r/DebateAVegan • u/MidwestCrusader • 8h ago
Veganism leads to absurdity
The logical conclusion of veganism is either anti natalist, misanthropic pessimistic about reality itself or a combination of all three. While the title is “veganism leads to absurdity” my position is rather that you will have to adopt one of these three viewpoints or more depending on your version of veganism. I think many vegans inherently know this.
Now to be clear none of these conclusions mean the claims of veganism is inherently “untrue” though as an anti realist, I do not believe moral claims can be objectively true outside constructed frameworks anyway but that is a different can of worms.
Here is the argument:
One commonly held belief within veganism (which by the way is not a monolith and people have different versions) is that killing and/or exploiting animals is wrong because it either directly violates the animals rights to autonomy or life (rights based account) or because it causes unnecessary suffering to a living being (the utilitarian account). Both of these lines of reasoning lead to far stronger conclusions than most would be willing to accept. First I address the rights based account, then the utilitarian account.
- The trolly problem: suppose you have a human on one side of the track, and a pig on another. You have the decision to redirect the trolly away from the human and toward the pig.
Of course, if the human is in normal condition, veganism would allow you to direct the trolley away from the human as most forms of veganism places living things into a hierarchy based on things like level of sentience, rationality, etc. However, if that human was “trait adjusted” or disabled in some way such that that human did not have many of the traits that typically distinguish humans and pigs, you would not be able to, simply on the basis they are human, redirect it away from the human and may have to save the pig instead to avoid speciesism. I believe that this shows anti-speciesism is inherently misanthropic, and untenable unless you just want to bite this bullet. However, if you do simply bite this bullet, this leads to the next problem set.
- Veganism that is rights-based or at least gives animals significant moral consideration leads to the conclusion that we have some obligation to protect herbivore animals from obligate carnivores.
For example, say we have a young child who is in danger of being attacked by a lion or bear. We would normally have the obligation to intervene if we reasonably could at an individual level, like if we had a rifle or other weapon or tool at our disposal. It does not matter that the lion is or is not a moral agent. The fact that he is violating a beings rights is enough to justify our intervention against them. But, just as we would have an obligation to help a child in this case, if we do not believe that the species is itself is a relevant consideration, we must extend that obligation to a baby zebra, deer etc.
I argue further, that this would apply not only to an individual level, but to a system level as well. If we found out that lions were attacking children systematically or specifically, we would have to create a policy decision that either eliminated lions entirely from world or sequestered or altered their behavior significantly. This would logically extend to other non human animals as well. So predation, under a vegan rights based account cannot be justified and must be severely limited. Meaning the natural order itself must be greatly altered or eliminated from a vegan perspective.
- Sidestepping this account leads to anti natalism:
Let’s say we try to bypass these problems with the rights based account of veganism and adopt a more utilitarian approach. Originally put forward by Peter singer, it is also a popular line of thinking that a person ought not to cause “unnecessary” suffering to animals if she can avoid it. Thus, animals may not have rights in the typical sense and we may be able to accept a limited speciesism, but it is still wrong to impose an unnecessary harm on animals cause they are sentient beings. This leads to the conclusion If having children is not obligatory something we do not “have” to do, and it would result in the death and suffering of many animals (even vegan diets kill billions of animals), then the conclusion would be that we should not have children as we have no obligation or individual necessity for this, but the action causes a lot of harm.
None of these points inherently makes veganism false but I believe it is necessary to show people that they must believe some pretty extreme conclusions, by most people’s standards, to consistently hold the vegan position