What I will call the “radical vegan” position holds that it is in-principle immoral to eat animal products in all cases. Animals are widely mistreated in the production of animal products, but even keeping the most well-treated animals would be immoral. Contrast this with the “moderate vegan” position that takes the poor treatment of animals in actual agricultural settings as the source of the wrongness of using those products. The moderate vegan concedes that some hypothetical agricultural settings, where animals are treated well and have full lives of worth, may be moral but that (almost) no real life agricultural settings are this way. It is the moderate position that I think is the most interesting foil for what I will call the “Whole Foods Omnivore.” I will get there, but first I will show why the radical veganism runs into trouble.
Well cared for domestic pet species are perhaps the best example of a human-animal relationship in which the animal comes out for the better, and which even most radical vegans are forced to consider ethical. The example of domestic pets is one that I will return to often, because it is an example in which the moral intuitions of the vegan are coherent whereas the omnivore’s are not. The vegan asks us to treat domesticated agricultural animals like we do domesticated pets and challenges the omnivore to point to a morally significant difference between those species. However, the seeming permissibility of keeping pets turns out to be a problem for the radical vegan.
My neighbor has two chickens and a dog. The chickens live in a well outfitted coop in his backyard and have access to his entire backyard during most of the day. They are well-fed, protected from predators, and generally looked after on equal footing with his dog. In fact, much of the time his chickens and (small) dog can be seen playing with each other in his backyard. They have names, just like his dog, and when one of his earlier chickens became ill suddenly and died he was sad about it. When he thought about getting another chicken after the first one died, he expressed concern about his existing chicken having an appropriate companion. It certainly seems that these chickens are in fact pets. However, the reason my neighbor has the chickens at all is that they also produce eggs on a regular basis. Contrary to what the radical vegan would be forced to say, it is hard to imagine that my neighbor is acting wrongly by collecting and eating these eggs.
My neighbor has two chickens because they produce about as many eggs as he can eat by himself. Nothing changes, it would seem, if he instead had four chickens to feed himself and his spouse. But what if he instead agrees on keeping the extra two chickens in order to sell them to me? Ignoring the legality of him crossing into commercial egg production, it isn’t obvious that we find anything wrong with this arrangement if the chickens are treated in the same way as in the scenario where he has two chickens. Of course, the chickens will not produce eggs for their entire lives, but let’s assume that our neighbor will take care of these chickens for their entire natural lives.
Now imagine that our egg example is repeated throughout the neighborhood. Each pair of neighbors has an agreement whereby one keeps four chickens and the other neighbor buys half of those eggs. The scale of the production itself wouldn’t seem to matter morally as long as the chickens are treated in the same way as the first (two chicken) example I introduced. But what happens when we start combining operations? Perhaps every fourth neighbor keeps eight chickens and sells eggs to the other three. Or every 16th neighbor sells to the other 15. At what point does our permissible backyard (pet) chicken operation become an impermissible animal agricultural operation?
The moderate vegan has a response. At some point the scale of the egg production will bring about impermissible animal treatment. The chickens will no longer be treated as individuals to be interacted with and cared for and will become anonymous egg producers. These individuals will be treated as a mere means to produce eggs. This provides a starting point to consider what sort of treatment animals deserve, and can inform what might be permissible production and uses of animal products. It is not the mere consumption of animal products that is unethical, but rather the source of those products and how those animals were treated.
