vegan – A Jumbled Little World

An aside about a disingenuous argument against veganism

I’m going to argue here that the ethical vegan faces difficulty justifying their views against the omnivore. However, one seemingly common argument by the omnivore does not work, and is best described as disingenuous.

It goes something like this. When a vegan claims that it is wrong to harm livestock through agricultural practices this is in fact an over-extension of moral concern, and there does not seem to be a reason to stop at livestock. In fact, even vegans must kill life when they eat plants. Why does the vegan stop their moral concern with animal life when we could extend it to plants as well? To live is to kill. The vegan is in fact naive in thinking that one can live without killing other living beings. Therefore, there is nothing morally worse with the omnivore diet than with the vegan diet.

The above argument is really about placing a burden of line drawing back on vegan. If they want to expand the realm of moral concern to non-human animals, then they will need to tell us why it should not be expanded yet further to an absurd extent.

I think the vegan has several related strategies to reply to the above argument. Below are a couple of them.

There is a basic epistemic problem of other minds – we can never know for sure that other humans or animals are conscious – but we infer that other minds exist from the similarity of their biology and behavior to our own. Most omnivores extend moral concern to our non-human pet species for this reason. Given how similar livestock animals are to many of our pets, it is reasonable to extend moral concern to them as well. We do not have the same reasons to extend moral concern to plants any more than to rocks or other non-living things. Note that this reasoning might not justify vegan concern for invertebrates, but it certain does so for livestock animals like cows, pigs, and chickens.
Even if we cannot rule out moral concern for plants, vegans can fall back on a claim that we should limit likely harm wherever possible. This thought has an epistemic and moral calculus flavor. From an epistemic perspective, we are certainly less sure of the moral status of plants than we are of non-human animals. Therefore, we should seek to protect animals before plants. From a harm reduction perspective, we are only ever required morally to do what is possible to reduce harm while looking after our own reasonable interests. It is reasonable to continue eating plants, because we must do it to survive, but not reasonable to continue eating animals just to moderately increase our own enjoyment.

I think that more space could be devoted to these replies though I don’t have time to do so now. Even though I think that this argument against veganism is typically given in a disingenuous way, it actually reveals something important about the vegan argument against eating animals. More on that to come.

Eggs for Vegans

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.

A New Series: Animal Rights

I’ve used this space for a number of different topics in the past from general philosophy, to cappuccino reviews, and even a covid diary. Over the next year I’d like to spend time exploring a topic that has come to interest me over the past few years.

To what extent is the raising, use, and killing of animals in agricultural settings unethical?

In order to address this I’ll also explore what we might owe wild animals that we encounter in our daily lives, and how this question relates to our treatment of animals in agriculture.

Most vegans, and to a lesser extent vegetarians and pescatarians, see the typical treatment of animals in agricultural settings to be an atrocious moral wrong that most of us ignore. In fact our society spends a great deal of energy keeping the treatment of animals in agriculture out of sight from the consumers of animal products. If we had to live next to a slaughterhouse or a high-intensity animal feed lot we would likely eat much less meat. Hunting itself is considered uncouth by urbanites even as they enjoy meat on a daily basis. There certainly is a misalignment between the emotions many of us experience when encountered with the harm and killing of animals and our attitudes towards the abstract idea of animal agriculture.

I’m going to start by exploring a possible middle way, but one that many animal rights advocates will think a delusion. I’ll call this the “Whole Foods Omnivore.” This is a person who recognizes the moral wrong in widespread mistreatment of animals in much of animal agriculture, but believes that animal product consumption can be made ethical through the improved treatment of those animals. I think this view is important both because it seems particularly common among a set of individuals who are otherwise quite concerned with animal welfare (at least among pet species) and because it touches on a number of different aspects of animal ethics. For instance, it isn’t obvious whether pasture-raised animals who are treated relatively well have worse lives than similar (non-domesticated) animals in the wild. Is that relevant? Does the condition of wild animals set a baseline above which any domestication project is ethical, even if those animals are systematically slaughtered?

The ethical evaluation of the so called “Whole Foods Omnivore” will touch on a number of important topics in animal ethics. Next I will motivate why this position is appealing and why it seems to overcome some initial objections. Contrary to what an ethical vegan or vegetarian might claim there may be limits on the sorts of lives we owe animals. Or at least that is where I will start. It turns out, I think, that the Whole Foods Omnivore is ultimately benefiting from uses of animals that they would never permit for other domesticated species like dogs and cats, and threatens their own ethical consistency.

Cappuccino Review: Mother Fool’s

1101 Williamson St, Madison, WI 53703

https://motherfools.com/

4* out of 5 (Very Good)

Note that they are check/cash only.

Mother Fool’s was one of the first cappuccinos I reviewed back in 2009. They made a great cappuccino then, so this was certainly a shop that I wanted to get back to for this round of cappuccino reviews. I had a pretty busy end to my summer, but in late July I stopped in to try out their cappuccino again.

Some things haven’t changed at all. It is still a classic Madison “hippie” coffee shop, and one of the few with live music. For a long time they have featured a good selection of vegan baked goods, but the big change since the pandemic is that their espresso drinks are now vegan only as well. It’s a pretty radical move that puts them in a small club nationally. Certainly, I don’t know of any other vegan only coffee shop in Madison (though I’m not vegan, so I might just be unaware).

The lack of whole cow milk left me in a bit of a quandary as far as a review goes. Oat milk was the recommended dairy replacement for a cappuccino, but I can’t say I have ever had it before. And it is also hard to compare the cappuccino at Mother Fool’s with other shops, because whole milk is a central component to a traditional cappuccino’s flavor and texture profile. With all that in mind I’m putting a “*” next to this rating, because it seems a little strange to compare a vegan cappuccino directly to a milk-based cappuccino. But my rating just reflects how much I liked the drink itself, so just take this all at face value.

I had an oat-milk cappuccino and a vegan donut (which I have had before and are great). I was a bit surprised at how good the oat milk tasted in a cappuccino. When integrated with the espresso the oat milk gave the drink a nice “baked-good” taste of caramel and brown sugar. It had a surprisingly neutral creaminess, though the flavor profile certainly was different from any cow milk cappuccino that I’ve ever had. The consistency of the oat milk seemed a bit thinner than whole milk, though not nearly as much as I had expected, and so I’m guessing this hurt the definition of the latte art. That said, the steamed milk still had a good amount of microfoam and a nice consistency.

I still like whole milk more than oat milk, but Mother Fool’s makes a great cappuccino regardless of the type of milk. It should certainly be a destination for any vegan, and also one for non-vegans to check out.

As this is the first coffee shop I’ve reviewed from my 2009 list it is worth noting that the drink they are serving now is likely better than the one I liked so much more than a decade ago. However, the ’10s were a period of pretty dramatic improvement in the Madison coffee culture. Mother Fool’s has certainly kept up, and it will be interesting to see if others have too.