hilll.dev

veganism

11 min read

In this blog post, I talk about bestiality, not because I’ve practised it or have any personal interest in it,but because I believe it’s important to bring up in order to make a point about moral consistency. If you don’t like to think about bestiality then imagine that every time I mention it that I’m instead talking about kicking puppies.

What being vegan means to me

I don’t contribute to the animal product industry, but that doesn’t mean I can’t consume animal products. For example, I’ll eat animal products to avoid food waste, finishing someone else’s meal, for instance, or use bones from a butcher if they’re given to me for free. Roadkill would also be acceptable in theory.

I can wear second-hand leather. I don’t go to the zoo. I don’t have pets, and if I ever did (or had children), I’d only provide them with vegan food. If you think that’s immoral, I understand where you’re coming from. I haven’t researched whether a plant-based diet is sufficient for pets or children. I’ve decided to have neither children nor pets for now.

Why I’m vegan

  • I’m more than 50% certain that animals deserve moral consideration.
  • I’m reasonably confident that future generations will look back on the animal industry like we now look back on the slave trade. Though I admit this is a weak argument, since future societies might be as well be aliens from our perspective.
  • I try to live morally consistently. Lots of people are disgusted by the idea of eating a dog or cat, yet think nothing of eating calves, pigs, or birds. That’s inconsistent.
  • Most people think raping an animal is immoral, but eating one is fine. That’s also inconsistent. You can argue that one correlates with sociopathy while the other doesn’t, but I’m not interested in reasons for why we should allow one but not the other, but instead in their moral value.
    • If you think both are acceptable, I respect your consistency even though we disagree.
    • If you think one is okay and the other isn’t, I think you’re being hypocritical.
  • also Health and Environment reasons, but I want to explore moral reasoning here

The “animals eat animals, so why can’t I?” argument

  • Humans are capable of moral reasoning. Animals are not.
  • This is an appeal to nature fallacy.
  • Animals also have sex with or rape other animals, should we also rape animals?

The “animals would kill use though” argument

  • You’re not an animal that kills to survive so comparing yourself to them or using them as ethical role models makes no sense.
  • Livestock animals are herbivorous and are in Captivity, and represent no threat to you whatsoever.

I’m not vegan can we still be friends?

Yes, most of my friends are not vegan and for lot’s of them I’m the only exposure to vegan philosophy. I also was not a vegan for most of my live, because I was convinced I didn’t need to value animals. I will not shame you, it’s your decision and your moral framework at the end of the day. But I will be sad about what you’re doing and I will disagree with it.

I agree with you but I’m not vegan because

I want to eat animal products

I know veganism is inconvenient, but I have more respect for people who realise that they’re acting hypocritical than people who try to deny it. I hope that fake meat science will advance and anyone who wants to can eat ethical meat.

I believe that my individual actions will have no effect

fair enough, similar to voting your individual actions don’t have any effect but at the same time we as a society need to make sure that people don’t believe that and go vote anyways. so if you’re in this camp, do you vote in elections? if yes why?

vegan food tastes bad

I disagree, but even if I didn’t enjoy vegan food, I would still eat vegan because I value life more.

how will I get my protein/nutritional balance?

it’s not that difficult, I challenge you do a little research to see what supplements you actually need.

it’s unhealthy

Even if I believed that veganism was unhealthy, which I don’t, I would still be vegan. I do things that are bad for me all the time because I want to act morally, for instance I don’t lie, cheat, steal, litter and scam everyday even though those things could provide benefits to me.

I’m vegetarian

The egg industry kills about billions of male chicks because they are useless to the egg industry. In most of the world I believe they are either shredded or gassed. When you buy eggs you’re paying for an industry that kills animals, so I would argue that most egg sources are not vegetarian.

The milk industry separates calves and their mothers directly after birth, inducing large amounts of stress on both, and then keep the mothers artificially lactating.

There’s more very bad practices in both the dairy and egg industry that you can look up yourself or scroll down to the section where I list a bunch of facts about factory farming and sources.

I disagree with you because

some animals deserve some moral consideration some of the time

If you think horses, dogs and cats deserve to live happy lives, but pigs and cows can be killed then I truly don’t understand you.

torturing sheep and eating sheep is not the same thing

ok let’s say I like to hear animals squeal when I kick or stab them, I enjoy the sensation of the sound. You would call me a bad person. Now if we change the sensation from hearing to tasting does that make the suffering any different? Someone responded to me saying that not all pleasure is created equal, I would respond by saying that if I enjoy torturing animals more than you enjoy eating them, does that make me morally superior? there shouldn’t be any difference in killing an animal because of the way it sounds or because of the way it tastes. Please don’t make the argument that you’re not personally killing the animal, it doesn’t make it better and I can just change the hypothetical to paying other people to kick puppies instead of doing it myself.

animals deserve no moral consideration

Ok. I can empathise with this view point because I held it since I started thinking about philosophy for the first time until I first became vegan, it’s possible that I’m wrong about having empathy for animals. But I wonder how with this view point infants or the mentally handicapped qualify for moral consideration. What if there was another enlightened Species? it’s easy to imagine a species so far advanced and above us that from their perspective we wouldn’t deserve any moral consideration. If there was a Species to which we were like cattle would they be in the moral right to enslave us? I think not.

animals are happy in captivity.

this was sent to me as feedback: “they live in pens, have no predators, they are able to fuck, they get fed, they get better treatment than in the wild in terms of care, they are free of diseases, it really isn’t that bad. They live a better life than some people in the world live”

I didn’t plan on diving into the details of factory farming, but since more than one person responded to me with blatantly wrong factual statements, I felt the need to talk about it, if you already know about this or you just care about the moral philosophy feel free to skip this part.

let’s address each claim:

now if you read all this and say “we’ll I just won’t eat factory farmed meat” then I refer you to the rest of my blog post

What about the people who would lose their job if everyone went vegan?

jobs have no inherent value, if they did we could just pay people to do things, like you could pay me 10€ per hour to just stand somewhere and do nothing and it would have created one new job. but no one pays me to stand somewhere so clearly jobs don’t have inherent value, but instead people provide value to society through their jobs, if everyone who works in the animal industry loses their job then I hope we have socialist policies for them to fall back on, just like I would hope for people in any other industry.

Problems I haven’t solved

What do vegans value?

  • If it’s more life, should I have as many children as possible?
  • If it’s less suffering, should I give away all my possessions and devote my life to doing good?

I haven’t figured these things out yet.

What about honey?

Are free range eggs from a local farm fine, since they are by-products? here the answer seems no.

If everyone suddenly went vegan what should we do about the animals in captivity right now? Certainly we can’t kill them and process them as a sort of last batch, but releasing them into the wild for which they are clearly unfit to survive also seems wrong.

What about wild animal suffering, should we kill all predatory animals, should capture and protect all aimals that would suffer otherwise? the answer to all of these seems to be no. But if we really value less suffering then we can’t just ignore suffering of wild animals just because it’s “natural”, remember natural doesn’t mean good. Children getting bone cancer is also natural but it’s not good.

I have more research to do on these topics.

Also I think the word humane slaughter is a misnomer, humane would be the absence of slaughter.

If you have something to say, something you want me to add, or something you want to argue about then email my at veganism [at] hilll [dot] dev

There are more conclusion and parallels to be drawn here, particularly to natalism, AI CSAM and abortion, I will write about those topics in the future.

note for kaj: I don’t care about what’s legal or not and what is a societal norm or not. Responding to me with, “Bestiality is not accepted by society but meat eating is therefore one is okay and the other one isn’t” is not useful to anyone. I’m writing this because I’m interested in drawing parallels and exploring the moral implications of actions that are commonly viewed as acceptable but from my standpoint should not be viewed as such. If your world view denies the existence of morals then you shouldn’t engage in moral discussions like this one but more broader discussions.

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