Vegan Practically

In my “about” blurb I mention that the blog is a companion to a book-in-progress. One thing the blog is helpful for is working through some issues I’m having with tone. I realize that food ethics in general raises issues that immediately put people on the defensive. Why so prickly? I touched on this a bit in my post, “Kindness Matters,” where I identified the tension between extending kindness and compassion to voiceless animals, on the one hand, and trying not to put people on the defensive, on the other hand.

This came up again for me this week because my course evaluations (which we now refer to as “feedback”) arrived. I taught a first year ethics course called “Ethics, Law, and Politics,” where we think about a variety of different issues in which there is an ethical angle, a legal angle, and a political angle. For example, we discussed COVID restrictions from all these points of view. We talked about sex work from all these points of view. And we talked about food ethics. It’s a philosophy course, so while we do read some legal documents, case decisions, and refer often to the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, we also read a lot of philosophy. One of the papers I assigned this year was “A Moral Argument for Veganism” by Dan Hooley and Nathan Nobis, from the collection Philosophy Comes to Dinner: Arguments about the Ethics of Eating (editors Andrew Chignell, Terence Cuneo, and Matthew C. Halteman, Routledge 2015). I will touch on the Hooley and Nobis paper in a minute.

One of my students detested the class, and said that in the section on food ethics, I failed to be objective and reportedly told the class they were “terrible people” for eating meat. But even though I can promise you I did not say anything remotely like that, it is clear that this is what this student heard, or at the very least felt. I am not a psychologist, but I think that a couple of things contributed to making the student (and quite possibly others) feel that way that are instructive takeaways for me.

First, I divulged that I am vegan. This was likely my first and biggest mistake. As philosophy professors, we often either let slip or explicitly put on the table what our own views are. But also as philosophy professors, we pride ourselves on being at least moderately objective (most of us recognizing that complete objectivity — “the view from nowhere” — is not humanly possible). I am used to teaching material about which I have a view, and also used to recognizing merit in compelling arguments for positions that are different from mine. Still, knowing that I am vegan and considering the stereotypes people associate with vegans (i.e. that we are militant, angry, and self-righteous), it is clear to me that despite that I am pretty sure I taught this material the same way I taught all the other material, they received as delivered by a militant, angry, and self-righteous vegan.

Second, the Hooley and Nobis paper makes people’s defenses go up right from the title, “A Moral Defence of Veganism.” Though very few students admitted, when I asked the class, that they felt resistant to it from the first time they read the title, that was not my experience when I tried to teach it. The paper’s main argument has two separate steps, the first of which is an argument that doesn’t even conclude that people should be vegan. It goes like this:

Step 1: Raising and Killing Animals for Food Is Wrong

1. If a practice causes serious harms that are morally unjustified, then that practice is morally wrong.
2. The practice of raising and killing animals for food causes serious harms to animals and some human beings.
3. These harms are morally unjustified.
4. Therefore, the practice of raising and killing animals for food is wrong.

When an argument is nicely laid out like this, the majority of philosophers would welcome the opportunity to take it up premise by premise (the premises are claims 1-3) and then consider whether the premises actually yield the conclusion (in this case, claim 4). That is what I tried to do the first day we considered this paper in class. Even students who had never spoken before became vocal and agitated in defence of eating meat. I dare say a fly on the wall of the room would have not pegged me as the angry or militant one that day.

I said, “but we are not there yet. No one is coming to take away your burger. We are simply examining the premises these authors have presented.” My continued insistence, not as a vegan but as a philosophy professor, to get back to the premises at hand, caused the students to want to defend their meat-eating without considering the argument and to interpret me as refusing to consider an alternative perspective.

Upshot: it is really hard to talk about food ethics. People don’t trust seemingly uncontroversial assumptions, such as “If a practice causes serious harms that are morally unjustified, then that practice is morally wrong.” And unless they are ready, they will not want to consider any evidence in support of the claim that “the practice of raising and killing animals for food causes serious harms to animals and some human beings.”

Here I must grant that the students were not all necessarily “ready” to consider these difficult issues that hit so very close to home. They were a captive audience in a philosophy class. Yes they could reasonably have expected a class that would make them think about some of their own attitudes and practices with respect to a number of different issues, but eating is so very much a part of our day-to-day lives. Indeed, an immensely enjoyable part. We are not always open to putting major parts of our lives under the microscope for philosophical scrutiny. (Note that no one was forced to watch any video recordings of animal abuse and torture — we merely read philosophy and the animal care guidelines that govern the Canadian agricultural industry)

There may be no amount of tone-moderation a person who has moral qualms about harm to animals in industrial agriculture can engage in that would avoid “being read” as militant, angry, and self-righteous. There is no way of presenting evidence of the harms that will not elicit discomfort or anger or defiance (indeed, one student said that the segment on veganism made her want to STOP being a vegetarian and START eating meat again). This presents an ongoing challenge as I write my book, in which my goal is to offer a more approachable way into veganism.

On a more optimistic note (for me, anyway), the majority of the evaluations were excellent. The students enjoyed the course and valued the opportunity to think about difficult questions that force them to reflect on their own engagement with the world. One student has become a vegetarian as a direct result of what we studied in class.

It has given me pause, however, about whether I will venture into this topic again in this level of class. Probably not. Instead, I think I will limit the food ethics discussions to food waste, which has always gone over really well as a topic and is also worth thinking about.