Like many people, there’s a good chance that vegans annoy you. We are preachy. We have weird dietary needs. Those needs mean that at most restaurants, we will have to stop and ask the server about the ingredients of anything we order. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg; organizations like PETA (well, mostly just PETA itself) are notoriously aggressive and untempered in their attempts to get you to realize the horrors of factory farming. They get in your face and pull off ridiculous stunts and needlessly, unhelpfully attack Steve Irwin.
I understand. It is annoying.
But that’s probably not what causes you, an assumed omnivore, the most grief. No, I suspect there’s something deeper causing you internal frustration whenever a vegan earnestly discusses their plant-based lifestyle: vegans are right.
PETA really isn’t right about everything—and for now we don’t need to get into the weeds on issues like the best way to spread awareness, or what sorts of organisms are okay to eat (for example, I think bivalves are fine to eat). But broadly speaking, the general push for the end of factory farming and the adoption of a wholly plant-based diet is morally right. Unless you’re a diagnosable psychopath, I think the following argument will convince you of that. It might not get you to stop eating meat immediately, but it should at least show you why it’s wrong—which, really, it is.
Let’s consider this argument, given in classic philosophy-style premise-conclusion format:
Most animals are capable of feeling pain and also have the desire to avoid that pain.
A good person should live their life in such a way that causes as little unnecessary, undesired pain (to others or themselves) as possible.
Eating animals causes them immense, horrendous pain, especially in our current industrialized farming situation.
It is possible to live a perfectly happy and healthy life without eating animals (i.e. it is unnecessary to hurt animals).
Therefore,
(5) A good person should live their life in such a way that they do not eat animals.
And that’s really it. I can even boil it down to a simpler statement: good people try to avoid harming others wherever they can do so without seriously harming themselves. That principle entails being vegan. But, of course, that isn’t the end of the discussion yet. I am going to address a few objections to my argument as well as some common justifications for eating meat next.
(I)
First, I’ll point out a suppressed premise between (3) and (4) in the preceding argument that needs to be clarified and argued-for: (3.5) buying meat from a restaurant or grocery store is the same as intentionally causing an animal pain.
I actually don’t think that’s entirely true. It depends on the sorts of normative constraints you believe are right, or applicable to the situation. For instance: if you’re a pure act consequentialist, then maybe you’ll simply say that meat eaters kill around 7000 animals in their lifetimes, as that’s about the average. So, they are responsible for the deaths of that many sentient creatures, even if they aren’t the ones doing the killing, because they have caused those consequences through their deliberate actions. I think this is a helpful number to point out, but I think there’s an easier and more intuitive way that we can think about people’s characters when considering the relationship between purchasing meat and the suffering of animals.
You’ll notice that my argument is one about good people. I intentionally use this language as, instead of appealing to a rarified concept of morally permissible actions, I want to ground my argument in a simpler intuitive notion of a good person—one that would be plausible under most fully-expanded moral frameworks (like consequentialism, deontology, or virtue ethics). Consider a similar example. If I told you that every time you bought a new article of clothing, one person had to die, you’d probably be concerned. A good person would see this as a reason not to buy new clothes, or at the very least as a reason to look into morally preferable means of buying clothes. Even if it’s not directly their fault that the one person has to die for each article of clothing, a good person would still be concerned that their actions indirectly had this effect. Good people care about the consequences of their actions, even the ones that aren’t properly considered their fault.
It doesn’t really matter that large industrial forces are at play in the case of animal agriculture. Following the same principles, even if it’s Tyson Meats’ fault that millions of animals are currently being tortured and killed (or, even if it’s the collection of all meat-eaters’ fault for demanding that torture and killing), we don’t really need to sort out what percentage of that fault ought to fall on any given meat consumer. We don’t need to, as some may suggest, figure out how much your $10 for a hunk of ground beef is itself contributing to the suffering of some number of cows. All we need to know is that you know that you are buying into a system of immeasurable cruelty. You know that animals can feel suffering and desperately wish to escape that suffering, and a good person would want very much to distance themselves from the forces leading to that suffering. A good person doesn’t want to do something that’s helping hurt others for no good reason.
Does this mean I’m calling you (again, a probably omnivore) a bad person? Yes and no. It’s obviously more complicated than “vegans = good; omnivores = bad.” There’s a whole psychological, cultural component that needs to be taken into account. I wouldn’t mind calling someone who willingly tortured a cow right in front of them a bad person because I could clearly see that they are fully aware of the effects of their actions. But when you’re hanging out grilling up burgers and chatting with friends over beers, the pain and suffering of the creatures you are eating are not apparent to you at all. So in cases where that whole causal chain is forgotten to a meat-eater, it’s hard to say that they are, strictly speaking, a bad person. I don’t think my friends are bad people for eating animal products at most meals. That said, I think a truly good person would be moved, perhaps after some time and consideration, by the very compelling reasons that eating meat brings about terrible pain and suffering. Maybe even moved to stop contributing to that suffering entirely by becoming a vegan.
(II)
Another line of reasoning is that animals don’t suffer in the relevant way. This could be because either (a) they don’t really feel suffering, or (b) some sort of divine force compels or justifies eating them.
I don’t think (a) is really compelling anymore, if it ever was. We know enough about the similarities among vertebrates to know that the differences between animals’ and humans’ nervous systems isn’t enough to justify the thought that they don’t feel pain in a similar way to the way we do. Watching an animal yelp and howl and try to get away from pain ought to be enough evidence anyway. (Have you ever stepped on your dog or cat’s paw? Yeah, you felt guilty—as you should have, you monster.)
I think that (b) is even less compelling. People occasionally offer that animals are put here by God for humans to eat, or that we evolved to eat meat and so we should. These are both terrible arguments. Or, really, it’s a bad argument, as ultimately it’s making the same relevant claim: the way of the universe is such that we are supposed to eat meat. First, it’s really difficult to believe that a purportedly all-knowing and all-loving God would be happy with us causing horrible suffering. And anyway, even if he did envision for us some sort of back-to-the-land, respectful, honorable hunting or herding-based meat economy, that is definitely not what we have now. No good God would ever think factory farming is permissible.
As for evolution, it’s important to observe that just because something happens to be a certain way does not mean that it morally ought to be that way. Evolution is one of the cruelest, most destructive forces acting on our planet. Billions, perhaps trillions of sentient creatures have been brutally maimed and killed throughout time due to natural selective processes. Apart from that, evolution doesn’t impose moral constraints of any kind. Humans evolved to hunt and gather in East Africa. Is everything we’ve done since then and other than that morally wrong? It’s just a dumb view. Evolution on its own neither justifies any action nor renders any impermissible.
You don’t have to be a vegan right now to be a good person. But, very plausibly, a good person should be moved by these thoughts. It takes time to transition. I was a vegetarian for four years before I became a vegan, and during those four years cheated often because God damn McDonald’s is honestly delicious as sin. But, slow though it may be, moral growth is important, and one place most people could stand to morally improve is in cutting animal suffering out of their daily lives.