The following is the transcript of a talk of mine delivered to the Prometheus Colloquium (sponsored by the undergraduates in JHU's Philosophy Program) on April 14, 2014. I should clarify that the ideas will soon be undergoing revision, and that there are not currently any citations.
In this talk, I discuss the idea of veganism from within a virtue- or character-based approach to ethics. I identify two virtues, respect and compassion, which I take to be central to veganism. I claim that these are reciprocal virtues, both of which we exemplify when we value other individuals for their own sake, that is, when we show regard for the value that they have for themselves. I juxtapose abolitionist veganism with “welfarist” or “humane” approaches to our ethical relations with animals, which I believe do not express (or adequately express) the virtues of compassion and respect. I conclude with the following thought: that the “animals issue”, so to speak, is, among other things, an issue of character.
What is a vegan? Different senses of the term are often used, but here is my proposal: a vegan is best understood as someone who, for ethical reasons, rejects all institutions and practices that exploit nonhuman animals. By "ethical reasons", I have in mind the view that nonhuman animals are not mere resources here for humans to use for their own purposes. Claims about product usage are secondary to the definition of veganism as I have given it: it would be unhelpful, I think, and miss something fundamentally important if I were to define veganism in terms of a laundry list of products that one can and can’t use. At its core, veganism is a way of valuing nonhuman animals, through one’s attitudes and practices, in a certain manner--of seeing them in a certain light.
That having been said, veganism obviously has implications for one’s lifestyle. Vegans regard the slaughtering of animals for their flesh as wrong, certainly. But they also recognize that in our society, virtually all animal products are produced in ways that exploit, not to mention abuse and brutalize, the animals that they come from, or in ways that are closely intertwined with their exploitation, abuse and brutalization. Perhaps there is nothing wrong in theory with collecting a hen’s eggs. In practice, however, most hens are kept in painful, unsanitary, unhealthy conditions, have their beaks cut off, are aggressively artificially inseminated, and are slaughtered or disposed of once they are no longer fertile. Hence, vegans do not use eggs. The same applies to milk products: in theory, there might be such a thing as a “happy dairy cow” who, aside from the occasional milking, lives a natural, uninterrupted life. But vegans realize that this is not a profitable arrangement, that dairy cows are kept in horrible, confining conditions, are continually impregnated to keep them lactating, hooked up to industrial milking machines, lose their male offspring to the veal industry, and are dragged off and slaughtered themselves once they can no longer put out milk. Hence, vegans do not consume milk products.
For analogous reasons, they boycott cosmetics that have been toxicity-tested on animals; disapprove of zoos and circuses; do not wear fur, leather, or wool; and so on. The exploitative nature of these products and practices also makes them unethical.
The proposal that we should change our treatment of nonhuman animals has generated a large field of philosophical literature over the past forty or so years. By and large, the literature has been dominated by two ethical traditions: the first is utilitarianism, which says that the right thing to do is always the thing that maximizes good states of affairs and minimizes bad ones; good states of affairs are always reducible to some mental state like pleasure, happiness, or desire-satisfaction; bad ones to pain, suffering, and the frustration of one’s interests. In a famous and often quoted remark, the 18th-century English philosopher Jeremy Bentham pointed out the bearings of utilitarianism on our moral relations with animals by posing a simple question: “Can they suffer”? If the answer is yes, as Bentham supposes it is, then any practice which promotes animal suffering is immoral. It wasn’t until two-hundred years later that this thought reached the general public through the work of Peter Singer, also a utilitarian. Since practices like factory farming and medical experimentation on animals cause a horrendous amount of suffering, Singer concludes that we should either abolish or significantly reform them. The bottom line: suffering is bad, no matter whose suffering it is, and if we deny this consideration to nonhuman animals based on their biological species, then we are, by analogy with racism and sexism, speciesist.
The second major approach is the non-consequentialist or rights-based theory made famous in the 1980s by Tom Regan. Like Singer, Regan thinks that there is something wrong in the way we treat nonhuman animals. But the wrongness lies not in the pain and suffering that our practices cause, but in the fact that we are violating the rights of these creatures not to be exploited or, to adapt a notion from Kant, treating them as mere means to our own ends rather than ends in themselves. Though I do not share his theoretical framework, I am much more sympathetic in some ways to Regan’s approach than to Singer’s. Regan proposes that all nonhuman animals who are the experiencing subjects of a life, as it were, have a kind of distinctive value that obliges us to treat them in certain ways. This sort of value is indifferent to species membership, and it isn’t reducible to the value of pleasurable or enjoyable mental states. Moreover, it would be wrong to exploit or harm an individual if doing so brought about the pleasure or happiness of the majority--something that a utilitarian, given certain circumstances, may permit. And whereas the utilitarian is content to allow for the exploitation of animals if we can find ways to do it less painfully or cruelly, Regan is not: barring extreme circumstances, killing an animal for our own purposes is wrong, even if the animal feels no pain.
Regan and Singer are often regarded as the “founders” of contemporary animal ethics, and while their approaches have been widely criticized and dissected in the intervening decades, they still tend to define the playing field, both academically and among non-philosophers who care about our treatment of nonhuman animals.
The approach that I favor, virtue ethics, has seen only a smattering of representation in the literature on animal ethics. Rather than characterizing right and wrong in terms of consequences or duties, the virtue tradition takes “How should we live?” to be the central question of ethics. The answer, of course, is that we should live well, by pursuing a life full of things that allow us to realize our potential as human beings. Aristotle refers to this notion as “eudaimonia”, which variously translates to “living well”, “happiness”, “success”, or “flourishing”. The ancient Greek philosophers, of course, disagreed among themselves about what the good life comprises, just as we do, and I do not propose to have all of the answers myself. But following Aristotle, I will share the following ideas:
First, a good life is not reducible to pleasure, even if it includes it as a component. Autonomy, reciprocated love, and, I should think, even the ability to feel negative emotions all factor in to a good life, but don’t essentially involve pleasure. For example, there would be something wrong in my life if I were stuck in the Matrix, or my spouse secretly hated me, or if I did not feel grief at the death of a loved one.
Second, the project of living well neither requires nor allows for egoism. This is because a good life requires that I regard and treat other individuals as valuable for their own sake, namely, as beings who, like me, are valuable because they are capable of living a good life. If an egoist agrees with me, then I find it difficult to characterize her position as egoism. While living well most certainly requires that we care about ourselves, it does not stop there. Indeed, if the circumstances call for it, it may require us to make great sacrifices.
Most relevant to our discussion, a good life includes good character. Good character is expressed through virtues such as honesty, benevolence, kindness, and justice, among others. In a virtue ethical framework, the right thing to do is what a virtuous person would do in a given situation. This conception of rightness is notably different from utilitarianism and non-consequentialism, both of which rely on a distinctive notion of moral obligation. Strictly speaking, moral rightness and wrongness aren’t necessary on a virtue-ethical theory. Rather, all considerations about what I should do get their normative force from the project of living a good life. However, the good life doesn’t always feature in deliberation in the same way that happiness or pleasure does for utilitarianism. Rather, what I ought to do is cashed out in terms of virtue, viz, the kind of character I am exemplifying in my life. This, again, is because ethical questions are questions about how to live well, and one’s character provides a description of how successfully she is pursuing this endeavor in certain respects, for example, in how she treats others.
Virtue ethics also tends to incorporate certain metaethical assumptions that contemporary analytic philosophers, such as Judith Thomson and Richard Kraut, have tried to unpack. Though not shared by all who do virtue ethics, one such assumption concerns the metaphysical nature of goodness. Kraut and Thomson take goodness to be a relational notion: specifically, they endorse the thesis that a thing is good if and only if it is good in a way or good for someone or something. This is one way in which the virtue tradition differs importantly from utilitarianism, which assumes that there is something that is just good, period, irrespective of whether it is good for anyone or anything. As I already mentioned, the classical utilitarian takes this to be pleasure: pleasure is just good, and the more pleasure the universe contains, the better the universe is. A relational view of goodness, on the other hand, doesn’t hold that pleasure is necessarily good; rather, pleasure is good if and only if it is good for someone, and not all pleasure, we can agree, is good for us. Metaphysically, the relational view has it that all goodness is the same: to be good is to be good for something. Some things may be good for us because they are good instrumentally (for instance, money, shelter, and vacuum cleaners), while other things are good for us because they are components of a flourishing life (for example, health, friendship, and so on). Certainly things might be good for us in more than one way: health, we can say, is good both instrumentally and for its own sake--it enables us to pursue other activities like work and exercise, but it is also an essential component of a flourishing life. A flourishing life, in turn, is good because it is good for the person whose life it is.
The proposal that all goodness is goodness-for raises a potential worry: if a thing is valuable if and only if it is good for someone or something, then how are we valuable? Many philosophers respond to this worry by positing that goodness for is not the only kind of value, that there is another kind of value--intrinsic or inherent value, we might call it--that grounds the ethical significance of individuals and does not depend upon any sort of relation or context. This is a canonical assumption of the Enlightenment tradition. It is central to Kant’s take on the value of humans, and it is also the way in which Tom Regan, who I mentioned earlier, takes nonhuman animals to be valuable. I reject this proposal, however, since, like Thomson and Kraut, I hold that goodness can only be a relational notion. How, then, do we explain the value of sentient beings?
One possibility is to dodge the bullet and say that sentient beings have no value. The only valuable thing is a flourishing life, but the individual whose life it is, strictly speaking, is valueless. But this doesn’t solve the worry, since it doesn’t give us any explanation of who or what a good life is good-for. We’re then forced to re-postulate the existence of intrinsic or inherent value, this time attributing it to a flourishing life. So I reject this move.
Nandi Theunissen has come up with an alternative solution to this problem: let us grant that all goodness is goodness for. The value of individual human beings is explained by the fact that we are good for ourselves, specifically, because we can determine and pursue the components of a good life by setting ends. The value of humanity is therefore reflexive: it points back at itself. But it also signals that there is a reason for us to care about other individuals--to not interfere with their capacity to live a good life, and, moreover, to do things that benefit them. Deliberatively, the reasons don’t issue from the value humans possess as such, but from the distinctive feature that makes them valuable: the ability to determine a good life--a life full of good things for them.
I am going to endorse this proposal, and add that I think something roughly similar applies in the case of nonhuman animals: nonhuman animals are also valuable because they are good for themselves, namely, by being at the center of a life that is good for them. They do not determine the components of a good life in the way that humans do. But the proposal that animals can fare better or worse in their lives, and that they are good for themselves, strikes me as plausible, and will motivate a good deal of my argument here.
To drive home the point that animals are good for themselves, try to imagine the following, hypothetical situation: think of all of the things that are good for a dog. The pleasure of interaction with humans and other dogs, going on walks, sniffing, chasing frisbees, digging, and so on. Now imagine all of these things happening without the dog. This is clearly difficult to do. For one thing it is metaphysically impossible. But more important, it wouldn’t explain what it is that makes the various parts of a dog’s life good for it. A dog’s life can’t possibly be a good life without there being a subject who is capable of engaging with and experiencing good things. A dog completes the picture by enabling the various components of its life to be good components for it. Thus, a dog is good-for-itself.
If my thought-experiment is too abstract or metaphysical, then I’ll simply restate the point as follows: nonhuman animals are good for themselves because they can experience and, in certain ways, pursue a life that is good for them. To borrow a phrase from Tom Regan, they are the subjects of a life. But while Regan posits that the value of a nonhuman animal is nonrelational or inherent, I propose that the value is relational and rests on the animal’s ability to be good for itself. I also think there is something more normatively significant about this proposal than Regan’s: it tells us the way in which it makes sense to care about an animal, namely, to show regard for it as the sort of being whose life can go well for it. It explains what it is to value a nonhuman animal as such, and not as a natural resource or tool. When I value a cow instrumentally because I like the taste of its flesh, then strictly speaking, it doesn’t make sense to say that I value the cow--rather, what I value in this case are its detached and processed body parts.
Having said that, I turn now to the notion of character, which, I take it, is largely expressed by how we value others. Veganism, I claim, is marked out by two central virtues, respect and compassion. These virtues are obviously not unique to veganism: they are among the many virtues of character that all of us should try to cultivate. So what do I take respect and compassion to involve?
Compassion, I take it, refers to something much more robust than mere unease with someone else’s suffering. Suppose Jane is sitting outside enjoying a cup of coffee when a bystander suddenly starts to cry out in pain. The stranger’s cries make Jane uncomfortable: they disturb her emotionally, so she gets up and leaves to put it out of her mind. This, I take it, is not an exercise of compassion. Jane acknowledges the stranger’s suffering, she dislikes it, but she does not regard the sufferer as valuable--her behavior suggests that she doesn’t care about the person whose suffering this is, since she makes no effort to help her. Compassion is sometimes derided as a sort of weak-willed squeamishness about the pain and suffering of others, or, even more unfairly, as a self-interested desire to get rid of the suffering that someone else’s pain causes me. But I can just as easily do these things by closing myself off to the suffering of other individuals, as Jane does, so I take it that compassion is not just suffering caused by suffering. Nor is compassion the same as pity: what distinguishes pity and compassion is that, while compassion involves feeling, it also involves a judgment about the other individual as valuable in the same way that I am valuable. Far from degrading other individuals, compassion involves respect for other individuals: it involves the recognition that another’s misfortune is something that is worth responding to because the other individual is someone who is worth caring about. This, I think, is also why a genuinely compassionate person need not and would not be moved by the petty or unwarranted suffering of self-centered people. Respect for other individuals, to which compassion is reciprocally connected, doesn’t take a self-entitled or self-centered sense of one’s own worth to be genuinely valuable. Being self-centered isn’t good for another individual and is therefore not salient for a compassionate person, who cares about the genuine good of others.
Another reason why it is misleading to liken compassion to a mere feeling of unease is because compassion involves more than just feeling: it also involves acting compassionately. Let me present a modified form of my earlier thought experiment: suppose that Jane, enjoying her coffee outside, suddenly notices a stranger crying out in pain. This time, Jane walks away to some private place, and there she begins to panic. She is worried about the stranger, but she does not know what to do or if she should do anything. Maybe she should get involved, or maybe she shouldn’t. Maybe she should call the police, or try to get someone else to help the stranger. In the end, she ends up doing nothing, and is later met with feelings of regret.
Certainly, Jane is more praiseworthy in this situation than she was in the previous one. But she still falls short of manifesting full compassion. This is because a compassionate person is also good at being compassionate, which requires figuring out what to do in a situation like Jane’s and then taking the appropriate action. While it would be inaccurate to characterize Jane’s response in this situation as wicked or even completely up to her, it still makes sense to say that a successful attempt to help the stranger would have been more compassionate. Jane’s failure, in this case, is a potential learning experience, one which may encourage her to think more carefully about what to do if something like this happens in the future.
Finally, to liken compassion to mere unease with someone else’s suffering is misleading because compassion doesn’t even have to be in response to suffering. For instance, we can feel compassion for an otherwise content child who was raised in a state of relative social deprivation, or, again, for the people in the Matrix, who are living a life of illusory freedom. The badness of their situation is not characterized by suffering, but their good is nevertheless at stake, and a compassionate person would be fully receptive to this and feel concern for them.
Having explained what compassion is (and isn’t), I turn now to respect. Respect involves not degrading, destroying, or interfering with someone else’s pursuit of her own good life. It does not have the affective character of compassion, but it resembles compassion by involving a certain judgment, that is, the recognition of another individual as someone who is valuable for her own sake, who inhabits a life that it is good for her to fulfill.
This is different from the Kantian notion of respect, which, as far as I am concerned, misconstrues the value of individuals. Kant’s notion of respect requires an esteem for rational nature, where a rational nature is one that can follow Kant’s moral philosophy. I don’t believe that this capacity explains why other beings are valuable--not only does it fail to account for nonhuman animals, it also fails to account for young children, the mentally handicapped, or those who have never read Kant’s ethics. I take respect to involve esteeming other beings because they are capable of living good lives, and this, not rational nature, is what explains their value.
I conclude this part of the discussion by reaffirming my position that compassion and respect require each other. They both follow when we genuinely value other individuals for their own sake. I’ve made the case that this is especially true of compassion: compassion is what we show when we recognize that someone else’s well-being is at stake, combined with the recognition that she is valuable. A similar claim goes for respect: it means recognizing that another individual is valuable for her own sake, just as I am valuable for my own sake. It is just this sort of kinship and fellow-acknowledgement that respect involves, and which allows compassion to manifest itself when one sees that another individual is suffering, in danger, or otherwise faring badly. And it’s just this type of kinship and fellow-acknowledgement that characterizes the vegan response towards nonhuman animals: vegans care about nonhuman animals because they regard them as valuable for their own sake. Respect and compassion express and exemplify this way of valuing others beings, human and nonhuman alike.
So what does this entail, in practice, with regard to our treatment of nonhuman animals? A person who has these virtues is concerned with how she treats animals, directly or indirectly, in her personal life. But she is also concerned with how others treat them, and responds in a certain way when she sees that they are being treated badly. These concerns are not separate: vegans boycott animal products because they think the exploitation of animals is a bad thing, something that should not happen. It makes no sense for a person who thinks this way to continue availing herself of the products of an unjust institution. But she also wants that institution to end, and wants other people to want the same thing.
Compassion and respect for animals therefore lend themselves to the advocacy of abolitionism, the proposal that all institutions that exploit nonhuman animals should be dismantled. This, I think, need not entail extinctionism, the view that we should phase out the existence of all domestic animals. Some abolitionists, such as Gary Francione, take this extreme position. Francione’s reasoning is that any use of an animal is immoral, that the domestication of nonhuman animals was an unjust arrangement at its inception, and that as long as we keep nonhuman animals around, we will be cruel to them. But I don’t share this view. True, there may be cases where we ought to let certain animals go extinct--for example, if they’ve been selectively bred to be unhealthy or have severe genetic disorders. But putting those cases aside, phasing out the existence of domestic animals violates their reproductive autonomy, and overlooks the possibility that there may be ways of using animals that aren’t exploitative. I leave open the broad practical and economic implications of this view, but the important point is that our relations with animals should always be guided by good character, which I think does not recommend itself to extinctionism.
That is, at least, my position. But there is a competing take on how we should reform our treatment of nonhuman animals, often called “humaneness” or “welfarism”, which one might think is a more sensible way of discharging our virtues with respect to nonhuman animals. The welfarist thinks that it’s permissible for us to use animals for things like food and clothing, so long as we do so in ways that are not cruel, and which allow the animal to live a life, albeit a truncated life, of relative pleasure and flourishing. The idea is not to eliminate but rather to reform the various industries that exploit animals, alleviating or getting rid of practices like factory farming. A typical abolitionist reply is that welfarism is inefficacious--all it does is make people more comfortable with buying animal products, no matter where they came from, and thus perpetuates the cycle of cruelty that welfarists themselves claim to oppose. I think there’s merit in this reply, but I’m interested in another question: whether welfarism is compatible with respect and compassion for animals. The idea that one can raise and slaughter animals “compassionately” is a popular slogan; being a “compassionate carnivore” is often proposed as a more reasonable alternative to veganism. “Respect” is often used to describe the same idea: “We can use animals for food,” the welfarist might say, “as long as we treat them with respect.” So one might contend that the virtues I have discussed don’t implicate veganism: it might be possible that we can still eat meat, yet do so in ways that are respectful and compassionate.
Is this actually possible? My answer is that perhaps it can be, if and only if one inhabits circumstances where there is no other choice but to harm animals in order to survive. Though cultural views on the treatment of animals vary, I maintain that regard for animals is a virtue, and wanton disregard for them a vice, regardless of one’s cultural or social situation. This virtue may express itself differently in different circumstances. Some hunter-gatherer societies, for instance, have a ritual of apologizing to a slain animal, explaining that they had no choice but to kill it. I grant that such a practice is admirable. But no one in this room is in that circumstance, so I’ll merely make note of it and then leave it be. The problem I’m interested in is whether one can respectfully and compassionately use animal products, particularly products that require the animal be killed, in circumstances where a vegan alternative is viable.
I begin by posing the following question to the welfarist: if veganism is an option, then why eat meat? I am first and foremost interested in her motives, and not in justification she might invoke for its permissibility. I highly doubt that the welfarist will claim that she eats animal flesh because she thinks it is helps the animal, or because she thinks it’s better for the animal than a worse alternative like factory farming. These, I take it, are reasons for preferring humane meat to factory farmed meat, but they are not, I think, why she prefers humane meat to veganism.
So I’ll supply what I take to be her answer: welfarists prefer to eat meat because they think it tastes better than what they’d eat as a vegan (a claim which I can anecdotally tell you is false). If so, then the welfarist is in a somewhat awkward position: she must demonstrate that it is possible to compassionately and respectfully eat animals because they taste good.
Let me reformulate the question another way: I have said that compassion and respect are responses we have to the value of other individuals, specifically, when we value them for their own sake. Thus, the welfarist needs to demonstrate how she can eat animals because they taste good but still value them for their own sake. If we formulate the question this way, then I now think that the welfarist’s position has gone from awkward to almost incoherent: to value someone for her own sake is to value her capacity to live a life that is good for her. This, it seems to me, rules out inflicting violence on her and destroying her capacity to live a good life. Yet this is precisely what the welfarist allows for, and precisely what her demand for animal flesh requires. So welfarism, I take it, though it involves an odd type of benevolence, isn’t respectful or compassionate. The welfarist still values animal products, but not the animals themselves, even if she attaches some sort of disvalue to their pain.
So let me try to account for what I think differentiates the character of welfarism from that of veganism:
Recall my earlier distinction between compassion and mere unease with someone else’s suffering. For some welfarists, making the industry less cruel to animals is just a way of mitigating their unease so that they can use the products that come from them. They don’t like to think about the fact that the animals they eat suffered, because the thought puts them off their food. Certainly this can’t be characterized as compassionate, as it issues from self-centered concerns.
Other welfarists might be more earnestly committed to the view that one can value animals for their own sake yet still eat their flesh. That being raised in relatively nice conditions and then slaughtered is beneficial for them. I have to question the extent of their earnestness, however, assuming that their preference for meat is really just because they like the way it tastes. That aside, recall the second case of Jane, who wants to help the stranger but just doesn’t know how. I present yet another modification to this thought experiment: suppose that Jane, upon seeing the stranger cry out in pain, pulls an epipen from her purse and injects the stranger with a potent shot of stimulant. This is the wrong thing to do: there’s no good reason to assume the stranger needs the stimulant, nor should Jane be administering drugs to a stranger. As it turns out, the stranger has a heart condition, and the subsequent rush of adrenaline renders him tachychardic and makes his bad situation worse. Does Jane exemplify compassion, simply through her good intentions? Perhaps she has the same desire as a compassionate person, a desire to help. But her actions lack practical wisdom--compassion, like any virtue, requires not just the right attitudes but also the right actions, and Jane is failing with respect to the latter.
I don’t take the welfarist’s rationale for eating meat to be completely analogous to the sheer folly exhibited by Jane. But the analogy is that even if the welfarist’s attitudes are compassionate, the proposal that slaughtering animals is good for them--that this shows regard for their capacity to live a good life--rests on false beliefs. How can we plausibly be said to show regard for the animal as the inhabitant of a life that is good for it by depriving it of the rest of its life? Is it simply because we think there is a point at which an animal’s life stops being good for it, that its pleasurable experiences, for example, eventually stop bearing fruit for its well-being, such that non-existence would be an acceptable or even a preferable alternative to the continuance of its life? This strikes me as an impossible position to defend--I see no compelling evidence that it’s true, no good reason to accept it.
In the end, it seems that the welfarist is willing to grant that we are entitled to exploit nonhuman animals--that we possess a privilege and they do not. But respect and compassion, when fully expressed, are hostile to privilege. Veganism and welfarism don’t vary by degree: they are fundamentally different ways of valuing other beings. Vegans, as I’ve said, see nonhuman animals in a certain light--to borrow a phrase from Cora Diamond, as “fellow creatures”, and not as things to eat. The animals issue is therefore an issue of character: it requires that one address and confront her own privileged attitudes.
This brings up one of the great frustrations faced by many vegans: why can’t people just “get it”, so to speak? Why can’t they just see the plain and obvious fact that the way we treat animals is wrong? My answer to this frustration is that character is not something one can be simply argued into. That is not how character develops.
A significant event, I think, that helped my conversion to veganism was the death of my dog six years ago. He had developed cancer, and his condition steadily deteriorated--he became incontinent, eventually he stopped eating, and we had to euthanize him. I was fortunate, perhaps too fortunate, in that I was away at college for most of this time, and didn’t have to witness the extent of his misery. That burden fell upon my mother and father.
After my dog was gone, I began to think harder about our relations with nonhuman animals. Most of us agree that animal suffering is a real thing--but I had never truly realized it, it had never truly struck me, as it did when I saw it happening to a member of my family. I then had the following thought: that we have the ability to enjoy meaningful relationships with animals. This gets at the notion of kinship or fellow-acknowledgement that I discussed earlier. Parents often express concern for stranger’s children by asking “What if it had been my child?” We can pose an analogous question of the nonhuman animals whose flesh we buy and eat: is this a being that I could commiserate with, something that I could envision myself as fundamentally in relation with? This is one question that the death of my dog raised for me.
That I learned something valuable from the death of my dog brings me to another point: that one’s character is largely a matter of luck. Grief, adversity, and other transformative experiences aren’t up to us, even if they can make us better people. Vegans need to acknowledge this is their judgment of others, just as they need to acknowledge the varying circumstances that make each person who he or she is.
To summarize: I have given my definition of what a vegan is, as a person who thinks it is wrong to exploit nonhuman animals, and expresses this belief in her practices and attitudes. In so doing, she exemplifies compassion and respect, both of which I take to be virtues. Compassion and respect are only possible when we value other beings for their own sake, that is, when we show regard for them as the type of being who can live a life that is good for it. Both of these virtues follow from a sense of fellowship between ourselves and other individuals that I think welfarism, in the end, does not allow for.
One final thought, before I open the floor to questions: virtue is not an all or nothing affair, something you either manifest perfectly or completely lack. A defect in one’s character doesn’t necessarily translate to a vice, and a strength in one’s character doesn’t mean that she won’t have defects elsewhere. Being vegan does not make you a better person than everyone else. I have never thought this, and it’s expressed in the fact that many of the people I admire and want to emulate--my friends, family members, and various mentors and heroes that I’ve had over the years--are non-vegan. If I thought that everyone who used animal products was completely devoid of goodness, then I would not be here before you.
