opinion essay 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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The Core Argument for Veganism

• Published: 04 April 2015
• Volume 43 , pages 271–290, ( 2015 )

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• Stijn Bruers 1  

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This article presents an argument for veganism, using a formal-axiomatic approach: a list of twenty axioms (basic definitions, normative assumptions and empirical facts) are explicitly stated. These axioms are all necessary conditions to derive the conclusion that veganism is a moral duty. The presented argument is a minimalist or core argument for veganism, because it is as parsimonious as possible, using the weakest conditions, the narrowest definitions, the most reliable empirical facts and the minimal assumptions necessary to reach the conclusion. If someone does not accept the conclusion, logical consistency requires that s/he should be able to point at axiom(s) on which s/he disagrees. The argument exposes hidden assumptions and provides a framework for an overview of the philosophical literature on animal rights and vegetarianism / veganism.

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Vegetarianism

Sovereignty as Autonomy

Veganism is broadly defined as avoiding the consumption of bodily products from sentient beings. Of course the conclusion of the argument will point at a more specific meaning of veganism. Hence, the argument does not say anything about some animals (e.g., zooplankton or oysters) nor about some kind of uses of animal products (e.g., collecting feathers in the woods or eating road kill). The argument focuses on the most common cases of buying meat, fish, dairy and eggs.

Engel ( 2000 ) also presented a lengthy argument, but I will not discuss the strengths and weaknesses of is argument compared to mine.

Regan refers to a more general ‘use as merely a means’, Francione refers to ‘treatment as property’. These basic rights are Kantian in nature, because they refer to a means-ends relationship.

Explicitly referring to mentally disabled humans is of course the well-known argument from marginal cases (e.g., Dombrowski 1997 ).

Some argue that mentally disabled humans should get rights because we could become mentally disabled in the future and then we would want our rights to be respected (see e.g., Wreen 1984 ). However, we cannot become a mentally disabled human who was never mentally abled before.

This is an often heard argument to grant rights to non-moral agents such as children who have a potential to become moral agents in the future (e.g., Melden 1980 ). Still, some mentally disabled humans have as little potential as non-human animals.

See the genetic basis of moral agency (Liao 2010 ).

See Gunnarsson ( 2008 ).

Narveson ( 1987 ) used an argument that reflects this condition of kinship with other individuals.

According to Narveson ( 1977 ), one of the reasons why we give rights to mentally disabled humans is because of feelings of sympathy on the basis of superficial similarities. This sympathy is merely triggered by similarities, and should not be confused with empathy. Also Wreen ( 1984 ) uses the argument that we identify ourselves with human non-persons.

This refers to a possible reply to the super-chimp (Kumar 2008 ) or super-cat (Wreen 1984 ) examples: a highly intelligent mutant super-cat would not get rights if rights are based on species normality (what most members of the species have). This seems counter-intuitive because this unique cat is rational. So the reply goes that this super-cat must belong to another species than Felis domestica (even if it can still interbreed with other cats). But then a same reasoning allows to conclude that a mentally disabled human with an exceptional property is no longer a Homo sapiens .

This is the underlying rationale of the Logic of the Larder (see Scruton 2004 ; Matheny and Chan 2005 ).

This counters the argument of ‘moral sociability as a precondition to justice’ (Barilan 2005 ). A subject has no moral sociability if its right to life is incompatible with the right to life of someone else.

Scruton ( 2006 ) and MacLean ( 2010 ) emphasize symbolic meanings of eating animal meat as well as taboos about e.g., eating human corpses to justify a distinction between humans and animals.

This refers to the argument of indirect duties or duties towards oneself, used by e.g., Kant ( 1785 , part II, paras 16 and 17) and Carruthers ( 1992 ).

Narveson ( 1987 ) tried to avoid the conclusion that use of mentally disabled humans is permissible by claiming that their use would not be as beneficial for us after all.

This refers to a condition proposed by Barilan ( 2005 ) for non-human species, but hereby translated to mentally disabled humans.

This refers to the least harm argument against vegetarianism proposed by Davis ( 2003 ), but hereby applied to mentally disabled humans.

This refers to the argument against vegetarianism/veganism that livestock farming allows us to use resources such as grazing land that otherwise remain unavailable for direct consumption.

See e.g., Young ( 1984 ), for whom the morality of killing X depends on others who have an interest in X’s continued existence. But also Scruton ( 2006 ) refers to the sentiments of others about the way we are allowed to treat someone. The impermissibility of using mentally disabled humans merely due to us being disturbed by that idea is like the prohibition of eating e.g., human cultured meat, plants that have a symbolic (e.g., religious) meaning or alcoholic beverages that are considered taboo in some cultures. These prohibitions have nothing to do with rights violations.

E.g. Goldman ( 2001 ) referred to moral intuitions that excluded animals.

E.g. Levy ( 2004 ).

This refers to the normality argument: moral agency is normal for humans because most humans possess moral agency. E.g. Thomas ( 2010 ).

This refers to the predation argument: we are allowed to eat animals when some animals eat other animals for survival.

This refers to the slippery slope argument (e.g., Carruthers 1992 ): if we start using mentally disabled humans, we might end up using mentally abled humans, because there is a continuum from disability to ability. See also Bruers ( 2013 ).

This refers to the human prejudice argument (Williams 2006 ): in the absence of an impartial point of view, we could (as humans) be partial in favour of other humans, from our own particular (human) point of view.

Both Francione ( 2000 , 2008 ) and Regan ( 1983 ) argued for veganism based on a Kantian basic right, but Regan (in his earlier work) used ‘subject-of-a-life’ as morally relevant criterion whereas Francione explicitly rejects that and argues that sentience is sufficient for a being to hold the right not to be treated as a resource. Subject-of-a-life is a narrower criterion than sentience, as it requires not only sentience but also preference autonomy (an ability to initiate action to pursue goals) and temporal consciousness (memory and a sense of one’s own future). Hence, my argument can be considered as a polishing and structuring of Francione’s work.

Note that this use is not a use as merely a means if plants do not possess a will and cannot be used against their will. Hence, this right is broader than the basic right in definition 1.

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Bruers, S. The Core Argument for Veganism. Philosophia 43 , 271–290 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-015-9595-5

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Received : 11 November 2014

Revised : 16 March 2015

Accepted : 23 March 2015

Published : 04 April 2015

Issue Date : June 2015

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-015-9595-5

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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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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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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 .

Liked that? Try this next.

The Incredible Power of a Cohesive College Application

How to Write a Personal Statement for Colleges

15 Amazing Personal Statement Examples (2024 Update)

8 Outstanding UC Essay Examples (Graded by Former Admissions Officers)

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Why we shouldn’t all be vegan

Visiting Research Fellow in Philosophy, University of Hertfordshire

Professor of Food Science and Biotechnology, Vrije Universiteit Brussel

Disclosure statement

Martin Cohen has no formal conflicts of interests although in a wider sense he is a long-time campaigner on ecological issues and the author of a recent book advancing philosophical and sociological arguments for a more ethical and holistic approach to food.

Frédéric Leroy receives research funding from various foundations and councils, incuding the Research Foundation Flanders and his University's Research Council. He is affiliated pro-bono with both the Belgian Association of Meat Science and Technology, a non-funded academic organisation grouping various Belgian scientists, and the scientific committee of the Institute Danone Belgium.

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After decades in which the number of people choosing to cut out meat from their diet has steadily increased, 2019 is set to be the year the world changes the way that it eats. Or at least, that’s the ambitious aim of a major campaign under the umbrella of an organisation simply called EAT . The core message is to discourage meat and dairy, seen as part of an “over-consumption of protein” – and specifically to target consumption of beef.

The push comes at a time when consumer behaviour already seems to be shifting. In the three years following 2014, according to research firm GlobalData, there was a six-fold increase in people identifying as vegans in the US, a huge rise – albeit from a very low base. It’s a similar story in the UK, where the number of vegans has increased by 350%, compared to a decade ago, at least according to research commissioned by the Vegan Society.

And across Asia, many governments are promoting plant-based diets. New government dietary guidelines in China, for example, call on the nation’s 1.3 billion people to reduce their meat consumption by 50% . Flexitarianism, a mostly plant-based diet with the occasional inclusion of meat, is also on the rise .

‘Conquering the world’

Big food companies have noticed the shift and have jumped onto the vegan wagon, the most prominent ones tightly associated with EAT through its FReSH program . Unilever, for instance, is a very vocal partner. Recently, the multinational announced it was acquiring a meat-substitute company called “The Vegetarian Butcher”. It described the acquisition as part of a strategy to expand “into plant-based foods that are healthier and have a lower environmental impact”. Currently, Unilever sells just under 700 products under the “V-label” in Europe.

“The Vegetarian Butcher” was conceived in 2007 by farmer Jaap Kortweg, chef Paul Brom and marketer Niko Koffeman, a Dutch Seventh-Day Adventist who is vegetarian for religious and ideological reasons. Koffeman is also at the origin of the Partij voor de Dieren , a political party advocating for animal rights in The Netherlands. Like EAT, the Vegetarian Butcher seeks to “ conquer the world ”. Its mission is “to make plant-based ‘meat’ the standard” – and the alliance with Unilever paves the way.

The dietary shift would require a remarkable turn around in consumer habits. Of course, there is much that both can and should be done to improve the way that we eat, both in terms of consumer health and environmental impact. And yes, a key plank of the strategy will be shifting consumers away from beef. But the extreme vision of some of the campaign’s backers is somewhat startling. Former UN official Christiana Figueres, for example, thinks that anyone who wants a steak should be banished. “How about restaurants in ten to 15 years start treating carnivores the same way that smokers are treated?”, Figueres suggested during a recent conference. “If they want to eat meat, they can do it outside the restaurant.”

This statement is typical of what social scientists call “ bootlegger and Baptist ” coalitions, in which groups with very different ideas – and values – seek to rally under a common banner. And this is what worries us. The campaign to “conquer the world” can be rather simplistic and one-sided, and we think this has some dangerous implications.

A skewed view?

EAT, for example, describes itself as a science-based global platform for food system transformation . It has partnered with Oxford and Harvard universities, as well as with the medical journal The Lancet. But we have concerns that some of the science behind the campaign and the policy is partial and misleading.

It is long on things that we all know are bad, such as some excesses of factory farming and rainforest clearing to raise beef cattle. But it is mostly silent on such things as the nutritional assets of animal products, especially for children in rural African settings, and the sustainability benefits of livestock in areas as diverse as sub-Saharan Africa to traditional European upland valleys. And, if vegetarian diets show that traditional markers for heart disease, such as “total cholesterol”, are usually improved, this is not the case for the more predictive (and thus valuable) markers such as the triglyceride/HDL (or “good” cholesterol) ratio, which even tend to deteriorate .

More importantly, most nutritional “evidence” originates from epidemiology, which is not able to show causation but only statistical correlations. Not only are the associations weak , the research is generally confounded by lifestyle and other dietary factors . Not to mention that part of the epidemiological data, such as the PURE study , show that the consumption of meat and dairy can be associated with less – rather than more – chronic disease.

Not so simple

In any case, even if plant-based diets can in theory provide the nutrients people need, as long as they are supplemented with critical micronutrients (such as vitamin B12 and certain long-chain fatty acids), that is not to say that in practice shifting people towards them will not result in a great many people following poorly balanced diets and suffering ill health in consequence. And when a vegan diet fails, for instance due to poor supplementation, it may result in serious physical and cognitive impairment and failure to thrive .

The approach seems particularly risky during pregnancy and for the very young , as also documented by a long list of clinical case reports in medical literature. Animal products are exceptionally nutrient-dense dietary sources – removing them from the diet compromises metabolic robustness. Without sufficient insight in the complexities of nutrition and human metabolism, it is easy to overlook important issues as the proportion of nutrients that can be absorbed from the diet, nutrient interactions and protein quality.

The same debate needs to be had when it comes to consideration of the environmental question. Too fast or radical a shift towards “plant-based” diets risks losing realistic and achievable goals, such as increasing the benefits of natural grazing and embracing farming techniques that reduce the wasteful feeding of crops to animals, lower climate impact and enhance biodoversity.

A shift towards a radically plant-based planetary diet loses the many benefits of livestock – including its deployment on land that is not suitable for crop production, its contribution to livelihoods, and the many other benefits that animals provide. It mistakenly assumes that land use can be swiftly altered and ignores the potential of farming techniques that may even have mitigating effects .

Sustainable, ecological and harmonious animal production really should be part of the solution of the “world food problem”, considered from both the nutritional and environmental scenarios. The Earth is an extraordinarily complex ecosystem – any one-size-fits-all solution risks wreaking havoc with it.

More articles about vegetarianism and veganism , written by academic experts:

Vegan diet: how your body changes from day one

Why aren’t more people vegetarian?

Vegans: why they inspire fear and loathing among meat eaters

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54 Veganism Essay Topic Ideas & Examples

🏆 best veganism topic ideas & essay examples, ⭐ good research topics about veganism, ❓ veganism research questions.

• 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.
• The Culture of Veganism Among the Middle Class According to Hooker, the culture of veganism has become so popular among the middle class that it is easy to associate it with the class. In this research, the focus will be to analyze the […] We will write a custom essay specifically for you by our professional experts 808 writers online Learn More
• 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.
• 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.
• 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 […]
• 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.
• 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 […]
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• How Veganism Could Contribute to a Human’s Life
• Utilitarian Defense for Veganism
• The Myth Behind the Claim That Veganism Is a Healthy Balanced Diet
• The Definition, History, and Benefits of Veganism, a Lifestyle Choice
• The Ethical Argument for Veganism
• Veganism: Pro and Contra Arguments
• Vegetarianism and Veganism: Not Eating Meat
• Saving the Environment With Veganism
• Are Veganism Means Not Eating Meat?
• What Does Veganism Mean?
• Veganism and Vegetarianism Are Becoming a Growing Trend
• Could All People Adapt to Veganism?
• Analyzing the Pro Veganism
• The Vegan Lifestyle Article – Veganism, Vegetarianism
• Animal Products and Eating Meat: Veganism and Vegetarianism
• Protecting the Environment and Veganism
• The Origin, History, and Effects of Veganism
• Veganism Might Save Us: From One Meat Lover to Another
• Why Is Veganism an Ethical Issue?
• Is Veganism Harmful to Health?
• Why Is Veganism a Social Issue?
• What Is the Main Idea of Veganism?
• How Does the Body Change While Following Veganism?
• What Percentage of the World Is Veganism?
• What Does Veganism Allow You to Eat?
• How Many Animals Are Saved by Veganism?
• Why Do People Stop Following Veganism?
• What Country Is Mostly Veganism?
• In Which Country Is It the Hardest to Stick To Veganism?
• How Long Can People Stick To Veganism?
• What Challenges Do Vegans Face?
• Why Does Veganism Not Allow You to Eat Honey?
• When Did Veganism Originate?
• How Does Veganism Affect the Economy?
• Is Veganism a Problem?
• Why Do People Disagree With Veganism?
• What Are the Cons of Veganism?
• How Does Veganism Affect the Psychological State of a Person?
• Where Are the Largest Number of Vegan Social Events?
• Do People Who Follow Veganism Look Older?
• Does Veganism Improve Health?
• At What Age Can a Child Be Introduced to Veganism?
• Why Is Veganism Bad for Society?
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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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Home Essay Examples Life Vegan

Reflection on My Way to Veganism: Opinion Essay

• Category Life
• Subcategory Lifestyle & Interests
• Topic Vegan

As a vegan for over 10 years, I have come to develop an in-depth understanding of the positive impacts this diet could have on the future of humanity and of the planet. The environmental impact, the constantly increasing number of people to be fed as well as the antibiotic resistance risk which is amplified by meat consumption are 3 key aspects to take into consideration when talking about the problems of conventional farming.

Multiple studies show that by 2050 the global food demand will increase by 60%. This demand could be answered by organic agriculture under the circumstances where meat production and food waste are reduced. In order to feed over 9 billion people, governments should encourage populations to move towards a more plant-based diet. Meat consumption should be reduced from 38% in the present to 11%. One might wonder if lowering the rate of meat consumption is possible since 1960 it grows by 3% per year. It is important to note that in the present, 26% of earth’s lands and 27% of global fresh water are used for meat and dairy production, while these make only 18% of what humans eat. If people would eat what they feed to animals, an extra 3.5 billion people could be nourished. Cows, for example, convert only 3% of what they eat into beef, while 97% is lost, therefore for 1kg of beef 25kg of grains are needed and 15.000L of water.

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Replacing animal proteins with plant-based proteins would also mean reducing the number of feed crops and increasing the number of food crops. As evidence, 100 kg of beef protein (500 kg of beef) needs about 0.6 ha cropland, feeding crops included, while 10 kg of plant-based protein from pulses only needs 0.25 ha. The effects of dietary changes on human health and life expectancy have become a rising concern of public health, who was initially preoccupied with obesity. There is some evidence that consumption of beef and pork increases the risk of intestinal cancer while lowering the amount of fatty meat consumed decreases the risk of coronary heart disease. Public health has also revised the dietary recommendations given to public health institutions. It is said that a well-balanced vegan diet, more varied and with less calories could save lives and reduce mortality by 20%.

Furthermore, concerns turn towards the high number of antimicrobial drugs used in both meat production and agriculture. They play an important role especially in meat production as they help to avoid diseases and infections. Antimicrobial drugs are antibiotics, antifungal drugs, and antiparasitic drugs. The ability of bacteria to resist the effect of these drugs is called antimicrobial resistance. However, intensive farming uses antibiotics to speed up growth. It is worth noting that antimicrobial drugs used in animal growth and agriculture are the same as the ones that are medically approved and important for humans too. The problem is that agricultural antibiotics drive up the levels of antibiotic resistance creating new superbugs. Bacteria become resistant when antibiotics are given unnecessarily to humans or animals. Humans naturally have bacteria in their gut. Antibiotics kill it, but resistant ones survive and multiply. Drug-resistant diseases are easily passed through direct contact of animals with humans, or by handling or eating raw or undercooked contaminated meat and even by swimming in or drinking contaminated water. The diseases are also passed into the environment through animal excrements, contaminating the soil. According to NHS, a literature review found 72% of 139 papers to find evidence of the link between animal antibiotic consumption and human resistance. Moreover, according to CDC, every year over 400,000 Americans get an antibiotic-resistant disease caused by foodborne bacteria. Antibiotic-resistant illnesses are hard to treat, often requiring hospitalization, and sometimes causing death. We could draw from this that policymakers should revise global regulations to reduce antibiotic use to more appropriate levels.

At the moment, the meat & dairy industry is one of the world’s largest greenhouse gas emitter and with the increasing interest in electric vehicles, it could potentially become the world’s largest greenhouse gas emitter. Meat & dairy industry is responsible for 14.5% of the greenhouse gas emissions (Food & Agriculture Organization of the United Nations), as much as all the ships, cars and planes produce together. The greenhouse gases emitted are methane, CH4, caused by the enteric fermentation, nitrous oxide, N2O caused by manure and fertilizers and finally, carbon dioxide, CO2 caused by the deforestation needed for their pasture. Meat production can be split into 2 sections: ruminants – cattle, sheep, goat; and mono-gastric – pork and poultry. Ruminants, particularly cattle, has a large share of emissions due to multiple factors. Firstly, as mentioned earlier, they are not effective in converting forage to products. Secondly, this inefficiency leads to deforestation to create large grazing areas. Deforestation has a high impact on the CO2 cycle, decreasing Earth’s capacity to capture carbon as well as on the quality of the land. Moreover, the release of CO2 gases warms the planet, threatening global warming. Ruminants also constitute the largest source of CH4 created by bugs in their digestive system. According to The Economist, by 2050, 60% more food will be needed to feed the population, and with the current pace of food production food created gas emissions could increase by 50%. However, if everyone would go vegan by 2050, greenhouse gas emissions would decrease by 3 quarters. Not only health and environment would benefit from the potential dietary changes but also the global economy. Currently, a lot of money is spent on treating diseases associated with one’s diet such as cancer, diabetes and heart diseases like coronary heart disease or stroke. Reportedly, 1 trillion US dollars used in present on public health could be saved by 2050 if people would go vegan.

While all factors ale pleading towards a vegan future, meat lovers are not to be forgotten. Plant-based meat factories have been developing globally. Quorn, Beyond Meat, Impossible Foods or The Vegetarian Butcher are only a few to name. They all have the same mission: to provide the population with high-quality products and the same ethical motivations: reduce greenhouse gas emissions, improve human health and animal welfare. In the present on Earth, there are over 25 billion animals for the meat & dairy industry. Globally, every 1 and a half years we kill more animals than people have lived in 200 000 years of history. Intensive farming is a regular practice, animals being forced fed and grown in very small places very closed to each other, not being able to develop their normal social structure. In order to become vegans by 2050 people need strong motivation. Governments should look into what motivates people to follow a vegetarian or vegan diet. Psychology studies show that omnivores can be hostile towards vegetarians to ease their guilt and morality of meat consumption. Eating meat is a social norm. Changing one’s diet to a vegetarian diet means to stop using animal products for humans’ pleasure, therefore restricts one’s access to social resources. By finding and giving the right motivations to change diets, governments can shape and predict future attitudes and behaviors.

Becoming a vegetarian represents a change not only in one’s personal life but also in his social life. Even if most vegans and vegetarians say that the change in their diet had a positive impact on their personal or professional life, they also report that this change represented a source of anxiety when it comes to expressing one’s self and a source of conflict with family and friends leading to many questions, stereotyping or even discrimination.

As happy as a vegetarian future might look, there is always a downside of the story as being vegan could not be an option for everyone. Millions of people all around the world are living in food deserts, most of the time being low-income houses. A food desert is an urban area in which it is difficult to have access to affordable, good quality fresh food. The interest in vegan food is growing in the rich world, but for people in a food desert veganism can only be a dream. Considering a completely vegan future is not truly achievable, the concept of veganism should be applied in context. Strengths and obstacles of local food systems should be analysed, land areas need to meet local food demand. The best solution would benefit both the people and the environment. Future sustainable meat consumption would consist of 0-2 servings of poultry eggs or fish per day and 1 serving of beef or pork. A serving would be 70g. Therefore, the average consumption per day per person would be 10g of beef or pork, 46.6g poultry, and eggs.

In conclusion, vegetarianism is a dietary change that would make food production in the future sustainable. In order to feed over 9 billion people, we will need to reduce food waste, improve access to food distribution in particular in food desert areas and also move towards a more plant-based diet. A plant-based world would not only benefit humans and their health but also the environment and the global economy. In contrast to growing animals, a plant-based diet would mean sequestrating CO2 emissions and also saving money from treating diseases associated with one’s diet. We can theoretically picture a vegetarian future, but truly it is in the hands of the governments to encourage this globally. Charles Darwin said ‘It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is most adaptable to change.’ Humans are made to adapt. We adapt to climate, to social contexts, to cultural change, and also genetically. Adapting to a new diet would mean a huge change in our lives but it only takes the right motivation to do it.

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Home — Essay Samples — Life — Lifestyle & Interests — Vegan

Essays About Being a Vegan

The importance of writing an essay on veganism.

Writing an essay on veganism is important because it helps to raise awareness about the benefits of a plant-based lifestyle. Veganism is not just a dietary choice, but a way of living that has a positive impact on the environment, animal welfare, and personal health. By writing an essay on veganism, you can educate others about the ethical and environmental reasons for choosing a vegan lifestyle, and inspire them to make more conscious choices.

Here are some tips for writing an essay on veganism:

• Research the topic thoroughly to understand the key principles of veganism and its impact on different aspects of life.
• Include statistics and studies to support your points about the environmental and health benefits of veganism.
• Address common misconceptions about veganism and provide evidence to debunk them.
• Include personal stories or testimonials from vegans to add a human element to your essay.
• Consider the opposition and address counterarguments in a respectful and informative manner.
• End your essay with a call to action, encouraging readers to consider the positive impact of veganism on their lives and the world.

By writing an essay on veganism, you can contribute to the growing conversation about sustainability and ethical living. Your words have the power to spark change and inspire others to make more conscious decisions for a better world.

Best Vegan Essay Topics

Looking for inspiration for your vegan essay? Here are 20 unique and engaging Essay Topics that go beyond the ordinary:

• The impact of veganism on the environment
• The ethics of animal testing in the beauty industry
• The rise of plant-based meat alternatives
• Veganism and social justice
• The health benefits of a vegan diet
• The portrayal of veganism in the media
• Veganism and cultural appropriation
• The future of vegan fashion
• Veganism and food accessibility
• The intersection of veganism and feminism
• Veganism and spirituality
• The role of veganism in combating climate change
• Veganism and sustainable living
• The challenges of being a vegan athlete
• The impact of veganism on global food systems
• Veganism and mental health
• The cultural significance of vegan food
• The economics of the vegan industry
• Veganism and food deserts
• The psychology of veganism

Vegan Essay Topics Prompts

Looking for a creative spark for your vegan essay? Here are 5 engaging prompts to get you started:

• Imagine a world where veganism is the norm. How would society be different?
• Write a letter to a non-vegan friend, explaining why you chose a vegan lifestyle.
• Create a dialogue between two people with opposing views on veganism.
• If animals could talk, what would they say about veganism?
• Write a persuasive essay convincing someone to adopt a vegan diet.

With these thought-provoking Essay Topics and creative prompts, you'll be well on your way to writing a compelling and impactful essay on veganism. Happy writing!

Benefits of Vegan

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Vegan Lifestyle: Why Veganism is More than a Diet

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Veganism is the practice of abstaining from the use of animal products, particularly in diet, and an associated philosophy that rejects the commodity status of animals. An individual who follows the diet or philosophy is known as a vegan.

Vegetarianism can be traced to Indus Valley Civilization in 3300-1300 BCE in the Indian subcontinent, particularly in northern and western ancient India. Early vegetarians included Indian philosophers such as Parshavnatha, Mahavira, Acharya Kundakunda, Umaswati, Samantabhadra, and the Tamil poet Valluvar; the Indian emperors Chandragupta Maurya and Ashoka; Greek philosophers such as Empedocles, Theophrastus, Plutarch, Plotinus, and Porphyry; and the Roman poet Ovid and the playwright Seneca the Younger. The Greek sage Pythagoras may have advocated an early form of strict vegetarianism.

Ethical vegans” also avoid the use of animal products like skin (leather or fur), feathers, and other things that cause animal suffering during production. Approximately 5% of the US is vegetarian (close to 16 million people), and about half of those are vegan - meaning about 7.5 million Americans abstain from all animal products. Vegans get their protein from products like lentils, black beans, veggie burgers, tofu, nuts, peanut butter, and soy milk.

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Opinion | Veganism isn’t necessarily the most ethical or sustainable option

Carolyn Pallof | Senior Staff Photographer

The vegan diet is on the rise in recent years.

By Paige Lawler , Assistant Opinions Editor September 22, 2020

The vegan diet has been on the rise in recent years, with many people ceasing consumption of animal products in order to live what is usually seen as a very ethical and sustainable diet.

But being vegan isn’t necessarily more ethical or more sustainable than eating a diet that includes meat and other animal products. In fact, depending on people’s consumption choices, being vegan can be less ethical and less sustainable than a “normal” diet.

One of the main reasons people choose to adopt a vegan diet is that it is “more ethical” to avoid consuming animal products — whether these products are meats, dairy products or makeup and soaps that are produced using animal products or testing. While I agree that many of these processes are not ethical, it doesn’t make sense to avoid eating meat in protest of the unethical treatment of animals when most fruits and vegetables aren’t produced ethically.

Many farms that grow produce en masse and ship their product cross-country to grocery stores rely on the work of underpaid farm workers. Especially amid the COVID-19 pandemic, these workers deal with horrible conditions and receive nowhere near enough compensation — there are only five states in the United States where farm workers are guaranteed to make minimum wage.

Additionally, through the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, farm workers have continued working in the fields because of their status as essential workers — despite the fact that many of these workers are undocumented and have limited or no options for health care or financial assistance should they contract coronavirus.

Most recently, workers in California have been subjected to unhealthy air due to wildfires, but they haven’t received the state mandated N95 masks to combat the poor air quality due to a pandemic-related shortage. The combination of these two puts farm workers at extreme risk of contracting the coronavirus or experiencing respiratory illness or damage from smoke inhalation.

It’s safe to say that none of these conditions are ethical. The mistreatment of and failure to provide protection for farm workers is, honestly, far less ethical than the meat industry, meaning that consumption of produce that comes from this industry invalidates any moral superiority one could gain from not consuming animal products. Frankly, it isn’t right to boycott animal products because the animals are “suffering” or “stressed” — or whatever the argument to boycott meat is — if you’re not also going to boycott the companies that exploit actual human employees.

Another reason people adopt vegan diets is that it’s supposedly a more sustainable option than eating meat. This is certainly true for some parts of the meat industry — namely the mass farming of cows to produce beef products — though it does not always hold true. The production of beef is admittedly an ecological disaster in and of itself. The industry causes significantly more environmental damage than other animal proteins due to the inefficiency of raising cattle — they use more water and land than other animals — as well as the massive amount of methane that cows produce. So, while it is certainly more sustainable to stop consuming red meat, the same isn’t quite true for other animal proteins — especially if someone plans to consume meat alternatives.

In terms of the amount of emissions produced, chicken is equivalent to factory factory-produced plant-based meat alternatives. And cell-based meat alternatives — synthesized from an animal cell in a lab — create five times as many emissions as chicken, meaning they are only slightly more sustainable than beef. Considering all of this, it seems more logical to simply purchase locally sourced, ethically raised chicken rather than a highly processed alternative — and buying locally cuts back on emissions produced from transporting food across the country, which is another front where the argument that veganism is “more sustainable” than other diets falls short.

Transportation of food only accounts for 6% of food industry emissions, which is admittedly not an enormous amount. But it is possibly one of the easiest sources of emissions to cut from your own consumption. All a person has to do to reduce this is start buying the majority of your produce and/or meat locally — i.e., from a farmers market rather than from a grocery store that imports its produce from a different state — or even a different country.

If someone truly wants to be vegan, that’s fine. I don’t care — anyone can eat whatever they want. But they cannot claim that they are vegan because it’s more ethically sound than eating meat, and they cannot claim that they are vegan to be more sustainable if all of their produce comes from a store that has imported it from California.

The better option — both in terms of ethics and sustainability — is to buy locally sourced produce and meat. Buying from a farmers market, for example, eliminates the emissions produced by shipping produce across the country, and it doesn’t send money to companies that treat their workers inhumanely.

Paige Lawler writes primarily about environmental policy and politics. Write to her at [email protected] .

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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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50 most common arguments against veganism debunked – the ultimate guide

The vegan movement is similar to other social justice movements – the civil rights movement, women’s rights movement, Black Lives Matter, the LGBTQ movement and more – in that the truth is on our side. Justice is on our side. And future generations will look back on what we have done to animals in horror and disbelief. Knowing this helps instill vegan advocates with confidence. So, let’s get started on the ultimate guide to arguments against veganism debunked.

Humans aren’t even at the “top of the food chain.”

Being vegan can save you thousands in health care costs, stress of cognitive dissonance, more money in plant agriculture, are we against animal cruelty, lambs and sheep, all arguments against veganism can be debunked, logical fallacies.

People tend to offer the same set of arguments against veganism, yet not a single argument can logically stand its ground. There is no sound argument against veganism.  The  philosophy of veganism  posits that insofar as we have a choice, we are morally compelled to reduce harm to all life forms as far as possible.  Each and every counterpoint crumbles when analyzed. 

Most people participate in the destructive system of carnism because they are simply on autopilot. They are unconscious. In attempting to justify the use of animals, people typically repeat clichés without questioning them. 

Many arguments against veganism rely on some type of logical fallacy, which vegans need to be able to recognize. Fallacies are errors in reasoning that make an argument illogical. They often lack evidence to support their claim. By naming these arguments for what they are, we can point out that they are not logically sound justifications.

1. “I eat meat because it tastes good.”

This argument relies on the “appeal to pleasure” logical fallacy . It claims that an action is acceptable because it feels good. The basic question here is: do taste buds have higher value than the entire life of an animal ? In other words, is sensory pleasure morally justified despite causing harm? If you say yes, then this principle must apply to all other situations to hold true as a moral standard. Otherwise, it becomes a double standard. With this line of reasoning, sexually exploiting an animal or even a human becomes morally justifiable. Because sensory pleasure cannot ethically justify all actions, it cannot justify any.

2. “I could never give up cheese.”

Environmentally speaking , the production of cheese produces an enormous amount of carbon emissions, destroys forests, and contaminates vast amounts of land and water. From a health standpoint , cheese is an addictive substance that promotes cancers, weight gain, diabetes, arthritis, osteoporosis, and multiple sclerosis, among other diseases.

From a human rights rights perspective , cheese is the end result of an industry that exploits farm workers, who endure poor working conditions, low wages, debt, and high rates of physical and mental illness, often without access to health care or legal protection. 

Finally, from an animal rights point of view, cheese is the product of an unbelievably exploitative industry that uses the reproductive systems of cows for human profit and takes baby calves from their mothers. The dairy industry causes cows physical pain from mastitis, lameness, susceptibility to disease and decreased lifespan. Dairy cows endure severe emotional and cognitive distress, including widespread abuse from workers. They will ultimately be killed for meat, and their male babies will be killed for veal after a short, miserable life. 

For the climate crisis, for your health, for human rights, for animal rights – let’s ditch the dairy.

3. “I only eat fish and seafood.”

Avoiding fish, shrimp and other aquatic life protects the ocean’s ecosystem, preserves wildlife like dolphins and whales, promotes your health, avoids supporting human rights violations, and acknowledges that fish are conscious, feeling creatures. At the individual level, as consumers who do not need to eat fish to survive, how can we justify needlessly buying it and perpetuating these systems? 

It’s time we reframe how we view fish: not as seafood, but as wildlife. Let’s keep fish in the ocean, where they belong. To learn more about the vast environmental and human rights concerns with eating fish in an entertaining and inspiring way, check out the Netflix documentary  Seaspiracy .

Both farmed and wild caught shrimp are tangled up in a damaging web of problems , including mangrove destruction, air and water pollution, biodiversity loss, antimicrobial resistance, and human rights concerns, including slave labor and endangering coastal communities. They also pose health risks and are subject to misleading labeling. That’s a lot of compelling reasons to consider opting for a  vegan shrimp brand  or  alternative recipes !

4. “I only buy local, ethical eggs.”

Firstly, eggs cannot legally be labeled “healthy,” “good for you” or even “safe” and promote cancer, diabetes and heart disease. Federal Dietary Guidelines don’t publicize this because they are industry-influenced.

Secondly, egg production is environmentally irresponsible . It contributes to high carbon emissions, significant pandemic risk, dangerous working conditions and compromises the health and wellbeing of nearby communities. 

Thirdly, chickens have been selectively bred to produce about 23 times more eggs than they naturally would (300 rather than about 13 annually) and suffer painful health consequences as a result. They benefit from eating their eggs to regain lost nutrients. The egg industry also kills newborn male chicks of laying hens within hours of birth in macerators because they will not produce eggs and will not grow fast enough to be profitable for meat. Even if you eggs came from your neighbor’s backyard, those chickens came from this same system.

Taking their eggs compromises their health, deprives them of a natural behavior and of what is theirs, supports a system that exploits them in the first place and continues to view them as a resource rather than beings in their own right.

To learn how to cook without eggs, check out this  podcast  from the Physicians’ Committee for Responsible Medicine and these  egg replacement tips and egg recipes , as well as our  savory oatmeal  recipe and  easy tofu scrambled eggs .

5. “I have a medical condition that prevents me from being vegan.”

While some medical conditions or food allergies may make it harder to be vegan, no medical condition is known to prevent being vegan and no one needs to eat meat or animal products . Not even kidney stones , chronic kidney disease or osteoporosis . If you have epilepsy and use a keto diet to manage it, it’s even possible to do a vegan keto diet. However, for the vast majority of people, a whole-foods plant-based diet is most health-promoting and disease-preventing. If you want to become vegan, there is a way.

6. “I can’t get enough calories on a vegan diet.”

Sure you can! See here for a guide to calorie dense vegan foods . See examples of vegan body builders and vegans who have made it a goal to put on weight .

7. “Vegan diets don’t have B12, iron, calcium or omega-3s.”

All vitamin B12 is actually  made by bacteria in the soil. In the past, humans were able to get more B12 from plants, but due to sanitation practices and modern industrial farming today, we no longer do. Animals raised on factory farms must also be given B12 supplements because their feed doesn’t contain much, either.

Firstly, animal-based sources of iron are heme iron. The problem with this is that your body can’t regulate how much heme iron you absorb. Excess iron is stored in one’s organs, especially in the liver, heart and pancreas. This can cause liver disease, heart problems, diabetes, and certain types of cancers.

Plant-based sources of iron are non-heme iron, which your body can regulate . If you consume too much, your body just excretes it. Good plant sources of iron include lentils, chickpeas, beans, tofu, cashew nuts, chia seeds, ground linseed, hemp seeds, pumpkin seeds, kale, dried apricots and figs, raisins, quinoa and fortified breakfast cereal, as well as cashews, sunflower seeds, tahini, quinoa, whole wheat pasta.

To improve absorption of non-heme iron , avoid consuming these foods at the same time as large amounts of calcium or vitamin C. Studies have shown vegan populations to have a higher intake of iron than other dietary patterns Furthermore, vegans are at no higher risk of developing iron-deficiency anaemia than the general population.

Cow’s milk is not the wholesome product we’ve been led to believe it is.  Because it is meant to make a baby calf grow into a 400 pound cow in several months, it is full of growth hormones (IGF).  It contains an addictive hormone called casomorphin, designed to generate a feeling of  euphoria and attachment  so that baby calves continue drinking their mothers’ milk.

Cow’s milk actually acidifies our blood and pulls calcium from our bones to neutralize the acid. We then excrete more calcium, which increases our risk of  osteoporosis.   It’s not just dairy with added hormones causes these issues. All cow’s milk is full of hormones because it is the breastmilk of a lactating cow who makes it to feed her baby.

As  Dr. Michael Kleper  puts it, “Cow’s milk is the lactation secretions of a large bovine animal who just had a baby. If you’re not a baby calf, you shouldn’t be eating baby calf fluid.” With this in mind, it makes sense that the majority ( 65% ) of the global population is lactose intolerant. Why would humans naturally have the enzymes needed to digest the milk of other animals?

Additionally, the insulin-like growth factor (IGF) in cow’s milk promotes cancer growth, especially  prostate cancer  and  breast cancer . It is linked to the development of  type 1 diabetes , and worsened symptoms in  arthritis  and  multiple sclerosis  due to inflammation. Furthermore, the antibiotics and natural and artificial hormones in cow’s milk  increase propensity for acne . 

Soy foods, beans, peas, lentils, some nuts, seeds, grains, leafy grens, and cruciferous vegetables are good vegan sources of calcium .

Although fish have been marketed for their supposed health benefits,  fish contain  saturated fat and cholesterol and often contain microplastics and mercury. While some people switch from red meat to fish in an effort to lower cholesterol, numerous studies indicate that the impact of beef consumption on cholesterol levels is similar to that of poultry and fish.

While industry-sponsored studies may claim otherwise, this is because they often compare their products to an even worse one to try to make theirs look better. In contrast, switching people from meat to tofu does lower cholesterol levels. Those on vegan diets dropped their cholesterol by  15-25% . Those on healthier vegan diets dropped their cholesterol levels up to  61%  within a matter of weeks.

Microplastic pollution in our water doesn’t just threaten our environment, but our health. Microplastics found in seafood are  linked to cancer  development.  An average portion of mussels (250g wet weight) contains about  90  particles and six oysters (100 grams wet weight) has  50  particles. Studies found microplastics in  1 in 5 cans  of sardines and in  100%  of mussel samples. 

Although fish and fish oil have been hyped for supposed cardiovascular protection, omega-3s and treating depression, systematic reviews have found no benefit for reducing risk of depression, suicide, cognitive decline, or dementia among healthy adults. Actually, it may even make things worse. Higher fish consumption predicted  worse cognitive performance , likely due to neurotoxic contaminants in fish, like mercury.

We can get omega-3s without these drawbacks from  walnuts, chia, flax and hemp seeds, as well as algae oil , which is where the fish get it to begin with.

8. “You can’t get enough protein on a vegan diet.” or “You need ‘high quality’ protein from animals.”

As often the number one question people have about veganism, this nutrient deserves its own point. The American Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics , the  British Dietetic Association , the UK’s  National Health Service , and Australia’s government-funded health service Health Direct , all state that well-planned vegan diets are nutritionally adequate across the lifespan and can help prevent disease.

People are so concerned about protein over all other essential aspects of food because we have been sold the “ the protein myth .” For decades, the animal agriculture industry has pushed the misinformation that we need to consume more protein. With their lobbying power, these myths have even weaseled their way into national dietary guidelines.

Furthermore, if you’re getting enough calories, you’re getting enough protein. You may have heard the idea that you need to combine plants at each meal to form “complete proteins.” That belief  persists despite being dispelled  decades ago. Although most plant proteins lack one or more of the 20 essential amino acids, vegans do not need to combine foods to form complete proteins. As long as you are getting enough calories, you will obtain all the essential amino acids naturally from the various plants you eat each day.

For all the evidence you need to demonstrate that plants have more than enough nutrients to for fitness, check out  The Gamechangers  documentary. Still not sure you can get enough protein on a vegan diet? Consider this: Some of the strongest animals, like elephants, rhinos, hippos and gorillas, maintain their muscle mass on an herbivorous diet. Humans can, too.

9. “Soy is bad for you.”

While you don’t have to eat soy to be vegan, soy is actually very health-promoting. Meat and dairy industries have spread propaganda about soy because it’s an excellent alternative. Both clinical trials and geographic rates of disease indicate that soy is health-promoting. The phytoestrogens (plant estrogens) in soy actually help protect against breast and prostate cancer .

The phytoestrogen in plants is similar in structure to animal estrogen. So, it attaches to the estrogen receptors in our bodies before estrogen the hormone can, thus reducing our risk of cancers. Soy can reduce the risk of breast, prostate and color cancers and dementia. Consuming soy after diagnosis also reduces risk of recurrence. Organic soy is best to avoid consuming herbicides. (If you think you have an allergy to soy, you might try organic, as you may just be reacting to the pesticides .) Finally, rather than promoting calcium excretion like dairy, soy has been shown to help decrease calcium excretion .

Geographic rates of disease also support this evidence. Soy has been a staple across Asia for thousands of years, and until Western foods were brought over, there was virtually no breast cancer there.

10. “My body craves animal products.”

We experience cravings for two reasons: 1) because we evolved to desire calorie dense foods to survive and 2) to satisfy emotional needs . Eating fat and sugar in particular has been found to have a calming effect , with the brain producing fewer stress hormones after eating fat and sugar.

Furthermore, some substances in animals products (like casomorphin in dairy) are actually addictive, which may contribute to your cravings. Finally, there is nothing nutritious in animal products that we can’t get from plants . Since food is plentiful today, what we need is colorful plant foods that are full of antioxidants, fiber, vitamins and minerals. If you transition to vegan eating, your taste buds will change and you’ll stop craving animal products.

11. “My doctor said I need to eat meat.”

Relies on the “appeal to false authority” logical fallacy , which assumes a position is true because of the authority figure who said so without questioning that authority. 

Doctors have virtually no training in nutrition its relation to chronic disease. Medical school training can even bias doctors against the power of nutrition and push pills and procedures . Furthermore, medical schools provide biased nutrition information from food industry giants such as the Egg Nutrition Board, National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, and National Dairy Council ( The China Study , p 373).

12. “But the food pyramid recommends animal products.”

Unfortunately, the powerful animal agriculture industry has successfully influenced dietary guidelines for decades. Thankfully, professional groups such as the Dieticians for Professional Integrity are working to eliminate the influence of food lobbyists from government dietary recommendations.

Nonprofits such as the Physicians’ Committee for Responsible Medicine are also working to correct public understanding of nutrition. They conduct research to provide extensive evidence of the benefits of a whole-foods plant-based diet for preventing and treating disease. Many reputable organizations support a well-planned vegan diet as nutritionally adequate for all stages of life, like the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics and British Dietetic Association .

13. “But God put animals on earth for us to eat.”

Simply referencing religion or the Bible is an “appeal to authority” logical fallacy that fails to provide a logically unsound justification for eating meat and animal products. Different authors of the Bible imply different messages about veganism. The Bible contains contradictory messages about eating meat; the concept of “dominion” refers to stewardship, not exploitation; eating meat was a matter of necessity in ancient times; and the “spirit of the law” encourages compassion.

As I learned as a religious studies major in college, the Bible is full of contradictory messages like these about eating meat because it is a collection of books written by many different authors and  edited  by countless others.  Various councils  decided which books to include and which to reject based on their beliefs.

As Rabbi Rami Shapiro  observed , “Often, people prefer knowing Biblical passages that reinforce their preexisting beliefs. People memorize parts of texts that they can string together to provide the Biblical basis for whatever it is they believe in, but ignore the vast majority of the text.”  In other words, people can reference parts of the Bible to make the case for or against veganism. Given this, why not take the approach that references the “spirit of the law”?

Actually, in the story of the Garden of Eden, God only gave permission for humans to eat vegetation. There was no violence in the Garden of Eden. It was only after the Fall and the Flood that a disappointed God lowered the standards for human behavior, making some concessions to our baser instincts.

The permission to eat meat comes with a curse. The animals, who were created to be Adam’s companions, will now “fear and dread” humans. Before “The Fall,” Adam and Eve were given the wealth and abundance of plants to eat. After sin entered the world, they were told they could eat animals, and that those animals would live in fear of them.

According to Christian Vegetarians and Vegans UK, “From a biblical perspective the concept of eating anything but plants by any animal – human or otherwise – only entered the world after The Fall. That surely should tell the reader something.”

Furthermore, Psalms, Proverbs and the Gospels speak of compassion towards animals. What most spiritual people take from the Bible to apply to their lives are the values of love, compassion, peace, gentleness, kindness, and selflessness. When using the Bible to determine whether it is acceptable to eat meat and animal products, consider these foundational values.

Let us reason here for a moment: does it not seem morally preferable to eat food that does not first have to be killed? Does it not seem that avoiding killing God’s creation for dinner shows more honor than killing it?

So, rather than asking, “ What does the Bible say about veganism? ” consider what seems consistent with the teachings of this prophet of compassion and peace. Would Jesus participate in or radically oppose a system that degrades the Earth and violates human rights and animal rights? Never mind what Jesus and his disciples did thousands of years ago when eating meat was a matter of survival – what would Jesus do today ?

14. “Animals are not as smart as humans.” 

Statements like this rely on the “might makes right” logical fallacy, which is the belief we are morally justified in doing something because we are physically and intellectually dominant. Best known as the basis of the philosophy of the Nazis.

We do not apply consistently apply intelligence as a metric to justify exploitation. Cats and dogs are not as smart as humans, but we don’t kill and eat them. Farmed animals have been shown to have thoughts and emotions more complex than young children, some people with severe mental disabilities, and even our pet dogs. Yet, we of course do not find exploiting these groups morally justifiable.

We don’t eat farmed animals because they’re less intelligent. We want to think they’re less intelligent because we eat them. All farmed animals – including  cows ,  pigs,   chickens ,  sheep ,  goats , and  fish   – have been shown to have individual personalities and  remarkable intelligence suited to their environments

What qualities do humans have that make us worthy of avoiding suffering and non-human animals not? The more we understand about the animals we farm, the more we realize that what matters is what we have in common: the ability to think, feel, experience pain and suffering, play, and care for one another.

15. “You can’t be 100% vegan. Sometimes small animals and insects are killed in the production of crops.”

This argument relies on the appeal to futility or nirvana fallacies . These very similar fallacies refer to rejecting a solution because it is not perfect or because it is impossible to live in complete consistency with that position.

The difference here is harming intentionally versus accidentally. Is it morally equivalent to accidentally run over an animal with your car and to intentionally do so? Of course not. The philosophy of veganism posits that we are responsible for doing all that is in our control to avoid causing harm.

16. “The chocolate, coffee, quinoa and avocados you eat harm the communities they come from.”

Firstly, it’s not only vegans who consume these foods. Secondly, it’s true that the  Mexican avocado industry  has been connected to violence and deforestation. Many chocolate brands acquire their  cocoa  from sources linked to child slave labor and deforestation, and many  coffee brands  pay farmers poorly and lack sustainable practices. It feels impossible to be a 100% ethical consumer, as we are just individuals at the end of a long supply chain. Although we can’t be perfectly ethical consumers, we  can  do what is in our control. 

“I am only one, but still I am one. I cannot do everything, but I can do something. And because I cannot do everything, I will not refuse to do the something that I can do.” Edward Everett Hale, author

17. “Our ancestors were hunter-gatherers who ate meat, so we should, too.”

This argument relies on the “appeal to tradition” logical fallacy. History and tradition do not create moral justification.  Is rape and murder justified because our primitive ancestors used to do those things, too? Furthermore, while it may have been necessary for our ancestors to eat meat to survive, it is no longer necessary for us in our modern society. 

18. “Humans developed big brains because of eating meat.”

Actually, scientists aren’t positive about what helped humans develop bigger brains. According to molecular archaeologist Christina Warinner, “For human ancestors to efficiently grow a bigger brain, they needed energy dense foods containing glucose. Meat is not a good source of glucose.” Studies of Neaderthal teeth indicate that they ate many starchy plants like roots, nuts, tubers and cooked barley. Regardless, the fact that our ancestors may have needed to eat meat to survive has no bearing on what we should do today.

19. “But it’s cultural.”

This argument relies on the “appeal to tradition” logical fallacy. If being cultural justifies consuming animals, that means that every action and traditional practice must be considered morally justifiable. A principle must apply to all situations or none for moral consistency.

20. “Plants are alive, too.”

This is a red herring logical fallacy . It brings up a different topic as a distraction from the real question at hand. Plants lack central nervous systems and pain receptors. They cannot feel pain or respond to circumstances in a conscious way (although they do show non-conscious reactions). Plants do not have a detectable ability to think and feel. Regardless, even if your intent is to harm fewer plants , eating vegan is still most in line with this value, because it takes far more plants to feed livestock who are then fed to humans than for humans to eat plants directly.

21. “I don’t eat my dog because my dog is a pet. Pigs are food.”

This is a “descriptive argument” logical fallacy. Just describing how something is perceived rather than providing moral justification for why that is so. Such statements do not describe facts because they cannot be empirically verified. What makes dogs inherently “pets” and pigs inherently “food”? These categories are merely human constructs. This concept is further challenged by the fact that many people now keep traditionally farmed animals as companion animals. 

22. “But it’s legal.”

The “appeal to legality” logical fallacy . An action being legal does not morally justify it. Many immoral things have been legal at various times, such as slavery. Take female genital mutilation and dog fighting. Are these ethical in countries where they’re legal?

23. “There are just too many problems in the world. I don’t have time to be vegan.”

The “appeal to other problems” logical fallacy . This one dismisses the argument because there are other problems going on in the world. This is a defeatist attitude. Although much is not in our control, we still have a responsibility to act on what is in our control. Of course, there are many issues in the world. Adopting veganism is only one of the actions we should take.

24. “Nature is cruel. In nature, animals kill and eat other animals. So we can, too.”

In what other areas do we justify our actions by the actions of wild animals? In contrast to lions, when we see an injured animal, we typically feel a pang of sympathy and repulsion towards the carcass. So, it follows that we cannot justify our diets by the diets of other animals.

Because we are human, we have the power to evaluate the morality of our actions. When it is not necessary for us to exploit, kill and eat animals, it is not moral in our modern society.

Where there is no need, there is no justification. Ultimately, what happens in the natural world does not provide moral justification for humans to perpetrate violence. Because we have the moral agency to choose, how could we justify causing unnecessary harm?

25. “But animals would eat you if given the chance. Why not eat them first?”

Firstly, the sad irony in this argument was not lost on French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau , who observed, “The animals you eat are not those who devour others; you do not eat the carnivorous beasts, you take them as your pattern. You only hunger for the sweet and gentle creatures which harm no one, which follow you, serve you, and are devoured by you as the reward of their service.” Secondly, see the “nature is cruel” argument (#24).

26. “Humans are omnivores. We have canine teeth.”

Many herbivorous animals have canines, such as gorillas and the saber-toothed deer. Humans’ incisor teeth (canines) are actually broad and flattened compared to the sharp incisors of carnivores.  Humans share about forty total anatomical features with other herbivores,  such as an acute jaw angle, a dexterous jaw that moves side-to-side and front-to-back, a small mouth opening to head size ratio; flattened molars; carbohydrate digesting enzymes in our saliva; long, winding colons; and flattened nails, rather than sharp claws.

27. “What about those who have to hunt or fish to survive?”

Although another animal in the wild may have killed the creatures humans hunt, humans are not justified in killing them ourselves. The morality of killing animals always boils down to one of necessity and moral agency. Unless  you  have to kill animals to survive, this is irrelevant.

In modern society, we can thrive without animal products. Secondly, unlike wild animals who must kill animals to survive, we have the ability to evaluate our actions. If we can live well without doing harm, why would we choose to harm?

28. “I honor the animals I eat with my hunting or farming practices.”

Some modern day hunters make the case that “honoring” the animals they kill makes it morally right. The problem is that the animals did not willingly give up their lives. There is no spiritual contract between two parties  when one is not in agreement .

Animals  do not sacrifice themselves  for humans to eat. They do not agree to be pulled out of the water to suffocate, forcibly bred, mutilated, confined in tiny spaces, and slaughtered while often still conscious. We forcibly take their lives from them in spite of their desire to live. There is no honor or respect in this. People make this claim to avoid the guilt they would feel if they truly introspected.

29.”It’s the food chain.”

Firstly, this is an appeal to biological determinism. It ignores the fact that we now have the moral agency to choose.  Secondly, humans do not exist in a natural ecological system where cows, pigs, chickens and fish are producers.  Modern humans are no longer hunter-gatherers living in the wild and competing with other animals for food. While our hunter-gatherer ancestors had to eat what was available to survive, we now have many options.

The food chain is a scientific concept that refers to the transfer of energy from organism to organism in ecosystems. The  Britannica encyclopedia  itself describes how eating plants directly is much more resource-efficient. Energy is lost at each step and humans can have more food available (to feed the growing population and avoid global food scarcity) by consuming plants ourselves and cutting out the “middleman” (animals).

Although it is a popular notion that humans are on the “top of the food chain,” science says otherwise. In a  2013 report  from the Proceedings of the Natural Academy of Sciences, the study ranked species’ trophic level (rank in a food chain) on a scale of 1-5 based on their diets. Humans scored 2.21, about the same as a pig or anchovy. Below us are primary producers (plants) and above us are apex predators (tigers, crocodiles). 

30. “It’s the circle of life.”

The  “circle of life”  is simply a concept that refers to the fact that life begins with birth and ends with death. The argument is essentially, “Unnecessary killing is justified because every creature must eventually die one day anyway.” With this logic, we would be justified murdering any animal or human simply because they are mortal.

31. “It’s a personal choice. Let’s just live and let live.” 

This is a common “thought-terminating cliché ” logical fallacy. It uses superficial phrases that discourage critical thought and meaningful discussion in an effort to end the conversation and protect one’s ego.

It’s a personal choice to kick a dog, but that choice has a victim. Every action is a choice, so we cannot justify an action morally by saying that we have the freedom to make a choice. As with other ethical concerns, we aren’t able to use personal choice as a justification when our choices inflict harm on others. While exploiting animals is still legal and broadly accepted, it is not morally justified. 

Furthermore, farmed animals are denied personal choice. They are forcefully exploited and slaughtered. Animals have a right to life, and if our dietary choices violate their rights and choices, they are not justified. Although humans’ desire for sensory pleasure via taste is defended as freedom, that choice denies freedom to the animals. Animals would not choose to walk into a slaughterhouse. Some say the animals are bred for that purpose. Yet is it really a gift to be bred into a life of misery? How does breeding them justify what we do to them?

Precisely because it’s a choice, why would we choose to be cruel? 

32. “Valuing animals over plants just because they’re more similar to us is anthropocentric.”

A “ straw man” logical fallacy that misrepresents the other person’s position. Neil Degrasse Tyson made a series of straw man arguments against veganism like this, which vegan activist Ed Winters debunks . He implies that veganism gives higher moral worth to animals than plants because they are closer to humans on the “tree of life.”  However, veganism holds that animals have higher moral worth than plants not because they are closer to humans but because they also experience pain and suffering. 

Tyson claims that because everything is alive, we are morally justified in killing anything. With this line of logic, it is morally equal to mow the lawn and to cut an animal’s throat. Using the same logic, a cannibal could justify eating a human over eating a chickpea. Yet Neil himself would argue that this is wrong because humans suffer and chickpeas do not. Applying this logic consistently, we are morally compelled to eat the chickpea over eating a non-human animal. 

33. “So you expect lions and tigers to be vegan too? This is ridiculous.”

The “appeal to ridicule” logical fallacy. This argument presents the opposing argument in a way that it seems ridiculous, usually by exaggeration or a straw man argument (misrepresentation).  Veganism acknowledges that some animals must eat other animals to survive, so their actions are justified by necessity. 

34. “If everyone stops eating animals, then all the animals will take over human society and start subjugating us.”

An example of the “slippery slope” logical fallacy . In this flawed argument, the person insists that a course of action will lead to a negative chain of events without evidence that this will happen.

35. “I have a friend who is vegan, and she says she’s tired all the time.”

An example of an “anecdotal” fallacy . Meaning: Relying on an anecdote rather than science as the basis for a conclusion. One person’s experience does not provide scientific evidence to draw a conclusion.

36. “We need animal manure to fertilize plants.”

Actually, we don’t! “Vegan organic” or “veganic” farming shows that it’s possible to organically cultivate and produce food crops with minimal or zero harm to animals, the environment and human health. It avoids chemicals, pesticides and fertilizers made from confined animals. Veganic farming is not a new idea. In Mesoamerica and Mexican indigenous agriculture, people used farming systems that did not rely on domesticated animals.

This way of farming uses mulch, vegetable compost, green manure, crop rotation and composted organic matter like grass clippings. In doing so, it increases soil fertility and provides a sustainable solution that frees farmers from depending on industrial fertilizer and pesticide manufacturers. Veganic farming avoids using animal products like blood meal and bone meal used in organic farming that come from animals in slaughterhouses and release huge amounts of greenhouse gases.

Vertical farming is another eco-friendly, sustainable option, which grows produce in a fully controlled environment. It grows crops year round, with no pesticides or herbicides, uses less water, creates less food waste, requires no transport, has more efficient production, increased taste control and better shelf life. Leaders of the movement view it as “a step evolution in food production.”

37. “Vegans are preachy and force their beliefs on others.”

Ad hominem logical fallacies like this one criticize one’s conversation partner rather than making a logical argument about the topic.

If this happens, it may be best to take a step back and reassure your conversation partner that you’re not criticizing them as people. Gently remind them that your intention is to reflect thoughtfully on a belief that society has conditioned in all of us. 

Remember, if we can learn how to identify the logical fallacies in arguments arguments against veganism, we can become more effective advocates.

38. “But most people eat meat and animal products.”

This statement relies on the appeal to popularity logical fallacy. It posits that something is just because most people agree with it.

Most people eat meat because most people eat meat. The majority of societies operate under an invisible belief system called carnism , which conditions rational, compassionate people to support a violent system of exploiting and killing certain animals. In other times and places it has been popular to kill and eat dogs, cats, dolphins, whales and other animals we do not categorize as “food animals.” In other times and places, it has been common practice to own slaves and to perform female genital mutilation. Are actions ethical merely when they are popular?

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

What about you ? Do you live in a food desert? If eating animal products is your only option because you live in a food desert, than that doesn’t go against the vegan ethos. If you don’t, then you have the choice not to.

40. “What would happen to all the farmed animals if everyone suddenly went vegan?”

The world will not go vegan overnight, so there will not be a sudden depletion of demand for animal products. As more people become vegan, demand will steadily diminish. As a result, fewer and fewer farmed animals will be bred into existence. Those that remain could be allowed to live on sanctuaries.

41. “What if you were on a desert island and had to survive?”

Veganism is simply about what is practical and possible. Since we’re not on a desert island and don’t have to eat animal products to survive, this means that we are making a choice to harm animals when we eat animal products.

42. “Why focus on animal rights when there are more important human rights issues?”

An “appeal to other problems” logical fallacy . The fact the other problems exist does not absolve us from addressing this one, which is exceptionally more in our power than many other issues. Importantly, veganism does address human rights issues through combating systems that fuel environmental racism , harmful working conditions for laborers, and world hunger .

43. “It’s too expensive to be vegan.”

Studies indicate whole-foods, plant-based diets cost less  

In a  2022 study  from the  Journal of Agricultural and Food Economics , the authors write, “Considering that price is a major factor when purchasing food, it is vital that these healthier and more sustainable diets are also affordable.” With data from 1,040 participants, the study concluded that “plant-based consumers do not spend more but in fact less than any consumer assessed. This could be a promising feature for the promotion of plant-based diets, with particular interest for consumers with lower incomes by ensuring food security.”

A  2021 Oxford University study  found that in Western countries, vegan diets were the more affordable option in high-income countries, reducing food costs by up to one-third. The study used food prices from the World Bank’s International Comparison Program and was published in  The Lancet Planetary Health .  The data refers to costs of whole foods, like legumes, fruits and vegetables. It did not include ready-made meals or highly processed foods like plant-based burgers. 

In lower income countries, eating a plant-based diet would be up to a quarter cheaper than a typical Western diet, but at least a third more costly than current diets. Making healthy, sustainable diets affordable everywhere, especially in lower income countries, requires political will to reduce food waste and adjust prices of healthful foods.  Reducing demand  for resource-intensive animal-based food is key to expanding access to healthful, plant-based foods for lower income countries, reducing food loss and food insecurity.

A  2020 study  performed in the UK found that plant-based meals cost 40% less than meat and fish based meals and required one-third less time to prepare. In this study, only 3.7% of all vegan household expenditure went towards meat substitutes. In  Ecological Economics , a  2016 study  found that “true vegetarians spend less money on food than meat eaters.” A  2015 study  in the  Journal of Hunger and Environmental Nutrition  demonstrated that whole foods plant-based diets cost, on average, $750 less a year. Finally, in a  survey  of 1,072 Americans, it was found that people on meatless diets spent an average of $23 less on food weekly.

Of course, the cost of our diets isn’t reflected in the grocery store bill alone. Looking at the bigger picture of healthcare costs associated with consumption of animal products gives us a more realistic picture. 

If we take the long view, plant-based diets also  protect us against costly chronic diseases  like obesity, heart disease, stroke, arthritis, high blood pressure, diabetes, and breast, prostate and colorectal cancer. These diseases can easily cost you tens of thousands of dollars over years of medical care. A  2015 study  by University of Oxford researchers published in the  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences  estimated that if Americans moved away from animal products all together, the country would save  $250 billion  dollars in healthcare costs.

Notable resources specifically designed to support affordable vegan cooking include: Vegan  Budget Bytes ,  Plant Based on a Budget  and  Forks Over Knives  budget meal plan. Be sure to check out the tips from  Nutritiously ,  Vegan Society ,  I Love Vegan  and  Jessica in the Kitchen  as well. You can find a list of  Top 50 Vegan Blogs  here with a short description of the types of recipes they offer.

Sure, it may be less convenient at times. But at what point is convenience no longer worth the cost of compassion, your health and our planet? Being vegan continues to win on the most meaningful fronts – a lifestyle that is  more healthful ,  more sustainable ,  more compassionate , and now, more economical.

44. “Veganism is a white people thing.”

There are many organizations led by vegans of color, such as Black Vegan Everything , Afro Vegan Society , Black VegSociety, Black Vegans Rock,   Obhoyaronno led by a Bhangli vegan activist, Veggie Mijas , Vegan Activist Alliance , the Food Empowerment Project founded by a woman of color, Chilis on Wheels and Casa Vegana de la Comunidad led by a Puerto Rican activist and Plant Based on a Budget founded by a Japanese-Mexican activist, among many others.

News articles have featured vegans of various ethnicities in the news, such as indigenous vegans , Latin American vegans , and more. There are vegan Lao recipes, vegan Filipino recipes, vegan Japanese recipes, vegan Caribbean recipes and many more. Saying it’s a “white people thing” ignores the important contributions of vegans of color.

45. “If everyone went vegan, farmers and meatpacking workers would lose their jobs.”

Progress involves creating new and better jobs

Firstly, we don’t determine ethics based on economics.  War, the prison industry, and the tobacco industry all create jobs. That doesn’t mean that we should fire missiles, imprison people unfairly and promote smoking in order to create jobs. Progress always involves  doing away with outdated tools , such as how horseback couriers were replaced with telegraphs, then with landline phones, then with the internet and cellphones.  At each step, some people lost jobs, but others were created so society could benefit.

Animal agriculture exploits farm workers, too

Secondly, workers endure  poor working conditions , low wages and debt, and higher rates of physical and mental illness. Because they are often undocumented, they typically  lack access  to adequate health care and legal protection as well.

Poor working conditions

Slaughterhouse workers especially are  primarily  people of color and immigrants who live in low-income areas. They are often afraid to report safety concerns, injuries, illnesses and animal abuse out of fear of being fired or deported. Most  dairy workers  receive no holidays, overtime, sick pay, or workers’ comp. Dairy farms are often  exempt  from paying overtime even with 70-90 hour workweeks, as federal employment laws often don’t apply to them.

In  2016 , workers at an Illinois egg production facility went on strike over complaints of unclean and unsafe working conditions; unfair pay, especially for women; lack of pay for holidays or vacations; sexual harassment and excessively long hours.

Farmers typically must take on about $1 million in debt to start a new poultry or pig farm. Because of this,  90 to 95 percent  of these farmers must sign contracts to raise animals for large companies like Tyson Foods and Smithfield Foods. As there is often only one company in the area, farmers usually do not have a say in who their employer is.

Physical injury and illness

Farm workers frequently face  vile, dangerous conditions . They wade through the noxious-smelling warehouses laden with the much of manure and urine, even sink and get stuck. When cows get scared, such as during storms, they may run at workers and kick them. Having received little to no training and being pressured to move the cows quickly, workers often resort to violent strategies.

Slaughterhouses have some of the highest reported injury rates in manufacturing:  20-36 percent  annually. Shifts are long, cold and damp. The repetitive movements lead to injuries like carpal tunnel, “trigger finger,” back problems, tendonitis, and arthritis .  This is due in part to how fast assembly lines are expected to move, coupled with a  lack of safety training  in using dangerous slaughtering and processing machines. 

Surveys have found that  two thirds  of dairy workers have been injured on the job. Then, they are either forced to work through injury or illness. If they don’t, they are often fired for getting injured and being unable to work. Farm workers also have increased rates of  respiratory ailments ,  gastrointestinal ailments , and  skin infections .

Higher rates of mental illness

Slaughterhouse workers are at particularly high risk of  adverse psychological health outcomes . The work is physically exhausting, monotonous, and requires managing dangerous equipment at high speeds in a cold, blood and smelly environment. Most new workers feel shocked, disturbed and repulsed initially. At the beginning, nightmares are common. After some time, they start to feel emotionally callused by the work.

The work is inherently violent, which damages their psychological well-being and can lead to cumulative trauma disorder. Violence against animals has been demonstrably linked to  psychological issues  in humans, namely, substance abuse, imitate partner violence and increased crime rates.

Slaughterhouse workers also are more likely to suffer  poor interpersonal relations , as they fear social rejection and are more likely to emotionally withdraw or act out. Further exacerbating the issue, most slaughterhouse employees are of low socioeconomic background and  lack the resources  to cope with this stressful environment.  Rates of depression and suicide  are elevated among dairy farmers compared with other occupational groups. 

Furthermore, many farmers and workers hold  contradictory attitudes  of saying they love and care for their animals, yet ultimately send them off to slaughter. This creates the weight of  cognitive dissonance , which is often hard for them to handle.  

Infrastructure to allow farmers to transition to plant agriculture

Finally, if we are truly concerned with farmers’ livelihoods, we should advocate for policy change rather than supporting the status quo. Transitioning the world to plant agriculture will create new and better jobs. Farmers produce what consumers demand, so they will adapt to shifting market demand.

Currently, the government provides enormous subsidies and bail outs for the animal agriculture industry. We must push for policy change to redirect government subsidies that allow the industry to produce meat cheaply. They can instead be used to transition farmers into a sustainable, ethical, health-promoting plant-based market.

We need to create infrastructure to scale-up the production of plant-based products. Firstly, government must provide institutional support, such as providing subsidies for producing plants rather than animal products and creating avenues to increase public demand for the products, such as school lunch programs.

Secondly, organizations and companies must support infrastructure to help farmers transition, including training and financial support. For instance, the Swedish oat milk company Oatly launched a  pilot program  in 2019 to support farmers in growing oats. Dairy-free cheesemaker Miyoko’s Creamery also created an  initiative  to help struggling dairy farmers shift to growing plants.

Organizations like  Farm Transformers , the  Farm Transformation Institute,  and  Plant-Based Protein Exchange  are also helping farmers transition from animal agriculture to plant agriculture. Farmers stand to benefit economically, too. As an example, the average profit per acre for pea farming in 2015 in North Dakota was  $14.03 more per acre  than smaller herd dairy farming.

Plant agriculture also creates about  1.5 trillion  more pounds of “product” to sell than animal agriculture. Additionally, it does so more efficiently by using 115 million acres less land. Although animal agriculture yields about $35 billion more than plant agriculture, it has about  $55.8 billion  more in expenses. As the report states, “plant-based agriculture grows  512%  more pounds of food than animal-based agriculture on 69% of the mass of land that animal-based agriculture uses.”

But by supporting the transition to plant agriculture, we help move farm workers away from an industry that exploits both human and nonhuman animals. We support the move to a more compassionate food production system better facilitates the mental and physical health of farmers. Importantly, we also contribute to market demand for products that yield higher profits for farm workers.

Let’s direct our dollars to plant agriculture, instead – for our future and for the farmers.  

46. “I only eat humanely slaughtered animals.”

Say you’re at a restaurant and saw the following on the menu: “Golden retriever burger. Certified humane killing.” How would you feel? Would you consider it humane for someone to kill a happy, healthy dog for food?

The reason we would not is because we have been socialized into an invisible belief system called  carnism  that teaches to view certain animals as companion animals and others as objects. This kind of thinking justifies killing non-human animals for food as “normal, natural and necessary.” Through it, we are desensitized to the reality of  what we do to animals .

“Humane” means compassionate

To see through the fog of our conditioning, we must ask ourselves what “humane” really means. Synonyms include compassionate, kind, unselfish, gentle and merciful. It means lovingly. What about on a small family farm, where animals enjoy free reign outside until their final day?

If someone gave their dog several years of life like this, but then killed the dog for meat, would this be humane killing? We hold a double standard for companion animals versus farmed animals. They do not differ in any way but our perception of them.

Let’s put ourselves in their shoes. If a more intelligent being raised  us  with the intent of eventually killing eating us, would we think they loved us? Thus, we cannot humanely kill farmed animals unnecessarily any more than we can humanely kill our pets unnecessarily.

“Humane” treatment

Many people believe that non-human animals can be “humanely” raised for slaughter. They trust the  marketing gimmicks  that label the meat, dairy or egg products “cage free,” “grass-fed,” or “American Humane Certified.” The labels merely indicate less suffering, as even the labels with the highest standards still permit acts of cruelty, such as debeaking, ear notching, and castration without painkillers. Even these certifications still allow for killing the types of animals who are not useful to the industry, such as male chicks and male dairy cows.

As activist Ed Winters puts it, “If cruelty is defined as causing unnecessary and intentional physical or mental harm, what we do to animals must constitute acts of cruelty. We cut off their tails, we castrate them, we forcibly impregnate them, we take their babies away from them, we lock them in cages where they can’t turn around. We load them into trucks and take them to slaughterhouses where we cut their throats or force them into gas chambers – and these are just the standard, legal practices.”

“Humane” slaughter

Even if animals  were  treated humanely throughout their lives, the actual slaughtering of the animals is often very painful. Although factory farms attempt to stun the animals with a stun gun, the terrified animal is often thrashing about so much that it is ineffective. Regardless of whether they are conscious or not, cows, pigs and chickens continue in the slaughter line: hung up by their legs, bled out alive, skinned alive, sent into gas chambers, burned in scalding water alive.

Baby male chicks, useless to the egg industry, meet a slightly different fate. They are sent through pipes into electrified plates and wood chippers alive, as they not useful for the egg industry. On commercial fishing boats, fish are hooked on lines for hours and left to suffocate for several minutes.

Animals as individuals

We are also often unaware of the irony between our natural appreciation of animals and our eating habits. Parents take their kids to the petting zoo, then out to eat hamburgers. Families root for the animals in movies like  Chicken Run  and  Finding Nemo , then eat chicken sandwiches and fish tacos. We are conditioned to view animals as one indistinguishable mass.

But what happens when one individual animal breaks away from a slaughterhouse? This very scenario occurred in England in 2019 with a cow the public nicknamed  “Daisy.”  The same people who would have eaten her in a burger pulled for her to escape. Most people wouldn’t want to have an animal they know individually killed for food, but can distance themselves from that reality when the animal is simply part of a nameless mass.

Animals are “someones,” not “somethings”

Many of us have rarely, if ever, interacted with farmed animals up close. But when we do so reflectively, we might question why we find it acceptable to kill them. As activist Ed Winters describes, “There is something profoundly moving about looking into the eyes of an animal. You recognize that behind those eyes is someone who is having an experience and through that recognition you can empathize with that experience.”

Because animals have subjective experiences,  they are “someones.”  Because they are not objects, they are not “somethings.” The more we know about individual animals, the more we recognize their individuality. Justifying why we kill them then becomes harder and harder. We realize that labeling what we do “humane killing” is just lying to ourselves to make ourselves feel better about it.

At the end of the day, we need to ask ourselves these four questions that Ed Winters poses:

• Am I against animal cruelty? (Everyone says yes.)
• What constitutes animal cruelty? Do you agree that it is causing *unnecessary* harm?
• Do we need to eat animal products to survive and thrive? (According to the World Health Organization, American and British Dietetic Associations, the Physicians’ Committee for Responsible Medicine, Dieticians for Professional Integrity and numerous academic journals – we don’t.)
• So, does eating animals constitute animal cruelty? 

I’ll offer three thoughts on this one: 

First, the social psychologist Melanie Joy wrote a book called  Why Love Dogs, Eat Pigs, and Wear Cows . She explains how society conditions us to see animals differently based on their species, yet they do not differ in any way but our perception of them. 

Have you ever noticed that we see our pets as individuals with personalities, but that society has conditioned us to view the animals we raise for food as one indistinguishable mass? Yet all animals have individual differences. Is there such thing as humane killing of an animal who does not wish to die?

Second, the philosopher Jeremy Bentham said, “The question is not, ‘Can they reason? Nor, Can they talk? But, ‘Can they suffer?”

Third, as Ralph Waldo Emerson put it, “However scrupulously the slaughterhouse is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity.” To resolve this tension, we either have to change our beliefs or change our behaviors. We cannot honestly say we’re against animal cruelty while personally funding an industry antithetical to this value.

47. “I only eat local animal products from small farms.”

Despite the  common misperception  that buying local meat from small farms will solve the environmental, public health and ethical issues of the industry, this is false. It’s something people wish to be true to continue justifying eating meat and animal products.

Yet buying local meat does not significantly reduce its environmental impact, and it is still much more damaging than buying plant foods from across the globe. Buying local meat continues to pose a threat of pandemic emergence. The earth simply cannot feed everyone on an animal-based diet; thus, pushing for more small-scale farming is a classist, colonialist argument. Finally, the end result is the same: killing unnecessarily.

48. “How do you know animals can feel and experience suffering?”

Those who interact personally with farmed animals find it obvious that they feel and can suffer. If we knew farmed animals as individuals, like we know our dogs and cats, we would find it harder and harder to justify killing them needlessly. We would be outraged by what happens to them. So, let’s get to know these species of animals a little better and take a closer look at some of the standard commercial farming practices for each species.

Regardless of whether we exploit cows for milk or for meat, these  gentle, playful  giants  suffer greatly . Although cow’s milk has been marketed as a wholesome product, it is anything but. Dairy production is cruel to the animals and workers and devastating to the  environment  and  human health .

Cows are like human females in that they only lactate after giving birth. So to make them give birth, workers artificially inseminate them by putting their hand up the cow’s vagina with forcibly taken bull sperm. When the cow gives birth, the  baby is taken away  in under a day. The mother is then hooked up to machines to sell the milk that her body made for her baby. Male calves are sold to the veal industry and female calves are raised for the same cycle.

While cows naturally live about twenty years, dairy cows’ bodies are so abused that they only live to be about  four to five years  old. After cows’ bodies are spent from continual impregnation and lactation, they are killed for beef. So, dairy is arguably even worse than meat, because a cow suffers her whole life before being sent to slaughter.

Although the cows suffer the most, they aren’t the only ones who suffer. Many farmers themselves  feel great remorse  about what they do to these creatures to earn a living.

Pigs are  among the most intelligent animals  in the world, sharing many cognitive abilities with chimps, elephants and dolphins. In the wild, they are very sociable and active, traveling about  30 miles a day  in groups and making  communal nests  to sleep in at night. They are  curious and playful . Yet they are prevented from engaging in any of these natural behaviors in the factory farming system. As farmed animals, they suffer severe  physical and psychological trauma . They are confined to metal crates without bedding that are small they cannot turn around. Farmers castrate piglets and dock their tails, ears, and teeth without anesthesia.

Chickens raised for meat have been selectively bred to reach slaughter weight at only six weeks old, such that they grow  300 times faster  and become four times heavier than they did around 1960. Because of this, many cannot even stand up, experience organ failure, and often break their bones due to the stress of unnatural growth.

The ancestor of the egg-laying hens laid only about thirteen eggs per year. But today’s chickens have been bred to lay about an egg a day. Not only is it a painful process for the chicken, but they lose vital nutrients through laying the eggs that weaken their bones. If you break open an egg and give it back to them, they will eat it because their bodies need the nutrients.

Living in factory farming conditions is so stressful for chickens that they will peck violently at each other. Because of this, farmers cut off their beaks and toes.

The only time most people think of turkeys is at the U.S. “presidential pardon” at Thanksgiving. Yet that 13 of the 16 turkeys 2010-2017 were euthanized due to or died from health conditions within the next two years, anyway. This is because modern day turkeys have been selectively bred so grotesquely that they suffer from extreme health problems.

Commercial turkeys  suffer from broken bones, weak legs and heart failure. Most are no longer physically capable of flying. They have been bred to grow so enormous that most can no longer naturally breed. Instead, workers artificially inseminate females. When chicks are born, they huddle by artificial heaters and will never meet their parents. Finally, they are slaughtered between 12-19 weeks old.

Like chickens,  farmed turkeys  are debeaked and de-toed, almost always without painkillers. The feces that they’re forced to live creates toxic gas, which then harms their eyes and lungs. Packed in beak to feather, they are prevented from engaging in all of their natural behaviors.

In nature, they fly at fast speeds, roam a mile or two each day, roost in trees, run and even swim. Mothers care for their young for at least five months. Wild turkeys even  like to play  with each other and other species. Yet factory farming deprives these  social, intelligent  birds of all their physical, mental and social needs.

Fish have feelings, too.  Seriously. Humans often have a hard time experiencing empathy for fish because their faces cannot show emotion and they cannot cry out in pain when we pull them from the water. But fish, too, know fear and pain. Like humans, other mammals and reptiles,  fishes have conscious awareness, or “sentience.”  Because of this ability, they experience pain,  have personalities, are intelligent  in ways that optimize their survival,  recognize individual humans , have memory,  communicate , and even have preferred fish companions. Some even  enjoy being petted .

But fishes suffer greatly because of humans. Commercial fishing operations kill typically kill over 2 trillion fishes annually in painful ways, often through suffocation. In addition to this, huge numbers of fishes are caught recreationally, as bycatch, or to be fed to farmed fish. To maximize profits, farm fisheries pack thousands of fish into troughs and cages, with hardly enough room to breathe, and certainly not enough to swim. These conditions are so foul they  become cannibalistic , their  eyes bleed ,  sea lice eat off their faces , and they can become riddled with  anemia, infectious disease, chlamydia, and heart disease.

In light of this knowledge, we are compelled to include fishes in our circle of compassion. As  Jonathan Balcome , author of  What a Fish Knows: The Inner Lives of Our Underwater Cousins , puts it, “When you purchase a product, you tell the manufacturer to do it again, and we really don’t want that happening.”

Whether we drink cow’s milk or goat’s milk, we’re still paying for farmers to take her baby away so we can drink the milk she made for her young. Whichever the species, we’re still paying for repeated, forced impregnation. Farmers also cut off young goats’ horns, which causes immediate pain from tissue damage, chronic pain from nerve damage and stress.

Most goat milk farms keep the animals inside year round. They prevent them from roaming, climbing, and being the  curious and joyful  creatures they are. Furthermore, as much undercover footage has documented, it is not uncommon for farm workers to violently abuse goats.  The industry  drains every last bit of profit from the goats’ bodies, sending the female goats to be killed for meat after exhausting their milk-producing abilities.

Among the gentlest of the animals commonly eaten in the West, lambs are killed at six to eight months of age, when they could naturally live up to twelve years old. Lambs are taken from their mothers within a few days of birth and raised and slaughtered in a manner like that of cows and pigs.

Lambs and sheep have individual  personalities, can learn complex mazes, form long-term friendships, and stick up for one another  in fights. They can  remember up to fifty faces  of other sheep and have well formed  spatial memories .

Naturally, sheep don’t need to be sheared, as they make just enough wool to keep themselves warm. But humans have  selectively bred  them to overproduce wool. Consequences for the sheep include  heat exhaustion and flies eating the sheep alive.  Sometimes, farmers with cut patches of skin off (often without anesthetic) in an effort to prevent flies from breeding their their skin. This leads to painful open wounds. After their wool production declines, they too are sold for meat.

When we get to know the animals we have been socialized to eat, we can see past the fog of our conditioning. Once we step out of the fog, we often wonder how it is that we ever believed in eating animals at all.

49. “Why do vegans have pets if it’s not okay to own and use animals? Do you make your cats and dogs be vegan, too?”

Owning pets is actually a debated topic among vegans. Most vegans consider it ethical to adopt rescued animals and treat them as valued individuals. However, most vegans do not view it as ethical to purchase them from breeders, as doing so commodifies them.

As far as feeding your pets goes, most people don’t know that cats, dogs and all species require specific dietary nutrients, not ingredients. According to Andrew Knight , a professor of Animal Welfare and Ethics at the University of Winchester, “There is no scientific reason why a diet comprised only of plant, mineral, and synthetically-based ingredients cannot be formulated to meet all of the palatability, nutritional, and bioavailability needs of the species for which they are intended.”

Cats can be fed synthetic vegan cat food or must be fed food that contains meat. This is due to a lack of amino acids like taurine. If you change your cat’s diet, however, it should be gradual. Dogs, on the other hand, are omnivores . Even without synthetic dog food, we can meet their nutritional needs with a balanced vegan diet.

50. “The world will never go vegan.”

According to a United Nations report , “a global shift towards a vegan diet is vital to save the world from hunger, fuel poverty, and the worst impacts of climate change.” The report warns that meat- and dairy-heavy diets are “unsustainable,” especially as the population is expected to grow to 9.1 billion by 2050.

Indeed, the world must go vegan.

As we have seen, none of these top twenty-five arguments against veganism stands its ground. Sensory pleasure, physical and intellectual dominance, authority figures, popularity, tradition, culture, legality, description, the existence of other problems and being an imperfect solution all fail to ethically justify the exploitation of non-human animals.

All arguments against veganism can be debunked because the philosophy of veganism – avoiding harm as far as practical and possible – makes an iron-clad ethical case. The next time you hear someone make one of these arguments, simply refer them to this ultimate guide to arguments against veganism debunked.

As inspiration for advocacy, I’ll leave you with the words of vegan activist Kerry McCarthy, who said, “When you exercise that muscle of empathy towards a voiceless group – animals – it means that every time you sit down to eat a meal, you’re forcing yourself to look beyond your own selfish wants out to the bigger picture. And as the wider world emerges to you, you can see that it’s something worth your attention… The vegan revolution is a cultural revolution… This is a battle we can fight and win in our own homes, with our own knives and forks.”  

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Campaign ads against Suozzi showed it's time to expose dark money sources

Representative Tom Suozzi, a Democrat from New York, at the US Capitol in Washington, DC, US, on Wednesday, Feb. 28, 2024. Photographer: Annabelle Gordon/Bloomberg Credit: Bloomberg/Annabelle Gordon

This guest essay reflects the views of Roger G. Wieand, senior researcher for campaign finance and ethics at Campaign Legal Center.

Just before the Super Bowl, New Yorkers were treated to a new television ad attacking Tom Suozzi, who ultimately won the special election to complete George Santos’ term representing the 3rd Congressional District.

What they didn’t know was that the ad had been paid for by a shadowy pop-up political group that exploited federal reporting deadlines to keep the sources of its money secret from voters until after votes had been cast.

The ad, called “Sanctuary Suozzi,” was paid for by a group called “Secure NYS PAC.” Despite existing for less than two months, it managed to raise and spend nearly $1.5 million on ads opposing Suozzi.

The group was a super PAC, a type of political committee that has flourished after the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2010 decision in Citizens United v. FEC. Super PACs are permitted to raise and spend unlimited sums on elections, including money from corporations and wealthy special interests.

The Supreme Court made clear that this spending must be openly disclosed to the public and independent of any candidate or political party. Federal campaign finance laws are supposed to ensure that voters know exactly who gives to super PACs.

From our Editorial Board, get inside the local, city and state political scenes.

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But some groups have developed ways to blatantly undermine that required transparency. By strategically timing its creation and funding around federal reporting deadlines, Secure NYS PAC was able to conceal from voters almost everyone who was giving it money to defeat Suozzi.

When New Yorkers went to the polls on Feb. 13, just $125,000 of Secure NYS PAC’s donations had been made public. The names of other contributors, like billionaire political donors Ronald Lauder, Stephen Schwarzman, and Kenneth Langone, were effectively kept secret until after the election.

Moreover, some donors gave money through obscure companies with names like “Molly LLC” (which gave $360,000), “LeMans LLC” ($100,000), and “Leon Rachel Corporation” ($100,000). These companies appear to exist only on paper — there’s no public record of them conducting any business, and no indication of who owns them or gave them money.

Secure NYS PAC is an illustration of a deeply concerning trend in which wealthy donors and political strategists have successfully concealed election spending from voters by undermining federal transparency laws.

Some super PACs also use this “pop-up” tactic to hide dishonest politicking or ties to the candidate. In 2020, “True Kentucky Patriots” spent millions to support a Libertarian Senate candidate. Only after the election was it revealed to be completely funded by a Democratic group trying to sap votes from Mitch McConnell.

Congress could act to stop this. One solution, the DISCLOSE Act, would make key changes to federal election laws to end secret spending. If the DISCLOSE Act were law, Secure NYS PAC would have been required to list its top five funders in its ads, and “traceback” requirements would have exposed who was behind the shell companies that quietly gave it large sums of cash. The bill has been introduced in every Congress since 2010 but has never passed both the House and Senate.

Instead, secret spending has ballooned into a fundamental feature of American politics. More than a billion dollars in “dark money” was spent in the 2020 election, and every year, wealthy individuals, corporations, and special interests find new ways to hide spending from voters.

Secure NYS PAC’s seven-figure secret spending operation is just a drop in an ocean of electoral spending that stays anonymous as voters cast ballots. 2024 is guaranteed to be the most expensive election in history. How much of that spending will be transparent?

THIS GUEST ESSAY reflects the views of Roger G. Wieand, senior researcher for campaign finance and ethics at Campaign Legal Center.

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Opinion: Listen: How a new death penalty method undermines physician authority

Joel Zivot is a practicing clinician and associate professor of anesthesiology and surgery. He is also an advocate against the use of medicine in capital punishment.

Back in February, Zivot wrote a First Opinion essay shortly after Kenneth Smith was executed using nitrogen gas in Alabama. In “ A new Louisiana capital-punishment bill would fundamentally alter physician licensing ,” Zivot argues against proposed bills in both Kansas and Louisiana that would allow “death by hypoxia.” Not only is this type of death cruel and painful, he argues, but such a bill would “effectively wrest control of physician conduct from medical boards.” Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry signed the bill into law in early March.

Read the rest…

© 2024 Benzinga.com. Benzinga does not provide investment advice. All rights reserved.

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Guest Essay

The Most Important Thing I Teach My Students Isn’t on the Syllabus

By Frank Bruni

Mr. Bruni is a contributing Opinion writer and the author of the forthcoming book “The Age of Grievance,” from which this essay is adapted.

I warn my students. At the start of every semester, on the first day of every course, I confess to certain passions and quirks and tell them to be ready: I’m a stickler for correct grammar, spelling and the like, so if they don’t have it in them to care about and patrol for such errors, they probably won’t end up with the grade they’re after. I want to hear everyone’s voice — I tell them that, too — but I don’t want to hear anybody’s voice so often and so loudly that the other voices don’t have a chance.

And I’m going to repeat one phrase more often than any other: “It’s complicated.” They’ll become familiar with that. They may even become bored with it. I’ll sometimes say it when we’re discussing the roots and branches of a social ill, the motivations of public (and private) actors and a whole lot else, and that’s because I’m standing before them not as an ambassador of certainty or a font of unassailable verities but as an emissary of doubt. I want to give them intelligent questions, not final answers. I want to teach them how much they have to learn — and how much they will always have to learn.

I’d been on the faculty of Duke University and delivering that spiel for more than two years before I realized that each component of it was about the same quality: humility. The grammar-and-spelling bit was about surrendering to an established and easily understood way of doing things that eschewed wild individualism in favor of a common mode of communication. It showed respect for tradition, which is a force that binds us, a folding of the self into a greater whole. The voices bit — well, that’s obvious. It’s a reminder that we share the stages of our communities, our countries, our worlds, with many other actors and should conduct ourselves in a manner that recognizes this fact. And “it’s complicated” is a bulwark against arrogance, absolutism, purity, zeal.

I’d also been delivering that spiel for more than two years before I realized that humility is the antidote to grievance.

We live in an era defined and overwhelmed by grievance — by too many Americans’ obsession with how they’ve been wronged and their insistence on wallowing in ire. This anger reflects a pessimism that previous generations didn’t feel. The ascent of identity politics and the influence of social media, it turned out, were better at inflaming us than uniting us. They promote a self-obsession at odds with community, civility, comity and compromise. It’s a problem of humility.

The Jan. 6 insurrectionists were delusional, frenzied, savage. But above all, they were unhumble. They decided that they held the truth, no matter all the evidence to the contrary. They couldn’t accept that their preference for one presidential candidate over another could possibly put them in the minority — or perhaps a few of them just reasoned that if it did, then everybody else was too misguided to matter. They elevated how they viewed the world and what they wanted over tradition, institutional stability, law, order.

It’s no accident that they were acting in the service of Donald Trump, whose pitch to Americans from the very start was a strikingly — even shockingly — unhumble one. “I alone can fix it,” he proclaimed in his 2016 speech accepting the Republican Party’s nomination for president; and at his inauguration in January of the following year, the word “humbled,” which had been present in the first inaugural remarks of both Barack Obama and George W. Bush, was nowhere to be found. Nor were any of its variants. That whole sentiment and politesse were missing, as they had been during a campaign centered on his supposed omniscience.

There are now mini-Trumps aplenty in American politics, but anti-Trumps will be our salvation, and I say that not along partisan or ideological lines. I’m talking about character and how a society holds itself together. It does that with concern for the common good, with respect for the institutions and procedures that protect that and with political leaders who ideally embody those traits or at least promote them.

Those leaders exist. When Charlie Baker, a former Massachusetts governor, was enjoying enormous favor and lofty approval ratings as a Republican in a predominantly Democratic state, he was also stressing the importance of humility. He was fond of quoting Philippians 2:3, which he invoked as a lodestar for his administration. “Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit,” it says. “Rather, in humility value others above yourself.”

That’s great practical advice for anyone in government, where most meaningful success hinges on teamwork and significant progress requires consensus. Governing, as opposed to demagoguery, is about earning others’ trust and cooperation. Exhibiting a willingness to listen to and to hear them goes a long way toward that.

“Insight and knowledge come from curiosity and humility,” Mr. Baker wrote in a 2022 book, “Results,” coauthored with his chief of staff, Steve Kadish, a Democrat. “Snap judgments — about people or ideas — are fueled by arrogance and conceit. They create blind spots and missed opportunities. Good ideas and interesting ways to accomplish goals in public life exist all over the place if you have the will, the curiosity, and the humility to find them.”

Humble politicians don’t insist on one-size-fits-all answers when those aren’t necessary as a matter of basic rights and fundamental justice. Humble activists don’t either. The campaign for same-sex marriage — one of the most successful social movements of recent decades — showed that progress can be made not by shaming people, not by telling them how awful they are, but by suggesting how much better they could be. Marriage-equality advocates emphasized a brighter future that they wanted to create, not an ugly past that they wanted to litigate. They also wisely assured Americans that gay and lesbian people weren’t trying to explode a cherished institution and upend a system of values, but instead wanted in.

“I don’t want to disparage shouting and demands — everything has its place,” Evan Wolfson, the founder of the pivotal advocacy group Freedom to Marry, told me when we revisited the movement’s philosophy and tactics. At times, he acknowledged, champions of a cause “need to break the silence, we need to push, we need to force.”

“But I used to say, ‘Yes, there’s demanding, but there’s also asking,’” he recalled. “And one is not the enemy of the other. People don’t like being accused, people don’t like being condemned, people don’t like being alienated. It’s a matter of conversation and persuasion.”

That’s consistent with the message delivered by Loretta Ross, a longtime racial justice and human rights advocate, through her teaching, public speaking and writing. Troubled by the frequent targeting and pillorying of people on social media, she urged the practice of calling in rather than calling out those who’ve upset you. “Call-outs make people fearful of being targeted,” she wrote in a guest essay for Times Opinion . “People avoid meaningful conversations when hypervigilant perfectionists point out apparent mistakes, feeding the cannibalistic maw of the cancel culture.” Instead, she advised, engage them. If you believe they need enlightenment, try that route, “without the self-indulgence of drama,” she wrote.

She was preaching humility.

She was also recognizing other people’s right to disagree — to live differently, to talk differently. Pluralism is as much about that as it is about a multiracial, multifaith, multigender splendor. That doesn’t mean a surrender or even a compromise of principles; a person can hold on to those while practicing tolerance, which has been supplanted by grievance. Tolerance shares DNA with respect. It recognizes that other people have rights and inherent value even when we disagree vehemently with them.

We all carry wounds, and some of us carry wounds much graver than others. We confront obstacles, including unjust and senseless ones. We must tend to those wounds. We must push hard at those obstacles. But we mustn’t treat every wound, every obstacle, as some cosmic outrage or mortal danger. We mustn’t lose sight of the struggle, imperfection and randomness of life. We mustn’t overstate our vulnerability and exaggerate our due.

While grievance blows our concerns out of proportion, humility puts them in perspective. While grievance reduces the people with whom we disagree to caricature, humility acknowledges that they’re every bit as complex as we are — with as much of a stake in creating a more perfect union.

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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Frank Bruni is a professor of journalism and public policy at Duke University, the author of the book "The Age of Grievance" and a contributing Opinion writer. He writes a weekly email newsletter .   Instagram   Threads   @ FrankBruni • Facebook

Opinion We have a radical democracy. Will Trump voters destroy it?

For some time, it was possible to believe that many voters could not see the threat Donald Trump poses to America’s liberal democracy, and many still profess not to see it. But now, a little more than six months from Election Day, it’s hard to believe they don’t. The warning signs are clear enough. Trump himself offers a new reason for concern almost every day. People may choose to ignore the warnings or persuade themselves not to worry, but they can see what we all see, and that should be enough.

Adapted from “Rebellion: How Antiliberalism is Tearing America Apart — Again” by Robert Kagan. Copyright © 2024 by Robert Kagan. Reprinted by permission of Penguin Random House. All Rights Reserved.

How to explain their willingness to support Trump despite the risk he poses to our system of government? The answer is not rapidly changing technology, widening inequality, unsuccessful foreign policies or unrest on university campuses but something much deeper and more fundamental. It is what the Founders worried about and Abraham Lincoln warned about: a decline in what they called public virtue. They feared it would be hard to sustain popular support for the revolutionary liberal principles of the Declaration of Independence, and they worried that the virtuous love of liberty and equality would in time give way to narrow, selfish interest. Although James Madison and his colleagues hoped to establish a government on the solid foundation of self-interest, even Madison acknowledged that no government by the people could be sustained if the people themselves did not have sufficient dedication to the liberal ideals of the Declaration. The people had to love liberty, not just for themselves but as an abstract ideal for all humans.

Americans are going down this route today because too many no longer care enough whether the system the Founders created survives and are ceding the ground to those, led by Trump, who actively seek to overthrow what so many of them call “the regime.” This “regime” they are referring to is the unique political system established by the Founders based on the principles of universal equality and natural rights. That, plain and simple, is what this election is about. “A republic if you can keep it,” Benjamin Franklin allegedly said of the government created by the Constitutional Convention in 1787. This is the year we may choose not to keep it.

A healthy republic would not be debating whether Trump and his followers seek the overthrow of the Founders’ system of liberal democracy. What more do people need to see than his well-documented attempt to prevent the peaceful transfer of power with the storming of the U.S. Capitol, the elaborate scheme to create false electoral slates in key states, the clear evidence that he bullied officials in some states to “find” more votes, and to persuade Vice President Mike Pence not to certify the legitimate results? What more do they need to know than that Trump continues to insist he won that election and celebrates as heroes and “patriots” the people who invaded the U.S. Capitol and smashed policemen’s faces with the stated aim of forcing Congress to negate the election results? As one 56-year-old Michigan woman present at the Capitol on Jan. 6 , 2021, explained: “We weren’t there to steal things. We weren’t there to do damage. We were just there to overthrow the government .”

Trump not only acknowledges his goals, past and present; he promises to do it again if he loses this year. For the third straight election, he is claiming that if he loses, then the vote will have been fraudulent. He has warned of uprisings, of “bedlam” and a “bloodbath,” and he has made clear that he will again be the promoter of this violence, just as he was on Jan. 6. Trump explicitly warned in 2020 that he would not accept the election results if he lost, and he didn’t. This year he is saying it again. Were there no other charges against him, no other reason to be concerned about his return to the presidency, this alone would be sufficient to oppose him. He does not respect and has never pledged to abide by the democratic processes established by the Constitution. On the contrary, he has explicitly promised to violate the Constitution when he deems it necessary. That by itself makes him a unique candidate in American history and should be disqualifying.

This kind of open challenge to our democracy was never meant to be addressed by the courts. As the Founders well understood, you don’t serve a subpoena to a would-be tyrant and tell him to lawyer up. Nor was it meant to be addressed by the normal processes of democratic elections. They knew, and feared, that a demagogue could capture the allegiance of enough voters to overthrow the system. That was why they gave Congress, and particularly the Senate, supposedly more immune from popular pressures, the power to impeach and remove presidents and to deny them the opportunity to run again — and not simply because they violated some law but because they posed a clear and present danger to the republic. After Trump’s attempt to overthrow the government in 2020, Congress had a chance to use the method prescribed by the Founders in precisely the circumstances they envisioned. But Senate Republicans, out of a combination of ambition and cowardice, refused to play the vital role the Founders envisioned for them. The result is that the nightmare feared by the Founders is one election away from becoming reality.

The problem with Trump is not that he has some carefully thought-out plan for seizing power, much less an elaborate ideological justification for doing so. (Others do have such plans and such justifications, including many of those who will populate his administration — more on that in a moment.) With Trump, everything is about him and his immediate needs. He will run roughshod over the laws and Constitution simply to get what he wants for himself, his family and his business interests. Americans know that if he is elected, he would abuse the justice system to go after his opponents. They know this because he says so. “I am your retribution!” he declares, and by “your” he means “my.” Americans know he would use his power as president to try to solve his financial problems. He did it as president and is doing it now as a presidential candidate . They know he would not respect the results of fair elections if he loses, which is the very definition of a tyrant.

So, why will so many vote for him anyway? For a significant segment of the Republican electorate, the white-hot core of the Trump movement, it is because they want to see the system overthrown. This should not come as a shock, for it is not a new phenomenon. On the contrary, it is as old as the republic. Historians have written about the “liberal tradition” in America, but there has from the beginning also been an anti-liberal tradition: large numbers of Americans determined to preserve preliberal traditions, hierarchies and beliefs against the secular liberal principles of the Declaration of Independence and Bill of Rights. The Founders based the republic on a radical set of principles and assertions about government: that all human beings were created equal in their possession of certain “natural rights” that government was bound to respect and to safeguard. These rights did not derive from religious belief but were “self-evident.” They were not granted by the Christian God, by the crown or even by the Constitution. They were inherent in what it meant to be human.

This is the central tenet of liberalism. Before the American Revolution no government had ever been founded on liberal principles, and the vast majority of human beings had never believed in these natural rights — certainly not the Christian church in either its Protestant or Roman Catholic versions nor Islam nor Judaism nor Hinduism nor Buddhism. People might be equal in the eyes of their god, but no government or religious institution had ever been based on the principle of equal rights. Not even the English system was based on this principle but rather on monarchy, a ruling aristocracy, and a contract between crown and subjects that was modified over the centuries but was not based on the principle of universal “natural” rights.

The Founders knew these ideas were radical, that they were inaugurating, in their own words, a novus ordo seclorum — a new order of the ages — that required a new way of thinking and acting. They knew, as well, that their own practices and those of 18th-century American society did not conform to their new revolutionary doctrines. They knew that slavery was contrary to the Declaration’s principles, though they permitted slavery to continue, hoping it would die a natural death. They knew that established churches were contrary to those principles because they impinged on that most important of rights, “freedom of conscience,” which was vital to the preservation of liberty, yet a number of states in the 18th and 19th centuries retained all kinds of religious tests for office. In short, they knew that a great many Americans did not in fact believe in the liberal principles of the Revolution. As Benjamin Rush, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, put it, “We have changed our forms of government, but it remains yet to effect a revolution in our principles, opinions and manners so as to accommodate them to the forms of government we have adopted.” They did not insist that citizens believe in those principles. One could be an American citizen whether one believed in the Declaration or not.

And a great many did not. Leaders of the slaveholding South called the Declaration “a most pernicious falsehood.” South Carolina’s John C. Calhoun called the very idea of equal rights a “false doctrine.” They believed in democracy, but only if it was an exclusively White democracy. When democracy turned against them in 1860, they rebelled and sought an exit from the system. That rebellion never ended. It has been weakened, suppressed — sometimes by force — and driven underground, but it has never gone away. Although the South was militarily defeated and deprived of its special advantages in the Constitution, its hostility to the Founders’ liberalism did not abate. As Southern writer W.J. Cash observed in 1941, if the war had “smashed the southern world,” it had nevertheless “left the essential southern mind and will … entirely unshaken” and Southerners themselves determined “to hold fast to their own, to maintain their divergences, to remain what they had been and were.” In 1956, almost a century after the Civil War, a fifth of Congress, almost all Democrats — signed the “Southern Manifesto” calling on states to refuse to obey the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision to end segregation in public schools. Nothing had changed. Are we so surprised that for many Americans, nothing has changed even today?

Nor has anti-liberalism only been about race. For more than a century after the Revolution, many if not most White Anglo-Saxon Protestants insisted that America was a Protestant nation. They did not believe Catholics possessed equal rights or should be treated as equals. The influential “second” Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s was anti-Catholic and anti-Jewish as well as anti-Black, which was why, unlike the original Klan, it flourished outside the South. Many regard today’s Christian nationalism as a fringe movement, but it has been a powerful and often dominant force throughout America’s history.

For two centuries, many White Americans have felt under siege by the Founders’ liberalism. They have been defeated in war and suppressed by threats of force, but more than that, they have been continually oppressed by a system designed by the Founders to preserve and strengthen liberalism against competing beliefs and hierarchies. Since World War II, the courts and the political system have pursued the Founders’ liberal goals with greater and greater fidelity, ending official segregation, driving religion from public schools, recognizing and defending the rights of women and minorities hitherto deprived of their “natural rights” because of religious, racial and ethnic discrimination. The hegemony of liberalism has expanded, just as Lincoln hoped it would, “constantly spreading and deepening its influence, and augmenting the happiness and value of life to all people of colors everywhere.” Anti-liberal political scientist Patrick Deneen calls it “liberal totalitarianism,” and, apart from the hyperbole, he is right that liberalism has been steadily deepening and expanding under presidents of both parties since the 1940s.

The fury on the anti-liberal right against what is today called “wokeness” is nothing new. Anti-liberal movements in America, whether in defense of the White race or Christianity, and more often both together, have always claimed to be suffering under the expanding hegemony of liberalism. They have always claimed that a liberal government and society were depriving them of their “freedom” to live a life according to Christian teachings and were favoring various minority groups, especially Black people, at their expense. In the 1970s, influential theologian R.J. Rushdoony complained that the Christian in America had “no right to his identity” but was forced to recognize “all others and their ‘rights.’” And he was correct if a Christian’s “rights” included the right not only to lead a Christian life oneself but to impose that life on the entire society, or if a White person’s “freedom” included the freedom to preserve white primacy in society. In the 19th century, enslavers insisted they were deprived of their “freedom” to hold human beings as property; Southerners in the post-Reconstruction era insisted on their “freedom” to oppress Black citizens in their states.

Today, anti-liberals in American society are indeed deprived of their “freedom” to impose their religious and racial views on society, on public schools, on the public square and on the laws of the nation. What Christian nationalists call “liberal totalitarianism,” the Founders called “freedom of conscience.”

Six decades ago, people like Rushdoony were responding not to “woke” corporations or Black Lives Matter but to civil rights legislation. Today, anti-liberal conservatives complain about school curriculums that acknowledge the racism that has shaped America’s history, but even five decades ago, before the invention of “critical race theory,” anti-liberal White people such as Rushdoony insisted that the “white man” was being “systematically indoctrinated into believing he is guilty of enslaving and abusing the Negro.” Nor is it new that many White people feel that the demands of minority groups for both rights and respect have “gone too far” and it is they, the White people of America, who are suffering the worst discrimination. In the 1960s, surveys taken by the New York Times showed that majorities of White people believed even then that the civil rights movement had “gone too far,” that Blacks were receiving “everything on a silver platter” and the government was practicing “reverse discrimination” against White people. Liberalism is always going too far for many Americans — and certainly for anti-liberals. Anti-liberals these days complain about wokeness, therefore, but it is the liberal system of government bequeathed by the Founders, and the accompanying egalitarian spirit, that they are really objecting to, just as anti-liberals have since the founding of the nation. Many of Trump’s core supporters insist they are patriots, but whether they realize it or not, their allegiance is not to the Founders’ America but to an ethnoreligious definition of the nation that the Founders explicitly rejected.

Some do realize it. The smartest and most honest of them know that if people truly want a “Christian America,” it can only come through “regime change,” by which they mean the “regime” created by the Founders. The Founders’ legacy is a “dead end,” writes Glenn Ellmers, a scholar at the Claremont Institute. The Constitution is a “Potemkin village.” According to Deneen and Harvard Law School’s Adrian Vermeule, the system established by the Founders to protect individual rights needs to be replaced with an alternative form of government. What they have in mind is a Christian commonwealth: a “culture that preserves and encourages order and continuity, and support for religious belief and institutions,” with legislation to “promote public morality, and forbid its intentional corruption,” a “forthright acknowledgment and renewal of the Christian roots of our civilization,” “public opportunities for prayers,” and a “revitalization of our public spaces to reflect a deeper belief that we are called to erect imitations of the beauty that awaits us in another Kingdom.”

These anti-liberal conservatives know that bringing such a commonwealth into being means jettisoning the Founders’ obsession with individual rights. The influential advocate of “conservative nationalism,” Yoram Hazony, wants Americans to abandon the Declaration in favor of a nationhood built on Protestantism and the Bible. America is a “ revolutionary nation ,” Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) insists, not because of the principles of the Declaration and not even because of the American Revolution itself, but “because we are the heirs of the revolution of the Bible” that began with “the founding of the nation of Israel.” There could hardly be a statement more at odds with the American Founders’ liberal, ecumenical vision.

Expressing a belief in God is no threat to the Founders’ system, but reshaping society in accord with Christian teachings is. To build the nation Hawley and Hazony imagine would require jettisoning not only the Declaration but also the Constitution, which was designed to protect the Declaration’s principles. The Christian commonwealth would not and could not be a democracy because the majority of people can’t be trusted to choose correctly. According to the Claremont Institute’s Ellmers, “most people living in the United States today — certainly more than half — are not Americans in any meaningful sense of the term.” They are a “zombie” or “human rodent” who lives “a shadow-life of timid conformity.” Only “the 75 million people who voted in the last election” for Trump are true Americans. Instead of trying to compete with Democrats in elections that don’t reflect the will of the people, Ellmers writes, “Why not just cut to the chase and skip the empty, meaningless process?” The “only road forward” is “overturning the existing post-American order.”

For these intellectuals, Trump is an imperfect if essential vehicle for the counterrevolution. A “deeply flawed narcissist” suffering from a “bombastic vanity,” as Deneen and Ellmers note, he has “lacked the discipline to target his creative/destructive tendencies effectively.” But this can be remedied. If Trump failed to accomplish the desired overthrow in his first term, Deneen argues, it was because he lacked “a capable leadership class.” Things will be different in his next term. What is needed, according to Deneen, is a “self-conscious aristoi,” a class of thinkers who understand “both the disease afflicting the nation, and the revolutionary medicine required for the cure,” who know how to turn populist “resentments into sustained policy.” Members of Deneen’s would-be new elite will, like Vladimir Lenin, place themselves at the vanguard of a populist revolution, acting “on behalf of the broad working class” while raising the consciousness of the “untutored” masses. Indeed, according to Harvard’s Vermeule, it will be necessary to impose the common good even against the people’s “own perceptions of what is best for them” — a most Leninist concept indeed.

The Christian commonwealth, then, would require a powerful executive freed from the Constitution’s liberal and democratic constraints. The new state, Vermeule wrote, with its “robust executive,” would “sear the liberal faith with hot irons,” wielding the “authority to curb the social and economic pretensions of the urban-gentry liberals.” The whiff of violence and oppression in such statements is intentional. The anti-liberal intellectuals understand that changing the liberal system will require far more than an election and a few legislative reforms.

Deneen and Vermeule are often dismissed as mere intellectual provocateurs, but their writings stand out because they have the courage to acknowledge that what they seek is incompatible with the Founders’ liberal system. While others conceal their views under a phony fidelity to American liberal principles or claim that what they want accords with the Founders’ true intent, Deneen, Vermeule and other anti-liberals acknowledge that the country they want, a country subservient to the Christian God, a country whose laws are based on the Bible, cannot be created absent the overthrow of the Founders’ liberal and defiantly secular system. Even a justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, Neil M. Gorsuch, speaks of the “so-called separation of church and state.” Anti-liberalism at the Supreme Court is nothing new, either.

And the anti-liberals know as well that this year may be their last chance to effect their counterrevolution. The percentage of the population made up of White people (let alone White Protestants) is steadily shrinking. Just as the anti-liberal conservatives of the pre-World War II years closed the immigration gates too late and were overwhelmed by a tide of non-Nordic peoples from Southern and Eastern Europe, so the immigration wave of largely non-White people since 1965 has brought the nation to the cusp of a non-White majority. The anti-liberals thus face the task of engineering the revolution with only a minority of the electorate committed to “regime change.”

Trump’s takeover of the Republican Party makes this possible. Trump is not a unique figure in American history. In each generation, anti-liberal forces have turned to the same breed of demagogue, the flouter of norms, the boorish trampler of liberal nostrums. William Buckley noted that the very “uncouthness” of George Wallace seemed to “account for his general popularity.” James Burnham marveled at how Joseph McCarthy’s “inept acts and ignorant words” had a “charismatic” quality that well expressed the fears and angers of his devoted followers.

What their critics saw as boorishness and malevolence, however, their followers saw as strength and defiance against a liberal system stacked against them. They were rebellious opponents of the system, “wreckers,” unabashedly anti-liberal in both thought and manner, and that is precisely what made them popular among a broad swath of White Americans who felt themselves losing ground in the culture and society — to Black people, Catholics, Jews and immigrants from non-Nordic countries. Today, exactly a century after the most overtly racist immigration restriction in American history, Trump once again calls for more immigrants from “nice” European countries, such as Denmark, Switzerland and Norway.

Trump did not just stumble into leadership of this movement of White rebellion. He summoned it. He made his debut as presidential aspirant on an unabashed white supremacist platform, championing the birther conspiracy that America’s first Black president was not in fact an American. Riding that issue alone, he catapulted to the front of the Republican pack, according to polls in 2011, before bowing out to continue his hit show, “The Apprentice.” Whether his debut as a white supremacist was opportunism or sprang from conviction hardly matters — it certainly has not mattered to his followers. The fact is, white supremacy has been his calling card, and millions have responded to it to the point where white nationalists have become the core of his movement. Many Christian nationalists already see him as a suffering Christ, and in this bizarre sense it is true that the prosecutions have “helped” him: The more adversity he faces, the more court battles he must wage, the more allegations that are slung at him, the more devoted they are to him.

No other group can be counted on for such absolute loyalty. While some Republicans wobble when asked if they would support Trump if convicted of a crime, White Christian Evangelicals overwhelmingly say they will support him no matter what. Trump needs that unshakable loyalty because he is fighting for his life. The thought that he might end up in jail has given him every reason to hew as closely as possible to the people who will stick with him even if he is convicted. These are also the people he will need to back him unconditionally in challenging the results of the election should he lose. If he wins, he will need them in what are sure to be titanic fights with Democrats and the legal system and to keep the Republican Party in line.

This is one reason Trump has so far shown no inclination to reach out beyond his base, to Nikki Haley voters, to more moderate suburban Republicans, to those who are made uncomfortable by his statements and actions. He may show flexibility on the important issue of abortion to secure his own election, but since clinching the nomination, he has only hardened his Christian nationalist message. His “poisoning the blood” campaign, his “dictator-for-a-day” comments, his release of the Trump Bible, his claim that, upon taking office, he will create “a new federal task force” to fight “anti-Christian bias to be led by a fully reformed Department of Justice,” are all aimed directly at his white Christian nationalist base without much concern for how millions of other Republican voters feel about it. Christians are “under siege,” he claims in hawking his Bible. “We must make America pray again.”

Besides, his hard tack toward white supremacy and Christian nationalism has cost him little among the broader Republican electorate.

Why not? Why is there so little resistance to Trump even as he commits ever more deeply to a Christian nationalist program for undoing the Founders’ liberal project?

For many, the answer is simply narrow self-interest, either a positive interest in supporting him or a negative interest in not opposing him or being seen to oppose him. This seems to be the answer for corporate America. Having first followed marketing data to appeal to the broadest cross-section of Americans by embracing communities only recently enjoying more of the full panoply of rights, businesses learned the hard way that Trump and his movement will not tolerate this and have mostly retreated to silence and neutrality. But they have also gone further, making clear as much as possible that they will not be a problem for him — either before he is elected or after.

This was the message JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon sent, from Davos, Switzerland, of all places, early this year when he declared that Trump was “kind of right about NATO, kind of right about immigration,” that he “grew the economy quite well.” There is no reason to doubt that he spoke for many of the richest Americans and for other corporate leaders. There was no outcry among them that anyone could hear. The truth is, they have no financial reason to oppose Trump. They know that Trump’s White working-class followers don’t have to be paid off economically because most care chiefly about the culture wars. Trump can still cut taxes and reduce federal regulations and other obstacles to corporate profit. The rich and powerful will always have some purchase in a Trump administration if only because he needs and respects money and will want to make deals for himself and his family, as he did in a first term. Whatever moral or political qualms business leaders may have about Trump, the bottom line dictates that they get along with him, and if that means turning a blind eye to his unconstitutional actions — Dimon’s favorable recounting of Trump’s first term notably ignored his attempt to overthrow the government — then so be it.

We already know that little or no opposition will come from the Republican Party ecosystem. Among elected officials, the few willing to stand up to Trump have either been driven out of the party or are retiring so fast that they cannot even bear to finish out their terms. Those who remain have accepted Trump’s iron rule and therefore now have an interest in his success.

But what about the average Republican voter, the “normal” Republicans who happily voted for George W. Bush, John McCain and Mitt Romney? Do they not see the difference between those Republicans and Trump — or do they not care? They, too, may feel their narrow interests are served by a Trump victory, and although they may not be Christian nationalists themselves, their views as White Americans make them sympathetic to the complaints of the anti-liberals. They, too, may feel they — or their children — are at a disadvantage in a system dedicated to diversity and wokeness. Their annoyance with a liberalism that has “gone too far” makes them susceptible to Trump’s appeal, and, more importantly, unconcerned about the threat he poses. Left to their own devices, they would not be interested in overthrowing the regime. But neither are they inclined to stand in the way of those who are.

Are these voters and GOP power players right to believe that they, like Dimon, will be just fine in a system no longer faithful to the Founders’ liberal ideals? Perhaps so. They will not be the first to suffer from a shift back toward a 1920s America. White Americans tolerated the systematic oppression of Black people for a century after the Civil War. They tolerated violence in the South, injustice in the courtrooms, a Supreme Court that refused to recognize the equal rights of Black people, women and various minorities. Will they rise up against a second Trump term infused by Christian and white nationalism, or will they acquiesce in the gradual dismantling of the liberal gains of the past eight decades?

The shame is that many White people today seem to have conveniently forgotten how much they and their forebears have depended on the Founders’ liberalism to gain their present status as fully equal members of American society and to enjoy the freedoms that they take for granted.

Most White Republicans, after all, do not have the “legacy European” lineage that Tucker Carlson praises. They do not have ancestors who stepped off the Mayflower or fought in the Revolution. The ancestors of the great majority of “White” Americans today were not considered “White” when they first set foot on American shores. Irish Americans may no longer remember that the Thomas Nast cartoons of the late 19th century depicted the Irish as apelike creatures. Many Italian Americans may not recall that a riot made up of “New Orleans’ finest” lynched and murdered 11 Sicilian immigrants and were never charged.

Many Catholics seem to have forgotten that they were once the most despised group in America, such that one of the Founders, John Jay, wanted them excluded from citizenship altogether. Most White Americans were at one time members of despised immigrant groups. They were the victims of the very anti-liberalism they are now voting back into power. They climbed to equality using liberalism as their ladder, and now that they have reached their destination they would pull away the ladder and abandon liberalism. Having obtained their equality using the laws and institutions of liberalism, their passion for liberalism has faded.

The Founders understood, and feared, that the fervor for rights and liberalism that animated the Revolution might not last. Writing in 1781, two years before the end of the war, Thomas Jefferson predicted that once the war ended, “we shall be going down hill.” The people would return to their quotidian lives, forgetting their passionate concern for rights, intent only on “making money.” They might never again come together “to effect a due respect for their rights,” and so their government would stop being solicitous of their rights. Over a half-century later, Lincoln, in his famous Lyceum address, lamented that the original spirit of the Revolution had dissipated with time, leaving Americans with only the normal selfishness of human beings. The original “pillars of the temple of liberty” had “crumbled away.” A little over two decades later, the nation fell into civil war.

If the American system of government fails this year, it will not be because the institutions established by the Founders failed. It will not be because of new technologies or flaws in the Constitution. No system of government can protect against a determined tyrant. Only the people can. This year we will learn if they will.

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