I find it very difficult to even watch so-called “vegan” content because the underlying assumptions made are just ludicrous IMO. Why? Because it’s all based on people’s fee-fees and as anyone who has watched my videos knows, I don’t give a damn about your feelings, only your facts. Any argument made on the basis of “but it makes me unhappy!” is just bullshit. I absolutely don’t care, which is why things like “ethical veganism” just make me roll my eyes. That’s why I decided to take a look at an article online trying to defend it and point out all of the places that it’s just ridiculously wrong.

This was really sparked by a number of videos put out by Rationality Rules on the subject and I’ll be honest, I couldn’t make it all the way through any of them because every bit of them are based on fee-fees and I am not remotely impressed by that. Rather than take on one of the videos on YouTube though, I wanted to take a couple of steps back. I found an article from Ohio State University on the “ethics of food” and figured that could be a decent stand-in. So let’s get started.

“Most of us think that it would be wrong to adopt a puppy from a shelter, in order to take it home and torture it until it dies. However, we do not think it is wrong to eat a steak for dinner. In this essay, I will argue that these views are hard to square with each other, and that the second view is false: it is wrong to eat meat.”

But that’s the thing. “Most of us” isn’t an argument. Most of us think so because we live in a culture where it isn’t deemed acceptable. This is an immediate appeal to emotion, which just isn’t impressive. Nobody is taking animals and torturing them for food. Torture is a very specific act which implies purpose. You do it specifically in order to cause pain or suffering. None of that is actually going on. First off, it is highly unlikely that you are taking a live cow home to eat it. Nobody is carving parts off of a cow while it’s still alive. The torture aspect is an appeal to emotion, a logical fallacy. This is very, very common in “arguments” for veganism.

“My argument has the following structure:
1. It is wrong to make animals suffer
2. If it is wrong to make animals suffer, then it is wrong to kill animals
3. If it is wrong to kill animals, then it is wrong to eat meat
C. It is wrong to eat meat.“

I disagree with almost all of it. Yes, it is wrong to make animals unnecessarily suffer, but you can certainly kill them humanely. This is just the assumption of torture without the demonstration of torture. Premise one doesn’t lead anywhere remotely close to the conclusion. Unfortunately, everything thereafter depends on premise one being taken as true and accurately reflecting what’s going on. This leads to a whole mess of fallacies in quick succession, again, based on feelings and not fact.

We’ve looked at things like this when it comes to religious philosophical claims, the premises of which are always just a shortcut to “therefore God!” Sorry, it just doesn’t. I reject every single premises entirely. First, while I agree that we shouldn’t needlessly make animals or anything else suffer, that’s not going on in the meat industry by and large.  There is absolutely nothing wrong with killing animals. We are fucking predators. Rent a clue. We evolved to eat meat. Deal with it.

If you choose not to, that’s entirely up to you, but don’t try to push your emotional ideology on others because it makes you sad. I don’t care about your happiness. Every single premise fails because none of them are designed to make sense, they are intended to evoke an emotional reaction in the reader.

That’s not going to work on me. It doesn’t get any better either. Skipping down a little, past more emotional appeals, we get to:

“You might object to my case for my first premise that it is only wrong to make a creature suffer if that creature is an ethical agent: the sort of being who can be morally responsible for its actions. But this is false. It is wrong to make babies suffer, and they are not ethical agents.“

I reject all of that though. I don’t think suffering is immoral. It’s just part of reality. To force it on an animal for no purpose other than seeing it suffer, that’s another matter, but life is filled with suffering. You can’t get away from it. Even if we remove humans from the equation altogether and look at the natural world, there is still lots of suffering. Predators kill things. Predators eat things. It’s going to go on whether we like it or not. It’s really time to get the hell over ourselves. If I had to go through this and cut out all of the emotional appeals, this article wouldn’t exist. None of them would. That’s a problem.

“You might object that it is only wrong to make human
beings suffer. This is implausible for several reasons. First, think about torturing a baby: what is wrong with this is surely the nature of the suffering inflicted, not the fact that the baby has a human genetic code. “

I knew this would come up, these people like to talk about torturing babies, but since no  torture is  going on at all, what difference does it make? Purposely causing suffering isn’t part of the equation so who cares? You have to recognize the real reason the author is doing this. It’s not to make a rational argument, it’s to appeal to the emotions of his readers. That’s a bad way to make a rational argument. Anyhow, I’m going to skip a little because he goes into a lot of “what if” nonsense and that isn’t impressive either.

“Some authors, like Carl Cohen (1986, 867) insist that all suffering is not equal: human suffering is much more ethically important than animal suffering. My argument is compatible with this thesis. I am not arguing that torturing a puppy is just as bad as torturing a human being. I think the latter is typically much worse. My claim is only that making the puppy suffer is wrong, and that the pleasure a human being might take from torturing it does not justify inflicting that suffering.“

I think it’s painfully obvious that this guy isn’t talking about reality. Nobody in a slaughterhouse is stabbing cows for pleasure just to see them squirm. They don’t have time for that. They have a lot of beef to process. They are just appealing to the ignorance of the reader, yet another fallacious tactic, because the audience probably isn’t well-versed in the reality of the situation. Sounds a lot like religion, doesn’t it? They’re using the exact same tactics.

Next, he tries to argue about it being wrong to kill animals, which he hasn’t demonstrated. I’ll take a snippet from that:

“Suppose that there is a cow that has a disease that will be fatal
unless treated by giving the cow a painful medical operation. If the cow would go on to have a long and pleasant life after the operation, performing this operation seems good, not wrong.”

Except that’s not how reality works again. Cows don’t just make appointments for medical treatment. Someone who OWNS them makes a conscious decision to operate on the cow, presumably making a cost/benefit analysis of the situation and if it is deemed to be more valuable to spend the money and the time for recuperation than it does to put the cow down, the surgery is done. Cows don’t have big bank accounts, after all. Most people don’t give a crap if the cow is happy, other than the fact that contented cows demonstrably give more milk. They are a commodity. Deal with it.

“We can bolster this initial argument by combining it with a plausible explanation of why it is wrong to kill animals. One important reason why killing a person is typically wrong is that killing typically deprives the victim of an objectively valuable future.“

No, that’s actually not how it works. The reason we tend to think that killing humans is wrong is because we are humans and we have a vested interest in our own survival. That’s part of the inherent social nature of humanity. We evolved that way. You know how else we evolved? To eat meat. Figure it out. The simple reality is, no life form is actually special in the grand scheme of things. One of the few things that we all have in common is that we die. Everything is food for something else. Welcome to the circle of life. I know that doesn’t make you happy, but too bad. Reality is what it is, not what  you wish that it could be.

“That is, killing someone deprives them of the valuable experiences activities, projects, etc. that they would otherwise have had  (compare Marquis 1989, §II; I do not claim, with Marquis, that this is the ‘primary’ thing wrong with killing). This principle applies to animals as well: just as suffering can make an animal’s life go badly, pleasant experiences can make it go well. So, just as with humans, it is plausible that it is (typically) wrong to kill animals because doing so deprives them of a valuable future.“

Nope. It all comes down to enlightened self-interest and empathy. We don’t want to be killed so we don’t kill other people. It’s that simple. There’s only so far that can go though. Where do you stop? Do you go as far as the Jains and not kill any insects? What about bacteria? Your body kills them by the millions every single day. What about viruses? Should we not try to stop COVID? Everyone has a line and that line is always subjective. This whole article is just someone taking their own individual line and insisting that line is true for everyone.  Just like the religious.

He then gets to the last premise, which fares no better than any of the others:

“There is a new restaurant in town: the food is sensational, and the prices are very low. How do they do it? Here’s how: the owner kidnaps world-­‐class chefs, and enslaves them at the restaurant. Suppose that the owner is connected with the mob,
and going to the police would just get you killed. Your  patronizing the restaurant does not enslave anyone, but it still seems wrong. The explanation for why it is wrong is
roughly that by patronizing the restaurant, you would be complicit in wrongdoing: you would be benefiting from a wrongful act (enslavement), while economically
supporting the wrongdoer (the slaver).“

Sorry but slavery is illegal, eating meat isn’t. It’s amazing how bad these people are at seeing the obvious flaws in their arguments. Humanity made a subjective decision that slavery wasn’t going to be acceptable, at least some of us did because slavery is still a thing out there in the real world. It was a societal choice, one that has never been made for eating meat. Slavery being wrong is as subjective as murder being wrong. They just have a whole lot more popular support. That’s just a stupid analogy. All of them are.

“Making animals suffer may be less awful than enslaving another human being. But the same form of explanation applies to eating meat. The raising of animals for food causes those animals a horrifying amount of suffering, and early death (see
Mason and Singer 1990 for some of the literally grisly details). If it is wrong to kill animals and to cause them to suffer, then the industry that produces our meat acts wrongly on a massive scale. It is wrong to eat meat because in doing so you are
complicit with that massive and systematic wrongdoing.“

Says you. That’s all that’s gone on throughout this entire article though, isn’t it? It’s just one person saying “I want this to be true so it is!” But that’s not impressive, at least not to me. This is aimed at overly-emotional people who desperately need a hug. It’s not aimed at critical thinkers who have a firm grasp on reality. Unfortunately, it’s all they’ve got. I’ve gone through entire discussions with these people pointing out everywhere that they’re wrong. “That’s a claim, present evidence.” “That’s an emotional appeal. It doesn’t prove anything”. The only thing it does is make them mad because they don’t really care about reality.

You know, just like the religious. These people all have the same mindset.

“In this essay I have argued that it is wrong to eat meat. One clarification of this conclusion is in order: like many ethical claims, it should be read as a claim about what is typically true. It is typically wrong for you to break all of my fingers, but if
doing so is the only way to prevent nuclear catastrophe, break away! Similarly, there may be unusual circumstances in which it is permissible or even required to eat meat. Nonetheless, if my argument is sound, each of us does wrong almost every time we sit down to a meal that contains meat.“

Yet there’s nothing true in it at all. Truth requires support. It requires demonstration.  The definition for truth is “that which is true or in accordance with fact or reality.” None of this is true. The only thing it’s in accordance with is their feelings. There’s nothing sound about any of this. It’s an emotional over-reaction from someone who has never been hungry a day in their life.

That’s kind of the thing, these people aren’t living in the real world. If you want to try again, step away from your emotions and actually rely on facts, that’s one thing. We might be able to find some common ground, but when the only thing you’re working on is “muh fee-fees!” you’re just lost. You won’t convince anyone but the most idiotic. There seems to be an awful lot of groups looking for the real suckers these days, aren’t there?

Kind of sad.