Vegan Practically

I’ve just finished reading Ed Winters’s book, This Is Vegan Propaganda: And Other Lies the Meat Industry Tells You (Vermillion 2022). It’s a great book with really good info about the impact of animal agriculture (particularly factory farming) on the animals, the planet, and humans’ health (not just the claim that veganism is a nutritionally healthy diet, but rather terrifyingly in the context of pandemic threat, foodborne pathogens, and antibiotic resistance). I’ll be using the book as a jumping off point for the Tuesday posts for the next little while, and will write a proper review of it soon.

Today I want to focus on one situation that the author describes that I’m sure every single vegan has encountered a lot: the special (or even not-special) occasion where they are the vegan outlier among a sea of omnivores. In the last chapter of This Is Vegan Propaganda, Ed Winters expresses well how the most difficult conversations he has about veganism are with those he loves the most. I have found the same. I can talk all day about it especially to philosophers. I tread more carefully with non-philosopher friends, and most carefully (if I tread at all) with family members. He aptly refers to “walking the tightrope.”

Winters describes a situation that came up for him some years back when he was fairly new to veganism (I assume he was new, given that at the time of writing he’d been vegan for only six years). His grandparents were celebrating their 60th wedding anniversary and had organized a family gathering to mark the occasion. As is the case with almost every celebration where the celebrants aren’t vegan, the meal would revolve around animal products. Winters says that to him it “didn’t seem right that a day of celebration should be marred by the suffering of others” (239).

He describes his grandparents, no doubt accurately, as “the most kind, gentle, and loving people” and yet they were “celebrating such a wonderful event by eating the remains of animals who had lived their lives in abject suffering” (240). He decided that he couldn’t attend the meal but would join his family afterwards. He recognizes that his decision might seem extreme, but imagines instead a meal of “Labrador tartar, …grilled cat with [whale fat gravy], and a cheesecake … made with gelatine from the boiled skin, tendons, and bones of a husky for dessert.” In that case, he asks, “wouldn’t the normal reaction be to voice some sort of objection?” (240).

He didn’t want to normalize the type of meal his family was enjoying by participating in that part of the event in silence. As I mentioned last week, it can feel like sitting silently in a room full of people telling racist jokes. But is that parallel apt?

I go back on forth on this one. I can’t imagine sitting silently in the face of racist jokes. But I often, indeed usually, say nothing when I sit with people eating animal products. In my day to day life I do my best to minimize these occasions. I try to pick vegan or vegetarian restaurants for outings. But it’s not always possible. To avoid sitting with people eating animal products I would have to never eat with some friends or family and I would have to skip almost all social events I am invited to, and all work-related events with catering. As Winters observes, decisions such as his contribute to his own “familial disconnection.”

In my work as a philosopher I have latched onto a really helpful distinction from Cheshire Calhoun’s article, “Responsibility and Reproach.” [Ethics, 99 (2):389-406 (1989)]. There’s a lot of good stuff in the article about how to think about wrongdoing that results from moral ignorance in cases of widespread participation in wrongful social practice. But her distinction between moral ignorance in a normal moral context and moral ignorance in an abnormal moral context is philosophical gold. I probably have used it over the years more even than Calhoun herself has. Though she is more concerned with casually-accepted and practiced sexism in the article, I have long considered the normalization of animal products as food to be an apt example of a wrongful social practice that is not widely recognized as wrong.

Let’s suppose (even though it might be debatable given the evidence) that rather than being wilful about their participation in wrong-doing, people who eat meat and other animal products are instead ignorant that it is wrong. It’s easy to be ignorant that something is morally wrong when “everyone else is doing it.” It’s the vegans who are considered the off-the-charts difficult people in this society. This type of moral ignorance takes place in an abnormal moral context.

Calhoun says: “abnormal moral contexts arise at the frontiers of moral knowledge when a subgroup of society (for instance, bioethicists or business ethicists) makes advances in moral knowledge faster than they can be disseminated to and assimilated by the general public and subgroups at special moral risk (e.g., physicians and corporate executives)” (396). We might offer a third “for instance” as “people who see the wrongness of animal exploitation, cruelty towards animals, and harm to the environment present in factory farming, which makes up 99% of the animal products consumed.” The meat-eating and animal-product consuming folks are the subgroup who are “at special moral risk.”

Calhoun maintains that given that the moral knowledge in this type of context is so specialized (again, we need to be charitable if this is going to hold with respect to consuming animal products), people have an excuse for their moral ignorance. Yes, consuming animal products is morally objectionable, but we can excuse someone for not knowing that because we live in an abnormal moral context with respect to that claim of wrongness (i.e. only a very few people are aware).

Moral ignorance in a normal moral context, by contrast, is not something people easily abide. That’s the “you should have known better” type of moral ignorance that serves as no excuse. In a normal moral context, “the rightness or wrongness of different courses of action is transparent to individuals, where ‘transparent’ does not mean self-evident, but simply that participants in normal moral contexts share a common moral language, agree for the most part on moral rules, and use similar methods of moral reasoning” (396). When some piece of moral knowledge exists in a normal moral context, you are expected to know it.

These bits of moral knowledge could be context-specific. I am not here claiming that the wrongness is itself relative to the context. I’m saying that within the vegan community, for example, it is widely known that eating animal products is wrong. So if you were attending a vegan potluck you wouldn’t put actual bacon in the brussels sprouts–you couldn’t use ignorance as an excuse. But if you’re attending pretty much any other type of potluck, you can expect that no thought has been given to this moral concern about animals or the planet, and that the majority of dishes will contain animal products. In those cases, pace Calhoun, the moral ignorance might excuse the wrongdoing (indeed, most people won’t even realize that there is wrongdoing to be excused).

Let’s assume, then, that ignorance of the wrongness of meat-eating and the consumption of animal products from factory-farmed animals in general (which constitutes 99% of the animal products consumed globally) exists (in circles other than those small pockets of people who are aware) in an abnormal moral context. That means that the people who take part and don’t realize there’s a moral issue at play have an excuse. When someone has an excuse, we don’t blame them. Of course there are debates we could have about whether it’s even an adequate excuse anymore to act like you’re not aware of the horrors of factory or its climate impact. Or we might contest whether the ignorance is “affected” rather than genuine. I’m going to go the charitable route today and say that there are arguments to be made that we still exist in an abnormal moral context with respect to our general attitudes about non-human animals, including considering them as food.

Moral contexts aren’t static. The key goal is to facilitate moral progress, where we shift a context from abnormal (where some piece of moral knowledge is new) to normal (where it’s widely expected that on the relevant issue everyone knows what’s what). We’ve seen this sort of shift. Slavery is no longer morally acceptable. Anyone who holds slaves today is doing something widely recognized as wrong. No excuse to say you didn’t realize. Yet within the past 200 hundred years some of the most “respectable people” owned slaves and didn’t think there was any reason to hide that fact.

We might say the same of racist beliefs and attitudes. Though there are still some circles where racism is freely and explicitly expressed or even applauded, most people understand that it’s morally wrong and wouldn’t admit to being racist. I’m not saying here that racism is resolved and over. I’m saying rather that there is a wide recognition that it’s not okay. Keeping to my own little world of the university for an example, it would be unthinkable to attend an event where people were spouting off racist rhetoric and attitudes. But it’s routine to be at a catered event where the majority of food served is animals. The same goes for my family. Racism is absolutely not tolerated. Eating animals is relished.

Even if it feels similar then — as Winters said, he just couldn’t get it out of his mind that all those dead animals at the centre of the 60th anniversary celebration suffered miserable lives — the racist jokes analogy is not quite right. And the difference turns on the moral context. We are (for the most part) living in a normal moral context with respect to explicit racism (again, I do not deny that racism remains an issue — only that its wrongness is more widely recognized). That means that people who hold, express, and act on racist attitudes are morally condemned for them. They have no excuse.

Sadly, we are living in an abnormal moral context with respect to the consumption of animal products. On this analysis, the very vastness of the widespread enjoyment of such products has generated a moral ignorance that is almost equally widespread. Literally trillions of non-human animals are killed in the food industry every year for human consumption. 70% of the corn and soy we grow is for animal feed. If we buy what Calhoun has argued, the widespread nature of such participation could constitute an excuse.

For now.

Calhoun argues further that to stay silent is to condone. And therefore, she maintains, it’s okay to reproach people even if they have an excuse and are not blameworthy. Over time, as more and more people come to know what is wrong, the context will shift from abnormal to normal.

Now, the 60th anniversary party for your beloved grandparents is not the time to reproach all and sundry. We need to pick the time and place. If Winters’s only two choices were (1) attend the meal and make everyone aware of the horrors of factory farming while they ate or (2) join the family after the dessert had been cleared, then he was right to come later.

My question is what we are to make of the third option? That’s the one we vegans with omnivore friends and family members take all the time: (3) attend the meal and sit quietly eating your vegan option while the genuinely kind, gentle and loving people around us savour dead animals.

Can we do that and then hope for the right occasion to engage in some dialogue? Perhaps not with everyone. But if we are going to be effective we need to learn to navigate these social situations with enough grace to invite future conversations with curious party-goers. It’s a long game. Though it is difficult sometimes, there are strategic reasons to walk that tightrope with the people we love and even with the people we don’t. They are existing in a time and place where the widespread wrongful practice of engaging consumption of animal products is the norm. And that makes it challenging — not impossible but challenging — to think and do something different.