As a moral philosopher maybe I live in a bubble where I feel more uncomfortable than other people when my actions depart dramatically from my considered beliefs. I’m not saying moral philosophers are necessarily more ethical than the average person. And I’m not saying other people don’t have strong moral convictions. I’m suggesting that maybe we feel worse when we’re inconsistent. In general, philosophers, especially analytic philosophers like I am, don’t like inconsistency. Logic and reason are really our bread and (vegan 😊) butter.
There is a lot of resistance to the idea that people should make changes to their eating based on ethical considerations. Like, people say they object to animal cruelty, and yet they support it every time they make an omelette (even a “Sydney” omelette from the Bear–just a side note about this: you can put crushed potato chips on Just Egg or on “omelettes” made of chickpea flour or silken tofu just as easily). I’m not a psychologist, but clearly there must be some compartmentalizing going on if so many really great people are unmoved.
I wonder sometimes whether people know and don’t care. Or whether they care about animal cruelty but don’t really believe it takes place in factory farming. Maybe people think that cruelty can’t possibly be an industry standard, that the animal products in supermarkets must come from producers that conform with sector-wide animal welfare guidelines and therefore they must be okay? Or maybe they don’t think about it at all? And that’s why vegans are more unpopular than anyone else (a BBC article about “anti-vegan bias” says “research has shown that only drug addicts inspire the same degree of loathing”).
Hank Rothenberg is a social psychologist leading the study. His work focuses on answering the question: “How do we continue to eat meat” when the mounting evidence and arguments suggest strongly, at least in the Western world, that it “is bad”? In particular, he is curious to get to the bottom of “how do people rationalize” continuing to eat meat in the face of the evidence and arguments, “and still feel like they’re a good person?” At bottom, he suggests, it requires a lot of mental gymnastics and people have about 15 different strategies for not reconciling their actions with what we are coming to understand about the meat industry as it exists today. He calls it “the meat paradox” and believes it is rooted in a type of cognitive dissonance (the holding of two incompatible views).
People have a whole arsenal of strategies, says Rothenberg. The strategies include: “pretending that meat has no link to animals, imagining that we eat less of it than we really do, wilful ignorance about how it’s produced – helped by the cartoons of happy farm animals that we’re exposed to from childhood – and only eating meat from animals which are ‘humanely’ farmed.” Vegans derail those strategies, so people don’t like vegans for that reason.
So it’s not that ethical reasons aren’t compelling. They are. But the ideology of meat-eating and the consumption of non-human animals for food holds strong. Rothenberg shares my view that there is an ideology at play, and that helps to explain the extreme resistance. There is also strength in numbers. It’s hard to see what could possibly be wrong with something almost everyone does daily, casually, and as a normal part of life.
Of course, vegans aren’t perfect either, and self-righteousness turns people off. But the very presence of a vegan, even one who isn’t saying a word and isn’t being all self-righteous, makes people feel judged, defensive, and even hostile. When you read the research about cognitive dissonance and the many strategies people employ to maintain it, including despising vegans, it’s easy to lose hope for change.
There is a lot more to say about these issues, and I am working on ways of introducing reflection in ways that invite rather than shut down conversation. As I’ve said many times on the blog, it’s hard to do when moral reasons (about harm to animals and harm to the planet) lie at the core of the matter.
What we can garner from the research is that compelling reasons aren’t necessarily motivating. This is not new information to moral philosophers, who have long been concerned with how to close that gap between moral reason and moral motivation. The psychology about how actively people employ strategies to avoid closing the gap go a long way to explaining why it is so difficult to do. Nonetheless, it continues to be an individual and collective project well worth the effort, even when not done perfectly.
Vegan Practically 
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