2023-02-01
• no tags • 1348 words
I have been a vegan since I was around ten, and was a vegetarian before that. However, in the past few years (~5 years) I've come to notice veganism is not so simple as it may at first seem. Below are a few of my thoughts.
With certain things in life it is hard to be certain of the view to take, and what course of action is right. I believe an acceptable approach however, is just to take the best option you know of at the time. For the veganism case I can always be assured that, regardless of intricate differences, something akin to veganism is more moral than eating factory farmed meat. And so basically, whilst the below will be arguing over specifics, never make perfect the enemy of the good.
The issue here is rather obvious. Generally, a vegan will be this way due to ethical (don't hurt the animals, dude) or environmental (save the planet, man) reasons. However, there exist circumstances when eating meat may actually help the ethical or environmental situation. For instance, if a piece of meat is to be chucked away, eating it is most moral as it means you will be fuller, thereby requiring fewer crops and saving on insect death (pesticide) and pollution (transport costs/fuel, etc.)
From this we might think, I will simply ony eat meat if specifically it is going to go to waste. More broadly than this, given that meat production is so much less moral than production of veg, it actually becomes a moral imperative not just not to eat meat, but to eat as much meat (as realistically possible) that would have gone to waste otherwise.
Now, a quick thought experiment.
Imagine we could produce meat in a way where there was no suffering (mentally, physically, etc.) to the animal, but which was still utterly terrible for the environment.
Would it be moral/good to consume this meat?
I think generally, the inclination would be to say, it is better, but still not perfect. Not eating meat is not just about the suffering, it is also about the environmental impact, perhaps.
(This assumes we are talking about a person who is vegan for ethical reasons primarily).
In this case, we ought apply a similar logic to plants. There is evil in, for instance, the emissions from the transport of fruit and veg. It behooves us to also eat less in the way of shop-bought veg, and begin to grow our own. I think most people would agree this to be a good way but to say it is good yet not to practice it is just as bad as the 'I know eating meat is wrong, but just chicken tastes soo good'-type meat eater.
And talking of chicken...
How do we deal with eggs?
We used to keep chickens, and I would eat their eggs. We would crush up the shells and feed it back to them after.
Given that we held these chickens, I know them to have had a decent quality of life. The worst that happened to them was they might get a scare from the fox, and unfortunately one did get eaten by the fox. But they didn't get their throats slit, and they got the whole garden to forage about for worms, or dust-bathe. They had a decent life.
I don't think it was immoral to eat their eggs. I never ate an egg with the Red Lion which certifies abuse. These were real eggs.
Now, an abuse we did do was that we fed them worms and oyster shells and the like. Technically no worse than feeding the cat, but even feeding the cat is immoral in an indirect way.
Were we by proxy eating the worms and the oyster shells and so non-vegan? Sure, but even then worms are so underdeveloped I don't think they really count as non-vegan in the same way as a cow does.
The thing is, there is nigh on no suffering here. The chickens don't suffer any real amount more than compared to their version of an idyllic life. The worms and oysters that we by proxy ate are hardly sentient. And there are no major transport costs, etc. except for the delivery of their food. This is no worse than shop-bought veg and the like.
The only objection is to one of feeling: I feel it is not right to eat eggs. But as it goes, it is hardly wrong. Let's extend this talk past chickens now.
Say I kept a cow: I had ample land, and so allowed her to graze and roam some decent-sized plot of it. She had a good life. Maybe I also keep some bulls, and potentially breed her to be larger/more meaty, but not in a way where it makes her life difficult.
When she has calves, I take some of her milk, but ensure never to take so much the calves cannot suckle or at least have some to drink from a container.
Once she has reached a decent age, I lead her away from the plot she is acquainted with and shoot her in the head. She dies instantly, without any pain whatever. There is no abbatoirish stench of blood or background squealing and screaming and so she is prior to moment of death altogether unaware of the fate that would befall her in the coming moments.
This is perhaps the best situation I can think of. There is no suffering to the animal, there is no real environmental concern any more than a cow existing normally, it is seemingly completely fine. As if we have somehow combined these and made a meat which is acceptable to vegan ideas. Though of course any rightful vegan would reject this...
A first objection though is suffering is brought about to the calves who are now without a mother. Presumably there would be other cows about and the calves would have grown up somewhat by the point you kill the cow. But either way, I am not sure I have a good rebuttal to this idea.
Another is that this treatment would still be murder if done to a human. This is true, and again I am not sure about how to deal with this one. I personally feel there is a qualitative difference between human and animal, and that, e.g. to kill a cow is graver than a spider, and graver still is to kill a human, though whether to kill a human is really graver I am not sure. This is a difficult question, and this blog post is quite long already.
However I do just feel that this way of keeping animals, and also of killing and eating them has a certain... quality to it. I call it that as I have recently been reading Robert Pirsig who has a metaphysics of Quality, but perhaps before I would have just called it respect for the animal, and for the general world around.
The questions are difficult and I do not know the answers. I have been playing recently in my head of Quality being the prime distinction, which makes the obviously-ugly factory farm, which is entirely mechanical, and exists for a singular reason (make more meat, more cheaply, at any cost), a purely classical solution, and the romantic idea of eating only veg go together. We can eat the meat, but only where it does not involve the abuse on the scale it does now, and where it is functioning alongside nature, not against it, in defiance of it.
Yet this has issues of its own, and I am not really sure on this Metaphysics of Quality yet. It feels and seems to be everso promising, but I have my doubts still.
So I return to the beginning. Don't make perfect the enemy of the good. Veganism (in some vague, nebulous, sense) is better than at least the factory farming-esque meat that people have the initial visceral reaction against, the ugly kind. It is more difficult getting into the weeds, and dealing with what seems like a more beautiful way. And as for why or what exactly is true? I don't know. I will likely never know. C'est la vie.