Veganism Is Good, Actually
We can judge our progress by the courage of our questions and the depth of our answers, our willingness to embrace what is true rather than what feels good.
Carl Sagan
This post is about my discovery and adoption of veganism. In addition, I provide a short explanation of veganism and introduce the rational basis for a vegan philosophy. I argue not only that veganism is a rational position but also that those who find my arguments convincing should become vegan as soon as possible. Like many vegans, I view animal welfare and the environmental crisis as two of the greatest moral crises of our time, and veganism is one step toward addressing both. My rhetoric is strong and not-at-all subtle, but I recognize the sensitive nature of the topic. Anyone who has questions or feedback is encouraged to leave a comment.
Also, I want to stress that I’m not trying to force my own views on other people. Rather, I’m encouraging others to examine their own views as well as their actions and make sure that the two are in line with each other. I believe that if most people acted in accordance with their own professed values, then most people would be vegan.
My Story
I was a sophomore in high school when one of my closest friends went vegan. In those days, I had very little awareness of unconventional diets and knew almost nothing about veganism. Needless to say, I didn’t understand what it was all about, and I gave in to the popular conception of veganism—as a fad worthy only of scorn and ridicule. So, I joked, laughed, and most importantly, didn’t think much about it—at first.
I had always been a sensitive person, especially toward animals. Although my family never kept pets, I was a very nature-oriented child. I spent my early days roaming the woods, climbing trees, fishing on the lake, and so on. Nature was all around me, and I was disgusted by its destruction at the hands of humanity. A friend of mine once killed a rat, while I begged him not to. This devastated me, and I buried the poor little guy out back, even carving him a makeshift tombstone. I refused to kill bugs. And when my grandma yelled at her dog, my blood boiled with the kind of anger only injustice can provoke.
Still, these feelings only rarely extended to my food. I remember asking my dad once why it was okay to eat animals. He responded that animals can’t feel pain, at least not like humans can. As a child, I guess that satisfied me, as I don’t remember fighting him on this point (and I always shared my opinion, even when I definitely shouldn’t have). Only later would the absurdity of this defense become clear to me.
So, there I was, a sophomore in high school, confronted once again with the opportunity to consider the morality of my food. Although I didn’t take action at the time, nor did I think too deeply about the subject, my friend had planted a seed in my brain that would come to haunt me in the coming years.
I don’t remember the exact timeline, so I won’t pretend to reconstruct my journey from average American carnivore to passionate vegan. But I do remember that three important things happened in my senior year of high school that forever changed my perception of food, animals, and morality.
The first was watching the documentary, Blackfish, in my English class. The film exposed the shocking extent not only of Orcas’ intelligence and social behaviors but also of humanity’s cruelty to these creatures. I learned that Orcas don’t attack humans in the wild but only when driven insane by years of suffocating captivity. The mere fact that Orcas could go insane was revelatory to me, as I had never before considered that an animal had any sanity to lose. Suddenly, animals seemed closer to humans than they had ever seemed before.
The second was researching animal cognition for my school’s Humanities club. This project expanded upon the foundation established by Blackfish. I learned that it is a scientific consensus that all mammals and birds and many other animals are conscious beings who possess awareness and the ability to suffer. I also learned that not only humans and great apes but also other mammals, birds, mollusks, and even fish are capable of making and using tools to solve problems. But most importantly, I learned that animals feel—not in a trivial, input-and-output kind of a way but in the sense that we humans do. At least in the ways that count—they feel pain, mourn their dead, love their children and family, and want to live—they are not so different from us.
And the final was researching the impact of food on the environment. Over the course of my research, I learned that meat production is utterly devastating to the environment, that the Amazon is being razed to make room for cattle and the crops that feed them, that toxins and other pollutants from industrial animal farms leech into the soil and flow into rivers, devastating ecosystems and seriously jeopardizing human health, that dense concentrations of farm animals are breeding grounds for infectious diseases, and much more. In other words, I learned of the nonsensical and frankly absurd inefficiencies and dangers of animal agriculture.
These three events, clustered together over the span of a few months, conspired to overthrow my old views and forced me finally to consider the food on my plate with the same intellectual rigor that I approached the rest of my life with. I’ve always considered myself a rational person, even an especially rational one. But the events of my senior year showed me what a fool I was for thinking that.
Or, rather, the moral awakening that confronted me at the time revealed to me the shortcomings of reason. Reason is merely a tool, and while it is extraordinarily useful at cutting through the superstition and nonsense of human thought, it isn’t any use when it isn’t used (obviously). It is often said that humans are rational beings, and I think this is true. But it’s only true in the sense that we have the capacity to reason. Importantly, we also have the capacity not to reason, which we often exploit so as not to think deeply about the things we’d rather not examine.
In Defense of Veganism
On that note, a common refrain against veganism is that it’s founded on an emotional (i.e. irrational) basis. Vegans are just too emotional, or they love animals too much, or they let their feelings cloud their judgment of things. Nature, critics of veganism say, is cruel and violent. Vegans, on the other hand, have become sensitized to this cruelty by their privileged and sheltered lives, which were given to them by those who weren’t afraid to get their hands dirty. In this view, the vegan is just one more in a long line of so-called weak men who doom the good times that created them.
On the contrary, I argue here that veganism can be a thoroughly rational stance. Although this point has been made a million times before, I’m writing this in the hopes that it can reach even just one person who wouldn’t have given veganism a chance otherwise.
Veganism is often inspired by emotions, yes—by love of nature, animals, and humanity, by hatred of injustice, by compassion and empathy, and so on—but these emotions do not invalidate the position. Rather, they infuse it with much-needed vitality. Veganism, like every movement against injustice, requires passion in order to penetrate the hate, ignorance, and worst of all, the apathy of the masses.
What Is Veganism?
All this talk of veganism is pointless if we don’t first agree on what it is we’re talking about. Veganism, as defined by the Vegan Society, is
a philosophy and way of living which seeks to exclude—as far as is possible and practicable—all forms of exploitation of, and cruelty to, animals for food, clothing or any other purpose; and by extension, promotes the development and use of animal-free alternatives for the benefit of animals, humans and the environment. In dietary terms it denotes the practice of dispensing with all products derived wholly or partly from animals.
So, the vegan doesn’t eat meat, dairy, eggs, or honey. They don’t wear wool, down, or leather. They don’t buy makeup or other products that have been tested on animals. They don’t eat fish or insects. They don’t watch bullfights or horse races. They generally avoid zoos and aquariums. They don’t ride horses. They don’t go to SeaWorld. They don’t hunt or fish. From these activities and many others—the vegan abstains. Of course, individual vegans make their own decisions, but these are some of the behaviors that are generally prohibited by a vegan philosophy.
Before continuing, I would like to stress the line, “as far as is possible and practicable.” Vegans are ordinary people, far from perfect, and they often make mistakes. In addition, individual vegans disagree on the finer details. While these mistakes and nuanced debates are important, they do not invalidate veganism as a movement nor weaken the rational basis for a vegan philosophy. With this in mind, I will mostly ignore them in this post.
That said, veganism is more than just a diet or lifestyle. Veganism is a political act and a form of protest. It is a boycott of an irresponsible, cruel, and reckless industry that inflicts suffering on a never-before-seen scale while fueling the rapid disintegration of the world’s ecosystems. On top of that, veganism is a revolt against the ideology of anthropocentrism—also called human exceptionalism or human supremacy—which has metastasized around the planet like cancer and which is quickly leading us into a very bleak future.
Why Veganism?
Without a rational foundation, all these words are nothing more than smug grandstanding and unearned self-righteousness. That said, let’s examine the rational basis for veganism. Here, I give a brief explanation of the three most popular arguments for veganism: human health, the environment, and animal welfare. I have listed them in order of strength, with the health argument being the one I find weakest and animal welfare the strongest. If you only want to learn about “good” arguments for veganism, you can start with the environment.
First, I should note that there are many arguments in favor of veganism, and although I’ve boiled them down to just three primary arguments here, this post is by no means a thorough exploration of the reasons vegans give for their philosophy and lifestyle. Whole books have been filled with these arguments, and if you’re interested, you should read them. A good place to start is the foundational text for contemporary animal rights activism, Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation. Animal Lib was the nail in the coffin of carnivory for me and the reason I went from vegetarian to vegan during my first year of university.
Argument #1 – Health
I want to get this one out of the way first. Although the health argument is maybe the most commonly circulated argument in favor of veganism, I find it easily the weakest and least convincing argument. In its simplest form, the health argument for veganism goes like this: a vegan diet is healthier than a nonvegan diet, so people who care about their health should be vegan. While this argument is fine for what it is, I think it’s a terrible argument for a vegan philosophy. This makes sense, considering it essentially isn’t an argument for a vegan philosophy. There are plenty of studies that suggest vegan diets are healthier than other diets, so the argument may be sound. But I’ll share a few reasons why I nevertheless find it unconvincing.
First of all, very few people care that much about their health. If the argument is sound, it only shows that people who prioritize their health above all else should be vegan. For other people, it’s pretty much irrelevant. Most people just want to be healthy enough, and that’s certainly possible without being vegan.
For example, the Mediterranean diet has been shown to be very healthy. Even a fairly relaxed diet that incorporates a wide variety of vegetables, legumes, meats, and other ingredients can be healthy. Even if the vegan diet is healthier than these diets, it’s probably not so much healthier that it warrants the practical, financial, and social disadvantages that come with being vegan in most countries today.
Second, if the health argument turned out not to be sound—hypothetically, let’s say some new studies were to find that a Mediterranean diet is healthier—then those who lean primarily on this argument would no longer have a backbone for their veganism.
Finally, and most importantly, this argument relies on the same human supremacy that a vegan philosophy seeks to root out and destroy. It says that human health is the most important factor when deciding what to eat. And while health is definitely important, we have to look at the cost of our health. If a small improvement in health incurred a significant moral cost, then I would say that the improvement would not be worth it (i.e. it’s not moral). For example, if it turns out that including fish in my diet would be healthier, I’m still not going to eat fish. The moral cost is just too high.
My health is important, but so is the welfare of those that produce my food and those that are my food. As long as I can survive and live a reasonably healthy and fulfilling life on a vegan diet, then that is enough.
In other words, there are many healthy ways to live, and each one has a different cost. The healthiest option may not be the one with the lowest cost; in fact, the cost may be unacceptable to us. At the same time, pursuing human health at the expense of and without consideration for the health and welfare of nonhuman animals is just another manifestation of human supremacy.
To be clear, the health argument can still play a role in strengthening the vegan cause and reassuring health-conscious people as they make the leap to a vegan lifestyle, but it can’t stand alone as a core argument for veganism. Fortunately, the following arguments are far stronger.
Argument #2 – The Environment
The environmental or sustainability argument for veganism is much stronger than the health argument. Principally, this is because it relies not on an anthropocentric framework but on an ecocentric one—a framework that takes into account not only human health but also the health of ecosystems. Regarding the health of ecosystems, animal agriculture is irredeemable, at least at the scale at which it is practiced today.
The impact of animal industries on the environment has been explored in detail in both the scientific literature as well as in popular media, so I won’t linger on it here. I may delve deeper into the topic in a later post, but for now I will just make a few comments. First, a vegan diet produces far fewer emissions than any other diet. In addition, animal agriculture is devastating the Amazon, Congo, and Borneo rainforests and destroying ecosystems around the world—all for the sake of a fundamentally inefficient source of sustenance.
By this, I mean that producing meat in nearly every case will be a less efficient use of land and resources than using the land to grow plants. It’s easy to see why when you consider that animals must eat plants, so we’re growing plants either way—only we have to grow far more if we choose first to feed them to animals and then to eat the animals. Also, as mentioned earlier, toxins from industrial animal farms can contaminate soil and water, leading to devastating effects on local ecosystems and human health.
Summed up in a sentence, the environmental argument says that if you care about the environment (i.e. the thing that allows you to survive on this planet), then you should be vegan. Otherwise, your actions are at odds with your beliefs.
This was the difficult realization that I had when I was a senior in high school—that I was a hypocrite—and it hurt a lot to think that I could be so irresponsible and so blind to the harm that I was causing. That said, I decided it was better to admit my faults and commit myself to do better rather than lean on ignorance as an excuse to continue living hypocritically. Of course, I can always do better, but I have never regretted my decision to boycott animal exploitation.
There is more nuance in the environmental argument than I have conceded, so maybe I’ll expand upon it in a later post. For now, I think it is enough to know that a conventional, omnivorous diet is extremely unsustainable for the planet and should definitely be avoided by anyone who claims to care about the environment.
Argument #3 – The Animals
Finally, we reach the most powerful argument for veganism, the animal welfare argument—sometimes called the ethical argument. The ethical argument typically goes something like this:
- It is wrong to cause unnecessary suffering
- Exploiting animals for food, entertainment, materials, or otherwise causes them to suffer
- Humans can survive without animal products, so animal products are unnecessary
- Animal products are unnecessary, so exploiting animals causes unnecessary suffering
- So, exploiting animals is wrong
- Paying someone else to do something wrong is wrong
- So, paying for products that require animal exploitation is wrong
To put it in a more accessible format, we can say that suffering is generally bad, so causing it should be avoided unless there’s a really good reason for it (i.e. it’s necessary). When we look at animal agriculture, the industry is saturated with the suffering of animals. Agony and torment practically ooze from the walls of factory farms.
Chickens are packed in so tight and overfed so much that they can’t open their wings or even walk. Pigs—naturally playful and curious animals not unlike dogs—are kept in tiny pens with virtually zero stimulation, where they go insane. Dairy cows are kept perpetually giving birth, their calves ripped from them immediately and sent to the feedlots. When a dairy cow is spent, she too is sent to slaughter. The atrocities committed on conventional farms are practically innumerable, and I think most people are at least somewhat aware of the suffering necessitated by the steak, bacon, or chicken nuggets on their plates, so I’ll leave it at that for now.
Needless to say, the exploitation of animals, especially according to current industry standards, requires immense, truly unimaginable suffering. And since humans can survive without animal products, this suffering is unnecessary and very, very wrong—a stain on our legacy and an utter embarrassment for a so-called civilized and moral species. Although most of us aren’t beating, forcefully impregnating, and slaughtering animals, we are paying others to do these things every time we buy an animal product.
Some try to counter this argument with various “what about…” questions, and I won’t address those here. All I will say is that while some animals suffer more than others, depending on what country they’re in, which farm they’re on, and so on, at the end of the day the truth is that—unless you are absolutely sure that the products you buy, wear, and eat do not cause unnecessary suffering, and I’m not sure how you could be sure of that—you should almost certainly be vegan.
The real world is gray, sure, but the more I learn about these industries the more cartoonishly evil they seem. There are nuances at the fringes, but the core thrust of veganism is certainly grounded in reality, reason, and most people’s moral views regarding animals.
To highlight the moral absurdity and hypocrisy of animal agriculture, I’ll ask a simple question: Why is it that when some news story comes out about a dog being left in a parked car somewhere, millions of people lose their minds, but when tens or hundreds of millions of cows and pigs, billions of chickens, and countless other animals are given the most miserable lives imaginable and then slaughtered every year, the vegans are the crazy ones? There’s no biological basis for prioritizing the well-being of dogs over, say, pigs. It’s completely arbitrary, and it truly doesn’t make any sense.
Sometimes I think the world has completely lost its mind, but—more than that—I feel ashamed that I didn’t notice my own hypocrisy sooner. For years, I happily filled my belly with the flesh of animals. Knowing what I know now, I’m appalled at my inability or unwillingness to see the truth that was always right in front of me.
There’s a lot more to be said about the ethical argument, but I think I’ve managed at least to paint it with broad strokes. For those who may not be aware of the conditions on factory farms, I encourage you to do some research or reach out to me. Personally, I hate watching footage from factory farms, and while I think it’s a little cowardly to avoid it, I comfort myself with the knowledge that I am not directly contributing to the suffering in those places. If you are similarly repulsed by violence against animals, then the easiest way to sleep at night is to go vegan as soon as you can. In addition, the mere fact that an animal wasn’t raised on a factory farm doesn’t mean that it lived and died free of suffering. In the end, if we really don’t want to cause animals to suffer, then we should stop paying people to kill them, regardless of the conditions in which they lived.
Next Steps
In my view, the arguments above make a very strong case for veganism. Anybody who is persuaded by these arguments and has the power to control their diet should transition to a vegan diet immediately, in a careful and responsible way—not because I or any other vegan is telling you that you must but because your own values demand it. Much is at stake. If you ever decide that these and other arguments for veganism no longer persuade you, then you are free to change your mind. However, until then, you have a moral imperative to boycott the animal agriculture industry as well as any products that require the unnecessary suffering of sentient beings. Stop contributing to something you know is evil.
If, however, you are not convinced by these arguments, then I encourage you to keep researching the topic. You can even reach out to me, and I would be glad to discuss the issue with you. With so much at stake, it is imperative that we be very careful about what we put in our bodies and which industries we support, whether or not we are vegan.
For those who are convinced but are not in control of their own diet, I sympathize with your situation. I first became a vegetarian when I was still living at home with my family, and it caused conflict, for sure. Knowing what I now know, I probably would have done things differently back then. There are many guides online that you can read to help deal with this situation, but my brief recommendations are: introduce the idea of veganism slowly and compassionately, as you feel comfortable; engage in thoughtful and two-sided conversation (try to reach a common understanding); and focus on doing what you can when you can. You’re in a tricky spot, and ultimately what you buy and eat may not be up to you. Just do the best you can.
Final Thoughts
Some have criticized the vegan movement for being too focused on individual rather than collective action. I believe this criticism is baseless. Beyond the collective goals and initiatives undertaken by vegan organizations, there is a more fundamental flaw to this criticism. Yes, it is based on truth—it is primarily collectivities that are ruining the planet and destroying animal wellbeing, be they corporations, governments, or otherwise. However, we are individuals, and we must do something. This isn’t an imperative—it’s an empirical observation. As Jean-Paul Sartre famously noted, “We are condemned to be free.”
In other words, at the end of the day I must act. Every second, in fact, I act. I choose. Although I am only an individual, and I alone can’t determine the behavior of society, I am nevertheless required by my very nature to act. This fact can’t be avoided—indeed, even inaction is a kind of action.
So, I am an individual who must act. And I must act in accordance with my values, or else—what’s the point? If I don’t act in accordance with my values—if I shy away from my own nature as a subjective being with values and a will—then I’m nothing more than a train car with no engine, forever being pushed along someone else’s tracks.
But all of this is beside the point—that the meat, dairy, egg, and other animal industries are quickly destroying the natural equilibrium that we rely on to survive and flourish; that these industries are intrinsically based on the ruthless exploitation of feeling beings; and that if we continue to support these industries with our money, then we are complicit in all of it. Fundamentally, veganism isn’t about morality, virtue, or being true to oneself—it’s not about us—it’s about ending the unnecessary suffering that we humans inflict on billions of animals every year.