and, obviously, by many vegetarians), that there’s something particularly problematic about eating the flesh of animals. Footnote 19 And if neither the strict vegan nor the freegan gets exactly what she wants from the approach, there may still be a great deal to be said for it—just as there may be a great deal to be said for the more general value of political philosophy for the ethics of eating animals. Footnote 20

Strictly speaking, this is not Bruckner's argument. He is only arguing for a conditional: namely, that if we accept the ‘Don’t cause or support extensive and unnecessary harm’ principle, then we ought to eat roadkill. He himself rejects the ‘Don’t cause or support extensive and unnecessary harm’ principle, but for simplicity’s sake, we will talk as though he’s arguing for roadkill consumption per se, since most people in the animal ethics literature are inclined to accept what he denies.

We acknowledge that it may be wrong to describe these foodstuffs as wasted , because they may go on to be eaten by animals. Might the potential need of these animals work as an argument against picking up roadkill or dumpster diving? We think not. The argument would seem to generalize to any instance of humans gathering food that would otherwise be eaten by animals, which would presumably be most crops, most forage, and even most foods found in shops — given that they would be thrown out were they not sold. But perhaps the argument could serve to rebalance harms, a little. Even dumpster-diving or collecting roadkill is not harm-free, insofar as it removes opportunities that may be valuable for animals.

We acknowledge that our definition of the ‘freegan diet’ may not match precisely how the term freegan is used elsewhere, but it does usefully capture the issue we are here exploring. There is scholarly disagreement about how exactly to categorise and conceptualise freeganism, but a representative definition of the movement is Leda Cooks’s: Freegans are individuals ‘dedicated to participating as little as possible in a capitalist economy, choosing instead to forage and salvage unused or wasted consumer goods as a means of sustenance’ (Cooks, 2017 , p. 195). A crucial moment in the movement’s history was the publication of a manifesto zine, Why Freegan? , that defines freeganism as ‘essentially an anti-consumeristic ethic about eating’ (Oakes 2000 ). Interestingly, the zine does explicitly criticise veganism, but not using these Bruckner-esque arguments. Instead, it criticises veganism (which is nonetheless a ‘good first step’) because animals should not be our only concern:

I couldn’t get behind any aspect of the corporate death consumer machine so I decided to boycott everything. … Besides the concern that veganism as an ethic for eating stops short, it is also still a very high impact lifestyle. The packaging from vegan food doesn’t take up less space in the landfill or consume less resources just because the food is vegan. The whole produce and consume dynamic is still played out, but the setting is a fancy health food store instead of a supermarket. Veganism is not a threat, or a challenge to the wasteful practices of our capitalist society. (Oakes 2000 ).

We accept, then, that freegans understood in this more expansive sense will have more criticisms of vegans than we explore here. We are interested, instead, in an internal critique of veganism that may be offered from a freegan perspective.

People follow plant-based or vegan diets for a variety of reasons, but we are here interested, following Bruckner, in harm to animals.

One of us (Fischer 2020 ) argues elsewhere that if this were true, it would be evidence against the premises that seemed to support veganism in the first place. If that’s right, then the stakes in this debate may be higher than people have realized.

Few animal ethicists have written about freeganism at any length, though there has been exploration in allied disciplines. The critical animal studies scholar Lauren Corman ( 2011 ) has explored the relationships between perceptions of freegans and perceptions of raccoons, for example — and critical animal studies scholars have a natural sympathy with both.

For literature reviews, see Ahlhaus and Niesen ( 2015 ); Cochrane et al. ( 2018 ), Kymlicka and Donaldson ( 2016 ); and Milligan ( 2015 ).

For the purposes of this response to Driver, we are assuming an act utilitarian framework. So, the way to assess whether you have an obligation to adjust your behaviour based on what it signals to others is to compare the expected utility of a meat-consuming signal versus that of a plant-consuming signal. This involves calculating the probability of having an impact on the people who are ostensibly picking up the signal, discounted by the probability that their actions make a difference. For an extended discussion of the problem of causal inefficacy in animal ethics, see Budolfson ( 2019 ).

The strict vegan, though presumably not the vegetarian, might add that thinking about society membership in this way would preclude seeing the products of animals’ bodies as resources. This thought will be challenged later.

In British law, for example, there are common-law offences concerning causing a public nuisance, outraging public decency, and preventing lawful and ‘decent’ burial. One anomalous case also saw a defendant plead guilty to ‘mutilating a corpse’, but this appears to have been a ‘legal error’ (Jones, 2017 , p. 603). Statutory offences exist concerning sexual penetration, and certain forms of professional misconduct. There’s no general offence concerning private acts of corpse desecration, however. For a discussion with a proposal for such an offence to be created, see Jones ( 2017 ).

Compare Buss ( 1999 ) and Stohr ( 2018 ).

This is an interesting and important concern, though orthogonal to the present enquiry. For more, see Milburn ( 2015 ) and Milburn ( 2017 ).

For more on milk as food, and how this grounds the in-principle permissibility of consuming the milk of animals on an animal-rights account, see Milburn ( 2018 ).

For more on this, see Palmer ( 2010 ).

Including the Wari’, of the Western Amazon.

Indeed, one of us (Milburn 2016 ) has previously argued for a society in which in vitro human flesh is consumed alongside in vitro nonhuman flesh. In vitro nonhuman flesh is desirable because it can minimise harm to animals by those reluctant to give up meat, while in vitro human flesh breaks down false human/animal’ dichotomies and hierarchies.

Donaldson and Kymlicka face challenges from the ‘extinctionist’ animal-rights theorists who support eradicating domesticated animals entirely; they also face challenges from interest-based animal rights theorists who support continued relationships between humans and animals but deny that citizenship rights are in animals’ interests. No doubt, too, someone could be broadly sympathetic to Donaldson and Kymlicka’s approach, but dispute precisely what a citizenship relationship entails, dispute the line between citizen and denizen, question whether a particular animal benefits from citizenship, and so forth.

Again, see also Palmer ( 2010 ).

Note that this is not a point about killing or selling , but eating. The approach we’re exploring here avoids familiar problems about closing the gap between the ethics of production and purchasing, on the one hand, and the ethics of consuming, on the other. It also avoids contentious arguments attempting to ground the particular wrongness of meat-eating in claims about the comparative harm of meat production and egg or milk production. Indeed, the arguments explored here could be expanded into an argument specifically for vegetarianism , rather than veganism . See Milburn ( 2020 ).

The authors thank reviewers and editors at the Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics for some helpful suggestions. A previous version of this paper was presented to the University of York’s Practical Philosophy Group, and thanks are offered to the audience. Josh Milburn’s research at the University of Sheffield is funded by the British Academy (grant number PF19\100101), and he offers thanks to the British Academy, the University of Sheffield, and his mentor (Alasdair Cochrane).

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Milburn, J., Fischer, B. The Freegan Challenge to Veganism. J Agric Environ Ethics 34 , 17 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10806-021-09859-y

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• The Strongest Argument for Veganism

This collection of articles was first published on the website of Sentience Politics .

Strong arguments derive their (surprising, counter-intuitive and far-reaching) conclusions from modest premises that everybody accepts. Here’s one such premise:

(1) We shouldn’t be cruel to animals, i.e. we shouldn’t harm animals unnecessarily.

(2) The consumption of animal products harms animals.

This is quite obvious for meat, but it’s also true for milk and eggs . Animals often suffer terribly as a result of overbreeding, from dreadful conditions on farms, during transportation and in the slaughterhouse. Studies show that stunning fails regularly . The egg industry painfully gasses all male chicks right after they hatch. In short: The production of animal foods generally leads to lots of acts of violence against animals and large amounts of suffering. – Here’s a further premise:

(3) The consumption of animal products is unnecessary.

One might ask how this third premise could be uncontroversial, given that food production is a pretty necessary practice. The question, however, is not “Is food necessary?”, but “Is animal food necessary (here and now)?” – Or in other words: “Are there viable nutritional alternatives to animal products?” For one cannot plausibly argue that something is necessary in the presence of viable alternatives. So let’s take a look at the scientific facts: The Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics – the largest nutritional organisation in the world – has a position paper stating that “appropriately planned vegetarian diets, including total vegetarian or vegan diets, are healthful, nutritionally adequate, and may provide health benefits in the prevention and treatment of certain diseases.” Official health bodies around the globe support this view . And the existence of millions of healthy vegans and a growing number of vegan top athletes bears it out. Also, “appropriate planning” is very easy in today’s world – healthy and tasty vegan (or at least vegetarian) food is available everywhere.

To sum it up: If our own health depended on eating animals, then there could be an argument for violence against animals (serving nutritional purposes) being necessary. But that’s not the case. We’re not inflicting horrible suffering on animals in order to preserve our own health and thus prevent our own suffering. We’re inflicting suffering on billions of animals in order to get a little more culinary pleasure at most. And very likely not even that: In an experiment at the University of Bochum , 90% of the students didn’t notice that their “beef goulash” was vegan. The availability of vegan gourmet food is increasing rapidly too. Last but not least, it’s largely a matter of culinary socialization anyway: Nobody craves exotic foods (such as dog, dolphin or chimp meat) that don’t exist and are taboo in our society. The same would be true in a vegan society (providing plenty tasty cruelty-free meats) with regard to all meat that requires violence against any sentient animal.

The (rather trivial) premises (1) – (3) logically imply that the consumption of animal products harms animals unnecessarily and satisfies the definition of “cruelty to animals”, which leads to the conclusion:

To recap the Strongest Argument for Veganism:

(1) We shouldn’t be cruel to animals, i.e. we shouldn’t harm animals unnecessarily. (2) The consumption of animal products harms animals. (3) The consumption of animal products is unnecessary. (4) Therefore, we shouldn’t consume animal products.

At which point could one plausibly block this line of reasoning?

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Essays About Veganism: Top 5 Examples and 10 Prompts

Veganism is on the rise. See below for our great examples of essays about veganism and helpful writing prompts to get started. 

Veganism is the practice of abstaining from animal-based foods and products. The movement originated from the philosophies against using animals as commodities and for capitalist gains. Now a booming industry, veganism promises better health benefits, a more humane world for animals, and an effective solution to global warming. 

Here is our round-up of essays examples about veganism:

1. A Brief History of Veganism by Claire Suddath

2. animal testing on plant-based ingredients divides vegan community by jill ettinger, 3. as vegan activism grows, politicians aim to protect agri-business, restaurateurs by alexia renard, 4. bezos, gates back fake meat and dairy made from fungus as next big alt-protein by bob woods, 5. going vegan: can switching to a plant-based diet really save the planet by sarah marsh, 1. health pros and cons of veganism, 2. veganism vs. vegetarianism, 3. the vegan society, 4. making a vegan diet plan, 5. profitability of vegan restaurants, 6. public personalities who are vegan, 7. the rise of different vegan products, 8. is vegan better for athletes, 9. vegans in your community, 10. most popular vegan activists.

“Veganism is an extreme form of vegetarianism, and though the term was coined in 1944, the concept of flesh-avoidance can be traced back to ancient Indian and eastern Mediterranean societies.”

Suddath maps out the historical roots of veganism and the global routes of its influences. She also laid down its evolution in various countries where vegan food choices became more flexible in considering animal-derived products critical to health. 

“Along with eschewing animal products at mealtime, vegans don’t support other practices that harm animals, including animal testing. But it’s a process rampant in both the food and drug industries.”

Ettinger follows the case of two vegan-founded startups that ironically conducts animal testing to evaluate the safety of their vegan ingredients for human consumption. The essay brings to light the conflicts between the need to launch more vegan products and ensuring the safety of consumers through FDA-required animal tests. 

“Indeed, at a time when the supply of vegan products is increasing, activists sometimes fear the reduction of veganism to a depoliticized way of life that has been taken over by the food industry.”

The author reflects on a series of recent vegan and animal rights activist movements and implies disappointment over the government’s response to protect public safety rather than support the protests’ cause. The essay differentiates the many ways one promotes and fights for veganism and animal rights but emphasizes the effectiveness of collective action in shaping better societies. 

“Beyond fungus, Nature’s Fynd also is representative of the food sustainability movement, whose mission is to reduce the carbon footprint of global food systems, which generate 34% of greenhouse emissions linked to climate change.”

The essay features a company that produces alternative meat products and has the backing of Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, and Al Gore. The essay divulges the company’s investments and plans to expand in the vegan market while providing a picture of the burgeoning alternative foods sector. 

“Experts say changing the way we eat is necessary for the future of the planet but that government policy is needed alongside this. If politicians are serious about wanting dietary changes, they also need to incentivise it, scientists and writers add.”

The article conveys the insights and recommendations of environmental and agriculture experts on how to turn more individuals into vegans. The experts emphasize the need for a whole-of-society approach in shifting more diets to vegan instead of putting the onus for change on an individual. 

10 Writing Prompts on Essays About Veganism

Here is our round-up of the best prompts to create interesting essays about veganism: 

While veganism has been a top choice for those desiring to lose weight and have a healthier lifestyle, some studies have also shown its detrimental effects on health due to deficiencies in specific vitamins. First, find out what existing research and experts say about this. Then, lay down the advantages and disadvantages of going vegan, explain each, and wrap up your essay with your insights.

Differentiate veganism from vegetarianism. Tackle the foods vegans and vegetarians consume and do not consume and cite the different effects they have on your health and the environment. You may also expand this prompt to discuss the other dietary choices that spawned from veganism. 

The Vegan Society is a UK-based non-profit organization aimed at educating the public on the ways of veganism and promoting this as a way of life to as many people. Expound on its history, key organizational pillars, and recent and future campaigns. You may also broaden this prompt by listing down vegan organizations around the world. Then discuss each one’s objectives and campaigns. 

Write down the healthiest foods you recommend your readers to include in a vegan diet plan. Contrary to myths, vegan foods can be very flavorful depending on how they are cooked and prepared. You may expand this prompt to add recommendations for the most flavorful spices and sauces to take any vegan recipe a notch higher. 

Vegan restaurants were originally a niche market. But with the rise of vegan food products and several multinational firms’ foray into the market, the momentum for vegan restaurants was launched into an upward trajectory—research on how profitable vegan restaurants are against restos offering meat on the menu. You may also recommend innovative business strategies for a starting vegan restaurant to thrive and stay competitive in the market. 

From J.Lo to Bill Gates, there is an increasing number of famous personalities who are riding the vegan trend with good reason. So first, list a few celebrities, influencers, and public figures who are known advocates of veganism. Then, research and write about stories that compelled them to change their dietary preference.

The market for vegan-based non-food products is rising, from makeup to leather bags and clothes. First, create a list of vegan brands that are growing in popularity. Then, research the materials they use and the processes they employ to preserve the vegan principles. This may prompt may also turn into a list of the best gift ideas for vegans.

Many believe that a high-protein diet is a must for athletes. However, several athletes have dispelled the myth that vegan diets lack the protein levels for rigorous training and demanding competition. First, delve deeper into the vegan foods that serve as meat alternatives regarding protein intake. Then, cite other health benefits a vegan diet can offer to athletes. You may also add research on what vegan athletes say about how a vegan diet gives them energy. 

Interview people in your community who are vegan. Write about how they made the decision and how they transitioned to this lifestyle. What were the initial challenges in their journey, and how did they overcome these? Also, ask them for tips they would recommend to those who are struggling to uphold their veganism.

Make a list of the most popular vegan activists. You may narrow your list to personalities in digital media who are speaking loud and proud about their lifestyle choice and trying to inspire others to convert. Narrate the ways they have made and are making an impact in their communities. 

To enhance your essay, read our guide explaining what is persuasive writing . 

If you’d like to learn more, check out our guide on how to write an argumentative essay .

Yna Lim is a communications specialist currently focused on policy advocacy. In her eight years of writing, she has been exposed to a variety of topics, including cryptocurrency, web hosting, agriculture, marketing, intellectual property, data privacy and international trade. A former journalist in one of the top business papers in the Philippines, Yna is currently pursuing her master's degree in economics and business.

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Against Veganism

Chris belshaw makes the case for rearing animals for their meat and produce..

Vegans want us to think carefully about what we eat. Certainly the bad practices rife in intensive farming generate powerful arguments against meat, dairy, eggs. But it may be harder to build a case against what might be called ‘humane’ farming (though some think there is no such thing). Pain can be reduced or eliminated in the better farming practices. So then the emphasis concerns killing. But is it really clear that we absolutely ought not to kill and then eat animals? There are three main arguments against this: we’re told that the production and consumption of meat is bad for us, bad for the environment, and bad for the animals who get eaten. Here I’ll be interested in the third claim.

Before getting into the argument, there’s some shorthand that needs explaining. I’m going to say that death isn’t bad for animals. Yet this needs clarifying. It certainly is bad for cows to be made into burgers, just as it’s bad for trees to be turned into pencils. But our concern will be with things that are bad in a way that matters , or which give us reasons against that thing. I’m also going to discuss what is permitted, required, or forbidden. Again, this is shorthand. There will usually be some special circumstances in which there might be good reason to do what is in general forbidden; or reasons not to do what is in general permitted, or even required. Even most vegans will allow meat-eating if that is the only way a person can keep themselves, or their family, alive. My concern will be with what is forbidden in general , or forbidden, other things being equal .

Arguments Permitting Animal Killing

Here are three arguments that killing and eating animals is permissible. The first has affinities with anti-natalism , some versions of which say how we shouldn’t start lives that will involve suffering. Even the best lives are temporary and involve pain and grief, so the anti-natalist says that we shouldn’t even have babies. Apply this logic to animals and we shouldn’t breed them. Can we extend that argument to say that we should end the lives of animals already living, on farms or in the wild? There might be good reason to do so, since pain is certainly bad for them, and in their case pain is uncompensated by pleasure, even when it is outweighed by it. For no animal thinks, as we might think, that the present pain – it’s hungry, or caught in a trap, or distressed at losing its young – will soon be over. So, the argument goes, given the inevitability of pain, it’s better for animals overall if their lives are ended. But if we’ve decided now to kill them, it seems there’s no reason then not to eat them, especially if that might alleviate hunger in our own lives.

Not many people will be impressed with this argument. They may prefer, as do I, a second argument, surely less counter-intuitive, which says that even if animals can have overall good lives, such that the pleasure outweighs and compensates for the pain, it is nevertheless not bad for them painlessly to die. Give them a good life; end it with a good, clean death; and then feel free to eat them. But how can I claim that their death isn’t bad? Because, unlike us, animals lack a consciously-formulated desire for survival. In this sense, they don’t want to live on. So it’s not bad that they die prematurely. Maybe we should concede that self-conscious animals such as whales, elephants, chimps, even dogs, are different here. But these are not the animals we eat.

Perhaps, other things equal, we should ensure that animal don’t die prematurely, but rather live on and die of old age. Yet a third argument insists that other things aren’t equal, and so eating meat is permitted. Consider just humane farming, and the animals alive right now. Our options are: continue with business as usual; kill them all now; care for them into their old age and death by natural causes; or finally, set them all free. Given that these animals don’t have a bad life, there is no reason to kill them now. What about the third option, caring for the animals until their natural deaths in old age? It may be easy enough for animal rights activists to steal a new-born lamb and give it a life of bliss in someone’s garden, but it’s less easy to apply this ideal on a global, industrial scale. We can’t choose to breed tens of billions of animals, then give all of them life-time care. So even if we might occasionally act to keep a farm animal from death, we can’t make this into a rule. What then about just setting them free? This last would be the worst option for most farm animals. Domesticated animals generally can’t look after themselves in the wild – especially when the wild is littered with towns and motorways. If this is what animal liberation is about, so much the pity.

What we should think about well-tended farm animals, then, is that even if their lives aren’t the best possible, they are nevertheless worth living, and generally the best lives available for them. A short, good life with a pain-free death; or no life at all. Which would you prefer?

In Kazuo Ishiguro’s 2005 novel Never Let Me Go there are two kinds of people. Most have lives more or less like ours, but some are clones, created and raised as a source of replacement organs. The clones could live into their eighties or nineties or beyond, as do the others, but instead they are pressured to ‘donate’ organs in early adulthood, and are ‘completed’ at the latest by their early thirties. Horrible? It seems so. But although a melancholy air hangs over their lives, there’s no suggestion that they think it would have been better if they’d never been born. And at the end of the novel, the main character suggests that on reflection their lives are not very different from those of other people. Shorter, yes; but death is pretty much the same for all of us – it’s usually bad that it happens, and it usually happens too soon.

I can’t decide whether we’re supposed to think there’s self-deception here, and that these lives, even if worth living, are in fact much worse than ours. For the clones are aware that death is coming sooner for them than it will for most of the people they see around them. They can think about, imagine, regret the longer life they’ll never have. Melancholy is the least we might expect.

But it’s not at all like this for animals. The sheep on the farms around here appear completely unaware that other animals – the dogs and cats, perhaps the horses – have long and cossetted lives. That they fare less well is no concern to them. So far as we can tell, they don’t think about it at all.

Arguments Requiring Animal Rearing

If killing and eating animals is in some circumstances permissible , and you want to eat meat, then go ahead. But three more ambitious arguments have it that this killing and eating of animals is morally required . The first of these is in certain respects a bad argument. The two that follow are better.

According to the so-called ‘Logic of the Larder’, we actually benefit animals – do them a favour – by bringing them into existence, even if for a short life. As Leslie Stephen put it, no one has more interest in bacon than the pigs who provide it ( Social Rights and Duties , 1896).

Sophistry? Well, there are things wrong here, but not as much as may seem. Any actual pig, it will be said, is harmed rather than benefited by being killed, brined, and sliced. But if it’s good for non-actual pigs to be made actual – to be brought into existence – and this happens only if we’re going eventually to eat them, then indeed our appetites are also working in their favour.

On this view, a short life really is better than no life at all. Yet even if we allow that good lives should be continued, we can still deny that such lives should be started. There’s nothing speciesist about this. Many of us feel more secure with the claim that we should make existing people happy, than that we should bring new people – similarly happy – into existence.

Yet it still might be good – but this time good for us – if certain animals are deliberately brought into existence, quite apart from whether we plan to eat them or not. We regret the threat of extinction that hangs over many rare breeds – Saddleback pigs, Ryeland sheep, Chillingham cattle, to name only three – and would prefer to keep them in existence. We acknowledge our connectedness to the past this way, and preserving these breeds through humane farming allows this connectedness to continue into the future.

A third argument, somewhat similar, focuses on landscape and environment. It reflects a simple but important aesthetic concern. The countryside we like, feel at home in, and want to explore, is very much shaped by farmers and their animals, and has been so for centuries. Remove the animals, and much of what we value in the countryside disappears. There is also a future-facing practical concern to take into account. It’s been recently rediscovered that in various ways the animals we rear can stimulate the regrowth of ancient woodland, increase biodiversity, help mend broken habitats. So these animals also have a more straightforward instrumental value.

This is all presently achieved by farm-rearing animals for meat and produce. Are there vegan-friendly routes to the same ends? We could keep a few examples of rare breeds in animal sanctuaries, charging for admission; and we could, at some cost, manage the landscape so as to preserve its traditional appearance, even without the help of animals. But those objections often raised against zoos and theme parks also apply here. Divorced from their long-standing rationale – and that involves, of course, most aspects of farming – these animals, and these environs, lose in meaning and value.

The Vegan Counter-Attack

Finally, I’ll consider three counter-arguments to the effect that we should believe that eating animals is wrong. There’s no spoiler in my saying now that these arguments fail.

I’ve focused on the alleged badness of death, and assumed that we can eliminate the anxiety, distress, and pain in killing animals. But, it is objected, this is wishful thinking. It’s inevitable that animals will in some ways suffer as they die.

Suppose I concede this. What follows? Is this intended as an across the board reason to keep animals out of existence? Then we’re back to the anti-natalist argument I mentioned earlier, and whose conclusion I said most people will surely view as extreme – that it is better for many farm animals to never have lived. It’s also hard to see how the argument can target just farm animals, as their lives in general, and their deaths in particular, are usually less painful than those of equivalent animals living in the wild.

There are also concerns about a slippery slope. People may say, give the all-clear to free-range chickens, and it’s just a small step to factory-farmed birds, lark pie, and roast albatross. A similar argument suggests that if voluntary euthanasia is permitted, we’ll soon be back with death camps. It’s hard to believe these arguments are ever made sincerely, and are not just rhetorical devices wheeled out to support foregone conclusions. But since they are so hopelessly pessimistic about human nature, such arguments are never made well.

Closely connected is what I’ll call the ‘splitting hairs’ argument. Even allowing that we won’t descend into murder and mayhem, still, ethical meat-eating demands that we busy ourselves with some rather fine distinctions. Mightn’t we instead agree with Peter Singer when he says, “Going vegan is a simpler choice that sets a clearcut example for others to follow”? However there are also suspects practices in tea and coffee production; similarly with avocado and soy; and notoriously so in clothing manufacture. No one suggests that we should therefore go about thirsty, hungry, and naked. My point though is that the requisite responses are not ones we all need to make personally. Surely governments and regulatory authorities can and should do much of the spade work here, as they ought to do with the other industries, determining which animal husbandry procedures should be permitted, which proscribed, and enforcing these decisions by demanding frequent and effective inspections, insisting on clear and useful labelling, and so on. Then, as individuals, we can more easily avoid getting things hopelessly wrong, while still having some choice about what to eat.

Some will say we shouldn’t eat meat whatever the cause of the animal’s death, because in doing so we show a lack of respect. But how is this disrespectful? More detail is needed here. If the suggestion is that there’s fault in eating something just because it was once alive, then it seems we should give up our fruit and vegetables also. Perhaps then synthetic food is the future?

Conclusions

I’ve said there’s no reason, for their sake, to bring animals or indeed people into existence. Nor is there good reason to keep animals (though often there is reason to keep people) in existence. But if we do bring animals into existence, there are good reasons to give them a good life.

The second of these claims is the most controversial. So suppose it’s false, and that there are reasons to keep animals in existence. Farming, I say, is still permitted. It’s not ideal for the animals, but it’s not bad for them either; as indeed it’s not bad for people to have a good but short life.

So I’m against veganism as an absolute principle. But is there nothing, other than the concessions I made at the beginning, to be said for it?

Think about pacifism. We might agree that total and implacable opposition to war in all its forms offered an important and necessary corrective to attitudes prevailing almost everywhere right up to the twentieth century, even while thinking that the complexity of our imperfect world calls for a more nuanced position. It’s the same with veganism. There’s much that needed to be, and has been, learned. All of us who care about animals are indebted to the vegan flag-flyers, even if we disagree with them.

Those who care about food are also indebted to them, for another benefit of veganism is its encouraging the development of good alternatives to a meat-based diet. No longer are the options simply the pretentious but dreary omelette aux fines herbes , or the less pretentious but equally dreary nut roast.

© Dr Chris Belshaw 2021

Chris Belshaw is an honorary Fellow in Philosophy at both the Open University and the University of York.

Question of the Month

Do you think you can do better than these arguments, or counter them? You still may have time to submit an answer to ‘Question of the Month’ for Issue 147. The question is: Can Eating Meat Be Justified? Please justify it, or reveal it as unjustified, in less than 400 words. The prize is a semi-random book from our book mountain. Subject lines should be marked ‘Question of the Month’, and must be received by 18th October 2021. If you want a chance of getting a book, please include your physical address.

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The 60 Most Common Arguments Against Veganism [Debunked]

Updated on November 8, 2023 Reviewed and fact-checked Found a mistake? Let us know!

As a vegan, you’ll be hit with various questions and criticisms from non-vegans in your life. Some of these questions will be asked sincerely. Other will be said defensively. Some may even be meant to attack your diet and lifestyle choices.

This post shares my personal answers to 60 common questions, objections, and critiques you’re likely to hear as a vegan. They’re not necessarily the “correct” answers. You may disagree with some of my responses. If you do, you may want to think about your own answers or even write them out.

Many of my answers make use of utilitarian ethics , which is explained more in Peter Singer’s book Animal Liberation . But I don’t consistently apply that ethical theory to the exclusion of others.

My view of ethics is also a bit more lax and relativistic compared to many ethical vegans. So I am less aggressive in some of my answers than others would be.

Adjust your answers to your own style, personal beliefs, and values. At the very least, you can use the list of questions and objections to brainstorm what your own answers might be!

Table of Contents

• “Where do you get your protein?”
• “Don’t you need fish for omega-3 fats?”
• “You can’t get vitamin B12 from plants.”
• “You can’t get enough iron from plants.”
• “You can’t get enough calcium without milk.”
• “Soy products aren’t healthy.”
• “Veganism relies on monoculture farming of grains—that’s not sustainable.”
• “Veganism requires supplements. That proves it’s not healthy.”
• “Vegans can’t gain weight/muscle to excel in sports like football.”
• “Vegan diets have too many carbs.”
• “Vegan diets have too many ‘anti-nutrients’ from grains and legumes.”
• “My body craves animal products because I need the nutrition in them.”
• “Veganism is a type of consumerism—it reinforces capitalism.”
• “Being vegan is impossible if you live in a food desert.”
• “You can’t be 100% vegan. All medications are tested on animals. Even roads contain animals.”
• “Humans are omnivores. Our bodies are made to eat meat. We have canine teeth.”
• “Eating meat is a personal choice.”
• “Eating meat is natural.”
• “Humans are at the top of the food chain.”
• “It’s the circle of life.”
• “Eating meat is what helped humans evolve to have such big brains.”
• “Plants feel pain, too.”
• “Even plant farming causes the deaths of field mice and insects.”
• “Farm animals only exist because we bred them for food—so they don’t have rights or lives without us.”
• “If everyone went vegan, what would happen to all the farm animals already alive?”
• “It hurts cows not to milk them. Cows like being milked.”
• “We are smarter and naturally superior to animals.”
• “Farm animals would never survive in the wild—so why should they have rights?”
• “If you eat every part of the animal, that is respectful and ethical.”
• “Animals would gladly eat you—so why not eat them?”
• “I only eat humanely slaughtered and humanely farmed animal products.”
• “Animals cannot enter into ethical or moral contracts with us.”
• “The animals are already dead. Why not eat the meat, so it doesn’t go to waste?”
• “We shouldn’t focus on animal rights until all human rights issues are handled.”
• “Medical conditions don’t allow everyone to be vegan.”
• “Only privileged people can afford vegan food. Veganism is expensive.”
• “The vegan community is just full of white people.”
• “The world will never be fully vegan.”
• “You buy other things that are made with unethical labor, like clothes from sweatshops.”
• “Veganism is boring—the food lacks taste and variety.”
• “There is no such thing as objective moral truth.”
• “Hitler was vegetarian.”
• “Sustainable vegan farming isn’t possible—animal manure is needed to fertilize plants.”
• “If everyone went vegan, so many people would lose their jobs.”
• “Vegans are preachy and pretentious.”
• “Meat tastes good.”
• “God put animals on earth to be food for us.”
• “If it’s wrong for humans to own and use animals, why do vegans have pets?”
• “So, do you force your cat or dog to be vegan, too?”
• “There has never been a vegan civilization in human history.”
• “Don’t force your beliefs on me.”
• “I don’t have enough time to be vegan.”
• “Meat and animal products are part of my culture.”
• “There’s no ethical consumption under capitalism.”
• “What if you were on a desert island or had to survive in the wild?”
• “What about mushrooms, yeast, and bacteria? They’re alive, too.”
• “Animals do not suffer when they’re slaughtered.”
• “Aren’t you projecting human desires and suffering onto other animals?”
• “I read a news story about a nutritionally deficient vegan baby…”
• “PETA is an offensive, racist, sexist organization.”

1. “Where do you get your protein?”

I get my protein from plants. Just like elephants and gorillas do. There are plenty of plant foods that have a good amount of protein: Beans, peas, lentils, peanut butter, quinoa, and many other veggies, nuts, seeds, and grains.

There are also plenty of meat substitutes and soy foods even higher in protein: Tofu, tempeh, textured vegetable protein (TVP), seitan, Beyond Meat, the Impossible Burger, Tofurkey, and all the other “mock meats.”

There are also vegan protein powders. Pea protein specifically is a complete protein with similar muscle-building effectiveness as whey. And there are many other vegan “protein blends” that are also complete proteins.

Most Americans eat far above the Recommended Daily Allowance (RDA) for protein, while a vegan diet naturally falls closer to the RDA.

And even if you want to eat a lot of protein as an athlete or bodybuilder, you can do it on a well-planned vegan diet using the high-protein foods above.

2. “Don’t you need fish for omega-3 fats?”

Fish are not the only source of omega-3s. There are also plant sources, such as flaxseed, chia seed, hemp seeds, and walnuts.

Even when looking at the specific kind of omega-3s found in fish—DHA and EPA—those can be obtained from a vegan source, too.

Many companies now make vegan omega-3 supplements that contain DHA and EPA sourced from algae (“algal oil”). This is the original source that fish get their omega-3s from.

So another benefit of choosing vegan omega-3s from algae is that you’re getting it straight from the original source (algae), without the mercury or PCBs often found in fish.

3. “You can’t get vitamin B12 from plants.”

That’s okay—vegans can easily, affordably, and safely get vitamin B12 from supplements. B12 supplements have been shown to be effective, and there’s no need to eat animal products for B12.

All vitamin B12 is actually made by bacteria , which is found in soil. In the past, humans were able to get more B12 from plants, but due to sanitation practices and modern industrial farming today, our plant foods don’t provide as much contact with this B12-producing bacteria anymore.

The way animals are raised on factory farms, they must be given B12 supplements, too. That’s because their plant-based feed doesn’t contain much B12 anymore, either.

So even when you eat animal products for B12 today, the original source of the B12 is typically a supplement given to the animals. It’s not actually “made” by the animals or anything.

Side Note: This is the best free video introduction I’ve found on adopting a plant-based diet— the right way . You’ll learn how to lower your risk of cancer, heart disease, type-2 diabetes, Alzheimer’s, and obesity—all with plants. Watch the free Masterclass here .

4. “You can’t get enough iron from plants.”

There are plenty of high-iron plant foods, from beans and lentils to pumpkin seeds, cashews, tofu, chia seeds, and quinoa.

In addition, if you eat those foods along with foods high in vitamin C, then the iron absorption is boosted even further. Getting enough iron is not a problem on a well-planned vegan diet.

Read more on vegans and iron here .

5. “You can’t get enough calcium without milk.”

Most plant-based milks like soy milk and almond milk are now fortified with the same amount of calcium as in cow’s milk. So if you just replace cow’s milk with plant milk, you’ll typically get the same amount of calcium.

It’s also possible to get enough calcium from low-oxalate dark leafy greens like kale, as well as other plant foods, fortified foods, or supplements. Milk is not necessary by any means.

Read more on vegans and calcium here .

6. “Soy products aren’t healthy.”

Most credible sources, including Healthline.com and the Harvard Health Letter , state that soy foods are either neutral or beneficial—especially when eaten in less-processed forms like tofu, tempeh, and unsweetened soy milk.

However, there are conflicting studies and theories about soy, for sure. Many sources argue that you should limit isolated soy protein , like what’s found in many soy-based mock meats.

Luckily, a vegan diet does not require soy—so you can avoid soy as a vegan if you choose.

There are plenty of vegan protein sources besides soy, including beans, peas, lentils, seitan (wheat meat), nutritional yeast, peanut butter, hemp seeds, and more.

You can also buy vegan protein powders or protein bars made from pea protein or others. Many of the most popular “mock meats” today, like Beyond Meat, are made with pea protein— not soy .

7. “Veganism relies on monoculture farming of grains—that’s not sustainable.”

First, there are many ways to eat vegan—and not all of them include grains or soy. There are ways to eat low-carb vegan, vegan keto , or other grain-free vegan diets if you wish.

Second, animal agriculture also typically relies on monoculture farming. Most animals are grain-fed, and it takes a whole lot of grain to raise a cow to the point of slaughter. The leading driver of deforestation in the Amazon Rainforest is the cattle industry. ( source )

So if you’re opposed to monoculture farming, you should also be opposed to eating the meat or other products of grain-fed livestock.

Third, there are forms of vegan farming out there that are more focused on sustainability. Look up “veganic” farming and “vegan permaculture” for two different approaches to sustainable food production without using animal products at any point in the process.

8. “Veganism requires supplements. That proves it’s not healthy.”

When it comes to vitamin B12—the most important supplement for vegans—there’s an interesting fact about that, which most people don’t know. First, vitamin B12 is actually made by bacteria—not plants or animals.

Humans used to get B12 from eating plants and drinking water from streams, because there was plenty of B12-producing bacteria in our soils.

But due to today’s industrial farming methods and sanitation practices, we no longer get much B12 through plants or water. So the main food source of B12 today is animal products.

However, what most people don’t know is that the B12 in most animal products actually got there because animals on farms are fed B12 supplements. That’s because the grains they’re fed don’t naturally contain much B12 anymore.

So even if you get your B12 from animal products, it’s most likely coming from a supplement originally anyway. And that’s necessary due to today’s farming and sanitation practices.

And it’s not totally unwarranted. Many physicians recommend that everyone take a vitamin D supplement, for example—because our modern lifestyles simply don’t include as much sunlight as our ancestors’.

Almost 20 million people in the U.S. take omega-3 supplements, too—because most of Western society has an imbalanced omega-3 to omega-6 ratio… not just vegans.

9. “Vegans can’t gain weight/muscle to excel in sports like football.”

Tell that to the “ 300-Pound Vegan ,” former NFL lineman David Carter.

Or tell it to a good bunch of the Tennessee Titans defensive line. As they explain in the documentary The Game Changers , something like a dozen players on the TItans went plant-based in 2018. They partially attributed their playoff run to the diet change.

Or tell it to vegan strongman Patrick Baboumian , who was declared “Strongest Man of Germany” in 2011.

There are plenty examples of people gaining muscle, size, and strength on a vegan diet. It takes some extra focus on protein and calories, but it can be done. And there are benefits as far as quicker athletic recovery, as well.

Even one of the strongest and most powerful animals in nature— the gorilla—eats a diet that is 97% plant-based or more (the exact percentage depends on the subspecies of gorilla).

10. “Vegan diets have too many carbs.”

There are a lot of misconceptions around “carbs.” They’re often associated with refined sugar and processed foods like bread, pasta, chips, pastries, and other low-nutrient foods. But carbs from whole foods like vegetables, fruit, whole grains, and beans are generally very healthy.

For most people today, their problem is not “too many carbs,” but too many processed foods of all kinds, in combination with too much saturated fat from animal foods.

That said, if you want to eat a low-carb diet for a specific reason, you can do that as a vegan. Simply focus on vegetables, nuts, seeds, avocados, oils, and mock meats as your major calorie sources. You can even be vegan keto if you choose.

11. “Vegan diets have too many ‘anti-nutrients’ from grains and legumes.”

This has become a more common argument against veganism in recent years. People warn of the lectins and other “anti-nutrients” in beans, grains, and other plant foods.

Based on the best science I’ve seen, these concerns are overblown. Lectins are mostly destroyed by soaking and cooking. Yes, if you eat raw, uncooked, dry beans, you would have an upset stomach and digestive problems to say the least.

But beans must be soaked and cooked for many hours. When you buy canned beans, they’re already cooked. Studies have shown that lectin activity is virtually non-existent after cooking. ( source )

Also, as it happens, these “high-lectin foods” are typically high in fiber, antioxidants, and other protective nutrients. So there seems to be very little actual cause for concern with lectins.

Population studies have also shown that people eating lots of whole grains and beans have better health and longevity. If the lectins in these foods were a serious health concern, we wouldn’t see this.

No major health organization promotes the dietary restriction of lectins. In fact, restricting lectin-containing foods goes against the advice of the American Heart Association, American Cancer Society, and American Diabetes Association. ( source )

12. “My body craves animal products because I need the nutrition in them.”

Cravings are rarely based on the nutrition you need to be healthy. Millions of people routinely crave cigarettes, drugs, ice cream, pizza, and chocolate cake.

So what explains cravings for animal foods? Our bodies evolved for survival in an environment where food was scarce. This has resulted in a human psychology that is very easy to tempt with high-calorie foods.

Meat and animal products are rich sources of calories and fat that would’ve been very beneficial to us in the evolutionary environments we evolved in.

But today, for the vast majority of us, we don’t need extra calories. What we actually need is more micronutrients—vitamins, minerals, antioxidants—and we need more water and fiber. That is, we actually need more colorful, healthy, whole plant foods. Not meat and cheese.

Luckily, if you stop eating animal products for a while, you will generally start to crave them less. Your taste buds will adapt and be able to appreciate vegetables, fruits, and other more subtle tastes again.

13. “Veganism is a type of consumerism—it reinforces capitalism.”

First, veganism isn’t just a consumer activity to the most committed, ethical vegans. It often involves other forms of action for animals and the earth, too—and many vegans are involved in other activist movements.

Second, consumer boycotts don’t inherently “reinforce capitalism.” Many people who oppose capitalism use boycotts as a tool to achieve their ends. Take the Palestinian movement for “Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions” (BDS) , which is supported by many socialists and anarchists.

Boycotts do not inherently “support” capitalism—they just use capitalism and market forces to achieve a specific effect in the world.

Third, even if veganism did “reinforce capitalism,” which is a stretch… once could argue that that’s okay, as it is supporting a more ethical form of capitalism. [Only add this point if you’re interested in trying to defend capitalism. Because it will probably lead to a broader debate about it!]

14. “Being vegan is impossible if you live in a food desert.”

Being vegan may be harder in a food desert, as any kind of specific diet might be. Saying it’s “impossible” is not precise, though, and it’s potentially condescending to people who live in food deserts and take great care to select the best food options from what they have access to.

Also, if it is harder to be vegan in a food desert, that’s not really a strike against veganism. That’s more of a strike against the food distribution systems in our society.

It may also be a strike against capitalism because it’s an example of free markets failing to meet the needs of people in those areas. But you can be vegan and also care about these other food justice issues.

There are vegan organizations like the Food Empowerment Project that are actively involved in food justice issues besides veganism itself, including programs to improve healthy food access in food deserts.

15. “You can’t be 100% vegan. All medications are tested on animals. Even roads contain animals.”

This statement assumes that “100% vegan” means “not ever consuming or using any animal by-products whatsoever .” But the most widely accepted definitions of “vegan” don’t suggest such perfection.

Here’s a quote from the Vegan Society’s definition of “vegan” :

“Veganism is a way of living which seeks to exclude, as far as is possible and practicable, all forms of exploitation of, and cruelty to, animals for food, clothing or any other purpose.”

This definition contains an acknowledgment that veganism is about doing what’s “possible and practicable.” For most vegans, yes, you’ll need to use some products that contain animal by-products or were tested on animals. That’s just a fact of the world we live in.

But it still makes a difference to mostly avoid animal products. It still makes a difference to seek out non-animal alternatives when possible.

Being vegan is not about being perfect—it’s about making the impact we can each make.

16. “Humans are omnivores. Our bodies are made to eat meat. We have canine teeth.”

Many of our anatomical features are actually closer to those of herbivores than omnivores:

• Our intestines are long like an herbivore’s.
• Our canine teeth are tiny compared to a true omnivore like a dog. (And there are other herbivores with much bigger canine teeth than ours—like gorillas and male musk deer.)
• We lack claws.
• We drink water like herbivores—sipping, not lapping.
• Uncooked meat is disgusting to us.
• Killing an animal is disturbing and uncomfortable for most of us.
• Our closest animal relatives are chimps and bonobos, both of which eat a diet of primarily fruit. Meat is less than 2% of the chimpanzee diet.
• Our color vision, sense of smell, and hands are perfect for finding and grabbing fruit.
• After years of eating meat and saturated fat, our bodies tend to develop atherosclerosis. That doesn’t happen to true omnivores like dogs—but it does happen to herbivores like rabbits that are fed meat.

So there’s a good deal of evidence that we’re closer to herbivores than actually being full-on omnivores. That said, even if you want to say we’re omnivores since we can eat meat… that doesn’t mean we should eat meat. It just means we can .

So eating meat is an option we have, physiologically. But we also have the option to be vegetarian or vegan. And this leaves us with a responsibility to choose our diet based on our values.

For more about the food that humans are meant to eat, refer to this post.

17. “Eating meat is a personal choice.”

You can call it a personal choice, but the fact is that it has an impact on other people and especially on other animals besides yourself.

If it’s a personal choice, then it is a personal choice that has the power to hurt or help thousands of animals over the course of your life, and to make life better or worse for future generations on this planet.

In my opinion, it is a choice worth making carefully, and in an informed, values-driven way.

18. “Eating meat is natural.”

This is the naturalistic fallacy . Just because something is natural, that doesn’t mean it is good. There are many aggressive, selfish things we may get impulses to do—but we understand they are harmful, so we don’t do them.

19. “Humans are at the top of the food chain.”

First, it’s actually debated whether humans are at the “top of the food chain.” Academics have debated whether humans count as “apex predators” or not, and it’s far from agreed upon.

Just think about it: There are many incidents where humans are prey for larger predators like bears or sharks. And we don’t routinely eat these big predators, either. We mostly kill animals from lower “trophic levels.” So it’s a stretch to say we’re at the “top.”

If you want to say humans are at the “top” because we could kill any animal… Remember we’re only capable of that because of tools like guns. And most humans are not capable of actually building a gun. Many of us don’t even understand how guns work.

So it’s only a small number of humans who have invented the tools that allow us to kill bigger animals… and it’s only a small number of humans who actually hunt or raise animals today.

Also—this is a bit of a circular argument. How do you know that human beings are at the “top” of the food chain? Because we can kill other animals? And you’re saying that’s also the reason we should kill other animals? Because we can?

Lastly, this is another example of the naturalistic fallacy. Just because something is natural doesn’t mean it is good.

20. “It’s the circle of life.”

Our modern industrial food system is very far from being a “circle of life.” Animals on factory farms typically only live a small fraction of their normal life span . They are typically kept indoors for their entire lives. They’re fed loads of antibiotics.

Their bodies are often mutilated with practiced like tail-docking (pigs), debeaking (chickens), and castration without pain killers. It’s the least natural, least “cyclical” thing you could imagine.

Instead of living naturally off the land and animals, what’s happening today is pure exploitation : Everything is optimized toward producing the most meat, dairy, and eggs at the lowest cost possible.

Also, a “circle” would suggest that our own dead bodies will become nutrition for the soil, plants, and other animals in turn. But animals in our industrial food system are fed grains like corn and soy, which are made using monoculture farming and typically many pesticides and even GMOs.

Meanwhile most of us dead humans will be planted in coffins, away in specific graveyards. To call this the “circle of life” just seems really naive.

21. “Eating meat is what helped humans evolve to have such big brains.”

Eating meat may have helped early humans survive and spread across the globe—as did the consumption of starches like hard tubers, which also increased with stone tool usage.

But that doesn’t mean we should keep eating meat.

The truth is that today, we have large brains because we now have those instructions in our DNA. And your brain does not shrink if you stop eating meat!

On the contrary, a diet full of fruits, vegetables, legumes, and whole grains can help optimize brain function and promote brain health, even reducing the risk of Alzheimer’s. ( source )

22. “Plants feel pain, too.”

I don’t actually buy that. There are ways to describe plant “behavior” that make it sound like plants experience pain… but plants do not have nerves or a central nervous system. So there is no known way they’d “feel” anything.

Also, most plants are sessile —rooted in one place. This suggests there would be no evolutionary purpose for sensations of pain. Pain in animals helps motivate us to run away from the painful stimuli. But plants can’t run away—so why would they feel pain?

The truth is that plants have entirely different ways of being than us.

There is no reason to believe that plants have consciousness, that they experience sensations of pain, or that such sensations are ethically relevant to which foods we eat.

Also, this is a completely separate point, but if you wanted to minimize the amount of plants you kill, a vegan diet would still be better than a diet including animal products.

This is because many more plants are killed in order to feed and sustain livestock on farms than are killed to actually feed humans directly. So if you want fewer plants to die, eating meat will not help!

Read more about how vegans justify killing plants here .

23. “Even plant farming causes the deaths of field mice and insects.”

This is similar to the argument that it’s impossible to be “100% vegan.” And my response, again, is that you don’t need to be perfect to have a massive positive impact.

Also—causing some unintentional deaths while doing what we need to do to survive (harvesting plants), is not the same as needlessly slaughtering animals.

We will probably always cause some harm to small creatures with our food production methods, even if we ate food solely from little gardens. But a vegan diet is comparatively less violent, less harmful, and more sustainable than other diets.

It’s most efficient for humans to eat plants directly, rather than feeding those plants to an animal and eating the animal. Less land, fuel, and water are needed when we eat plants directly.

24. “Farm animals only exist because we bred them for food—so they don’t have rights or lives without us.”

Regardless of how we’ve bred and raised farm animals, they fact now is that they exist and they suffer.

Imagine if we “bred” a new kind of human to become bigger and more docile, as we’ve done to farm animals. That wouldn’t give us the right to enslave or kill these new kinds of humans.

Animals are “subjects of a life.” They have preferences about what happens to them. They experience pain, and they’d prefer to avoid it. This means that how we treat them is ethically relevant.

It doesn’t matter that we gave them their life… Once they have that life and are capable of suffering, their suffering is ethically relevant.

25. “If everyone went vegan, what would happen to all the farm animals already alive?”

First, it’s not realistic that everyone will go vegan overnight. A much more likely scenario is that we would gradually become more and more plant-based, and meat could be phased out over time.

Second, if we ever decided to be vegan as a whole society, there would likely be support for allowing the remaining farm animals to live out their lives at animal sanctuaries.

These types of animal sanctuaries already exist, and they would find much more financial support in this hypothetical future where everyone is vegan.

26. “It hurts cows not to milk them. Cows like being milked.”

Yes, I’ve been told that cows seem to enjoy being milked when their udders are full of milk.

But that is different from a cow actually wanting to be confined indoors, artificially impregnated, separated from her calf, milked for 10 months, then artificially impregnated again, separated from her calf again, milked for 10 more months, then one more cycle of this—then killed around age 3 (even though their natural life span is 20 years).

So even if cows “like being milked,” that doesn’t mean they like being used as dairy cows overall.

The dairy industry is also intimately connected to the veal industry. The baby calves killed for veal are generally male calves from the dairy industry.

The dairy industry also emits a lot of methane, a greenhouse gas that contribute to climate change. Animal agriculture contributes 6-7% of the US’s total greenhouse gas emissions every year. 20% of that emission is methane from dairy cows (mainly from cow burps, actually).

So you have to look at the broader context of the cycle of impregnation and separation of mother and calf, as well as the broader impact of the dairy industry in the world.

If you do that, it’s easy to see why vegans don’t support dairy .

27. “We are smarter and naturally superior to animals.”

Animals don’t have to be smart for us to care about their pain, fear, and suffering. The fact that they can’t read books or do math, has nothing to do with the fact that they do suffer.

Most people would agree that it’d be wrong to hurt or kill unintelligent humans. We still care about the rights and welfare of people with lower IQs or mental disabilities. So how could you use a difference of intelligence to justify harming other animals

Arguably, being “higher animals” as humans is exactly what’s allowed us to develop ethics and morality that transcends our base instincts.

28. “Farm animals would never survive in the wild—so why should they have rights?”

Because they are conscious beings capable of suffering.

We don’t judge the moral standing of our fellow humans by whether they could survive in the wild, so why would this be relevant in our consider of other animals? (Many humans today wouldn’t survive in the wild, either!)

29. “If you eat every part of the animal, that is respectful and ethical.”

I would agree that seems more respectful than killing an animal for no reason. And I respect that some tribes or individuals may have ways of hunting or killing animals that feel much more wholesome compared to factory farms.

But here’s why I still don’t think it’s ethical:

Just imagine you’re a deer walking through the woods with your family. Then suddenly, someone shoots you or your family member. You’re terrified. You may be in horrible pain. Maybe you witness your family member die. And then maybe you’re alone after that—an orphan.

Now just imagine, after you experience this, the hunter explains to you: “Hey, sorry—but don’t worry about it—we’re going to eat your family member’s whole body, with the utmost respect.”

Would you be relieved? Does that make everything okay? Or would you still be terrified, alone, in pain, missing your family member, etc? Being hunted is bound to be terrifying for animals, even when it’s done “respectfully.”

And with the knowledge and technology we have today, it’s just not necessary. At least not in the developed world. So it’s a choice we make. And it’s a choice we make at the expense of those animals who have to feel that terror.

30. “Animals would gladly eat you—so why not eat them?”

First—most of the animals commonly eaten as meat are herbivores: Cows, pigs, chickens, turkeys, deer, etc. So in fact, those animals would not “gladly eat me.”

Second, that’s not really a sound ethical argument. We don’t hold animals to the same standards of morality and ethics that we hold our fellow humans to. Animals don’t have the same power of reason as we do.

But when it comes to how we should treat animals , Jeremy Bentham said it well: “The question is not, Can they reason?, nor Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?”

We seek to spare animals suffering because we, too, know what suffering is like. And we know we don’t like it. And we don’t want to inflict that on any other sentient being if we don’t have to.

31. “I only eat humanely slaughtered and humanely farmed animal products.”

I appreciate that you care about the humane treatment of animals, and you want to choose humane options. But many of these labels are very misleading.

First—most terms like “humanely raised” are not legally defined. So depending on the exact term, it could mean different things. Many such terms are empty—they’re more about marketing than actual animal welfare.

“Grass fed” cows can still be fed grass indoors, for example. “Cage free” chickens are often stuffed by the thousands into sheds. The actual farms don’t necessarily look like the commercial with happy cows in a meadow.

Second—even when you see the best animal welfare certifications on a product, like Animal Welfare Approved (AWA) or Certified Humane (CH), there are still some cruel practices allowed.

One example is castration without pain relief, which is allowed on both AWA and CH products. So even the best certifications do not guarantee a complete lack of cruelty.

Third—there is just inherent exploitation in animal agriculture. One example is the heart-breaking separation of mother and calf in the dairy industry—it can’t be avoided, even on the most “humane” farms.

Also, farming animals pretty much necessitates keeping them confined and then eventually killing them. Even when those actions are done in less-cruel ways, it’s still confinement and killing.

For all these reasons, I’m personally not satisfied with “humane meat,” and I think the term is a bit of an oxymoron.

32. “Animals cannot enter into ethical or moral contracts with us.”

There are plenty of ethical frameworks that don’t depend on any kind of moral contract or agreement to be established between both parties. The fact that animals are conscious and capable of suffering is enough reason for us to care about reducing their suffering.

33. “The animals are already dead. Why not eat the meat, so it doesn’t go to waste?”

There are actually some contexts in which some vegans actually do agree with this logic.

There are “freegans” who are fully vegan except that they’re okay with eating meat if it’s just being thrown away otherwise. Often, freegans participate in “dumpster diving” behind grocery stores to retrieve this discarded food and take it home before it goes to waste.

But in most contexts, it’s not so clear that meat is going to be thrown away if we don’t eat it.

Usually, when we eat meat, we increase the total demand for meat. Most often, we are paying for meat, which sends financial signals to companies that they should keep producing more.

Even when we aren’t paying for meat, eating it usually sends a signal of demand at some level.

If you eat meat at your family dinner, your parents will be more likely to keep buying enough meat to feed you on an ongoing basis, for example. This also applies at big parties and gatherings, although the signal may be less clear.

But there are other reasons not to eat meat in such contexts, too.

By refusing to eat meat, we’re often increasing demand for vegan alternatives. Then we’re sending signals to companies that more people want vegan options. When they get enough of these signals, they’ll be likely to offer more vegan options, which will make it easier for others to go vegan, too.

Another valid reason not to eat meat is that some people just feel that it’s gross or wrong… and it just doesn’t feel good to participate in it! And it’s as simple as that.

34. “We shouldn’t focus on animal rights until all human rights issues are handled.”

There will always be multiple issues that demand our attention.

Most of us, including vegans, do value human life more than animals. So on a gut level, we understand that impulse. But when animals are suffering so badly on factory farms, it just becomes hard to ignore.

In many cases, human rights violations today are at least restricted by laws—and people are at least sometimes prosecuted for breaking those laws.

In contrast, there is not even one federal law protecting animals that live on factory farms. Billions of animals are raised each year—in incredibly cruel conditions—specifically to be killed. And it’s all legally protected.

So, it’s not that vegans think animal rights are more important than human rights overall… it’s just that animal rights are being so brutally violated on such a mass scale.

Also: You can be vegan and still focus on human rights. Going vegan only really takes time during the initial learning period. Once you’re used to it, being vegan doesn’t really take up time or energy.

In fact, being vegan will likely give you more health and energy, which you can put toward fighting for human rights issues. Countless people who fight human oppression have also made a choice to eat a vegan diet—including famous feminist and anti-racist activist Angela Davis .

35. “Medical conditions don’t allow everyone to be vegan.”

I’ve actually researched this issue quite a bit . And while I respect that everyone’s body is different and you should listen to your doctor, I can tell you it’s very rare that a vegan diet would actually be impossible based on a medical condition.

That said, a vegan diet can certainly be much harder any time you have to “stack” multiple diet requirements on top of each other.

So yes, if you need to eat a very specific diet for a medical condition, it can get quite restrictive to stack veganism on top of that. And when a diet becomes very restrictive, there can be worries about getting all needed nutrients.

But it can pretty much always be done, if you really want to do it. You can be a gluten-free vegan, soy-free vegan, low-carb vegan, nut-free vegan, and so on.

One of the most difficult medical conditions to pair with veganism might be kidney failure. If you’re on dialysis, you typically need high protein while keeping potassium and phosphorous lower. That can be a challenge with vegan foods.

But even in those “tricky” cases, a good dietitian could usually figure out a vegan meal plan that is safe and hits the needed targets. So in most cases, it just comes down to how much you actually want to be vegan and how much you actually care about figuring it out.

For more on this topic, see “ Can Everyone Be Vegan? 13 Medical Conditions That May Prevent It .”

36. “Only privileged people can afford vegan food. Veganism is expensive.”

Having more money and better grocery store access can make veganism easier, as it can make any specific diet easier. But veganism is possible at pretty much any budget.

Many common vegan staple foods are cheap and widely available: Potatoes, rice, oats, pasta, corn, beans, peanut butter, bananas, apples, frozen vegetables, etc.

Heck, there are even some vegan ramen noodle brands. (Last I checked, the Oriental flavor by Top Ramen is vegan—and that’s just one example.)

You don’t need to buy vegan cheese, Beyond Burgers, or expensive non-dairy desserts to be vegan. In fact, you will be healthier if you don’t buy them.

If you’re on a budget, don’t go to places like Whole Foods Market or natural foods stores. There are plenty of vegan options at Wal-Mart and other big chains, or discount places like Aldi.

If you’re short on money and short on cooking time, it can be harder to find cheap vegan convenience foods… but they exist. Look into fat-free baked beans, pasta, bananas and apples, peanuts and peanut butter, cereal or oatmeal, and ramen noodles like I said above.

It’s potentially quite condescending when people say poor folks can’t be vegan. Yes, being poor could be an extra hurdle as a vegan—just like it’s an extra hurdle in many endeavors—but if you’re committed to being vegan, you can do it.

37. “The vegan community is just full of white people.”

This is one of the more harmful stereotypes of the vegan movement , because it could become self-perpetuating. And most of us agree that we want vegan spaces to be inclusive.

The truth about veganism and whiteness, as far as I can tell, is that the media simply chooses to promote white vegan speakers, authors, and figureheads more than vegans of color.

Black vegans exist. Latino vegans exist. Asian vegans exist. Native American vegans exist.

The idea of veganism as a white people’s movement is not true and never was true. There have been important vegans of color and a prominent tradition of “vegan soul food” all throughout the history of veganism.

Many of the most vegan-friendly cuisines are traditionally eaten by people of color around the world—Ethiopian food, Indian food, and various other Asian cuisines.

When people say veganism is a “white person thing,” that’s erasing the contributions of countless vegans of color. And this makes the vegan movement a less inclusive place for vegans of color going forward.

I’ve heard from many vegans of color who say it’s the most frustrating thing to hear people say veganism is “a white people thing.” They’re just like standing there like, “Hello?”

38. “The world will never be fully vegan.”

First off, the world could be fully vegan someday—it’s not impossible.

Moral judgments about others issues, like human slavery, have dramatically changed across the world in the last 500 years or so. There’s no reason that moral values around animals couldn’t change, too.

Second, the world doesn’t need to be fully vegan in order for vegans to have an impact. Every animal that’s saved from suffering matters—and over a lifetime, each vegan saves thousands of animals .

Every person who goes vegan also decreases their carbon footprint and environmental impact, which helps keep our planet habitable for future generations.

39. “You buy other things that are made with unethical labor, like clothes from sweatshops.”

I’d like to do a better job with my other purchases over time, too. It’s not easy to remove ourselves from every single unethical practice or industry in the world… but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to do our best.

Going vegan is one of the most high-leverage, impactful changes we can all make. That’s because it not only helps the animals, but it also helps the environment and it’s good for our own health. So I started there.

But I don’t claim to be perfect or done with my journey to living a more compassionate life.

40. “Veganism is boring—the food lacks taste and variety.”

Maybe you’ve had a few bland vegan meals… but this certainly doesn’t apply across the whole spectrum of vegan options out there.

Some of the most vegan-friendly cuisines are Indian food, Thai food, Ethiopian food, and Mediterranean food. And from those four cuisines alone, you have such a wide variety of different flavors, spices, and types of food you can get vegan.

Then, add everything you can do with vegan Mexican food, vegan Chinese food, vegan pasta and pizza dishes, and so many more…

Most people find that going vegan pushes them to explore different cuisines and foods that they never tried before. Often, vegan foods like nutritional yeast , Soy Curls , and seitan become new favorites.

If vegan food seems boring, you probably just haven’t had that much yet.

41. “There is no such thing as objective moral truth.”

Depending on your view of things, this might be true. But even in that case, I’m sure we can agree: Personal values and following your own morality is an important part of being fulfilled and proud of who you are.

So I would just ask you to be honest with yourself: Do you actually feel that it’s okay to hurt animals, and like that’s something you want to contribute to?

Most people might say, “Yeah it’s okay, I don’t care about animal rights.” But if you really make yourself look at what’s happening… and if you see how it’s hurting these animals… you might start to feel some empathy for them.

I know that’s what changed it all for me. When I saw the videos of animals suffering in factory farms and slaughterhouses, I just had a feeling deep down that I didn’t want to support it anymore.

It wasn’t based on “objective morality,” logic, or what anyone else told me was wrong. It wasn’t based on a commandment or a specific moral theory. It was based on what I felt in my gut and in my heart about it.

42. “Hitler was vegetarian.”

It wasn’t Hitler’s vegetarianism that caused him to do any of the violent things he did. And that’s so obvious, I’m not even going to say anything else about it.

43. “Sustainable vegan farming isn’t possible—animal manure is needed to fertilize plants.”

Animal products like manure, bone meal, and blood meal are not needed to fertilize plants. There are nitrogen-fixing plants that can synthesize plenty of usable nitrogen through a symbiotic relationship with bacteria and fungi.

For examples of this, just look up “veganic” farming . (Vegan + organic = veganic.)

Veganic farmers plant nitrogen-fixing crops into their fields during the off-season (as a “cover crop”) or even at the same time as their main crop.

There is no magic ingredient in animal manure that you can’t get from nitrogen-fixing plants and fertilizers made from them.  The animals got their nitrogen from nitrogen-fixing plants in the first place.

Vegan permaculture also provides some interesting agricultural ideas for working with nature, harnessing natural biodiversity, and using predator-prey relationships to balance pests and control yields.

But vegan permaculture would also be a drastic departure from today’s monocrop farming. It may be unlikely for us to realistically see it widely applied in our lives.

Veganic farming overall, however, is not limited to personal gardens or community plots. One Degree is a profitable company whose cereals or breads you may have seen in grocery stores—especially if you ever shop at Whole Foods or health-food stores.

One Degree has a network of veganic farmers around the world who have successfully adopted the model. These include sizable farms (thousands of acres) that harvest their crop with combines and semi-trucks full of grains.

44. “If everyone went vegan, so many people would lose their jobs.”

First, everyone won’t realistically go vegan overnight. So if it ever happens, it’ll only happen gradually. That means the industry will have time to adapt. Very likely, some companies that currently make animal products would just switch to making plant-based versions.

Second— many of the jobs in animal agriculture are horrible . For example, workers at slaughterhouses often experience physical injuries, along with PTSD and other emotional, psychological issues from killing animals all day, every day. ( source )

Also, I personally believe the intense, life-long suffering of animals on factory farms is worse than the temporary issue of people losing their jobs. Most people who lose their jobs would find new ones just fine.

Many developments in human history have made old jobs obsolete. It happens all the time due to technology. But does that mean we should stifle our technology and stay in the past, just to allow people to keep their jobs?

People will adapt. People have to adapt. That’s just a fact of life, and specifically, it’s a fact of capitalism. You’re not entitled to a job if it’s no longer contributing value that is in demand.

45. “Vegans are preachy and pretentious.”

Honestly, I’d agree that some vegans can be preachy… But most of us are just passionate. We feel strongly that animals are suffering, and we really want to help. In order to do that, we have to convince others to go vegan, too. So we try to spread the message.

But don’t let a few preachy people ruin veganism for you. Going vegan doesn’t mean you have to love and agree with all other vegans. Honestly, I find some vegans obnoxious—but that’s okay.

I’m vegan for the animals and for myself. So it doesn’t really matter what the rest of the vegan movement is like. If some of them are obnoxious, that’s their own problem.

What I care about is eating and living in a way that feels good and right to me . I like how I feel eating plants and being vegan. I feel good about the impact I’m having, and it makes me healthier.

If you really dislike vegans and the vegan movement, you can always just call yourself “plant-based.” That’s a more neutral term with fewer associations.

46. “Meat tastes good.”

Yes, meat does taste good. And human meat would also taste good, I’m guessing. But that doesn’t mean it’s okay to kill humans to eat them.

And I’m saying the same about cow meat or chicken meat. Whether it tastes good is irrelevant to the question of whether it’s morally okay to kill an animal for it.

There are many things that would be pleasurable to do, but we don’t do them because it would cause suffering and harm to others. I’m saying that cow suffering also matters.

Plus, if you think about it, it’s not actually the meat itself that really tastes so good. Have you noticed that pretty much every meat is seasoned with salt (a mineral) and plant ingredients like tomato-based ketchup and BBQ sauce, mustard, herbs, olive oil, and so on?

47. “God put animals on earth to be food for us.”

I know many Christian vegans who would dispute that! For every passage in the Bible that seems to label animals as food, there are other passages that contradict it.

Many Christians would agree that God wants humans to be “stewards” of animals. But stewardship is not domination. Being a steward of animals means looking after them and taking care of them. Not building factories to exploit and kill them.

Many Christians believe that it was in God’s plan for us to out-grow the killing of other animals for food, and that veganism is perfectly in line with the values of mercy, compassion, and caring for God’s creation.

At the least, the Bible seems to be neutral on whether humans eat animals. It certainly doesn’t dictate that we should eat animals.

48. “If it’s wrong for humans to own and use animals, why do vegans have pets?”

This is actually an issue that’s debated among vegans. Some vegans do see an inherent ethical problem with pet ownership and the status of animals as property.

That said, most of us are practical enough to see a difference between providing a loving home to a rescued dog vs raising animals specifically to kill and eat them. So most vegans are okay with having pets.

Still, there are issues of exploitation and cruelty in the pet industry. Puppy mills churn out dogs to sell, while unwanted strays are put down at shelters. Many pets are neglected, mistreated, and generally lack freedom.

Most vegans just try to be conscious of these issues, and they do the best for their pets that they can.

49. “So, do you force your cat or dog to be vegan, too?”

Cats are obligate carnivores, meaning they cannot survive on a fully plant-based diet. Some vegans may try to get around this with supplements, but most vegans respect that their cat needs to eat meat.

On the other hand, dogs are actually omnivores—not carnivores. Since evolving from wolves, dogs have become more capable of digesting starches and carbohydrates, and getting vitamin A from plants like humans can, too.

All this means that dogs can be healthy on a well-planned vegan diet. In fact, there are several dog food brands and supplements specifically made for vegan dogs.

One of the oldest dogs ever on record was actually a blue merle Collie in the UK named Bramble. Bramble lived to age 27 in good health, eating a mostly vegan diet of rice, lentils, and vegetables.

In practice, some vegans feed their dogs a vegan diet, but others don’t because it’s more expensive or they’re not confident about how to make sure it’s healthy.

For more on whether cats and dogs can be vegan, refer to this post .

50. “There has never been a vegan civilization in human history.”

That doesn’t mean there couldn’t be one today or in the future. And it doesn’t mean a vegan diet is unhealthy or unsustainable.

We’ve only really started to deeply understand the science of human nutrition in the past 100 years or so. The word “vitamin” didn’t even exist until 1913.

So it makes sense that we’re better positioned to safely eat a fully vegan diet today than in the past. That said, there has been a rich history of people experimenting with vegetarianism throughout history.

Did you know that Pythagoras started a vegetarian movement back in ancient Greece? (Yes, the guy from the theorem!) Followers of Jainism have a principle of “ahimsa” that calls for non-violence towards all living beings . So most Jains have always been vegetarian.

Buddhism also has ties to vegetarianism. Some scholars argue that the Budhha was a strict vegetarian, while others say he only ate meat when it was offered by a host. Meat-eating was also even banned in Japan for a period of ~1,200 years, from 675 A.D. to 1872.

The word “vegan” was only coined in 1944. But modern science is discovering that there are many benefits to a plant-based diet. And our modern technology makes it safer and easier than ever to be fully vegan.

For more on this kind of vegan history, refer to this post .

51. “Don’t force your beliefs on me.”

I’m not trying to forcing my beliefs on anyone. I’m just asking you to question your own beliefs.

Most of us grew up eating animals, and we never really questioned it. Since meat-eating is the norm in society, most of us just keep doing it without really looking into the facts.

But when you take the time to look at the impact on your health, on the animals, and on the planet… many people decide it’s more in line with their goals and values to eat plant-based.

All I’m trying to do is prompt you to ask these questions, and consider for yourself, what you really want to be doing with your diet—instead of just falling into the norm.

52. “I don’t have enough time to be vegan.”

It can take a little time to figure out veganism at first. But I’ve found that once you’re accustomed to it, veganism doesn’t take extra time at all.

There are so many quick vegan meals and snacks. Fresh fruit and nuts are some of the fastest foods of all. Many packaged snack foods like chips and cookies are “accidentally vegan”—you just need to learn which ones.

It’s also simple to carry trail mix with you, or quickly pack a vegan sandwich and carrots or fruit for lunch.

Chipotle is quick and easy to make vegan. Falafel places are great for a quick vegan lunch. There’s even a growing list of fast-food restaurants that offer the Beyond Burger. (See my full selection of vegan restaurant guides .)

If you want to be vegan, you can find the time to figure this stuff out.

53. “Meat and animal products are part of my culture.”

Increasingly, veganism is a global movement. More and more people of all cultures and cuisines are coming up with vegan versions of their diets.

Yes, cultural ideas about meat may vary—but there’s also a biological component to having compassion toward innocent creatures, and caring about our health and the Earth.

Food is emotional and social, so going vegan may seem very “against the grain” in some cultures and families. But all traditions and foods can be reimagined in a plant-based version.

As a vegan in a traditionally non-vegan culture, you can even be a part of building bridges between your culture and a vegan future. Create the vegan recipes in your cuisine if you can’t find them.

This can potentially make your culture that much more relevant to an up-and-coming generation that cares about food justice, health, and animal welfare.

If you’re confused or feeling lonely about going vegan in your culture, search and find others who have already done it. You should be able to find them online. Hear their perspective and the challenges they overcame, and know you’re not alone.

54. “There’s no ethical consumption under capitalism.”

Depending on your view of capitalism, this may be valid to an extent. There’s certainly a level of exploitation in most major industries, including “vegan” industries like the farming of grains and fresh produce.

That said, most of us would agree that it’s still good to boycott the worst industries and brands—even if the other ones aren’t perfect, either.

And animal agriculture has to be near the top of the list of “worst industries.” Not just for animal abuse, but for the abuse of human workers , too.

Workers at slaughterhouses commonly experience trauma and PTSD, becoming desensitized from killing so many animals and witnessing so much suffering. Workers are also frequently cut and injured themselves from the line moving so quickly.

As depicted in the movie Fast Food Nation , many workers in these facilities are also undocumented immigrants. As these immigrants often have no legal recourse to report unsafe working conditions, they may be regularly mistreated and hyper-exploited.

Angela Davis is just one of the many anti-capitalist figures who promote a vegan diet as a sensible, compassionate choice—even if it doesn’t solve every ethical problem in our economy today.

55. “What if you were on a desert island or had to survive in the wild?”

Well, I’m not on a desert island. And neither are you. We’re in modern human civilization.

Maybe meat was helpful in our species history. Maybe it was necessary back when we didn’t know much about nutrition and we had fewer food options. But it’s not necessary now.

Ethics is contextual. For example, most people agree that some violence is okay in the context of self-defense. But that’s different from initiating violence for no good reason.

So, asking if I’d still be vegan in a very different context (a desert island)… It’s just not the same question at all as whether I should be vegan in modern human civilization.

56. “What about mushrooms, yeast, and bacteria? They’re alive, too.”

Vegans aren’t against killing things that are “alive.” We’re against killing individuals who suffer, have preferences, and are subjects of a life.

Bacteria and fungi are “alive,” and so are plants—but we have no reason to believe that they suffer. Mushrooms and yeast do not have central nervous systems.

Some of these organisms may react to stimuli… but that’s different from feeling pain. There’s no reason for us to believe that these organisms have consciousness or a capacity to actually feel suffering.

Even when it comes to oyster and bivalves, which are animals, some vegans are okay with eating them because they don’t have central nervous systems. That’s a separate debate, though. Read this post on “ostrovegans” for more on that.

57. “Animals do not suffer when they’re slaughtered.”

There has been plenty of documentation of cases where animals visibly suffer in the process of slaughter.

Some animals are fully conscious when their throats are cut. This is still practiced in some parts of the world according to Jewish and Muslim rules of slaughter. It’s debated whether it is actually painful to the animals, but I imagine it is at least quite scary…

Most places in the world, animals are knocked unconscious before slaughter, using tools like a “captive bolt gun.” But these stunning practices don’t always go properly.

In 2019, the US Department of Agriculture deregulated pig slaughter. This has resulted in faster line speeds, less oversight, and more pigs that are still conscious as their throats are slit.

One USDA inspector found that, after deregulation, more pig carcasses were found with water in their lungs—a sign that these pigs were still breathing when dropped into scalding hot water tanks (that comes after having their throats cut). ( source )

Even in the majority of cases when animals are knocked out properly, videos show the animals expressing clear fear and stress as they’re transported, corralled, and then sequentially knocked out.

And even if slaughter were somehow totally painless… there is typically suffering inflicted at many other points in the animals’ lives.

Many animals undergo procedures like tail docking and castration without pain relief. And they’re often held in tiny indoor cages for their whole lives, living in filth and their own waste.

Some animal products are produced more humanely than others—but even the strictest animal welfare certifications are still considered inadequate by many advocates.

58. “Aren’t you projecting human desires and suffering onto other animals?”

This is a fair question to be asking. Certainly, animals don’t have all the same awareness as we have… so we could expect their fears and concerns to be different. There are likely situations that would be distressing to a human but not to another creature.

That said, there is quite a bit we can gather about animal experience by observing how they react to things. Many of us know from having pets, just how deeply animals can bond and feel. (I’d personally guess that my dog is more needy and emotional than most humans!)

We also have a scientific understanding of which animals have a central nervous system, and a fair bit of understanding about that stuff.

Also, the kinds of abuse that animals experience on factory farms is pretty blatant . It’s not just a little boredom or lack of freedom. It’s being castrated without pain relief, being separated from your mother at birth, and not even having space in your cage to turn around—things like that.

There are some animal rights conversations that could get a little more complicated… but when it comes to factory farms and slaughterhouses, we know that animals don’t want to be there.

59. “I read a news story about a nutritionally deficient vegan baby…”

Yes, it’s possible for vegan babies to become nutritionally deficient—just like this is possible for non-vegan babies. News outlets often latch onto vegan malnutrition stories, as the anti-vegan crowd is guaranteed to share the article far and wide.

But experts agree that babies and children of all ages can be healthy vegans. This has been stated by the American Academy of Pediatrics, the British Dietetic Association, and the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics. It just requires proper planning.

So if you’re planning to be pregnant or have a child, look up resources on those topics—such as the relevant chapters in Brenda Davis’s book Becoming Vegan . Perhaps seek out a registered dietitian to help plan the diet.

But a few cases of poorly planned vegan diets doesn’t mean the lifestyle isn’t sound when it’s done right.

60. “PETA is an offensive, racist, sexist organization.”

PETA does not speak for all vegans, and not all vegans support PETA. Some vegans are very against PETA , in fact.

PETA tends to use controversial campaigns to drive publicity. Some make comparisons between animal oppression and the oppression of women or people of color. Or they compare factory farming to the Holocaust.

Various PETA campaigns have been referred to as racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, fat-phobic, and more by critics. Many compassionate people have likely been turned off from veganism by these campaigns.

But again: Being vegan doesn’t mean you support PETA. As a vegan, you can be supportive, neutral, or opposed to PETA.

More on Vegan Ethics

For more discussion of vegan ethical arguments, check out my big post on vegan ethics here .

Two More Recommendations for Your Plant-Based Journey

1. This is the best free video training I’ve found on plant-based nutrition. You’ll learn how to reduce your risk of cancer, heart disease, type 2 diabetes, Alzheimer’s, and obesity—all with plant-based food. Watch the free “Food for Health Masterclass” here .

2. This is the  best vegan multivitamin I’ve found  in my 14 years of being vegan.  It has vitamin B12, vitamin D, omega-3—and nothing else. Translation: It only has the nutrients vegans are  actually low in . Read my  full review of Future Kind’s multivitamin here  (with 10% discount).

I’m Tyler McFarland, the editor and main author here. When I first went vegan 13 years ago, convenience products like veggie burgers and soy milk were a lot harder to find. Now they’re everywhere!

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This blog is reader supported. If you click a link on this page and buy something, I may receive an affiliate commission at no extra cost to you. Learn more here . As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases.

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The content on IAmGoingVegan.com is intended only for informational and educational purposes. It is not intended to give medical advice or replace your doctor or health practitioner. No content on this website is intended to diagnose, cure, treat, or prevent any disease or health condition. The publisher of this content does not take responsibility for possible health consequences of any persons applying the information in this educational content. Always consult your healthcare provider before making changes to your diet, lifestyle, or nutritional supplementation.

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9.3: The Argumentative Essay

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Learning Objectives

• Examine types of argumentative essays

Argumentative Essays

You may have heard it said that all writing is an argument of some kind. Even if you’re writing an informative essay, you still have the job of trying to convince your audience that the information is important. However, there are times you’ll be asked to write an essay that is specifically an argumentative piece.

An argumentative essay is one that makes a clear assertion or argument about some topic or issue. When you’re writing an argumentative essay, it’s important to remember that an academic argument is quite different from a regular, emotional argument. Note that sometimes students forget the academic aspect of an argumentative essay and write essays that are much too emotional for an academic audience. It’s important for you to choose a topic you feel passionately about (if you’re allowed to pick your topic), but you have to be sure you aren’t too emotionally attached to a topic. In an academic argument, you’ll have a lot more constraints you have to consider, and you’ll focus much more on logic and reasoning than emotions.

Argumentative essays are quite common in academic writing and are often an important part of writing in all disciplines. You may be asked to take a stand on a social issue in your introduction to writing course, but you could also be asked to take a stand on an issue related to health care in your nursing courses or make a case for solving a local environmental problem in your biology class. And, since argument is such a common essay assignment, it’s important to be aware of some basic elements of a good argumentative essay.

When your professor asks you to write an argumentative essay, you’ll often be given something specific to write about. For example, you may be asked to take a stand on an issue you have been discussing in class. Perhaps, in your education class, you would be asked to write about standardized testing in public schools. Or, in your literature class, you might be asked to argue the effects of protest literature on public policy in the United States.

However, there are times when you’ll be given a choice of topics. You might even be asked to write an argumentative essay on any topic related to your field of study or a topic you feel that is important personally.

Whatever the case, having some knowledge of some basic argumentative techniques or strategies will be helpful as you write. Below are some common types of arguments.

Causal Arguments

• In this type of argument, you argue that something has caused something else. For example, you might explore the causes of the decline of large mammals in the world’s ocean and make a case for your cause.

Evaluation Arguments

• In this type of argument, you make an argumentative evaluation of something as “good” or “bad,” but you need to establish the criteria for “good” or “bad.” For example, you might evaluate a children’s book for your education class, but you would need to establish clear criteria for your evaluation for your audience.

Proposal Arguments

• In this type of argument, you must propose a solution to a problem. First, you must establish a clear problem and then propose a specific solution to that problem. For example, you might argue for a proposal that would increase retention rates at your college.

Narrative Arguments

• In this type of argument, you make your case by telling a story with a clear point related to your argument. For example, you might write a narrative about your experiences with standardized testing in order to make a case for reform.

Rebuttal Arguments

• In a rebuttal argument, you build your case around refuting an idea or ideas that have come before. In other words, your starting point is to challenge the ideas of the past.

Definition Arguments

• In this type of argument, you use a definition as the starting point for making your case. For example, in a definition argument, you might argue that NCAA basketball players should be defined as professional players and, therefore, should be paid.

https://assessments.lumenlearning.co...essments/20277

Essay Examples

• Click here to read an argumentative essay on the consequences of fast fashion . Read it and look at the comments to recognize strategies and techniques the author uses to convey her ideas.
• In this example, you’ll see a sample argumentative paper from a psychology class submitted in APA format. Key parts of the argumentative structure have been noted for you in the sample.

Link to Learning

For more examples of types of argumentative essays, visit the Argumentative Purposes section of the Excelsior OWL .

Contributors and Attributions

• Argumentative Essay. Provided by : Excelsior OWL. Located at : https://owl.excelsior.edu/rhetorical-styles/argumentative-essay/ . License : CC BY: Attribution
• Image of a man with a heart and a brain. Authored by : Mohamed Hassan. Provided by : Pixabay. Located at : pixabay.com/illustrations/decision-brain-heart-mind-4083469/. License : Other . License Terms : pixabay.com/service/terms/#license

3 Psychological Barriers That Make It Hard to Go Vegan

Committing to veganism is nowhere near as easy as it looks. here's why..

Posted May 3, 2024 | Reviewed by Davia Sills

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• It can be difficult for vegetarians and prospective vegans to go completely vegan.
• Lack of knowledge can be a major barrier to making the transition to veganism.
• Other contributing factors include ingrained dietary habits and fear of losing out on pleasure.

A 2024 study published in Frontiers in Psychology examined the reasons why vegetarians and prospective vegans—who attempt to avoid meat for the same reasons vegans do—do not go completely vegan. Researchers found three primary mental blocks that keep them from this dietary transition.

Here are three psychological reasons why people avoid veganism, according to the study.

1. The Knowledge Gap of Dietary Consequences

Researchers found that there is a significant knowledge gap between vegans and non-vegans which leads to different mental perceptions of the impact of their diet on their health and animal and environmental welfare , including knowledge about nutrition , one’s ecological footprint, climate change , and the present condition of the animal industry.

“Vegetarians valuate the animal industry significantly less negatively than vegans and prospective vegans. Moreover, vegetarians generally possess less correct information about the animal industry—as, for example, indicated by the fact that a third of the vegetarians were not aware that their dietary choices still lead to the death of animals,” the researchers explain.

Researchers also found that vegans tend to invest more time into learning objectively about diet and animal-related issues compared to non-vegans. They also rely more on reputable scientific studies for this information than others do.

This knowledge gap is a key factor keeping vegetarians and prospective vegans from making the transition, as vegans are usually driven to sustain their diet by seeking out such deeper, often uncomfortable knowledge.

Researchers also suggest that since gaining “vegan literacy” can create a cognitive dissonance or inner conflict about one’s dietary choices, many individuals actively avoid gaining more knowledge about these issues or repress what they know. Becoming vegan would involve confronting these truths at both a cognitive and emotional level.

“Vegetarianism may represent an intermediate stage in which individuals are already aware of the fact that the animal industry harms animals (therefore resulting in the renunciation of meat), while at the same time potentially not wishing to know all the details about, for example, the production of cheese, which could then result in a broader change in lifestyle,” the researchers add.

2. The Cheese Paradox

Many individuals avoid veganism as they feel they would miss out on delicious food and cite the importance of taste in their meals above all else. Researchers suggest that vegans likely care about taste as much as non-vegans do, and this mental block may be a way to reaffirm current non-vegan lifestyle choices.

“The finding stating that it may be difficult for vegetarians not to consume dairy products—especially cheese and eggs—because they would miss the taste and ‘substitute’ products often fail to meet consumers’ taste expectations implies that a vegan lifestyle may be associated with the expectation of a worse taste experience,” the researchers write.

Cheese is often the hardest animal product to give up and is even experienced as addictive . “The cheese paradox ” highlights how, despite knowing that consuming cheese affects animal and environmental welfare, wanting to continue consuming it is a highly significant motivator for many non-vegans. However, some participants in the study did not actually know whether the cheese was vegan or vegetarian, highlighting once again the impact of the knowledge gap.

3. Old Habits Die Hard

Many individuals hesitate to adopt a vegan lifestyle due to the challenge of breaking deeply ingrained dietary habits . Vegetarians and prospective vegans may struggle to give up the comfort and familiarity of their current lifestyle. The perceived difficulty of the transition and questioning the feasibility and convenience of going vegan can also make it seem particularly formidable.

Another significant factor hindering the adoption of veganism is the lack of social support. The societal acceptance of a vegan lifestyle is often limited, leading to concerns about potential stigma , criticism, or isolation. This influence appears less pivotal for vegans, suggesting a greater readiness to navigate social challenges associated with veganism. In contrast, the fear of uncertainty in one’s social life can make non-vegans wary of this change.

So, if you have found yourself considering veganism, remember that it is natural to struggle with making a significant life change and with fighting the psychological discomfort that often accompanies greater vegan literacy. However, if you are looking to make the transition, it appears that knowledge is power, and it can be the key to fighting these mental blocks and living by your core values.

A version of this article also appears on Forbes.com.

Mark Travers, Ph.D., is an American psychologist with degrees from Cornell University and the University of Colorado Boulder.

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