write a essay about veganism

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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Veganism - Essay Samples And Topic Ideas For Free

Veganism is a lifestyle and dietary choice that excludes all animal products and attempts to limit the exploitation of animals as much as possible. Essays could discuss the ethical, environmental, and health aspects of veganism, challenges faced by vegans, and the societal reaction to veganism. The impact of veganism on the food industry could also be explored. We’ve gathered an extensive assortment of free essay samples on the topic of Veganism you can find at PapersOwl Website. You can use our samples for inspiration to write your own essay, research paper, or just to explore a new topic for yourself.

Pros and Cons of Veganism

Veganism is a controversial topic among many people that often results in heated debates. Those who follow the vegan lifestyle, or at least advocate for it, argue that it is a clean and healthy way to live, a way that has positive effect on both a person's physical health and their impact on the environment. On the other hand, there are people who counter that veganism is a radical and impractical lifestyle that is almost impossible to maintain in today's […]

Positive Effect of Veganism on Environment

What is veganism, and why should people be for being vegan in the first place? Veganism is a specialized diet that ignores all animal products and is targeted around plant-based foods. The vegan and omnivorous diets both differ from one another on an ethical stand point, when referring to our health, the environment, as well as onto the animals themselves. If those things aren’t enough to change societies perspective. There are a couple of different opposing arguments that are going […]

Why we shouldn’t all be Vegan

A persuasive piece intended to present the findings and belief on how veganism is not the only way to stay healthy. This paper would be published in the New York Times health and fitness section and will be directed to those who believe that the only way to save the world, and your health is to be vegan. The New York Times has a wide audience as the range of ages are from millennial (ages 18-29) to generation X (ages […]

We will write an essay sample crafted to your needs.

A Look into Veganism and Plant Based Diets

In recent years the trend of converting to a vegan or plant based diet has been on the rise. As a result there has been rising debate among vegans and those who Maintain a western diet if veganism is a safe and healthy way to go about maintaining your health. It is to my understanding that converting to a vegan or plant based diet is completely possible to thrive on and encouraged. a vegan diet although completely devoid of animal […]

A Better Understanding of Veganism

Intro: Many people believe that humans are naturally supposed eat meat and dairy and that there is a humane way to produce meat and dairy products, when in reality, that is not the case. That idea stems from childhood. Diet is a learned behavior just as religion and culture is. Usually, a child may grow up in an omnivore household, eating the average diet of fruits, veggies, meat, dairy, and grains. In a vegetarian household, a child may be taught […]

Going Vegan for the Animals

For as long as I can remember, I always loved animals but I never asked myself as an animal lover if it was okay to eat other animals but now that I look back,I feel like a hypocrite, loving one animal and eating another. And I always ask myself why I didn’t think of it earlier but the reason I didn’t was because the people around me ate meat like it was okay and so it was normal for me […]

Why Veganism is not a Healthier Lifestyle

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 other purposes. Following a plant-based diet can have a lot of benefits for our body and our planet, but often happens that following a very strict vegan diet can lead to inadequate protein consumption. According to a study made by (Larson, Johansson 2002) in the Umea University in Sweden, about […]

The Benefits of Veganism on Animal Rights

Millennials are central drivers of this worldwide shift away from consuming animal products. But the plant-based movement is bigger than any one generation. Over recent years, veganism has turned from a fad into a healthy trend. While many people may think that the dietary limitations of a vegan lifestyle may not have many benefits, it does have a particular benefit in aiding animal rights. As animal activists seek to obtain a means to further their protest for animal rights, veganism […]

Might a Vegan Diet be Healthy, or Even Healthier?

While many people enjoy their steaks and burgers, a growing population of the world is turning to a plant based diet. Being vegan, otherwise known as people who have cut all animal products out of their diets, is one of the fastest growing trends in the world. Over 6% of the world is vegan, with almost 4% of them not using any animal products. With this growing trend, could any of it be bad? There are many things to look […]

Veganism and its Effects

The local coffee shop is always occupied with that one person who never fails to remind the baristas and surrounding customers that their extra soy non-dairy milk espresso with added hazelnut syrup is better for the environment than the usual black coffee with a splash of milk purely because it does not contain an animal byproduct. With the current situation of global warming, and the never-ending increase of Earth’s population, more and more people are turning to veganism. Trying to […]

Veganism in Modern World

The topic about veganism has received recognition not because of the adoption of its culture, but due to the controversies surrounding it. Veganism is the practice of people avoiding animal products and their byproducts. Instead, this group of people concentrates on healthier food, such as legumes, vegetables, fruits, and grains to name a few. Traditionally, people have relied on animal products such as meat and milk due to the belief that they enhance growing and developing strong bones. However, people […]

Is Veganism Detrimental to One’s Health

There are many reasons why people are inclined to practicing a vegan diet including, health conditions, ethical values, and to help the environment. Veganism has been said to reverse many conditions such as high blood pressure, heart disease, and even aging ("Animal products | Health Topics | NutritionFacts.org," n.d.). Moral value also plays a big part in the movement to become vegan as many animals are slaughtered and abused due to high demand. Because of this, approximately 1.6 million Americans […]

Veganism Might Save Us: from One Meat Lover to Another

Does the word "vegan" ring a bell? Yes, exactly. That's the face. Eyes glare, mouths twist, sometimes laughter erupts— and not the good kind. We are all quick to shut down our hearing system when somebody happens to mention they are vegan; we put them on mute and kindly nod our heads just enough to be polite. Well, maybe we shouldn't. Veganism is not only a much healthier lifestyle for us, not to mention the great impact it has on […]

Is Veganism Beneficial or Detrimental to Society?

Veganism, a "strict vegetarian diet," is a very popular, yet controversial lifestyle to follow today. According to Alina Petre, a registered dietitian, the online search for the term vegan has risen by more than 250%. The word vegan has become more and more popular amongst society and many have gained more knowledge on the lifestyle itself. When researching the term veganism, according to The Vegan Society the word veganism can be defined as: A philosophy and way of living which […]

Veganism: do the Anecdotes Hold Answers?

Veganism, seen as an extreme form of vegetarianism, is a lifestyle based on complete flesh-avoidance that can be traced back to ancient Indian and eastern Mediterranean societies (Suddath, 2008). The terms was first coined in November 1944 by British woodworker named Donald Watson, announcing that because vegetarians ate dairy and eggs, he was going to create a new term called "vegan," to describe people who did not. Watson's cause was fueled by the emergence of tuberculosis, which had been found […]

Veganism Unfolded: Navigating the Nuances of Vegan Vs Vegetarian Diet

In recent times, there has been a growing international discourse regarding dietary preferences, with vegan and vegetarian diets gaining prominence. Both have garnered attention not only as dietary preferences but also as ways of life that promote animal welfare and environmental sustainability and healthier livelihoods. The purpose of this essay is to analyze the distinctions between vegan and vegetarian diets, focusing on their environmental and health implications, as well as the ethical considerations that frequently influence these decisions. The fundamental […]

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Last updated May 29, 2023

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Blog > Common App , Essay Advice > How to Write a Great College Essay About Veganism

How to Write a Great College Essay About Veganism

Admissions officer reviewed by Ben Bousquet, M.Ed Former Vanderbilt University

Written by Kylie Kistner, MA Former Willamette University Admissions

Key Takeaway

People become vegan for a number of reasons. For some, it’s a deeply held personal choice, while for others it’s simply a matter of taste.

If you’re vegan, chances are that it’s a topic that’s important to you. You may even be wondering if veganism is something you should write about for your college essay.

Your college essay should be about something you are most passionate about, and veganism can allow you to talk about a core part of your values.

But veganism is also a fairly common topic that can at times be difficult to extract an original and meaningful message from.

Like any common topic, there are pros and cons to writing a personal statement about veganism. The topic isn’t off the table, but some approaches are more effective than others.

Where College Essays About Veganism Can Go Wrong

To achieve the goals of a personal statement, a college essay about veganism has to be about more than just your veganism.

After all, you are vegan for a reason. Something about the practice resonates with you at a deeper level. That significance is what you should focus on.

Two of the most common approaches to writing a college essay about veganism miss this mark because they rely too much on generalities instead of your deeply-held and identity-based reasons for being vegan.

“Why I became vegan”

The first ineffective approach is the surface-level “why I became vegan” or “how veganism changed my life” framework.

If veganism is something important to your lived experience, then it’s only logical that you’d want to write your college essay about what led you to be vegan or the specific ways being vegan has improved your life.

That is valuable. But too often essays that follow this approach give only common-knowledge reasons for being vegan. In doing so, they fail to address something truly meaningful about the writer.

A 2018 poll found that 3% of American adults identified as vegan, up from 2% in 2012. Your admissions officer is very likely familiar with the most common reasons behind veganism, so sharing this kind of surface-level answer is inadequate.

Unless you truly interrogate how veganism connects to a broader part of who you are, then your essay will leave an admissions committee wanting.

“Why you should be vegan”

The second common trope to avoid is the simple persuasive approach to “why you/everyone should be vegan.”

Maybe you do think everyone should be vegan. Maybe it’s even the belief that has sparked your interest in studying environmental science or food studies.

Because this topic carries a lot of weight, writing about why people should act a certain way takes a lot of time and care that is typically not possible in a personal statement.

A persuasive essay about veganism also says too much about others and not enough about who you are, so it’s best to find another approach.

Overall, college essays about veganism can go wrong when they make an admissions committee say, “That’s great! But now what?”

If you only write about your veganism, you leave the admissions committee with more questions than answers about who you are and why they should admit you.

Before you begin your college essay about veganism, you should consider asking yourself two questions:

How does my veganism relate to a larger part of who I am?

• And what do I want admissions officers to do with that information?

Using these questions as a guiding framework, let’s discuss two ways to go about writing your essay.

Effective ways to approach your college essay about veganism

Background and identity.

One way to make an essay about veganism stand out is by connecting your veganism to another significant part of your background or identity.

Instead of writing generally about why you became vegan, allow veganism to be only part of your more complex story.

Drawing these connections for the admissions committee will give them more genuine insight into who you are and what motivates you.

Consider the “how” and “why” behind your veganism to identify the value or motivation that is most central to you.

Did you go vegan after watching Food, Inc.?

Or maybe you grew up on a farm and your veganism is because of (or in spite of) your upbringing.

Or perhaps you simply have a dairy allergy and don’t like the taste of meat.

In all of these cases, the compelling story is not that you are vegan. Your veganism is compelling because it developed in a context that is specific to you.

Let’s plug the Food, Inc. example into our questions:

I went vegan after watching Food, Inc. > I watched Food, Inc. in health class. > I cried during the documentary because I felt bad for the animals that were being treated poorly. > I love my veganism because I can actively live out my compassion for animals.

And there it is! A compelling, motivating part of your identity: your compassion.

And what do I want admissions officers to do with this information?

I want admissions officers to know that I am deeply compassionate towards animals. > This compassion is a guiding principle for how I move throughout the world.

With these two questions answered, you have a seedling for your essay. If you find that your answers to the questions actually aren’t that compelling, then you might consider a different topic.

Related Interests

The second effective way to approach your essay about veganism is to relate it to a specific academic or co-curricular interest.

Your veganism can then be a vehicle through which you talk about another topic related to your goals and passions.

This approach is effective because it allows you to discuss something you’re personally passionate about (veganism) and connect it to another part of yourself (your interest or accomplishment) that gives the admissions officers more reason to admit you.

Probably the most popular connections are wanting to study environmental science or biology or being a climate or animal rights activist.

Let’s try the questions again:

I’m vegan. > I’ve joined and now lead an online community of vegans. > I’ve developed an academic interest in niche communities and am interested in learning more about them.

I have an extracurricular accomplishment managing an online community of 5,000+ members. > My veganism has led to a budding interest in the psychology and sociology of online groups.

Again, you’ve found the seed. You can use your newfound connections as the foundation of your college essay.

Key Takeaways

Veganism is deeply important to many people. If you’re one of them, it’s okay to write your college essay about it.

While some approaches are better than others, essays about veganism are still fairly common.

So if you choose to write one, make sure that you root your essay in genuine and specific examples that clearly illustrate how your veganism connects to a core part of you.

In the end, your college essay about veganism should showcase another value, belief, or interest that you hold deeply. Once you’ve determined what that looks like for you, check out our other resources for writing a college essay and creating a cohesive application narrative .

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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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Essay Samples on Vegan

Veganism as a sociological challenge to dominant social norms.

Veganism is a hugely contested idea which began to gain recognition when the Vegan Society was founded in 1944. The Vegan Society may have been established 78 years ago, there is evidence suggesting it can be traced back much further. Early philosophies dating back to...

• Social Learning Theory
• Sociological Theory

The Turning Point Of Our Eating Habits

The turning point in our food culture and healthy lifestyle is veganism. This term has skyrocketed in popularity over the past few years, there are now more than 320 million vegans in the world, and this is more than twice as much as the vegan...

A Lot of Conflicting Ideas About the Vegetarian Diet

Humans create inventions to solve a certain issue. where if an issue occurs then a person would start to think of solution to this issue and therefore this person called an inventor. An invention is something that would have influence in the living style to...

• Eating Habits
• Vegetarianism

The Impossible Burger as the Staple of Vegan Food

The growing popularity of vegan food has become an apparent currency in cultural exchange in the US. Los Angeles isn’t just all about Hollywood glitz and glamor, it’s also all about the healthy and plant-based lifestyle. Eating healthy and cleansing oneself from meat, fried food,...

The Access to Healthy Living as per Veganism

You just finished up your lab class and feel the hunger creeping up on you. Thinking about which small snack you can have before heading to your next class, you grab a Cliff bar to get you through to dinner. A Cliff bar looks healthy...

• Healthy Lifestyle

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The Benefits of Vegan Diet for the Environment

Can the human body benefit from eating vegan or are we meant to consume animal products? This has been a complex and sometimes controversial issue. Veganism is a diet that excludes all animal products and byproducts. People become vegan or a variety of reasons, sometimes...

• Environmental Protection

The Horrific Truth Behind the Veganism Guidelines

Is veganism a life you would want to live? Think about it; no turkey at Christmas dinner, no Sunday roast, no more dairy. These are values vegans nowadays demand and live by. According to the “Vegan Society”, in 2016 there were an estimated 540,000 vegans...

Going Vegan: The Best Substitutes for Meat and Dairy

Delicious Alternatives to Meat & Diary Most people would admit that they see the immense benefits of a vegan lifestyle in regard to how much it would improve their health, benefit the environment, and save the lives of countless animals; however the biggest concern for...

Analysis Of Gary Yourofsky's Speech About Veganism

The title of Gary Yourofsky’s speech carries a strong claim: “Best Speech You’ll Ever Hear”. This speech addresses every aspect and reason that would lead someone to veganism. It was delivered to a class at Georgia Institute of Technology in 2010. The speech goes on...

Harmless Space Travel - Vegans In Space

The vegan diet has been around for over 2, 000 years. However, being vegan is as convenient as it has ever been. Personally, it is a life changing decision that has many benefits to your body and the environment. There are hundreds of options to...

• Space Exploration

Vegan Gains Biography

It was on the 26th day of June 1991 that vegan bodybuilder was born in Canada. The Canadian launched his YouTube channel in December 2014 with a self-introduction in a video named Why a Bodybuilder Became Vegan after he went vegan in 2011. Since then,...

Best topics on Vegan

1. Veganism as a Sociological Challenge to Dominant Social Norms

2. The Turning Point Of Our Eating Habits

3. A Lot of Conflicting Ideas About the Vegetarian Diet

4. The Impossible Burger as the Staple of Vegan Food

5. The Access to Healthy Living as per Veganism

6. The Benefits of Vegan Diet for the Environment

7. The Horrific Truth Behind the Veganism Guidelines

8. Going Vegan: The Best Substitutes for Meat and Dairy

9. Analysis Of Gary Yourofsky’s Speech About Veganism

10. Harmless Space Travel – Vegans In Space

11. Vegan Gains Biography

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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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______. “ 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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BEING VEGAN: A personal essay about veganism

I wear a necklace that spells out the word vegan. People peer at it and ask me, “Are you vegan?” It seems like an odd question, but people find vegans odd. When I respond that I indeed am a vegan, the comeback reply I dread most is when the person lists the animal products they eat, and how they couldn’t live without chicken or cheese.

In the cut and thrust of talk about food, I’ll then respond that the chicken is the body of an animal who wanted to live. That cheese is made from milk, a nutritious sustenance meant for a mother to give her newborn calf. If the baby cow was male, he was slaughtered for veal.

The slaughtering of baby animals is a good way to end what could escalate into an uncomfortable conversation neither of us really wanted to have.

Few of us are born vegan, and those who choose to become vegan usually do so following a personal epiphany, perhaps in the wake of a health crisis, or after meeting and befriending a farm animal whom one might formerly have considered food. That was my route. I was 40 before I understood that I was living a lie, claiming to love animals on the one hand, and eating them on the other. Today, veganism brings me peace of mind and a nice circle of friends.

I find it regrettable that vegans are so widely disliked in the mainstream media, but I’m not surprised. Our insistence that animals are neither objects nor ingredients is a perspective that people find challenging and even subversive. Our choice not to eat or wear animals challenges people to think about their own relationship to animals.  Most people love animals. Most people don’t want to think about animals being gruesomely treated and slaughtered. Faced with a vegan, the non-vegan has to think about that. Or else thrust such thinking into the depths of the psyche, and quick.

Toronto Mayor Rob Ford, on a weight-loss campaign to shed some of his 300 pounds, hurriedly dismissed two PETA-sponsored vegans who brought him a basket of vegan treats during one of his weekly weigh-ins. He wouldn’t even look them in the face. He abruptly dismissed a question from a reporter about veganism and retreated into his office.  He skipped a subsequent weigh-in.

His Honour could have relaxed a little. Veganism is a way of life that is not forced on anyone. We don’t come to your house with flyers or make robo-calls. We’re not funded by some giant corporation. We’re people who care deeply about animals, and about the people who have nothing to eat because so much of the corn and grain grown in North America goes to feed livestock, not hungry children.

Vegans mean it when they say they love all animals. A recent vegan advertising campaign showed a dog or cat facing a pig or chick, and underneath was the caption: “Why love one but eat the other?”

The questions we raise bother people. One commenter on a social media forum wrote:

“Those who don’t eat meat, I can empathize with you but you also need to get off your soapboxes.”

I relish the irony of being told to get off my soapbox from someone who is firmly planted on theirs. Non-vegans have been doing more than their fair share of “preaching” for centuries. In our day, McDonalds and Burger King push their beliefs and products on me dozens of times a day through TV and newspaper ads, and coupon flyers stuffed into my mailbox.

The Canadian government forces me to subsidize the meat and dairy industries through taxation. Non-vegans have preached and promoted their point of view on such a large scale that they have successfully hidden the cruelty of the meat and dairy industries from public view.

When I’m responding to an item in the newspaper about the subject of veganism, someone in the next comment box will inevitably ask me why I bother with animals when there is so much human suffering in the world. I love that question because it allows me to explain that I see animal liberation and human liberation as being intertwined.

The great physicist Albert Einstein famously said: “Nothing will benefit human health and increase the chances for survival of life on Earth as much as the evolution to a vegetarian diet.” He also held the view that not eating animals would have a physical effect on the human temperament that would benefit the lot of humankind.

The vegans I know care about injustice, enslavement, and oppression, no matter what the race, ethnicity, or species of the victim. When someone argues with me that human problems take precedence, I have to turn the argument on its head and ask not only what that person is personally doing to alleviate the suffering of human beings, but why they feel the heartless exploitation of other animals should continue even so. Humans are hurting, so kindness to animals must therefore be abandoned?

The most ridiculous argument that I hear is that plants have feelings too. To which I quote the answer provided by vegan food writer Colleen Patrick-Goudreau, who asks, in an episode of her podcast devoted to what she calls excuse-itarians—“ Really? Really?”

Animals are sentient and plants are not. Sentient beings have minds; they have preferences and show a desire to live by running away from those who would harm them, or by crying out in pain. Plants respond to sunlight and other stimuli, and apparently they like it when Prince Charles talks to them, but they are not sentient; they don’t have a mind, they don’t think about or fear death, they aren’t aware and conscious.

Finally, there’s the argument of last resort: that eating flesh is a personal choice. If it were my personal choice to kick and beat you, would you say to me “that’s your personal choice”? Being slaughtered for food is not the personal choice of the billions of animals that just want to live their portion of time on Earth.

Being vegan has changed not only what I eat and wear, but how I cope with the anger, outrage, dismissal and verbal abuse of others.

I’m learning, as I go, to let it all go. I speak out where I feel my words will do the most good, and if all else fails, I’ll simply smile and say, “Don’t hate me because I’m vegan.”

[su_panel background=”#f2f2f2″ color=”#000000″ border=”0px none #ffffff” shadow=”0px 0px 0px #ffffff”]Bonnie Shulman is a writer and editor working in Toronto. She earned her Master of Arts degree at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Alberta. You can follow her on Twitter at @veganbonnie .

image:  rian_bean (Creative Commons BY-NC-SA)

The biggest issue for me in the whole politics of eating is the divide that’s created among people solely based on their choice of diet. To be vegan or non-vegan shouldn’t matter. Like any labels I wish they didn’t even exist. But of all the unnecessary labels, to have to use the word vegan is pretty sad. What one chooses to eat is a personal choice that doesn’t hurt anyone else, yet some people blow it up into such a big issue.

I wish people didn’t get so annoyed at vegans because it just contributes even more discord to this world. The only upside I see is that when people single out vegans and get defensive it at least causes them to think and talk about veganism.

Hi Breathe:

I agree that discord between people isn’t pleasant. Yet that is the end result of being an advocate for animals. I want to put a stop to the wholesale torture of animals on factory farms. To do that, I have to take a stand. I have to stand up and declare myself for animals. I have to campaign about the abuse, so that more people know what goes on behind those walls where pigs and chickens never see the light of day their entire lives. Speaking up for animals makes some people uneasy, and they get angry. On the other hand, some people, meat eaters included!, appreciate the stance I take. I say meat eaters too because even good people who eat meat don’t want animals to suffer as they do in the current conditions on factory farms. Watch any video by Mercy For Animals and you’ll see what I mean. It’s horrifying.

Thanks for your response. Take care.

First, I appreciate that you’re willing to stand up for animals. It takes courage and it’s a thankless job, which is why so few do it.

As I mentioned, I see the benefit to standing up for animals and I don’t discourage that. What I was getting at is how can we advocate while maintaining peace? How can we raise our communication to a higher level?

Saying the V-word pisses people off. It always has… maybe always will because people just don’t like to think that they’re in the wrong. Defensiveness is one of the ego’s most potent tricks. It has the power to disprove even the most solid logic. And so, enemies are built. The point is not even to build “allies” because that too is separation. We’re all humans doing the best we can with the resources we have at work. So the question is how do we advocate for animals by overcoming this ego battle? For me, that just means loving them, being in nature, connecting to them and sharing my love for them. Now I don’t believe that this is making a world of difference or anything. The whole issue of animal rights is no easy situation to deal with and I’d just like to think of different ways of doing things.

Breathe, you ask the million dollar question. And you hit the nail on the head: advocacy can lead to icky feelings between people! I once passed by a demonstration against wind farms, and I asked someone with a picket sign why she was against wind farms, and she kind of spat in my face with disgust at my question. Naturally, I am ALL FOR windfarms now (haha – I actually was before the incident).

May I recommend a great book? It’s my advocacy bible and I have a review on Amazon.com about it. I think it really addresses what you talk about – we have to change the world for animals without alienating people. I am not perfect, I admit, but I hand out vegan food at work and leave easy vegan recipes in the servery. That helps! Food is good! I’ve even got some people to try out Meatless Mondays, without even asking them to do so. They just thought it was cool to give vegan food a try. They love it now.

Here’s the book:

The Animal Activist’s Handbook: Maximizing Our Positive Impact in Today’s World by Matt Ball and Bruce Friedrich. These are the top advocates that I know of, and I respect them so much. They are brilliant people who understand that we must not lose touch with people in our animal advocacy. Again, they are the masters. I bow to their wisdom!

Thanks for writing!

Breathe, When you are in a non vegan diet what one chooses to it hurt innocent animals. It took me a while to connect the dots. I was not always a vegan, but becoming a vegan was a moment of brilliance that it is one of the best things that has ever happen to me. I can not keep exploiting animals.

I don’t hate anyone because they are vegan. But the vegans hate me because I insist that eating meat is natural for humans. Being vegan is a choice. Eating meat is a choice.I respect yours but do you respect mine? Your article is again full of accusations. Up to today I never got an answer to the questions: How does a vegan think about a Lion eating a Zebra? How does a vegan think about a cat eating a mouse or a bird? And why do they think different about a human eating a cow or a chicken? Humans are omnivores since millions of years. And please spare me the – how did you cal it “The most ridiculous argument ” that our bodies, our teeth etc are not made for meat. We eat it since millions of years for heavens sake! When do people accept that eating meat is our natural food? Yes we can chose to not eat meat. Yes I do accept that. But it is a choice! And if you want to tell me that I hurt animals by killing them then you have to accuse a Lion as well. And by the way, dairy is not our natural food. I agree with you on this. Not because we steal it from the mothers but because it is not natural and that’s why so many people are dairy intolerant. It is natural to be weaned off dairy products. But we do not have a great number of people who are meat intolerant. Because it is part of our natural diet.

Dear Peter:

When a lion eats a zebra I am distressed at the images of the kill, but I let it go because that is the way of the lion world. They cannot grow plants and raise crops. I am not angry at the lion for having its dinner. I find it pretty ridiculous that you would even think that. Also, people are not lions, so why do you even bring that up as an argument?

What do I think about a cat eating a mouse or bird? if it is a domestic cat I’m infuriated, because there so many farm animals are being slaughtered already, the by-products of which go into animal food readily available at stores. The decrease in the number of North American songbirds has been attributed largely to household cats.

If meat is a natural part of our diet, why do so many people thrive the minute they give it up? Also, why are so many of our hospitals stuffed to the gills with people requiring heart surgery? Only a minor percentage were born with heart defects. Among the rest, many gorged on such meat products as steaks, bacon, sausages and chicken fingers, as well as high-fat dairy, until their bodies rebelled.

I see my article has made you very angry. If this doesn’t prove my point then I don’t know what does. Thank you for writing, PeterNZ.

Question for you – would you be able to go right now, pounce on a cow, pig, etc.’s back, chomp through their hide/skin with your teeth to their muscle and eat it without cooking it? If your answer is NO (which it should be if you are human), well then there is your answer. Next, just because something has been done for millions of years, does not mean that it is right. Humans have done MANY things for millions of years that have been considered atrocities (sadistic Roman gladiator games, slavery, etc.). Were those things okay? These are just excuses. Believe me, I understand, as I made excuses my whole life…Done with that!

Bella I am a completely normal human being and i would be more than happy to go to my local supermarket and eat food that they provide, as this is what is normal for our culture. let me just quote History.com, one of the most reliable sources possible “In a paper published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, an international team announces the discovery of burned plants and bones from 1 million years ago. Their findings suggest that Homo erectus?not Homo sapiens or Neanderthals?became the first hominin to master flames, possibly in order to cook their food.” as my ancestors have done I would happily cook the meat so that the food becomes safe for my consumption, I agree with you in the concept that no human would go and pounce on a wild animal and sink their teeth into them as this is not what a normal human would do. I personally if it was down to survival would light a fire and cook the meat so that I could enjoy the delicacy that has been provided to me by nature. just this weekend i have enjoyed one of my favourite meals that does meat in it. i would suggest some of the recipes from this site as i have found them the best http://www.foodnetwork.ca/everyday-cooking/photos/most-popular-beef-recipes/

In your responses try to not be so aggressive as your way of life is far from the main stream and preferred way of living 🙂

also note to the author of this post, don’t try and act like your not trying to bring attention to your self, your twitter name is legitimately “veganbonnie”.

We vegans don?t hate u guys but we just wish non vegans to understand how the animals have to suffer and have to end their precious life just for the food u eat. and don?t compare humans with loins we humans can think rationally and we have can grow crops .. we have many options but the lions don?t have any options.. we respect your choice to eat meat but animals do not exist for humans and our uses. Animals also have moral rights to live in this world as much as human have.

Human beings have a variety of options when it comes to getting protein into their bodies – rice paired with lentils, chickpeas or any kind of bean forms a perfect protein. There is also tofu, and a lot of soy products are viable alternatives for those who are not allergic to soy. We cannot educate a wild animal such as a lion, to grow, harvest and ferment soybeans. Or chickpeas. This argument is silly. Lions hunt based on instinct. Human beings are more advanced (arguably) and therefore, we can use our more advanced brains to make food choices that do not cause harm to other living things. We have many instincts that we can overcome, and that we have overcome in order to be able to live in “civilized” societies.

Eating the flesh of a living thing is a personal choice that kills an innocent creature. There is nothing inherently wrong with your choice. But don’t get defensive when someone points out this fact.

Fact: You choose to place your tastebuds and your personal enjoyment over the life of another living creature, because you view yourself as more advanced and therefore entitled to consume flesh.

You do not need to feel guilty about your choice. Just be honest about it, and accept the moral consequences. That’s all. Meat may have been eaten by humans since the dawn of time… but historical precedent is not, in my mind, a valid excuse by which to continue justifying a behaviour.

In a similar vein, women have been treated as property since the dawn of time as well. Men are more powerful and indeed women did not always hold legal personhood status throughout history. So we should continue in the same vein, no? But this argument doesn’t fly today. Why? Because we know better, so we can act better. The same goes for the meat argument.

Your dietary implications may not be clean and pretty, but if you’re going to stand firm in your position, stick to it 100%. Do not waver, and do not speak about naturally being an omnivore. Just because you CAN eat it, enjoy it and thrive on it, doesn’t mean you SHOULD continue to do so. If we are enlightened beings, as we all like to claim to be, we should be held to a higher moral standard. If we do not want to hold ourselves up to that standard, that is fine.

P.S. Before you begin to assume things about me I will tell you that no, I am not a vegan. Why? Because I love eating fish, and cheese on occasion. But I don’t apologize for it. I know I can live without it, and I know that I am making a personal, selfish choice in the face of cruelty and suffering.

Laura, your reply is so beautifully heartfelt, and I read it with great interest. I love your honesty. Part of my animal advocacy is just asking people to be honest with themselves about the choices they make.

I also think you make a critically important statement that really hits the nail on the head. I’ll repeat it here:

Just because you CAN eat it, enjoy it and thrive on it, doesn’t mean you SHOULD continue to do so.

Thank you for contributing such wise words to the conversation, and all the best.

http://www.amif.org/blog/eating-meat-is-ethical/

This is so inspiring! I am a loyal vegetarian and have been for almost 9 years, I really feel deeply moved by it! I’ve thought about becoming Vegan but on a strict competitive national training programme it could be difficult, but you’ve definitely persuaded me to give it a go! Thank you for your thoughtful insight!

I just wanted to voice my support and appreciation for this article. With your stance and mine, putting the word “vegan” out in the world is going to make people angry. Anything different makes people angry. But if that anger ever leads to them making sure they understand the implications of their actions, it is worth it. It is worth it if they think.

I have had a close friend of mine tell me that he honestly believes in mind over matter. He also said he couldn’t ever stop eating meat. That self-limitation is stopping the human race from doing great things. WE must think through our actions, because we are the only species who can. Do what is right, because we are able.

Can people really be okay with eating a being that loved its mother? I always hypothesize a world were people could speak to animals and I ask the meat eater “Tell that animal to its face that it was born for the purpose of dying and feeding you, only for a single day, before you eat its children.”

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Vegans argue that animal farming is not only cruel but also bad for the environment. World Vegan Day, on 1 November, puts the focus on the vegan way of life.

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‘All life deserves respect, dignity and compassion. All life.’ – Anthony Douglas Williams

What is veganism and what do vegans do?

Vegans try to live, as much as possible, in a way that avoids exploiting and being cruel to animals. This means following a plant-based diet. Vegans do not eat animals or animal-based products like meat, fish, seafood, eggs, honey and dairy products such as cheese. For many vegans, living a committed vegan lifestyle means not wearing clothes made from animal skins and avoiding any products which have been tested on animals.

How are vegans different from vegetarians?

Vegetarians don’t eat meat or fish but they can eat eggs, honey and dairy products, but vegans don’t eat any animal-based food products. Vegans argue that suffering is caused in the production of these foods, for example they say that, on some dairy farms, male calves are killed because they are too expensive to keep, and on some farms, cows are killed when they get older and produce less milk. Similarly, on some egg farms, male chicks are killed because they do not produce eggs. As for honey, vegans say that bees make honey for bees, not for humans, and that bees’ health can suffer when humans take the honey from them. Vegans believe that the products they use and consume should be free from not just cruelty but any exploitation of animals.

When did veganism start?

The Vegan Society was founded in 1944, but there is evidence of people deciding not to consume animal products over 2,000 years ago. The sixth-century BC Greek mathematician and philosopher Pythagoras was in favour of kindness to all species, and his diet could be described as vegetarian. There was a tradition of vegetarianism in the Indus Valley, Babylonian and ancient Egyptian civilisations even earlier. The Vegan Society points out that in 1806, the famous romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley was one of the first people to publicly object to eating eggs and dairy products on moral grounds.

Why do many people decide to become vegan?

For many people, the main reason for going vegan is probably that they believe that animals and all other sentient beings should have the right to life and freedom. However, there are other reasons. Vegans argue that the production of meat and other animal products is very bad for the environment. They point out that a huge quantity of water is needed to grow grain to feed animals in the meat industry. The enormous amount of grain which the meat industry needs often leads to forests being cut down and habitats being lost. In contrast, much lower quantities of grain and water are needed to sustain a vegan diet. In addition, many vegans say that all the nutrients our bodies need are contained in a carefully planned vegan diet and that this type of diet helps prevent some diseases.

What is World Vegan Day?

On 1 November every year, vegans all over the world celebrate their way of life. There are workshops, exhibitions and public debates on World Vegan Day, and it is a wonderful opportunity for anybody thinking of becoming a vegan to learn more about the subject.

• https://www.vegansociety.com
• https://www.awarenessdays.com/awareness-days-calendar/world-vegan-day-2018
• https://www.azquotes.com/quote/1069748

Would you consider becoming a vegan? If you already are a vegan, how did you choose to become one?

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Well, I think the veganism is a very brave and kindness choice life, because consider all types of life and they say We all be import for equally.

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I consider myself a vegetarian person but not a vegan one. I love the benefits of an organic diet since I've been taking care of myself, about what I eat, I feel full of beans, more cheerful, and my health got better. One of the reasons I've been learning about vegan or vegetarian diets it's that I love animals and I'm interested and saving and taking care of the ecosystems. Even though I love animals I do respect people who like eating meat, I know they are not committing a crime, and I do respect traditions and ways of living. Despite that, I agree to share information and take part in movements against cruelty to animals or explain ways to take care of nature. I'm not sure about becoming a vegan one day because I'm used to eating eggs and dairy products and becoming vegan means spending too much money on a diet. My slide of advice is never to stop reading and learning about the newest articles about nutrition, vegetarian or vegan diets, and the different ways that we can help to take care of nature. Being a vegan or vegetarian person means always learning and being curious and responsible about giving opinions.

yes i'm a vegeterian and can consider being a Vegan.

I think that the vegan diet has to be expensive. I mean that to maintain a properly level of protein during the day require is a very complicated products, which are really high-priced. But the other side there is clearly evidence the veganism is good for health, becouse the animal based products almost always contain a additional ingredients,which have bad impact on our body functioning.

I don't feel low whenever non vegans mock us by saying that plants do feel pain as they are a living creature too and bla bla..., because Veganism is all about least suffering possible and it doesn't promote hypocrisy anyway. Veganism is a way through which you can help stop cruelty on sentiment animals and assure their rights and freedom. It's not my belief, it's the core structure of this movement. Thanks for going through this! Signing off on behalf of a vegan:)

I am half vegan, half vegetarian. I am allergic to dairy products so I wasn't even thinking to much about changing diet, it was a must do. I feel so much better after not eating meat and switching to plant based food. I have much more energy and I feel a lot healthier.

I think We must respect against vegan or vegetarians. I aggree with vegan's some idea and some bad people behave the worst against animals for instance They cut down calf and male chicken. We have to respect all live. Whether we are vegan or not .

no, I don't want to become a vegan because I'm vegetarian but I eat eggs and all dairy products and cheese. every morning I eat eggs or egg paratha

Hi there! me neither, I am a meat-eater, however I am concerned about who are vegetarian or vegan. Sometimes I think it is too cruel to animals. As I was raised eating meat, it is now at the age of 50 hard to regret.

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Thinking Veganism in Literature and Culture pp 1–24 Cite as

Introduction: Thinking Through Veganism

• Emelia Quinn 6 &
• Benjamin Westwood 7  
• First Online: 25 May 2018

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Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature ((PSAAL))

This introduction outlines the social, environmental, and intellectual contexts shaping the emergence of vegan theory. It establishes an understanding of veganism’s messy, contradictory aspects, which runs counter to contemporary conceptualizations of it as a faddish diet or punitive set of proscriptions. Quinn and Westwood argue that veganism is situated between two opposing, but necessary poles: utopianism and insufficiency, aligned respectively with the work of Carol J. Adams and Jacques Derrida. The importance of these coordinates derives from their opposition: veganism as a confluence of utopian impulses, and the acknowledgement of their inevitable insufficiency. This introduction shows how thinking through veganism—as a heuristic lens and topic in its own right—opens out onto a wide variety of issues and questions explored in the following essays.

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Oxford English Dictionary , 3rd ed., s.v. “vegan, n.2 and adj.2. ”

See Robert McKay’s essay in this collection.

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Around the Performative: Periperformative Vicinities in Nineteenth-Century Narrative,” Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham, 2003), pp. 71–72.

See Richard Twine’s essay on the “intersectional disgust ” that he suggests has divorced the question of the animal from mainstream feminism (“Intersectional disgust ? Animals and (eco)feminism ,” Feminism & Psychology 20, no.3 (2010): 397–406). While we are reluctant to conflate homosexual oppression with the oppression of animals, we do not shy away from the recognition of important analogies that allow us to theorize human social and political structures in relation to the nonhuman. As Twine concludes “It would be a shame if disgust were to get in the way of conversation” (p. 402).

As made clear by Carol J. Adams in Sexual Politics of Meat  (London, 2015) and Annie Potts, “Exploring Vegansexuality: An Embodied Ethics of Intimacy” William Lynn: Ethics and Politics of Sustainability. 9 March 2008. http://www.williamlynn.net/exploring-vegansexuality-an-embodied-ethics-of-intimacy/

See, for example, José Esteban Muñoz , Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York, 2009) and Judith Halberstam , The Queer Art of Failure (Durham, 2011).

See Sara Salih’s essay in this collection.

J. M. Coetzee, The Lives of Animals (Princeton, 2001), p. 67.

See, for example, Martha Nussbaum, Hiding from Humanity: Disgust, Shame, and the Law (Princeton, 2004). Nussbaum condemns disgust as reliant on fears that are “typically unreasonable, embodying magical ideas of contamination, and impossible aspirations to purity, immortality, and nonanimality, that are just not in line with human life as we know it” (p. 23).

Matthew Calarco, “Deconstruction is not vegetarianism: Humanism, subjectivity, and animal ethics,” Continental Philosophy Review 37, no. 2 (2004): 194.

Ibid., pp. 195, emphasis added.

United Nations, “World population projected to reach 9.7 billion by 2050” UN.org , 29 July 2015. http://www.un.org/en/development/desa/news/population/2015-report.html

United Nations Environmental Programme, “Assessing the Environ-mental Impacts of Consumption and Production” UNEP.org , 2010. http://www.unep.fr/shared/publications/pdf/DTIx1262xPA-PriorityProductsAndMaterials_Report.pdf ; London Economic, “Vegan Food Sales up by 1500% in Past Year” The London Economic, November 2016. https://www.thelondoneconomic.com/food-drink/vegan-food-sales-up-by-1500-in-past-year/01/11/ ; Vegan Life, “Veganism Booms By 350%” VeganLife Magazine, 18 May 2016. http://www.veganlifemag.com/veganism-booms/

The UK National Health Service supports this, stating on its website that a well-planned vegan diet will provide all the nutrients the body needs. NHS, “The vegan diet,” nhs.uk. http://www.nhs.uk/Livewell/Vegetarianhealth/Pages/Vegandiets.aspx

Michael P. Branch and Scott Slovic, The ISLE Reader (Athens, 2003), p. xvi.

See, for example, Graham Huggan and Helen Tiffin , Postcolonial Ecocriticism (Abingdon, 2010), Carol J. Adams and Josephine Donovan, Animals and Women: Feminist Theoretical Explorations (Durham, 1995), and Val Plumwood , Feminism and the Mastery of Nature (London, 1993).

For more on Deep Ecology, see George Session, Deep Ecology for the Twenty-First Century (Boston, 1995).

Robert C. Jones, “Veganisms,” in Critical Perspectives on Veganism, eds. Jodey Castricano and Rasmus R. Simsonsen (London, 2016), pp. 15–39.

Kara Jesella, “Vegans exhibiting an ever wilder side for their cause,” nytimes.com , The New York Times, 27 March 2008. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/27/arts/27iht-vegan.1.11463224.html

Best et al., “Introducing Critical Animal Studies,” Journal for Critical Animal Studies 5, no.1 (2007).

Taylor and Twine, “Introduction. Locating the ‘Critical’ in Critical Animal Studies,” in The Rise of Critical Animal Studies, eds. Nik Taylor and Richard Twine (Abingdon, 2014), p. 2.

Ibid., p. 6.

Ibid., p. 12.

Pederson and Stanescu, “Future Directions for Critical Animal Studies,” in Critical Animal Studies, p. 262.

Wright, The Vegan Studies Project: Food, Animals, and Gender in the Age of Terror (Athens and London, 2015), p. 7.

Joshua Schuster, “The Vegan and the Sovereign,” in Critical Perspectives, pp. 216, 210.

Anat Pick, “Turning to Animals Between Love and Law,” New Formations: A Journal of Culture/Theory/Politics 76 (2012): 65–85.

For more comprehensive surveys of the development of animal studies, see Linda Kalof (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Animal Studies (Oxford, 2017); Garry Marvin and Susan McHugh (eds.), Routledge Handbook of Human-Animal Studies (Abingdon, 2014); Derek Ryan, Animal Theory: A Critical Introduction (Edinburgh, 2015); and Kari Weil , Thinking Animals: Why Animal Studies Now? (New York, 2012).

The French edition was published in 1999, with an extended version released in 2006. The work itself is based largely on the text of a series of lectures given by Derrida at the 1997 Cerisy-la-Salle conference on “The Autobiographical Animal.”

Derrida, “‘Eating well’, or the Calculation of the Subject,” in Points… : Interviews, 1974–1994 , ed. Elisabeth Weber, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Stanford, 1995), p. 280.

Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am , ed. Marie-Louise Mallet, trans. David Wills (New York, 2008), p. 111.

Ibid., p. 28.

Adams, Sexual Politics of Meat , pp. xix; emphasis original.

Ibid., p. 63.

Ibid., p. 21.

Erica Fudge, Animal (London, 2002), p. 45.

Derrida, “Eating Well, ” p. 282.

Calarco, “Deconstruction is not vegetarianism,” p. 198.

Ibid., p. 194.

Gary Steiner, Animals and the Limits of Postmodernism (New York, 2013), p. 63.

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Quinn, E., Westwood, B. (2018). Introduction: Thinking Through Veganism. In: Quinn, E., Westwood, B. (eds) Thinking Veganism in Literature and Culture. Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73380-7_1

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Veganism, Moral Motivation and False Consciousness

Susana pickett.

School of History, Politics and International Relations, University of Leicester, Leicester, UK

Despite the strength of arguments for veganism in the animal rights literature, alongside environmental and other anthropocentric concerns posed by industrialised animal agriculture, veganism remains only a minority standpoint. In this paper, I explore the moral motivational problem of veganism from the perspectives of moral psychology and political false consciousness. I argue that a novel interpretation of the post-Marxist notion of political false consciousness may help to make sense of the widespread refusal to shift towards veganism. Specifically, the notion of false consciousness fills some explanatory gaps left by the moral psychological notion of akrasia , often understood to refer to a weakness of will. Central to my approach is the idea that animal exploitation is largely systemic and the assumption that moral motivation is inseparable from moral thinking. In this light, the primary obstacle to the adoption of veganism arises not so much from a failure to put genuine beliefs into action, but rather in a shared, distorted way of thinking about animals. Thus, common unreflective objections to veganism may be said to be manifestations of false consciousness.

Introduction

Why does the case for veganism often fail to convince? Insofar as it does sway opinion, why then does it fail to motivate large-scale social change? Whilst moral disagreements are inevitable, the core case for veganism from the animal rights perspective – complemented as it is by environmental, social justice, and global health considerations – is robust. 1 Considering this jointly with commonly held moral principles, one might reasonably expect the percentage of vegans to be much higher, at least in economically developed societies. On the other hand, apathy towards veganism prevails, and common objections to veganism often rest on rationalisations (Piazza 2015 , p. 114). In this paper, I suggest that a failure to accept the moral status of animals as required by veganism may itself constitute a failure of moral motivation (hereinafter referred to as motivation). Central to this position is the premise that moral thinking and motivation are inseparable, and thus thinking does not necessarily precede motivation. If this is the case, then common excuses presented against veganism express failures of motivation rather than intent, by which I mean the motivation to think of animals as being recipients of moral consideration in a manner that conflicts with our social habits and received opinion.

To narrow the scope of my opening questions, I examine the motivational problem from two radically opposing perspectives; namely akrasia and false consciousness. Akrasia – often known as ‘weakness of the will’ – is a failure of practical reasoning whereby individuals act knowingly and willingly against their better judgement. This idea has already been developed by Aaltola ( 2016 ) to explain the widespread reluctance to adopt veganism. Marxian false consciousness, by contrast, is traditionally understood as the social consciousness of an exploited class. It leads individuals to act – not fully knowingly or willingly, and thus not akratically – under a dominant ideology. This ideology may run contrary to one’s best interests, but I argue that it can also taint one’s conception of the ‘greater’ good. I understand false as applying to groups of individuals beyond social class, and argue that it is false consciousness, rather than akrasia, that is more likely to be a persistent condition that dampens motivation. As such, false consciousness may have greater explanatory power than akrasia for the widespread refusal to shift towards veganism.

This paper is divided into three sections. First, I offer a brief overview of the motivational difficulties associated with veganism, specifically the role of willpower and typically presented rationalisations. Second, I give an overview of akrasia and the structure of akratic action. Furthermore, I consider social factors which impact upon our moral thinking, serving to highlight that moral thinking is not reducible to syllogistic-style reasoning. Shortcomings of the application of akrasia lead on to the final section on false consciousness, wherein I explore the persistency of dominant ideologies and their impact upon moral thinking and motivation.

The Vegan Motivational Problem

Moral motivation is typically conceived as the phenomenon of being motivated to do what one judges to be the right thing to do. Naturally, moral reasons can conflict with one’s self-interest and other reasons. In the animal ethics literature, care ethicists, including Luke ( 1992 ), are critical of the mainstream, rationalist approach exemplified by Singer ( 2015 ) and Regan ( 2004 ). The rationalist approach tends to put forward arguments for veganism and vegetarianism without tackling the motivational question of why some people may be convinced by their arguments but fail to put their beliefs into action. By contrast, care ethicists consider humans to have an innate sense of empathy towards animals, which is the basis of moral motivation, but such empathy needs to be cultivated. A problem with this approach is that most people carry on eating animals despite being empathetic to their suffering. Indeed, it is not unusual for carnivores to feel guilt and avoid imagining a slaughtered cow when eating a hamburger (Greenebaum 2012 , p. 316). Hence, it is pertinent to ask why veganism poses such motivational difficulties, considering that the public possesses some moral regard for animals as well as varying degrees of empathy for animals.

Bona Fide Challenges

While some aspects of veganism, such as health and environmental considerations, may be motivated by human self-interest, other dimensions conflict not only with narrow self-interest but also with prudential self-interest. As such, they constitute bona fide reasons to act or side against veganism. ‘Go vegan’ approaches present veganism as being easy, yet some challenges merit attention. These include financial sacrifice, social alienation, and conflict. However, I argue that taste (flavour) is not a bona fide reason.

First, veganism may sometimes involve financial sacrifice. This is because vegan substitutes often cost more (Mills 2019 , p. 17). However, this does not apply to a large part of the population who has access to and can afford plant-based foods. Second, veganism involves alienation. Food is communal in family and social situations, and a vegan at the table can be seen as a threat (Twine 2014 , p. 632). Worse still, vegans often experience exclusion and disapproval (Bresnahan et al. 2016 , p. 13) and such forms of discrimination as ‘vegaphobia’ can arise (Horta 2018 , p. 359). Third, veganism involves moral conflict, not only because of how vegans are perceived but also because of how they perceive others. Raimond Gaita states that vegans who provocatively shout, ‘meat is murder’ exhibit a pathological gap between what they profess and how they act, in that ‘they don’t act as though they live among murderers’ (Gaita 2016 , pp. 22–23). This insight is powerful, even when applied to less polarising claims such as ‘meat involves unnecessary suffering’. From the perspective of some vegans, it can be soul-draining to inhabit a world that celebrates animal consumption and forces ‘question upon question from non-vegan interlocutors’ (Reid 2017 , p. 39), and vegans are often asked to justify their standpoint and then subsequently criticised for being ‘preachy’ (Cole and Morgan 2011 , p. 149). Fourth, radical factions can create tension with other individuals who do not live up to the expectations of the ‘hegemonic vegan frame’, a phrase coined by Wrenn ( 2019 ) to describe highly bureaucratised veganism (often referred to as the ‘vegan police’). There are indeed many ‘veganisms’ (Jones 2016 , p. 24). Hence, vegans may face opposition, not only from non-vegans but also from other vegans.

Finally, Kazez ( 2018 ) argues that food taste is not necessarily trivial. For example, persistently unpalatable food could affect one’s wellbeing. However, I disagree that this constitutes a bona fide argument against veganism, because it is based on a hypothetical consideration that assumes too much since not all vegan food tastes disgusting to most people. As Singer notes, it is not as if animal flesh is uniformly delicious and vegetarian food is uniformly awful (Singer 1980 , p. 333). Given this logic, one can reasonably object on the basis that taste is typically trivial when compared with what Rowlands ( 2013 , p. 6) refers to as an animal’s ‘vital interests’. What is one to make, then, of those seemingly incapable of going vegan owing to their craving for meat? For instance, Eugene Mills recounts how he gave up after trying to be vegan for three days. His cravings for hamburgers became so powerful that he became distracted from the pursuit of important projects (Mills 2019 , p. 19). It is not clear, though, that he deemed veganism to be an important long-term project.

Excepting taste, the aforementioned challenges can constitute bona fide, prima facie reasons for not embracing veganism. When coupled with the realisation that one’s lifestyle choices may have little positive impact globally (this is the phenomenon of ‘causal inefficacy’ which I discuss in more detail later), and after considering the disconnect between consumption, production, and killing, these reasons can become powerful. As a result, it may require substantial willpower to become a vegan against one’s cultural traditions. There are cases, however, where veganism does not require willpower. For example, where veganism is second nature (Lumsden 2017 , p. 221); or one finds joy rather than sacrifice in veganism (Aaltola 2015 , p. 42). In general, though, the act of becoming a vegan does require some degree of willpower.

Willpower in Deliberation

One may object on the grounds that, if animals have no moral status, as Hsiao ( 2015 , p. 284) proposes, then the moral motivational question of veganism does not arise. However, I disagree that this is necessarily the case. It appears to me that moral thinking and motivation are inseparable in the same way that reason and feeling cannot be fully separated, any more than form and content can. Indeed, without motivation, moral thinking would not be possible, for what else would motivate the thinking insofar as moral thinking is not purely theoretical? Hence, when I speak about moral motivation, albeit broadly conceived, I also include the motivation to deliberate about moral matters, including those concerning animals. According to this view, which I refer to as the ‘motivational unity thesis’, motivation is not always something that takes place at the end of a practical deliberation as to whether it is right or wrong to act (this is the narrow conception of motivation). Motivation is also needed to see certain others as worthy of moral deliberation in the first place.

The idea that animals have no moral worth is not commonplace, but the notion that animals are of lesser worth is central to the orthodoxy of animal welfare, a commonly held view which justifies animal suffering according to their utility to humans. This view has been said to explain ‘some of the apparently schizophrenic attitudes to animals that occur in Britain and elsewhere’ (Garner 2013 , p. 80). Regardless of whether one believes that animals are of lesser, or indeed no moral worth (or whether one has ever considered any of this in terms of moral worth), the motivation to think things through with moral seriousness fails when we conclude that we have a right to eat or kill an animal merely because, for example, it is traditional, natural, or simply because the animal was raised on a local farm or one with higher welfare standards than some other farms.

More elaborate justifications against veganism can be provided, but we fail to do justice to animals as the objects of our deliberation if we conclude that safeguarding our lifestyle habits is generally a good enough reason to justify animal exploitation. This constitutes a broad motivational failure insofar as we fail to view animals as individuals who are ‘equally real’, to borrow Thomas Nagel’s phrase (Nagel 1970 , p. 14). Still, one might lodge at least two objections. First, there is no motivational failure if it is not deemed morally objectionable to use animals as commodities in industrialised societies. Second, one might concede that a motivational failure only exists if one holds the conviction that veganism is morally obligatory, yet otherwise fails (akratically) to act accordingly.

Since this paper is not an argument for veganism, I cannot respond to the first objection directly but can link it to the second objection. To clarify, I can invoke the motivational unity thesis to argue that motivational failures can take place at the level of thinking alone (including what kind of beings to include in these considerations), and not merely when it comes to putting beliefs into action. Based on this premise, the exclusion of animals from serious moral consideration is tantamount to moral nihilism and leads only to further rationalisations when probed. Therefore, in addition to the prudential ( bona fide ) reasons against veganism discussed earlier, I now turn my attention to some common rationalisations.

Two Rationalisations

Rationalisations against veganism readily occur when the issue is not thought through. Indeed, we are prone to motivated ignorance (Tam 2019 , p. 6). The objection that animals only exist to be eaten and various other defensive tactics, exhibit apathy in the face of superior evidence to the contrary. Poor argumentation is relevant to motivation because thinking requires effort, while social habits and contempt inhibit it. Many rationalisations against veganism are merely strawmen, yet more sophisticated objections permeate the animal ethics literature, namely the causal inefficacy objection and the principle of unnecessary harm. On the one hand, causal inefficacy is the idea that an individual’s veganism has no impact on the market, specifically that one’s veganism will not make a difference to overall meat consumption. On the other hand, unnecessary harm is the principle (in the current context) by which it is unjustifiable to harm animals when vegan alternatives are available—a principle that is subject to distortion. Both principles are nonetheless interesting as they serve as a double-edged sword, both for and against veganism.

The causal inefficacy objection to veganism has accrued a vast literature which has been recently summarised by Fischer ( 2020 ). It is related to the ‘free-rider’ problem of rational choice theory, although my concern here is with the role of motivation in our thinking about causal inefficacy serving effectively as a proverbial ‘get out of jail free card’. There is a parallel with global warming, whereby people manage feelings of hopelessness with expressions such as ‘what can one person do?’, often to avoid thinking about a challenging issue (Cole & Morgan 2011 , p. 156). In fact, from the existence of a global problem alone, nothing clearly and directly follows with regards to individual responsibility.

In this context, group identity can be powerful, since a group can be more impactful and offer moral support: ‘within the safe bubble of the vegan community, its practitioners are noticeably joyous’ (Twine 2014 , p. 637). Relatedly, hope plays an important role in moral thinking. Moody-Adams ( 2017 , p. 155–6) discusses the motivating power of hope, specifically how those social movements which deepened our understanding of justice and compassion were driven by those who were confident in acting on their moral convictions and hopeful of moral change. Similarly, Agnes Tam emphasises the power of “We-reasoning” as a distinctive form of communitarian rationality (Tam 2019 , p. 3). Naturally, this does not mean that one abandons self-critical thinking, but it is a potential pitfall of identity groups (Fukuyama 2018 , p. 115).

As Garner points out, the phrase ‘unnecessary harm’ is somewhat vague, a catch-all that can have political advantages in supporting a spectrum of speciesist positions depending on geographical and historical factors (Garner 2013 , p. 81). For example, animal harm is viewed as a necessary evil in support of traditional forms of hospitality and economic interests. Central to the manipulation of these principles is the conflation of difficult, often potentially intractable empirical and analytic problems with practical moral matters about how one should live. In this vein, Reid has pointed out that simply not having a fully worked out theory of veganism is not sufficient reason, in of itself, for not becoming a vegan, in the same way as not having a fully worked out theory of knowledge is not a justification for epistemic scepticism (Reid 2017 , p. 38). Indeed, veganism can be seen as a practical stance in response to animal exploitation, even though it can only ever be aspirational, for it is not possible to avoid causing harm altogether (Gruen and Jones 2016 , p. 157–158). In order to reach the vegan practical conclusion, one need not have to resolve intractable problems of causation, collective responsibility, or necessity.

I have argued, because moral thinking and motivation are not entirely separable, that distorted thinking can dampen motivation, while motivational failures may also result in morally distorted thinking. Take, for instance, the conflation of difficult empirical and philosophical matters with practical moral considerations. Next, I consider how philosophers have traditionally accounted for the breakdown of moral motivation in practical deliberation, and how this can be applied to the vegan motivational problem.

Omnivore’s Akrasia

Akrasia , sometimes referred to as a weakness of will or incontinence, is often understood to mean an intentional action contrary to one’s better judgement. It is, by definition, rather a failure of practical rationality in the shape of a motivational failure. The literature on akrasia dates back to ancient Greek philosophy and the contemporary literature in moral psychology is often technical. To be concise, I assume that akrasia is possible and follow Davidson’s ( 1980 ) definition of akrasia as an action that is free, intentional, and contrary to a full-blown practical judgement.

In doing x an agent acts incontinently if and only if: (a) the agent does x intentionally; (b) the agent believes there is an alternative action y open to him; and (c) the agent judges that, all things considered, it would be better to do y than to do x . (Davidson 1980 , p. 22)

Practical reasoning often starts with prima facie judgements, whereupon various reasons are weighted against each other until an evaluative conclusion is derived. When deliberating whether one ought to become a vegan, prima facie reasons might include animal welfare, health, or environmental concerns (notwithstanding myriad other reasons for and against veganism, including one’s psychological and social wellbeing, or how one’s actions will be perceived by others). An individual may accept good overall reasons for adopting veganism, yet fail to embrace it in practice. Indeed, this seems quite plausible. Elisa Aaltola ( 2015 ) coined the term ‘omnivore’s akrasia ’ to refer to the state arising in those who voluntarily consume animal products despite believing that they have been produced by immoral means. Could widespread akrasia , then, play a major role in preventing a significant proportion of the public from adopting veganism? I argue that, despite its explanatory power, the traditional approach is subject to two limitations.

The Limits of Traditional Akrasia

A limitation of akrasia is that moral decisions, such as the decision to go vegan, may not necessarily be the outcome of practical deliberation. On the flip side, one’s better judgement may be faulty. In explanation, ‘all things considered’, or prima facie judgements may not necessarily yield a correct moral answer, not least because we are limited as epistemic and moral beings. Some philosophers (Arpaly 2000 ; Audi 1990 ; McIntyre 2006 ) have even questioned whether akrasia is necessarily irrational. What if the better judgement itself is faulty, or if the desires which ground the ‘better judgement’ fail to represent the agent’s overall desires and interests?

I shall illustrate this with a powerful example from Bennett's reflections on Huckleberry Finn (Bennett 1974 ), so that I can then explore how this applies to veganism. In Mark Twain’s famous novel, Huck believes that, all things considered, the right thing to do is to turn his slave friend Jim in to the authorities, but he fails to do so. ‘Huck hasn’t the strength of will to do what he sincerely thinks he ought to do’ (Bennett 1974 , p. 126). He acts simply out of sympathy for Jim. This turns akrasia on its head, for Huck acts out of moral necessity (he cannot do otherwise), yet he acts against his better judgement.

Similarly, veganism may not necessarily be the direct outcome of practical deliberation. For some, the commitment to veganism may happen over and above any prima facie considerations. It may be the case that one already has an inner necessity. For example, one is moved by the visceral repugnance of the slaughter and ingestion of animals or a deep sense of compassion.

Thus, one could argue that the akrasia explanation of non-veganism involves an overly simplistic, syllogistic account of moral thinking, largely ignoring the social context. Individuals are not disembodied moral agents capable of making rational decisions independently of the social contex—there is much more at stake than merely prima facie reasons in terms of practical deliberations about what one morally ought to do. Could a more nuanced, socially informed notion of akrasia serve to overcome this limitation?

Sociopolitical Akrasia

Aaltola ( 2015 , 2016 ) takes a nuanced sociopolitical approach to omnivore’s akrasia . Like Amelie Rorty ( 1997 ), she views akrasia as a social problem, in that social forces prevent veganism by placing individuals within a continual state of akrasia wherein conscious deliberation and self-control are futile. These forces include ambiguity or conflict at the root of our institutions, habit, consumerism, and the culture of immediate reward or sensory hedonism. Significantly, the meat-eaters’ paradox, in which a societal love for certain animals such as dogs and cats is cultivated, while cows, pigs, and other animals, which are equally sentient, are mistreated and slaughtered, is entrenched within our institutions (Aaltola 2016 , p. 118).

Despite these conflictual beliefs, 2 most individuals believe that food choices are rational but overlook how these choices are grounded via emotive, cultural, or otherwise more ambiguous justifications (Aaltola 2016 , p. 117). Habit perpetuates the meat-eaters’ paradox for, although the original reason for eating meat was survival, it is no longer essential for a large part of the world’s population, so it is in some ways a mindless habit and one that is exacerbated by consumerism. Given this, asking individuals to exercise self-control is insufficient (Aaltola 2016 , p. 124). Indeed, ‘our akratic choices may take place beyond the possibility of conscious deliberation, and thereby beyond the possibility of conscious hedonism or egoism’ (Aaltola 2016 , p. 131). This results in a vicious circle wherein contempt may feed moral apathy and we may thus become apathetic to act altruistically. Therefore, Aaltola ( 2016 , p. 135) concludes that we are in a state of continual akrasia .

Whilst such application of akrasia is insightful, akrasia may not be the best explanation for the phenomenon of widespread omnivorism. Crucially, the possibility of perpetual akrasia seems absurd, especially given that akrasia is, by definition, free intentional action contrary to one’s better judgement. In the context of permanent akrasia , as described by Aaltola, individuals are not acting freely or intentionally, and their better judgement is not to become vegans. As such, they are not akratically failing to become vegans: they never set out to do so in the first place, so there is no motivational failure as the rational outcome of practical deliberation.

Similarly, akrasia may not be the best notion to incorporate mindlessness, self-deception or voluntary ignorance. The notion of akrasia struggles to accommodate the fact that not all our thinking is transparent, bona fide , or easily moulded into practical syllogisms. For instance, it has been said that, once we are accustomed to behaving in ways that have implicit normative content, we struggle to contemplate the possibility of change and may thus engage in self-deception to justify wrongful actions (Cooke 2017 , p. 9). John Searle exemplified one such deception: ‘I try not to think about animal rights because I fear I’d have to become a vegetarian if I worked it out consistently.’ (Cooke 2017 , p. 10).

Indeed, such deception is more likely to be widely shared, given that most people give similar excuses against veganism, commonly referred to as the 4Ns (the belief that eating meat is natural, normal, necessary, and nice; Piazza et al. 2015 ). For Luke ( 1992 , p. 106), such rationalisations consume abundant social energy. However, one can object that very little thinking power is normally used, even though the passions may be inflamed. Given these limitations, one must ask whether the notion of false consciousness would fare any better in accounting for such persistent motivational gaps and largely unreflective responses to veganism or be more cohesive with the idea that animal exploitation is largely systemic.

Omnivore’s False Consciousness

False consciousness is a post-Marxian notion. Although Marx did not use the phrase ‘fase consciousness’, the notion is embedded in much of his thinking. Thus, Miller ( 1972 , p. 433) argues that a broad interpretation of the related concept of ideology, understood as applying to theories, belief-systems and practices involving the use of ideas, has great explanatory power concerning the persistency and influence of ideologies over the actions of the groups who adopt such ideologies. Crucially, if such a group is confronted by others holding incompatible ideas, ‘it has no resources to fall back upon, it can only reaffirm its original faith’ (Miller 1972 , p. 433). Alternatively, if the ideology is seen primarily as an explanatory framework, then ‘the ideology is given repeated empirical confirmation, through the selection of what is perceived’ (Miller 1972 , p. 433). When ideologies function in these ways, they can be said to involve false consciousness. If Miller is correct, and omnivorism can be shown to depend on an ideology that necessarily involves false consciousness, then this may account for the persistency of omnivorism over reasoned arguments, thus filling the gaps left by omnivore’s akrasia .

In Marxist theory, false consciousness is essentially deemed to be political in nature and refers to the social consciousness of the proletariat as an exploited class under capitalism. It is thereby related to the concept of ideological power and forms the basis of Luke’s third dimension of power, wherein the illegitimate use of power by one group over another confers the power to mislead (Lukes 2005 , p. 149). To put it simply, it is the power to control what groups think as being right, resulting in biased acceptance without question. Marx and Engels used the concept of ideology to refer to ‘the distorted beliefs intellectuals [hold] about society and the power of their own ideas. Those who produced ideologies suffered from false consciousness: they were deluded about their own beliefs.’ (Eyerman 1981 , p. 43). Given this tenet, one may be puzzled by my use of false consciousness, as it seems to shift the construct of veganism to being about people rather than about animals. How, then, is false consciousness relevant to the problem of motivation in veganism, given that animals are the exploited group in question, even to the extent that some theorists, such as Perlo ( 2002 , p.306), have likened animals to the proletariat?

The notion of false consciousness has evolved since its origins, and my intention here is to expand its application further. Marx’s concept was further developed by Gramsci, Lukacs and the early Frankfurt School, and later expanded to apply to any social class with a ‘limited form of experience in society’ (Eyerman 1981 , p. 43–44). Thus, it is not limited to Marxian class and has been more applied broadly to groups both before and after the rise of capitalism. For example, Michael Rosen ( 2016 , p. 10) sees Marxian false consciousness as a critique and the development of rationalistic understandings of a previously unformulated notion of false consciousness, beginning with Plato, for whom irrationality of the soul led to the injustices of the state; and Aristotle, for whom false consciousness is necessarily akratic . Omnivore’s false consciousness may thus be viewed as a novel development and a particular application of false consciousness 3 to a broad majority of humans who practise omnivorism in economically developed societies.

Narrow and Broad False Consciousness

So, what then is false about false consciousness? False consciousness is often portrayed in terms of one being misled about one’s true interests. However, there is a distinction arising between being blinded by one’s interests (i.e., being impetuous) and being blind to them, where false consciousness is often associated with the latter (Runciman 1969 , p. 303). The self-interest interpretation, however, omits the altruistic and moral dimensions of human thinking, whereby one may also be blind not only to others’ interests but also to their moral dimension. Traditionally, false consciousness is about group interest and social ontology, but I shall argue that it can also distort moral thinking in much the same way as it distorts non-moral thinking. The notion that Marxism is not totally abstracted from morality is not novel (e.g., Lukes 1985 ), so I will instead set the context before I explain how it bears on veganism.

Marx avoided talk about morality, not only because he hated preaching and was distrustful of the moralist per se (Popper 1995 , p. 220), but because he saw contemporary morality as being part of the bourgeois superstructure, in which class morality added an extra layer of false consciousness. The worker believes, according to Singer, that capitalist has a moral right to the profits 4 (Singer 2018 , p. 83). Although Lenin and others claimed that Marx’s theory was purely scientific, it has since been argued that Marx held a normative position, not least because of his desire to end capitalism (Cochrane 2010 , p. 95; Singer 2018 , p. 82), his hatred of servility, and his ‘desire for a better world that it is hard not to see as moral’ (Lukes 1985 , p. 3).

Central to the Marxian notion of false consciousness is the tenet that both the capitalist and proletariat are afflicted by it and, thus, that the proletariat believed, whether implicitly or explicitly, that the capitalist had a moral or legitimate right to profit. If proletarian Jim held such a belief about himself, he would also believe that the capitalist had a right to the labour of his fellow proletarians. In this world view, the proletariat is both wronged by the capitalist and unaware that they have been wronged. Similarly, capitalists had so distorted or delimited moral ideas insofar as they too failed to acknowledge the true interests of the exploited group and were unaware of their wrongdoing. In the case of animals, the public largely carries on supporting systemic practices of animal-exploitation without acknowledging the wrongs inflicted on animals in its name.

Hence, false consciousness may be understood narrowly as relating to either self or group interest or, more broadly, as including an altruistic moral dimension in the sense of limiting such a dimension. Indeed, if I am blind to my own true interests, then I may not necessarily be receptive to those of other people or those of animals. My claim is not that there is a causal link between blindness to one’s own interests and blindness to the interests of others, but rather that it is absurd to contend that false consciousness impacts only one’s self-interested thinking. Crucially, false consciousness may so taint one’s conception of the good and limit the moral self, that it has the effect of occluding the motivational difficulties of veganism. Hence, the akratic break (motivational failure) does not actually take place, at least not explicitly.

This broad interpretation of false consciousness presupposes a close link between alienation and false consciousness. As Rosen states in his discussion of Marx’s early writings on alienation as a form of life, ‘the alienated worker’s failure to recognize himself in the product of his labour and the failure of isolated individuals to recognize each other fully as fellow human beings are expressions of false consciousness that are lived and experienced before they are theorized about or reflected upon.’ (Rosen 2016 , p. 35). In this sense, the moral self is not impervious to false consciousness. This is interesting within the context of the vegan debate, as the cumulative case for veganism (i.e., the case from a wide range of perspectives) encompasses both moral and enlightened self-interested strands. If we deem both the narrow and broad sense of false consciousness to be appropriate, then this may help to explain how a substantial proportion of the general public may be somewhat blinded by the dominant animal-exploiting ideology in contrasting, yet complementary ways, so as to render the ideology quite impenetrable.

This narrow sense of false consciousness applies to the case for veganism from either anthropocentric or enlightened self-interest perspectives. Strictly, these perspectives support plant-based living as opposed to fully blown ethical veganism but are largely consistent with it. Overall, exploitative animal practices are agreed to have a detrimental impact on the environment, sustainability, and climate change (Rosi 2017 ; Sabaté & Soret 2014 ), as well as global human health (Tuso 2013 ) and that of future generations (Deckers 2011 ). Zoonotic diseases such as severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) and coronavirus disease (COVID-19) have also been traced to wet markets where animals are confined within unnatural and unsanitary conditions (Singer 2020 , pp. 82–83). Despite these, and other harms to humans, the animal agricultural complex has a vested interest in continued animal exploitation. Moreover, the advertising industry and media can exercise tremendous power in perpetuating the desire to consume animal products.

There are at least two difficulties with the attribution of narrow false consciousness in these scenarios. First, the oppressor and oppressed (or exploiter and exploited) groups are not distinct, for at least some humans count as the exploited, even though they too contribute to animal exploitation through their consumption and labour. Although this complicates matters, it does not in of itself make the premise of false consciousness impossible, for (unlike Marxian social class) an individual can belong to more than one group at any one time. In this respect, animals are posited as the oppressed, yet humans are both oppressor and oppressed. In fact, the presumption of such a stark dichotomy of classes would have very little application in terms of the animal agricultural complex which lacks any clearly defined boundaries.

Second, false consciousness is supposed to affect both the exploiter and exploited alike, but it is not altogether clear why it would not be in the interest of the exploiter to exploit, particularly in terms of material self-interest. It may well be that the exploiting group is subject to false consciousness but is not necessarily deceived about its own material self-interest. After all, many people’s livelihoods depend on animal agriculture, which does not go against their immediate, material self-interest. However, the exploiter might be in denial about the consequences of their own exploitation. In Hegel’s dialectic, which influenced Marx’s thinking, the master (to his own detriment) becomes too dependent on the slave. When translated in terms of the current exploitation of animals and nature, exploiters act in such a way as though they are blind to the ultimate consequences of their actions, yet the crucial difference here lies between enlightened self-interest in the medium term and the long run, for it is the latter that false consciousness is supposed to affect.

On the other hand, in a somewhat broader sense, false consciousness acts against the case for veganism from the point of view of ethical and political perspectives such as animal rights and care ethics. These are deemed to be ‘veganism for the animals’ perspectives that constitute the core of ethical veganism, which are not defensible from the standpoint of self-interest. In this context, false consciousness might serve as a good explanatory match for two phenomena; namely the absence of moral reflection on whether one ought to become a vegan (in light of the meat-eater's paradox), and second, the poverty of thinking exemplified by the public’s common rebuttals in response to arguments for veganism.

Although not all objections or negative responses to veganism are crude, there is a widespread social malaise in the form of a prevalent moral apathy towards the exploitation of animals. This matter is political, not only from the perspective that humans exercise illegitimate power over animals but also that animals are worthy of political justice as argued, for example, in The Political Turn in Animal Ethics (Garner and O'Sullivan 2016 ). Further, it could be construed that the public’s commonplace objections to veganism are socially determined and thus often devoid of individual self-expression. The issue is also a very personal one, in the sense that moral thinking is inextricably personal, yet such thinking may at times be thwarted by sociopolitical imperatives. When deliberating on whether one ought to become a vegan, insofar as one engages in moral discourse at all, the moral problem is, and ought to be, inescapably one’s own in the sense that one cannot pass it on to someone else to resolve on one’s behalf (on this topic see Gaita 1989 , p. 128), let alone rely on the unexamined opinions of the majority. However, this is precisely what tends to happen when people confront veganism. The next step, then, is to relate common, unreflective objections to veganism to aspects of political false consciousness.

Four Features of False Consciousness

To deconstruct how thinking can be systematically distorted, I build on Miller’s account of the four dimensions of false consciousness (Miller 1972 , p. 443–444), sketching how these features may be manifested in omnivore’s false consciousness. The four interrelated features are conceptual inadequacy, isolation of phenomena, eternalisation, and reification.

First, false consciousness involves a degree of conceptual inadequacy in that it leads to fallacious reasoning . For example, generalisations based on superficial similarity, whereupon subsequent analysis can reveal them to be disparate. Conceptual inadequacy includes such common injunctions against veganism as animals being unintelligent, carnivorism natural, and vegans self-righteous. These claims expose distortion as empirical analysis – and frequently linguistic or logical analysis alone – can prove them to be fallacious.

For instance, does it follow from the premise that animals are less intelligent that we have a moral right to eat them? Does the fact that something is natural necessarily make an action or attitude morally justifiable? Are all vegans self-righteous? Even if they all are, this latter argument is effectively ad hominem and therefore invalid. Similarly, the idea that veganism is impossible because nobody can ever avoid partaking in harming animals is to misunderstand the very concept of veganism. It exhibits fallacious reasoning by misusing the concept of vagueness. Just because there are borderline cases between a child and an adult, or shades of grey, it does not necessarily follow that nobody can ever be an adult, or that nothing can be truly black. The same holds true for veganism. While nobody would seriously deny that adulthood or true blackness are possible, many are prepared to subject veganism to a reductio ad absurdum . These common examples of conceptual inadequacy are not isolated mistakes, or merely manifestations of the ignorance of specific information, but rather are fundamental ways in which thought fails. They are manifestations of how the acceptance of the moral and political legitimacy (or neutrality) of animal exploitation is deeply rooted within the collective consciousness and embedded within our social institutions.

Second, the process involves the isolation of phenomena, notably a refusal to see an instance of individual behaviour as being part of a wider social system. For example, the belief that one exercises free will in consumer choices 5 and, therefore, that one’s decision to eat animals is autonomous when one is, in actuality, making socially conditioned decisions which are influenced by the meat industry. Hence, Nibert talks of a socially engineered public consciousness, highlighting how organisations such as the ‘Center for Consumer Freedom’ exploit both the concepts of ‘freedom’ and ‘consumer choice’ (Nibert 2013 , p. 266). Since others are doing the same, these attitudes are considered to be justificatory of the wider system.

Third, it involves eternalisation, whereby conventional relationships or characteristics are regarded as being permanently fixed within the nature of things. For example, in medieval Europe, society was ranked hierarchically from God down to inanimate objects. Similarly, the hierarchical belief in speciesism is effectively an extension of the belief that ‘might is right’, wherein biological omnivorism is extrapolated to entail a right to exploit animals. For Cooke, the view of the innate inferiority of animals is embedded within our social consciousness, and the moral imagination must be cultivated to break out of such self-deception (Cooke 2017 , p. 14–15). This feature of false consciousness serves as the key to perpetuating certain practices.

Let us consider an example of eternalisation, such as the common belief (in some countries) that a turkey must be the centrepiece of the Christmas dinner table, as tradition dictates, in such a way that a vegan alternative is deemed to be out of the question. In what way is this thinking distorted? How does it manifest as a form of false consciousness? One of the distortions revolves around the false belief that tradition is alone sufficient justification for engaging in a specific practice. Some traditions, such as forced marriages, are morally wrong and so tradition alone does not morally justify a practice. It constitutes a distorted form of thinking rather than a question of holding a false belief, as most individuals living in liberal societies do accept that tradition alone does not morally justify a practice. It manifests as a form of false consciousness insofar as the distortion is not politically neutral.

Like most animal agriculture, the mass confinement, fattening and slaughter of hundreds of millions of turkeys aged between 14 and 24 weeks for Christmas involves the illegitimate use of power of humans over animals. Yet, such traditions continue, not only because people enjoy certain flavours and family traditions, but also because a powerful industry lobby has a vested interest in perpetuating and normalising this form of animal exploitation. For example, in December 2019, the UK’s National Farmers Union (NFU) took issue with a BBC commercial in which a cartoon turkey wearing an ‘I Love Vegans’ sweater announced ‘less of us have been gobbled this year’ (The Telegraph 2019 ). The NFU feared that the BBC was promoting a political view. What was not questioned, however, was that the farming and killing of animals may not be a politically neutral standpoint.

Finally, it involves reification. It reduces individuals to the status of mere objects of fixed properties, their individuality denied, similar to the archetypal Nazi depiction of the Jew (Miller 1972 , p. 444). Animals, too, are objectified when reduced to the status of commodities such as forms of food or modes of transportation, or even being owned as pets. As expressed by Cole and Morgan ( 2011 , p. 149), ‘ethics are simply ruled out of order by the prior to objectification and invisibilisation of nonhuman animals that speciesist material and cultural practices instantiate’. This takes place on a large scale, even when people are generally aware that animals such as the Christmas turkey are (or rather were) individuals, not mere things. Still, animals are essentially commodified, an idea that also links into Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism.

Miller’s analysis provides a framework for dissecting how common objections to veganism, and the belief systems that ground them, are distorted and thereby largely unmovable. It gives weight to the idea that these objections manifest false consciousness. As a form of political false consciousness, omnivore’s false consciousness involves distorted and limited forms of thinking that are not often scrutinised. I have only touched on a small number of common objections to veganism, although there are many others, such as those exemplified in a defensive omnivore board. 6 When one of these notions is challenged, many more excuses are proffered.

What these distorted forms of thinking lack in terms of sobriety they make up for in intuitive persuasiveness by conforming to a widely accepted worldview or way of life. According to this worldview, nonhuman animals are inferior to human animals in politically significant ways that accord the latter the moral entitlement to exploit the former. As Miller recognises, one cannot easily fight instances of false consciousness by pointing out isolated errors. Thus a broader stance is needed, yet it may not be possible to avoid false consciousness altogether (Miller 1972 , p. 444). Therefore, one might ask what makes false consciousness not only possible but also so persistent and prevalent?

The Persistency of Ideologies

The link between false consciousness and ideology is key to its persistency. Gauthier ( 1997 , p.27–28) points out that the notion of an ‘ideology’ is employed inconsistently, yet is generally regarded as a pejorative aspect of our consciousness. He sees ideology as a theoretical construct, part of the ‘deep structure of self-consciousness’, that is, the capacity to conceive oneself relative to others and therefore to act in light of this conception of oneself as a member of the human species. Although it can be the subject of reflection, it is necessarily pre-reflective. This sounds puzzling, but Gauthier sees a similarity between ideology and language in that ‘both conceal a deep structure which unconsciously affects conscious activity’ (Gauthier 1997 , p. 28). Even if one cannot think outside the boundaries of a specific language or ideology, reflection and critique are still possible, thereby enabling moral progress.

Like languages, ideologies also promote social commonality. One of the main functions of social institutions is to maintain and transmit a common ideology (Gauthier 1997 , p. 28). Hence, individuals with very different ideologies, such as vegans and non-vegans, may find communication difficult. Moreover, for Marx, an ideology was not merely false but served an intentional role both in upholding the extant social order (Rawls 2008 , p. 361) and continuing the status quo in terms of the exploitation of the proletariat. For example, hiding the act of robbery within the construct of capitalism is essential. Similarly, exploiters of animals do not want to be perceived to be exploitative, whether these agents be the state or the lawmakers protecting animal-exploiting institutions. Farmers’ associations have privileged access in terms of shaping the viewpoint of the media and in influencing agricultural policy and legislation (Benton 1993 , p. 160). For example, both the US and Australia have introduced ‘ag-gag’ laws that essentially criminalise the dissemination of information about the treatment of animals (O'Sullivan 2016 , p. 53). Moreover, the institutionalised praise of exploiters and punishment of animal liberationists is not a morally neutral position with regard to conceptions of the good that liberal states purport to do. As Schmitz says, ‘the animal question debunks the appearance of neutrality’ (Schmitz 2016 , p. 42).

If we interpret ideologies as being pre-reflective, this aids in explaining their persistency and evasiveness from rational argumentation. As Miller suggests, repeated selective perception confirms the ideology (Miller 1972 , p. 433), yet it is difficult to construct a simple verification or falsification test, as ideologies are false at the level of the whole (Miller 1972 , p. 435). As such, they are not a mere set of commonly held ideas, but rather embody attitudes, common behaviours, and practices. Thus, the ideology that dominates our relationship with animals in developed societies gives rise to a level of false consciousness. It is pre-reflective in that societies embrace omnivorism without perceiving the moral need to justify it, although it is possible to reflect on it. When the dominant ideology is challenged, rationalisations can ensue. Since an ideology is not a specific set of beliefs that can be proven to be true or false in isolation, it is very difficult to ‘prove’ that omnivorism is morally wrong, or that veganism is right in such a way that any rational moral agent could be convinced.

One might object to the premise that attributing false consciousness is arrogant, for it requires a privileged perspective in terms of intellect and education. As Polsby states, ‘the presumption that the “real” interests of a class can be assigned to them by an analyst allows the analyst to charge “false consciousness” when the class in question disagrees with the analyst’ (Polsby 1963 , p. 22–3). However, is the attribution of false consciousness necessarily arrogant? Lukes ( 2005 , p. 149–150) argues that recognising the possibility of false consciousness is neither condescending, nor inherently illiberal, or even paternalistic. He considers, for example, J.S. Mill’s analysis of the subjection of Victorian women to the rule of men (in Mill 2009 [1869], p. 25) which can be interpreted as showing how most women were subject to false consciousness in the form of voluntary servitude, as opposed to coercive power. In light of such historic examples, and the fact that gender equality is now largely undisputed, the objection from arrogance is begs a question in that it denies the possibility that anyone might ever be politically deceived. It is ad hominem insofar as it attacks the character of the analyst, not the soundness of their views. Similarly, if future generations were to embrace the cause of animal rights and veganism, the attribution of an omnivore’s false consciousness to previous generations may then not seem too paternalistic.

Some Marxists could argue that the notion of false consciousness simply does not apply here. That may well be the case if indeed false consciousness is taken literally in a Marxist context. Instead, I have argued that there is a broad reading of false consciousness according to which it can narrow the moral self precisely because the interests of animals are not perceived in such a way as to trigger the moral motivation to practice veganism. In fact, I have attempted to detach the concept from Marxist theory as far as possible, so that one does not have to embrace Marxism in order to be able to accept how such a concept (and related concepts) may command useful explanatory power where the notion of akrasia falls short. 1

If there is such a thing as omnivore’s false consciousness, it would seem to follow that animal liberation (from human oppression) requires human liberation from omnivore’s false consciousness. Broad false consciousness may need to be confronted head-on through practices that promote more reflective and altruistic thinking (Cooke 2017 ). Narrow false consciousness, on the other hand, may be tackled directly by promoting some of the benefits of plant-based living (Fetissenko 2011 ), or indirectly by creating the conditions that normalise such a lifestyle (Lumsden 2017 ), for example, by making the shift from animal to plant agriculture easier and more desirable for farmers, or through the technological development of realistic alternatives to culling animals (e.g. in vitro meat; see Milburn 2016 ). A drawback of the self-interest approach, however, is that it only favours animals contingently in those instances where enlightened human self-interest happens to be convergent with those of animals. These challenges make a global shift to veganism not only fraught but also currently inaccessible to those on the opposite side of the debate. Considering how humans have habitually exploited animals, the future for most animals looks grim. On the other hand, social movements depend on hope and persist in the belief in moral progress has been said to be a regulative concept (Moody-Adams 2017 , p. 154).

Concluding Remarks

Starting from the assumption that there is a strong case for veganism in the literature, and the hypothesis that moral thinking and motivation are inseparable, I have considered how akrasia and false consciousness are ‘conceptual pathways’ through which our practical thinking about animals is distorted. Omnivore’s akrasia leaves some important gaps, for it is delimited to free and voluntary action against one’s better judgement. As such, the phenomenon of widespread omnivorism in developed societies may be better explained in terms of omnivore’s false consciousness (but I am not thereby suggesting that animal liberationists should embrace Marxism). Where omnivore’s false consciousness arises, there is no clear or explicit motivational failure to become a vegan, precisely because there is insufficient reflection for an akratic break to take occur. Further work in the field of moral psychology is evidently needed to unravel the motivational unity thesis, a theorem upon which this paper leans heavily.

Insofar as veganism expresses an ideology, it cannot be proven either to be true or morally right through arguments alone in such a way as to persuade any rational being or otherwise fully-fledged moral agent. Veganism is, as such, not an analytic truth to be derived from abstract moral principles but rather a moral way of life. Arguably, it is also a moral requirement. Principles such as causal inefficacy and unnecessary harm can be turned against veganism via analytic rationalisations which exploit scepticism and err on the side of narrow human self-interest, rather than an altruistic stance towards animals. Despite difficult technical and analytic considerations, one can experience veganism as an inescapable imperative; as a spiritual necessity; or as a powerful political identity against the oppression of animals. As such, some animal advocates may feel utter despair and therefore struggle to comprehend how others are not similarly moved. They may experience helplessness as to why common reasons against veganism are so weak. This paper is but one expression of such puzzlement, and a first attempt to make sense through the hitherto underexplored notion of false consciousness within the field of animal ethics.

Acknowledgements

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the MANCEPT ‘Just Animals? The Future of the Political Turn in Animal Ethics’ workshop in September 2019. I am especially grateful to Robert Garner, Steve Cooke, Josh Milburn and Eva Meijer for their comments and support. I am also greatly indebted to the anonymous reviewers of this journal.

Self-funded.

Declaration

The authors declares that they have no conflict of interest.

1 For a concise exposition of the cumulative case for veganism see Stephens ( 1994 ). For more recent arguments see Francione ( 2008 ), Huemer ( 2019 ) and Singer ( 2020 ).

2 There is no conflict if animals are viewed and treated only according to their purpose to humans, but it can be argued that this is how things are (the animal welfare orthodoxy), not how they ought to be.

3 False consciousness is often assumed without explanation in the Critical Animal Studies (CAS) literature (e.g., Nibert 2002 , p. 247).

4 Marx may not have thought that the proletariat held such explicit beliefs given that they had no access to the superstructure, but the relevant idea is that the proletariat was blind to their interests.

5 Vegans too can be consumerist.

6 A compilation of poor excuses against veganism such as ‘we have carnivore teeth’. For an example see https://vegansaurus.com/post/254784826/defensive-omnivore-bingo .

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• Wrenn, C. (2019). Why I’m Giving Beyoncé’s Vegan Campaign a Chance. http://www.coreyleewrenn.com/why-im-giving-beyonces-vegan-campaign-a-chance . Accessed 21/07/2019.

85 Vegetarianism Essay Topic Ideas & Examples

For a vegetarianism essay, research paper, or speech, check out the titles our team has provided for you below.

📍 Great Research Questions about Vegetarianism

🏆 best vegetarianism essay topics & examples, 📌 interesting topics for essays on vegetarianism, 👍 good vegetarian essay topics.

• What are the key types of vegetarians?
• How do you get animal proteins as a vegetarian?
• Why do some people hate vegetarians?
• What are the ecological benefits of vegetarianism?
• Is a vegan diet affordable for the middle class?
• What are the health benefits of eating meat?
• Are there any unsolvable issues regarding a vegan diet?
• What is the best vegetarian food?
• How do you deal with the risk factors of a vegetarian diet?
• What are some myths about veganism?
• Vegetarian vs. Meat-Eating While meat is a rich source of essential minerals and vitamins, it also results in many adverse effects to the human body.
• Vegetarianism Health Benefits It is going to be argued that; Being a vegetarian is good for health since it leads to the prevention of obesity and overweight, developing strong bones, prevention of heart disease, having cancer protection, having […]
• Why You Should Not Be a Vegetarian To conclude the above, it is important to note that vegetarianism refers to a form of food culture in which the individual eschews animal products.
• Vegan vs. Vegetarian Diets: Impacts on Health However, vegetarians have the option of consuming animal products like eggs and milk, but this option is not available to vegans; vegetarians tend to avoid the intake of all the animal proteins.
• Vegetarian or Meat Eaters Contrary to the belief that meat is a great source of proteins, the quality of the protein in meat products is considered to be very poor since there is lack of proper combination of amino […]
• Vegetarianism Relation with Health and Religion These are the vegans, the lacto vegetarians, and the Lacto-ovo vegetarians. Apart from the explained contributions to health, vegetarian diets are also instrumental in checking blood pressure, aiding digestion, removal of body toxins and betterment […]
• Vegetarianism and Its Causes The first cause to discuss is connected with economic reasons or the inability to include meat in everyday diet. Many vegetarians share the opinion that a meat-based diet is a sign of inhumanity.
• Can Vegetarian Diets Be Healthy? The analysis of the effectiveness of such a nutritional principle for the body can confirm, or, on the contrary, refute the theory about the advantages of vegetarianism and its beneficial effect on body functions.
• Target Market for the “Be Fine Vegan Skin Care” To be competitive in the market and realize profits from the sale of the product “Be Fine Vegan Skin Care” in a competitive market, marketing executives analyze and design a market plan that is strategically […]
• Moral Status of Animals: Vegetarianism and Veganism The significance of acknowledging the concept of sentience in this context is the fact that vegetarians and vegans accept the idea that animals are like humans when they feel something.
• Benefits of Vegetarianism Cancer is one of the leading causes of death worldwide and in spite of enormous research efforts and many treatment options, there is still no guaranteed cure for the disease.anou and Svenson assert that in […]
• Worldwide Vegan Dairies: Digital Marketing Of particular importance is the promotion of vegan cheese in Australia, where information technology is also developed and the culture of a vegetarian lifestyle is flourishing.
• The Impact of Vegan and Vegetarian Diets on Diabetes Vegetarian diets are popular for a variety of reasons; according to the National Health Interview Survey in the United States, about 2% of the population reported following a vegetarian dietary pattern for health reasons in […]
• Harmfulness of Vegetarianism: The False Health Claim According to the article “How vegetarianism is bad for you and the environment”, “Plant-based sources tend to be low in saturated fat, a component of the brain and a macronutrient vital for human health”..
• Health 2 Go: Vegan Waffles for Everyone All fruits and berries are purchased daily from local suppliers and stored in a contaminant-free unit of the Health 2 Go.
• City’s Finest as a Vegan Ethical Shoe Brand The brand is focused on authenticity and transparency, producing the shoes locally and sourcing recycled and reclaimed materials that combine the principles of veganism and sustainability.
• Vegetarian Consumer Behaviour Raphaely states that the advances in agriculture created a threat to the environment, and it is important to study this situation in an in-depth manner.
• Vegetarian and Non Vegetarian Healthier Diet The first and foremost is that a vegetarian diet is one of the best weapons that can be used against overweight and obesity.
• Vegetarian Women and Prevention of Iron Depletion and Anemia Most of the body’s iron exists in hemoglobin, a quarter of the rest exists as metabolized iron-ferritin in the liver and the rest is found in the muscle tissue and selected enzymes.
• Soul Food: The Origin and Reasons of Vegetarianism This paper explores the origin, the performance of this practice, the solutions this practice offers to the challenges the Indian culture faces, and how vegetarianism reflects the values of the people.
• Ecological Benefits of a Vegetarian Diet The final level of the food sequence is carried out by organisms that help in the decomposition of the primary; secondary; and tertiary organisms back to the food flow by acting as nutrients and manure […]
• The Vegetarian Burger – A Product Review The burger also comes with significant nutrient components of Sodium and potassium.The total carbohydrate of the burger amounts to 6g which is 2% of the whole production unit.
• Vegetarian Diet and Proper Amount of Vitamins Issue This difference was accounted for by 14% lower zinc levels in the vegetarian diet and 21% less efficient absorption of zinc while eating it.
• Vegan Hot Dogs: Product Marketing The market for vegan hot dogs is a constantly growing market because the younger layer of the population is becoming more adherent to non-meat or vegan food sources.
• The Vegan Dog Kit Company’s Business Plan According to statistics, the number of vegetarianism in the United States is on the rise: as of 2018, five percent of the population adheres to a meatless diet, with half of them practicing veganism. Evidently, […]
• Pro-Vegetarianism to Save the Earth While most people agree that population growth is closely connected to the emission of greenhouse gases, which are harmful to the environment, as they lead to global warming, a rare individual believes that he or […]
• Vegetarianism Among Chinese Customers This paper explores the reasons for the rise of vegetarianism among the Chinese. A cross-section of Chinese consumers is also motivated to abstain from meat products because of concerns about the infringement of animal rights.
• Consumer Behavior Theory: Vegetarianism If this philosophy is extrapolated to the vegetarianism trend analysis, the theory of reasoned action suggests that the rise in the number of vegetarians stems from people’s tendency to associate vegetarianism with good health.
• “Quit Meat” Vegetarian Diet: Pros and Cons Although many dieticians think that meat is an essential nutrient, the reality is that it is inappropriate to eat animals because it is unhealthy and unethical.
• Vegan Parents’ Influence on Their Children’s Diet The first reason why a vegan diet should not be imposed on children is that every parent should pay close attention to the needs of their toddlers.
• Vegetarian Diet: Pros and Cons On the contrary, the study A Comparison of Some of the Cardiovascular Risk Factors in Vegetarian and Omnivorous Turkish Females by Karabudak, Kiziltan, and Cigerim portrayed that vegetarians had higher risks of hyperhomocysteinaemia and lower […]
• Positive Reasons and Outcomes of Becoming Vegan Being vegan signifies a philosophy and manner of living that aims at excluding, as much as achievable, any kind of exploitation of, and cruelty against, animals for meat, clothing and other uses while promoting and […]
• Herb’aVors Vegan Drive-Thru Product Business Model As a result, the wide public will be able to receive the brand-new service with the excellent health promotion characteristics and traditional cultural implications of fast-food. The breakthrough of the offered concept is the vegan-based […]
• Vegetarian Groups by Motivation To understand the reasons underpinning the popularity of this movement, it is important to distinguish the triggers that make people turn into vegetarians.
• Vegetarianism and Health The doctors claim that vegetarian diets pose a threat to the health of women since they inflict menstrual disruption as well as infertility.
• Vegetarian Diet as a Health-Conscious Lifestyle Making a transition from omnivore to vegetarian lifestyle, besides the impact on the person’s health, people consider the public opinion and the community’s reaction on their decision.
• Vegetarian or carnivorous diet However, a diet rich in meat and animal products has been found to have severe detrimental effects to people’s health. A well balanced diet that incorporates both meat and vegetables is essential.
• Today’s Society Should Move toward Adopting Vegetarian Diet: Arguments For While it is hard for many people to reduce the necessity of eat meat-based products and to increase the use of vegetables and other vegetarian products, however, there is a necessity “to reconsider the increasing […]
• Vegetarianism Is Good For Many Reasons For Health, Ethics, And Religious
• Understanding What Vegetarianism Is and Its Dietary Limitations
• A History of Vegetarianism: Moral and Philosophy
• Vegetarianism and the Other Weight Problem
• The Environmental Necessity of Vegetarianism
• The Misusage Of The Vegetarianism In Teenage Females With Eating Disorders
• Determinants of Vegetarianism and Meat Consumption Frequency in Ireland
• The Dietary Concept of Vegetarianism and the Nutritional Intake
• Vegetarianism Is The Human Conception For Man ‘s Own Advantage
• Why Vegetarianism Is Good For You And The Planet
• Vegetarianism: The Key to a Health-Conscious, Ecological America
• The Significance of Cow Protection and Vegetarianism in Hinduism
• Relative Moral Superiority And Proselytizing Vegetarianism
• Determinants of Vegetarianism and Partial Vegetarianism in the United Kingdom
• An Analysis of the Three Important Aspects of Vegetarianism
• Negative Stereotypes of Vegetarianism
• Vegetarianism Versus Eating Meat
• The Effects Of Vegetarianism On Health And Environment
• A Description of Vegetarianism as a Way of Life For Many People For Centuries
• History And Philosophy Of Vegetarianism
• Vegetarianism – To Meat Or Not To Meat
• Arguments in Favor and Against Vegetarianism
• American Vegetarianism How It Became a Subculture
• The Benefits of Vegetarianism and Its Main Features
• The Health and Economic Benefits of Vegetarianism
• The Main Benefits of Vegetarianism and Its Importance
• Some Economic Benefits and Costs of Vegetarianism
• Why Vegetarianism Is Good For Many Reasons For Life
• The Hidden Politics of Vegetarianism Caste and the Hindu Canteen
• An Analysis of Vegetarianism as the Best Way To Save Animals Lives and Help the Environment
• Vegetarianism: Fighting the Addiction to Meat
• The Earliest Record of Vegetarianism in Ancient History
• Vegetarianism Is The Modern Diet Plan
• An Analysis of the Moral and Religious Reasons of Vegetarianism and Its Health Benefits
• Benefits Of Veganism And Vegetarianism
• Animal Rights Is A Cause For Vegetarianism
• Vegetarianism vs Veganism
• Chicago (A-D)
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The Veganism Conversation

When I walk around Ohio State’s campus, I often see posters that read “veganism is a moral issue” posted all over the place. Every time I see these posters, I question what exactly they’re trying to convey. I can understand that the practice of raising animals solely food is in many respects immoral, yet I sense there’s a broader message in this slogan.

For starters, this slogan could be interpreted negatively. The media often presents the stereotype of the judgy vegan . This stereotype implies that vegans may be self-righteous and quick to judge or lecture others about their eating habits, which can create tension in conversations about veganism. For this reason, it’s important to acknowledge that perspectives on morality can vary widely among different people and cultures. While some may see veganism as a moral imperative, others may not share those same ethical beliefs and may prioritize different values. When people are overly defensive or combative in conversations, it can be difficult for any significant progress to be made. This is certainly not helpful in the era of the climate crisis.

Conversations about veganism can become even more controversial when the cultural nuances surrounding food are explored. Food is deeply intertwined with cultural identity, tradition, and social practices. Many traditional cuisines around the world are not vegan , and individual food preferences often come from a person’s familial and/or cultural background. Asking individuals to adopt a vegan diet without considering these cultural nuances can be perceived as dismissive or disrespectful of their culture. It’s important to approach conversations about veganism with cultural sensitivity, acknowledging the diversity of food traditions and potentially finding new ways to incorporate plant-based options into existing traditional cuisines.

It is also necessary to recognize the role that privilege may play in the ability of a person to go vegan. Food deserts are areas in which access to affordable and nutritious food is limited, often due to the absence of grocery stores or farmers’ markets. In these areas, people often depend on fast food and convenience stores, which usually don’t have many healthy, plant-based choices. Simply telling the people who live in these areas that “veganism is a moral issue” overlooks the larger socioeconomic problems that they face in gaining access to a diverse group of foods. Addressing food deserts requires solutions that prioritize community empowerment and access to nutritious foods for all.

This dilemma has reminded me of Tom Mustill’s video starring Greta Thunberg titled “ Our Relationship with Nature is Broken “. In this video Greta explains the ways in which humans are actively destroying the environment and how this disconnect can begin with the very food we eat. In the farming process, many animals are raised in dirty, crowded factories to be killed after their already short lives. The ways in which we farm animals for food not only impact their welfare as sentient beings, but they also contribute directly to the destruction of natural habitats. This, in turn, intensifies the pressures of human activity on animals and biodiversity overall. While Thunberg does not explicitly frame switching to a plant-based diet as a moral issue, she is in some way making a moral argument. She appeals to the people watching the video by persuading them to have empathy and not to exploit our ecosystems or other living beings any further.

I think Greta’s approach works better than the slogan in that her approach does not come off as super judgmental. Rather than be divisive, Thunberg makes a call for the masses to come together while still being firm in her message. Overall, it’s important to keep in mind that individuals’ dietary choices are personal and influenced by various factors, and that adopting a non-judgmental approach can promote empathy and understanding in discussions about veganism. For substantial change to occur, we must all come together and be willing to listen rather than tear down or villainize the other side.

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Vegetarianism Essay

This is a model  vegetarianism essay .

As I always stress, you should  read the question very carefully  before you answer it to make sure you are writing about the right thing.

Take a look at the question:

Every one of us should become a vegetarian because eating meat can cause serious health problems.

To what extent do you agree or disagree?

Staying on topic

If you rush to start writing and don't analyse the question and brainstorm some ideas you may include the wrong information.

There are religious or moral arguments for not eating meat, but if you discuss those you will be going off topic .

This question is specifically about the health problems connected to eating meat.

So you must discuss in your answer what some of these problems are and if you think there are real health risks or not.

Knowing about the topic

And don't get worried that you do not know much about diet and health.

As part of your IELTS study it will help if you know the basics of most topics such as some health vocabulary in this case, but you are not expected to be an expert on nutrition.

Remember, you are being judged on your English ability and your ability to construct an argument in a coherent way, not to be an expert in the subject matter. So relax and work with

Organisation

In this vegetarianism essay, the candidate disagrees with the statement, and is thus arguing that everyone does not need to be a vegetarian.

The essay has been organised in the following way:

Body 1: Health issues connected with eating meat (i.e. arguments in support of being a vegetarian Body 2: Advantages of eating meat

Now take a look at the model answer.

Model Essay

You should spend about 40 minutes on this task.

Write about the following topic:

Give reasons for your answer and include any relevant examples from your own experience or knowledge.

Write at least 250 words.

IELTS Vegetarianism Essay - Sample Answer

Vegetarianism is becoming more and more popular for many people, particularly because of the harm that some people believe meat can cause to the body. However, I strongly believe that it is not necessary for everybody to be a vegetarian.

Vegetarians believe that meat is unhealthy because of the diseases it has been connected with. There has been much research to suggest that red meat is particularly bad, for example, and that consumption should be limited to eating it just a few times a week to avoid such things as cancer. Meats can also be high in saturated fats so they have been linked to health problems such as cardiovascular disease and diabetes.

However, there are strong arguments for eating meat. The first reason is that as humans we are designed to eat meat, which suggests it is not unhealthy, and we have been eating meat for thousands of years. For example, cavemen made hunting implements so that they could kill animals and eat their meat. Secondly, meat is a rich source of protein which helps to build muscles and bones. Vegetarians often have to take supplements to get all the essential vitamins and minerals. Finally, it may be the case that too much meat is harmful, but we can easily limit the amount we have without having to cut it out of our diet completely.

To sum up, I do not agree that everyone should turn to a vegetarian diet. Although the overconsumption of meat could possibly be unhealthy, a balanced diet of meat and vegetables should result in a healthy body.

(264 words)

You should begin by intoducing the topi c. The introduction in this vegetarianism essay begins by mentioning vegetarians and the possible harm of eating meat .

It then goes on to the thesis statement , which makes it clear what the candidate's opinion is.

The first body paragraph has a topic sentence which makes it clear that the paragraph is going to address the possible health issues of eating meat.

Some reasons and examples are then given to support this.

The second body paragraph then has a topic sentence which makes it clear that the main idea is now about the arguments for eating meat .

The conclusion in this vegetarianism essay then repeats the opinion and gives the candidates final thoughts.

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It’s Time to End the Quiet Cruelty of Property Taxes

By Andrew W. Kahrl

Dr. Kahrl is a professor of history and African American studies at the University of Virginia and the author of “The Black Tax: 150 Years of Theft, Exploitation, and Dispossession in America.”

Property taxes, the lifeblood of local governments and school districts, are among the most powerful and stealthy engines of racism and wealth inequality our nation has ever produced. And while the Biden administration has offered many solutions for making the tax code fairer, it has yet to effectively tackle a problem that has resulted not only in the extraordinary overtaxation of Black and Latino homeowners but also in the worsening of disparities between wealthy and poorer communities. Fixing these problems requires nothing short of a fundamental re-examination of how taxes are distributed.

In theory, the property tax would seem to be an eminently fair one: The higher the value of your property, the more you pay. The problem with this system is that the tax is administered by local officials who enjoy a remarkable degree of autonomy and that tax rates are typically based on the collective wealth of a given community. This results in wealthy communities enjoying lower effective tax rates while generating more tax revenues; at the same time, poorer ones are forced to tax property at higher effective rates while generating less in return. As such, property assessments have been manipulated throughout our nation’s history to ensure that valuable property is taxed the least relative to its worth and that the wealthiest places will always have more resources than poorer ones.

Black people have paid the heaviest cost. Since they began acquiring property after emancipation, African Americans have been overtaxed by local governments. By the early 1900s, an acre of Black-owned land was valued, for tax purposes, higher than an acre of white-owned land in most of Virginia’s counties, according to my calculations, despite being worth about half as much. And for all the taxes Black people paid, they got little to nothing in return. Where Black neighborhoods began, paved streets, sidewalks and water and sewer lines often ended. Black taxpayers helped to pay for the better-resourced schools white children attended. Even as white supremacists treated “colored” schools as another of the white man’s burdens, the truth was that throughout the Jim Crow era, Black taxpayers subsidized white education.

Freedom from these kleptocratic regimes drove millions of African Americans to move to Northern and Midwestern states in the Great Migration from 1915 to 1970, but they were unable to escape racist assessments, which encompassed both the undervaluation of their property for sales purposes and the overvaluation of their property for taxation purposes. During those years, the nation’s real estate industry made white-owned property in white neighborhoods worth more because it was white. Since local tax revenue was tied to local real estate markets, newly formed suburbs had a fiscal incentive to exclude Black people, and cities had even more reason to keep Black people confined to urban ghettos.

As the postwar metropolis became a patchwork of local governments, each with its own tax base, the fiscal rationale for segregation intensified. Cities were fiscally incentivized to cater to the interests of white homeowners and provide better services for white neighborhoods, especially as middle-class white people began streaming into the suburbs, taking their tax dollars with them.

One way to cater to wealthy and white homeowners’ interests is to intentionally conduct property assessments less often. The city of Boston did not conduct a citywide property reassessment between 1946 and 1977. Over that time, the values of properties in Black neighborhoods increased slowly when compared with the values in white neighborhoods or even fell, which led to property owners’ paying relatively more in taxes than their homes were worth. At the same time, owners of properties in white neighborhoods got an increasingly good tax deal as their neighborhoods increased in value.

As was the case in other American cities, Boston’s decision most likely derived from the fear that any updates would hasten the exodus of white homeowners and businesses to the suburbs. By the 1960s, assessments on residential properties in Boston’s poor neighborhoods were up to one and a half times as great as their actual values, while assessments in the city’s more affluent neighborhoods were, on average, 40 percent of market value.

Jersey City, N.J., did not conduct a citywide real estate reassessment between 1988 and 2018 as part of a larger strategy for promoting high-end real estate development. During that time, real estate prices along the city’s waterfront soared but their owners’ tax bills remained relatively steady. By 2015, a home in one of the city’s Black and Latino neighborhoods worth $175,000 received the same tax bill as a home in the city’s downtown worth $530,000.

These are hardly exceptions. Numerous studies conducted during those years found that assessments in predominantly Black neighborhoods of U.S. cities were grossly higher relative to value than those in white areas.

These problems persist. A recent report by the University of Chicago’s Harris School of Public Policy found that property assessments were regressive (meaning lower-valued properties were assessed higher relative to value than higher-valued ones) in 97.7 percent of U.S. counties. Black-owned homes and properties in Black neighborhoods continue to be devalued on the open market, making this regressive tax, in effect, a racist tax.

The overtaxation of Black homes and neighborhoods is also a symptom of a much larger problem in America’s federated fiscal structure. By design, this system produces winners and losers: localities with ample resources to provide the goods and services that we as a nation have entrusted to local governments and others that struggle to keep the lights on, the streets paved, the schools open and drinking water safe . Worse yet, it compels any fiscally disadvantaged locality seeking to improve its fortunes to do so by showering businesses and corporations with tax breaks and subsidies while cutting services and shifting tax burdens onto the poor and disadvantaged. A local tax on local real estate places Black people and cities with large Black populations at a permanent disadvantage. More than that, it gives middle-class white people strong incentives to preserve their relative advantages, fueling the zero-sum politics that keep Americans divided, accelerates the upward redistribution of wealth and impoverishes us all.

There are technical solutions. One, which requires local governments to adopt more accurate assessment models and regularly update assessment rolls, can help make property taxes fairer. But none of the proposed reforms being discussed can be applied nationally because local tax policies are the prerogative of the states and, often, local governments themselves. Given the variety and complexity of state and local property tax laws and procedures and how much local governments continue to rely on tax reductions and tax shifting to attract and retain certain people and businesses, we cannot expect them to fix these problems on their own.

The best way to make local property taxes fairer and more equitable is to make them less important. The federal government can do this by reinvesting in our cities, counties and school districts through a federal fiscal equity program, like those found in other advanced federated nations. Canada, Germany and Australia, among others, direct federal funds to lower units of government with lower capacities to raise revenue.

And what better way to pay for the program than to tap our wealthiest, who have benefited from our unjust taxation scheme for so long? President Biden is calling for a 25 percent tax on the incomes and annual increases in the values of the holdings of people claiming more than $100 million in assets, but we could accomplish far more by enacting a wealth tax on the 1 percent. Even a modest 4 percent wealth tax on people whose total assets exceed $50 million could generate upward of $400 billion in additional annual revenue, which should be more than enough to ensure that the needs of every city, county and public school system in America are met. By ensuring that localities have the resources they need, we can counteract the unequal outcomes and rank injustices that our current system generates.

Andrew W. Kahrl is a professor of history and African American studies at the University of Virginia and the author of “ The Black Tax : 150 Years of Theft, Exploitation, and Dispossession in America.”

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips . And here’s our email: [email protected] .

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Hubert Butler Essay Prize announced

Books newsletter: borris and west cork festival line-ups; banagher brontë festival; open mic for gaza; write by the sea; john mcgahern exhibition; commonwealth and jhalak prizes.

Hubert Butler: This year’s Butler essay prize theme is ‘With narratives of conflict currently distorted by misinformation and the substitution of memory for history, what are the chances of reconciliation?’. Photograph: Matt Kavanagh

In The Irish Times this Saturday, Salman Rushdie talks to Keith Duggan about Knife, his memoir about surviving a vicious attempt on his life; Ingrid Persaud tells John Self about her new novel, The Lost Love Songs of Boysie Singh; Nuala O’Connor tells Niamh Donnelly about her latest novel, Seaborne. Peter Murtagh rode his motorbike through North and South America for his travel book, From Tip to Top, and never felt in need of a gun, but writes about how in Texas and Arizona he found intense pressure around the issue. Director Pat Collins discusses his award-winning adaptation of John McGahern’s final novel with Donald Clarke; and there is a Q&A with Leeanne O’Donnell, author of Sparks of Bright Matter.

Reviews are Paul Gillespie on Circle of Stars, A History of the EU and the People Who Made It by Dermot Hodson and Nationalism in Internationalism: Ireland’s Relationship with the EU by by Michael Holmes and Kathryn Simpson; Houman Barekat on Knife: Meditations after an Attempted Murder by Salman Rushdie; Neil Hegarty on Paul Carlucci’s The Voyageur; Declan Burke on the best new crime fiction; Mia Levitin on Choice by Neel Mukherjee; Jessica Traynor on Weathering by Ruth Allen; Chris Cusack on The Axeman’s Cardinal by Catherine Chidgey; Gráinne Lyons on From Tip to Top: The Journey of a Lifetime, From Chile to Alaska by Peter Murtagh; Nadine O’Regan on The Amendments by Niamh Mulvey; Pat Carty on Nuclear War by Annie Jacobsen; Niamh Donnelly on Maggie Armstrong’s Old Romantics; and Sarah Gilmartin on You Are Here by David Nicholls.

This week’s Irish Times Eason offer is Someone Else’s Shoes by Jojo Moyes. You can buy it with your newspaper for just €5.99, a €5 saving.

Eason offer

The Hubert Butler Essay Prize is in its seventh year. Over a period ominously racked by global crisis and conflict, the prize has focussed attention on themes and issues which are central both to Butler’s work, and the world today - such as frontiers, identity, the abuse of political power, coping with the pandemic, and the tension between individual and community values.

This year’s theme is ‘With narratives of conflict currently distorted by misinformation and the substitution of memory for history, what are the chances of reconciliation?’

We wanted to encourage examination of the uses and abuses of history, at a time when deep-rooted antagonisms all round us have taken a particularly toxic form, and also to consider the implications of the tendency to discount ‘history’ in favour of ‘memory’. Butler’s commitment to clarity of thought and his determination to face up to uncomfortable truths has never been more acutely needed, and the essay form - as he showed so consummately - remains uniquely suited for projecting this essential endeavour.

First prize is €1,500 and there are two second prizes of €500. The judges are Roy Foster (chair), Barbara Schwepcke, Catriona Crowe and Nicky Grene. Closing date is June 29th. The winner will be announced on 13th August at a prize giving in Kilkenny, presented by Olivia O’Leary. Entry details here: hubertbutleressayprize.com

The Borris House Festival of Writing & Ideas, which takes place from June 7th to 9th, has launched its schedule. Final tickets are on sale for Friday and Sunday, while Saturday and Weekend tickets have already sold out. festivalofwritingandideas.com

Borris, Co Carlow is home to this annual gathering of writers from all over the world - approximately 80 in total - and the event now features performances of theatre and music as well as its unique and bespoke curated encounters between writers.

Among this year’s big names are Margaret Atwood, Elizabeth Strout, Minnie Driver, Ocean Vuong, Adam Clayton, Jon Ronson, Nick Broomfield, Cerys Matthews, Ruby Wax, Sebastian Barry, Kevin Barry, Lemn Sissay, Peter Francopan, Deborah Levy, Fintan O’Toole, Ciarán Hinds, Neil Jordan, Sinead Gleeson, Emma Dabiri, Anne Enright, Orla Guerin, Fergal Keane, Annie Mac, David O’Doherty, OIivia O’Leary, Anthony Horowitz, Liz Nugent, Roy Foster, Colm Toibin, Misha Glenny, Louise Kennedy, Dylan Moran, Claire Kilroy, Mikel Murfi and Ye Vagabonds.

In a new departure this year, there will be an event on Sunday, June 9th in Dublin, at the Bord Gáis Energy Theatre: Margaret Atwood with special guests musician Laurie Anderson, climate activist and Chair of the Elders Mary Robinson, hosted by broadcaster and writer John Kelly. bordgaisenergytheatre.ie

The West Cork Literary Festival, an eight-day celebration of writing and reading, takes place in and around Bantry from July 12th to 19th. There are master classes, readings, and workshops, as well as interviews with authors, book launches and other events.

Writers taking part this year include Anne Enright, Colm Tóibín, Adania Shibli, David Nicholls, Dolly Alderton, Paul Lynch, Rónán Hession, Eimear Ryan, Theo Dorgan, Andrea Mara, Irvine Welsh, Miriam Margoyles, Elizabeth Day, Caleb Azumah Nelson and Jason Allen-Paisant.

“We have just announced this year’s line-up and we’re delighted by the response so far and by the excitement generated,” said festival director Eimear O’Herlihy. “It feels like West Cork Literary Festival is becoming a destination festival because what could be better than a week in Bantry in the summer with friends, writers and exciting and inspiring conversations happening on stages and in cafes all over town?” Booking for all events is now open on westcorkmusic.ie/LFprogramme or 027 527 88.

The Inaugural Banagher Brontë Festival will be held from this Friday to Sunday, April 19th-21st.

The weekend will open on Friday at 7pm with a premiere of An Evening with Charlotte Brontë devised specifically for the Banagher Brontë Group by Michael and Christine O’Dowd.

All events on Saturday will be held in Crank House starting at 11am with Joanne Wilcock’s talk, Falling in Love with Arthur. Joanne will explore the different opinions and feelings people have had about Charlotte Brontë's husband, Arthur Bell Nicholls.

At midday, Brontë scholar, Pauline Clooney (author of Charlotte & Arthur) will present Currer Bell’s Silent Years 1852-1855, an examination of Charlotte Brontë's paths to publication and her attitude to a writing life, and how, consequently, this attitude illuminates her creative silence from 1852 until her death in 1855.

At 2.30 p.m. Dr. Maebh O’Regan will present The Art of Branwell Brontë. From their earliest years the Brontës were passionate about art and were particularly inspired by the wood engravings of Thomas Bewick.

Further enquiries to James Scully on 085 710 7569 or banagherbrontegroup.com

Open Mic for Gaza

Open Mic for Gaza will be held again on Global Pay It Forward Day, Sunday, April 28th. The online fundraiser will run on Zoom from 7pm-9 pm, featuring a wonderful line-up of special guests including |Michelle Gallen, Catherine Dunne and Juliana Adelman along with 15 open mic readers/performers. All funds raised will go to the Ghassan Abu Sittah Children’s Fund . You can register, donate, and express interest in an open mic slot here .

Write By The Sea, a boutique literary festival held annually in Kilmore Quay, Co Wexford, has secured a publishing partnership with Waterford-based literary journal, The Waxed Lemon.

The four category winners of the 2024 Write By The Sea writing competition will have their work published in the Winter 2024 edition of The Waxed Lemon. Each winner will also receive a prize of €500, plus a free weekend ticket to Write By The Sea festival. Second-place winners in each of the four categories will receive a cash prize of €300 and third-place winners will receive €200. Writers can submit their work now until June 21st via writebythesea.ie/writing-competition/

Joanne McCarthy of The Waxed Lemon said: “Nothing beats seeing your work in print. Write by the Sea is one of Ireland’s most respected literary festivals and we’re really delighted to be joining the judging panel and to be printing the winning entries.”

A Deep Well of Want

A Deep Well of Want: Photographs and Archives of McGahern Country, a new exhibition of photographs by Paul Butler, documents the landscape and passing rural life of Co. Leitrim and surrounding areas – the hinterland of writer John McGahern. It opens as part of Cúirt Festival on April 24th at 4pm-5pm in Room G10, Hardiman Building, University of Galway, with a Q&A discussion with the curators, moderated by Prof Tom Inglis (McGahern Barracks Museum).

Accompanied by archives and literary manuscripts from the John McGahern Archive, held at University of Galway Library, curated by Dr. Barry Houlihan, this exhibition presents a visual and documentary journey through McGahern Country – to the sites, places, words, and ideas that formed a wellspring for the literary imagination of John McGahern.

Opening as part of Cúirt Festival of Literature, the exhibition represents the largest display of manuscripts and materials from the McGahern archive. Combined with the beautifully captured and evocative photographs by Paul Butler, the exhibition is a unique opportunity to explore the visual and the written landscapes of McGahern and of Co. Leitrim.

Twenty-three writers from 13 countries have been shortlisted for the world’s most global literature prize – the Commonwealth Short Story Prize. Writers from three Commonwealth countries – Mauritius, Rwanda and St Kitts and Nevis – have been shortlisted for the first time. The prize is viewed worldwide as a bellwether of new talent and many nominated writers go on to find publishers, agents and other opportunities. Previous regional and overall winners include Sharma Taylor, Kevin Jared Hosein (both from the Caribbean) and Fijian writer Mary Rokonadravu – and this year’s themes are also interesting. One features a young person contemplating gender transition, a quarter are meditations on motherhood, and there are many speculative fiction stories. Five regional winners (for the five regions of the commonwealth) will be announced on 29 May and the overall winner on 26 June.

The Jhalak Prize and Jhalak Children’s & Young Adult Prize 2024 shortlists have been announced. The Jhalak Prize shortlist features exhilarating fiction, a raw snapshot of contemporary multicultural London, beguiling non-fiction about landscape and the natural world, an audacious true crime tale and an award-winning poet.

The Jhalak Children’s and Young Adult Prize shortlist features thought-provoking young fiction, vividly illustrated picture books, a YA thriller and an assured debut for middle grade readers. As with previous years, the shortlists demonstrate the exceptional quality and breadth of work produced by writers of colour, from the UK and Ireland today.

Prize director Sunny Singh said: “Every year, the Jhalak Prize shortlists exemplify literary excellence in contemporary Britain and mark them as future classics. I am in awe of the courage required to tackle difficult themes and ideas coupled with the command of the chosen genre and form demonstrated by our shortlistees. These are books about belonging and its price, about confronting injustice with hope, and about the audacity of trying even in the face of impossible odds. Most of all, these are books about moral courage, which makes the books on our 2024 shortlists necessary, urgent and timeless.”

The shortlist for the Jhalak Prize is: A Flat Place, Noreen Masud; Anansi’s Gold: The Man Who Swindled The World, Yepoka Yeebo; Boundary Road, Ami Rao; Fire Rush, Jacqueline Crooks; Self-Portrait As Othello, Jason Allen-Paisant; Twelve Words For Moss, Elizabeth-Jane Burnett. The 2024 shortlist for the Jhalak Children’s & Young Adult Prize is: Geoffrey Gets the Jitters, Nadia Shireen; How to Die Famous, Benjamin Dean; Safiyyah’s War, Hiba Noor Khan; Steady for This, Nathanael Lessore; To The Other Side, Erika Meza; and Wild Song, Candy Gourlay.

The two winners will be announced at the British Library on May 30th. Each winner will be awarded £1,000 and a specially created work of art as part of the ongoing Jhalak Art Residency.

IN THIS SECTION

Knife by salman rushdie review: living to tell the tale of being saved by love, impossible city: paris in the twenty-first century – a place like no other, cork world book fest turns 20, hagstone by sinéad gleeson: there is a lyricism to this magical and otherworldly debut novel, university changes gender identity policy that said refusal to use pronouns was ‘unlawful’, woman living ‘exotic’ lifestyle given four months to vacate home bought with crime proceeds, us comedy giant conan o’brien declares ireland ‘quite the ride... for a ginger’, man convicted of operating ‘dodgy box’ service remanded in custody, friends, colleagues and family bid farewell to the late, great larry masterson.

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NPR suspends veteran editor as it grapples with his public criticism

David Folkenflik

NPR suspended senior editor Uri Berliner for five days without pay after he wrote an essay accusing the network of losing the public's trust and appeared on a podcast to explain his argument. Uri Berliner hide caption

NPR suspended senior editor Uri Berliner for five days without pay after he wrote an essay accusing the network of losing the public's trust and appeared on a podcast to explain his argument.

NPR has formally punished Uri Berliner, the senior editor who publicly argued a week ago that the network had "lost America's trust" by approaching news stories with a rigidly progressive mindset.

Berliner's five-day suspension without pay, which began last Friday, has not been previously reported.

Yet the public radio network is grappling in other ways with the fallout from Berliner's essay for the online news site The Free Press . It angered many of his colleagues, led NPR leaders to announce monthly internal reviews of the network's coverage, and gave fresh ammunition to conservative and partisan Republican critics of NPR, including former President Donald Trump.

Conservative activist Christopher Rufo is among those now targeting NPR's new chief executive, Katherine Maher, for messages she posted to social media years before joining the network. Among others, those posts include a 2020 tweet that called Trump racist and another that appeared to minimize rioting during social justice protests that year. Maher took the job at NPR last month — her first at a news organization .

In a statement Monday about the messages she had posted, Maher praised the integrity of NPR's journalists and underscored the independence of their reporting.

"In America everyone is entitled to free speech as a private citizen," she said. "What matters is NPR's work and my commitment as its CEO: public service, editorial independence, and the mission to serve all of the American public. NPR is independent, beholden to no party, and without commercial interests."

The network noted that "the CEO is not involved in editorial decisions."

In an interview with me later on Monday, Berliner said the social media posts demonstrated Maher was all but incapable of being the person best poised to direct the organization.

"We're looking for a leader right now who's going to be unifying and bring more people into the tent and have a broader perspective on, sort of, what America is all about," Berliner said. "And this seems to be the opposite of that."

Conservative critics of NPR are now targeting its new chief executive, Katherine Maher, for messages she posted to social media years before joining the public radio network last month. Stephen Voss/Stephen Voss hide caption

Conservative critics of NPR are now targeting its new chief executive, Katherine Maher, for messages she posted to social media years before joining the public radio network last month.

He said that he tried repeatedly to make his concerns over NPR's coverage known to news leaders and to Maher's predecessor as chief executive before publishing his essay.

Berliner has singled out coverage of several issues dominating the 2020s for criticism, including trans rights, the Israel-Hamas war and COVID. Berliner says he sees the same problems at other news organizations, but argues NPR, as a mission-driven institution, has a greater obligation to fairness.

"I love NPR and feel it's a national trust," Berliner says. "We have great journalists here. If they shed their opinions and did the great journalism they're capable of, this would be a much more interesting and fulfilling organization for our listeners."

A "final warning"

The circumstances surrounding the interview were singular.

Berliner provided me with a copy of the formal rebuke to review. NPR did not confirm or comment upon his suspension for this article.

In presenting Berliner's suspension Thursday afternoon, the organization told the editor he had failed to secure its approval for outside work for other news outlets, as is required of NPR journalists. It called the letter a "final warning," saying Berliner would be fired if he violated NPR's policy again. Berliner is a dues-paying member of NPR's newsroom union but says he is not appealing the punishment.

The Free Press is a site that has become a haven for journalists who believe that mainstream media outlets have become too liberal. In addition to his essay, Berliner appeared in an episode of its podcast Honestly with Bari Weiss.

A few hours after the essay appeared online, NPR chief business editor Pallavi Gogoi reminded Berliner of the requirement that he secure approval before appearing in outside press, according to a copy of the note provided by Berliner.

In its formal rebuke, NPR did not cite Berliner's appearance on Chris Cuomo's NewsNation program last Tuesday night, for which NPR gave him the green light. (NPR's chief communications officer told Berliner to focus on his own experience and not share proprietary information.) The NPR letter also did not cite his remarks to The New York Times , which ran its article mid-afternoon Thursday, shortly before the reprimand was sent. Berliner says he did not seek approval before talking with the Times .

NPR defends its journalism after senior editor says it has lost the public's trust

Berliner says he did not get permission from NPR to speak with me for this story but that he was not worried about the consequences: "Talking to an NPR journalist and being fired for that would be extraordinary, I think."

Berliner is a member of NPR's business desk, as am I, and he has helped to edit many of my stories. He had no involvement in the preparation of this article and did not see it before it was posted publicly.

In rebuking Berliner, NPR said he had also publicly released proprietary information about audience demographics, which it considers confidential. He said those figures "were essentially marketing material. If they had been really good, they probably would have distributed them and sent them out to the world."

Feelings of anger and betrayal inside the newsroom

His essay and subsequent public remarks stirred deep anger and dismay within NPR. Colleagues contend Berliner cherry-picked examples to fit his arguments and challenge the accuracy of his accounts. They also note he did not seek comment from the journalists involved in the work he cited.

Morning Edition host Michel Martin told me some colleagues at the network share Berliner's concerns that coverage is frequently presented through an ideological or idealistic prism that can alienate listeners.

"The way to address that is through training and mentorship," says Martin, herself a veteran of nearly two decades at the network who has also reported for The Wall Street Journal and ABC News. "It's not by blowing the place up, by trashing your colleagues, in full view of people who don't really care about it anyway."

Several NPR journalists told me they are no longer willing to work with Berliner as they no longer have confidence that he will keep private their internal musings about stories as they work through coverage.

"Newsrooms run on trust," NPR political correspondent Danielle Kurtzleben tweeted last week, without mentioning Berliner by name. "If you violate everyone's trust by going to another outlet and sh--ing on your colleagues (while doing a bad job journalistically, for that matter), I don't know how you do your job now."

Berliner rejected that critique, saying nothing in his essay or subsequent remarks betrayed private observations or arguments about coverage.

Other newsrooms are also grappling with questions over news judgment and confidentiality. On Monday, New York Times Executive Editor Joseph Kahn announced to his staff that the newspaper's inquiry into who leaked internal dissent over a planned episode of its podcast The Daily to another news outlet proved inconclusive. The episode was to focus on a December report on the use of sexual assault as part of the Hamas attack on Israel in October. Audio staffers aired doubts over how well the reporting stood up to scrutiny.

"We work together with trust and collegiality everyday on everything we produce, and I have every expectation that this incident will prove to be a singular exception to an important rule," Kahn wrote to Times staffers.

At NPR, some of Berliner's colleagues have weighed in online against his claim that the network has focused on diversifying its workforce without a concomitant commitment to diversity of viewpoint. Recently retired Chief Executive John Lansing has referred to this pursuit of diversity within NPR's workforce as its " North Star ," a moral imperative and chief business strategy.

In his essay, Berliner tagged the strategy as a failure, citing the drop in NPR's broadcast audiences and its struggle to attract more Black and Latino listeners in particular.

"During most of my tenure here, an open-minded, curious culture prevailed. We were nerdy, but not knee-jerk, activist, or scolding," Berliner writes. "In recent years, however, that has changed."

Berliner writes, "For NPR, which purports to consider all things, it's devastating both for its journalism and its business model."

NPR investigative reporter Chiara Eisner wrote in a comment for this story: "Minorities do not all think the same and do not report the same. Good reporters and editors should know that by now. It's embarrassing to me as a reporter at NPR that a senior editor here missed that point in 2024."

Some colleagues drafted a letter to Maher and NPR's chief news executive, Edith Chapin, seeking greater clarity on NPR's standards for its coverage and the behavior of its journalists — clearly pointed at Berliner.

A plan for "healthy discussion"

On Friday, CEO Maher stood up for the network's mission and the journalism, taking issue with Berliner's critique, though never mentioning him by name. Among her chief issues, she said Berliner's essay offered "a criticism of our people on the basis of who we are."

Berliner took great exception to that, saying she had denigrated him. He said that he supported diversifying NPR's workforce to look more like the U.S. population at large. She did not address that in a subsequent private exchange he shared with me for this story. (An NPR spokesperson declined further comment.)

Late Monday afternoon, Chapin announced to the newsroom that Executive Editor Eva Rodriguez would lead monthly meetings to review coverage.

"Among the questions we'll ask of ourselves each month: Did we capture the diversity of this country — racial, ethnic, religious, economic, political geographic, etc — in all of its complexity and in a way that helped listeners and readers recognize themselves and their communities?" Chapin wrote in the memo. "Did we offer coverage that helped them understand — even if just a bit better — those neighbors with whom they share little in common?"

Berliner said he welcomed the announcement but would withhold judgment until those meetings played out.

In a text for this story, Chapin said such sessions had been discussed since Lansing unified the news and programming divisions under her acting leadership last year.

"Now seemed [the] time to deliver if we were going to do it," Chapin said. "Healthy discussion is something we need more of."

Disclosure: This story was reported and written by NPR Media Correspondent David Folkenflik and edited by Deputy Business Editor Emily Kopp and Managing Editor Gerry Holmes. Under NPR's protocol for reporting on itself, no NPR corporate official or news executive reviewed this story before it was posted publicly.

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