As a vegan and veterinary social worker I am amazed at the amount of judgement that exists among vegans. I have personally experienced my own backlash. For example, one thought very prevalent among some vegans is the notion of diet and health. I am a vegan who has not always been well. I have an autoimmune disease and other physical ailments. Rather than being supported by the vegan community just the opposite occurs. It is as if I have been shunned because I do not have a specific vegan image (I have gained weight due to certain medications)
or being asked “Why do I take or need medication in the first place”?
The notion seems to be that I am somehow doing veganism wrong, because if I were doing it right then I would be the picture of health. As part of my veterinary social work practice I offer vegans and others who are interested in ethical veganism, consultations, and I have found that many of my clients, are saddened that some vegans have trouble extending their compassion to include humans as well. The mentality that veganism is in possession of a magic wand and makes all health issues disappear is unrealistic (and I am by no means denying that some vegans experience improved health). However, there are many vegans who would like to be at the forefront of advocacy but simply put, do not “look the part”. We are unfortunately missing out on a more truthful, and compassionate approach—which is to be or become a more kind and welcoming vegan community for all vegans with all of our flaws and imperfections which makes us human and relatable!!
sorry to hear this - both about your health and the response from vegans. we need to be a lot less rigid about all these things. i wish you all the best
People come to veganism from many different angles. For a long time it seems to me that most of the people who became vegan did so because of woo health reasons (other than those who became vegan for the animals).
A vegan diet is generally healthier, however, since veganism is not widespread and is certainly not taught in medical schools, when things don’t go as expected, there is less research and fewer resources for handling them in a vegan compatible way.
This will change once veganism gains popularity, but we aren’t there yet and we need to be supporting as a community rather than judgmental.
Fortunately, a lot of the woo vegans have become (unsurprisingly) ex-vegans, so I expect the community to be kinder going forward.
It was a pleasure having you on for a second interview. It feels like some people think this movement has already reached its final form, I think it's still very much in its infancy. The thinking definitely isn't done!
Great stuff, Tobias. Even if I did have to deal with YouTube to get the whole thing. (Maybe it is a generational thing, but when given the option of spending half an hour listening to something -- while periodically hitting "skip ad" -- that I could read in four minutes, I usually say nah. So consider that high praise about wanting to hear you.)
The only reason I engage in vegan chatting/politicking is you, thanks to a chance discovery (I forget how) of your work a few years ago. I'm not sure if you recognize my name (I would kinda like the answer to be no; I feel sorry for young people today whose every youthful outburst and entire corpus of half-formed thought becomes part of their permanent record). But I was perhaps the closest thing to what you are now during the 1990s, on the internet and on the American vegan conference circuit. To be sure, I lacked the maturity and gravitas that you display (and that I would like to think I have now).
It is utterly remarkable that so many people resist your tactical advice that is so obviously correct. I mean we are not talking cutting-edge or controversial sociopolitical tactics, but obviously correct stuff that everyone has know is correct forever. I mean, I think Saint Paul would have nodded along and thought, "yup, this guy gets it". The simple observation that combative vegan activism has accomplished approximately nil in the last 30 years should, alone, convince them. To say nothing of what all the formal and informal research about persuasion says. Or, well, just knowing something about people.
The last bit of snark points to the fact that your adamant detractors -- like the loudest critics in many other realms -- are not neurotypical. This is not meant as judgment of their worth as people or the legitimacy of anything they might say; I just note it for its explanatory power. Worrying about the source of some micro-ingredient in a food is not devotion to a material cause, it is obsession. It is akin to the behavior and narrow self-obsessed perspective of gym bros, and not at all like the views of community organizers. Many such people lack the ability to empathize, and are so far from understanding people that they do not even recognize there is something they are missing. Frankly I am probably less vegan now than I would be had I not dealt with them so much in an earlier life. (And anyone who insists there is no such thing as less or more vegan, or pretty much vegan, is right at the crux of this disconnect with the vast majority of people.)
I can understand a trolley-problem type of deontological self-focus if presented with the question, "if by taking up a standard meat-centered diet yourself, you would cause 10 people who were destined to eat that diet for the rest of their lives to become vegan, would you do it?" I can understand why someone's sense of deontology or personal purity might cause them to say no, even though it pained them a bit to do so. (Maybe for 50 too. However, if they insisted on not giving up their personal purity if the stakes were a billion others changing, it would be pretty clear that they do not actually care about any external impact they are having.) There is a second order analysis of the trolley problem that says that even if your deontological notions say that you would not pull the lever, if there is any consequentialism in you at all, and you are watching someone else standing at the lever, you should hope they pull it. Analogy: Someone might say "I'm afraid I just could not bring myself to eat that lasagna, but I am glad that Tobias did so because that is clearly what is best for the cause."
One thing that occurred to me while struggling through listening to real-time chatting (jk!) was that you are dealing with (as I dealt with in an earlier life) people who are behaving in a very right-wing manner with regard to ritual and "it is just obvious!!!" purity. I think you may have actually used the term "right-wing". But the community organizing that could advance the cause is by far most likely to appeal to people who lean more progressive on most things. This disconnect itself is a tactical disaster, even apart from the tactical disasters of convincing people it is all-or-nothing, way too unpleasant to bother with, a cult, etc. The people who are most likely to expand their circles of compassion to worry about factory farming or animal well-being beyond that are the ones who are most likely to immediately walk away when they hear the voices of people who sound just like advocates for, say, denying gay people rights.
A few weeks ago, I was lay leading a service in my church (Unitarian Universalist, so a promising target audience for messages about compassion and circles of concern), and slipped in five minutes about how it is remarkable that people who [...various things about vehemently fighting for the excluded and downtrodden...] would blithely eat factory-farmed food just because it is a bit more convenient, cheap, and/or comfortable. The next week, my son was leading the service and reinforced and added some points about this. Neither of our services as primarily about that topic, but it fit in well. Or perhaps sneaked in well. I have no idea what out material impact was, and probably never will for sure. But I would speculate that those few minutes, with those mild and encouraging remarks that we optimized for the audience, accomplished more than the lifetime accomplishments of any of the people who were calling you "traitor" and such.
Thanks Carl, for your kind words and interesting thoughts (your name does ring a bell but I can’t exactly place it).
I have to say i do not know if there are many people who take such critical and quite black-and-white views. Maybe they are just the loudest. But even if that’s the case, it’s problematic (and actually I think the case is that there are a sizeable number of them).
I think the “not neurotypical” angle (without any judgment indeed) is interesting, although i don’t think one has to be not neurotypical to be very strict about one’s diet. It is really the way we are thought it when we start being vegan, myself included. Today I wouldn’t explore all the additives and e-numbers on a packaging - I think it serves little purpose, but I did in the past. And today I still will not easily make larger exceptions than that. I don’t think it harms animals, but still there’s something psychologically appealing to the consistency (within reason).
Thanks for the reply. I agree that the loudest are not necessarily representative, but they can still make things rather uncomfortable -- especially for potential converts.
There is a lot of appeal in bright-line consistency. I wrote a couple of model-based papers about this point a while ago. (Elevator summary: It is easiest to be at a stable local maximum, in terms of what you have decided to choose, rather than living life on the sloping part of a maximization curve, where you are constantly having to choose whether to move a little bit up or down.)
I like your trolley essay. In that context, my main thought translates into someone saying "I just couldn't eat the steak, despite the assessment that I could convert the result into worldly net benefits, but I hope someone offers that choice to Tobias and he takes the money, because I am confident it would put it to good use."
Following up after thinking more here, have you (Tobias or anyone reading this) every collected responses to what I think is an interesting and real-world thought experiment: If you as a vegan had a meat dish put in front of you by accident (the damage from factory farming and such is done), and you knew with certainty that the food would just be discarded and destroyed if you did not eat it (so no attenuation of the damage is possible, by possibly displacing someone else's future eating of other meat), would you eat it? To make this as clear-cut as possible, let's posit that you are quite hungry and have no alternative available (say, on an airplane), believe it would be aesthetically appealing to eat, and would not cause you any physical distress from eating something your body was not used to.
It seems to me that a "no" at that point is a self-centered (personal purity) statement, not one about consequences. Even my son, who is more vegan that I am, says he would say yes. But perhaps there is another argument.
To take this one further, embellish the thought question with: you thought you had been served a close-imitation veggie burger like Beyond, and you have eaten a bite or two of it, and are then informed it was accidentally actually a beef burger. Would you finish eating it? Now perfect spiritual (or whatever) purity is off the table for the day, but there is still room for purity of deliberate actions or some such.
I think these are probably more revealing about someone's motivational morals than the "getting paid" scenario, which brings up complexities of effective giving and such. And it really happens sometimes.
assuming that one is indeed not disgusted, i think for many vegans there still would be something like respect or whatever at play for many vegans (respect for the animal). Like, if no one would see you damage a human body somewhere on a cemetery, and no one is harmed, you probably wouldn't do it either. Not exactly the same, but I assume similar things are at play. I would agree there's no harm done in your examples, but i guess our morals are not always rational. I might do it if really really hungry, or if i get paid for it and can donate the money. I guess that's not entirely rational, but so be it :-)
I wasn't trying to argue for a particular judgment with what I said, though I realize it might have come across that way because of an "well, I know what *my* answer would be" vibe. Or perhaps I seemed to be condemning personal purity motives, when really I was just trying to sort them out from consequentialism. I was genuinely interested in what the views about it might be among people you know.
I get your point, that some vegans would feel it was a desecration. So that is another sensible candidate reason for refusing. Interestingly, speaking for just my personal feelings, reasoning along those lines would push me in the other direction: something like, it honors what the animal endured better to consume it's body, make use of it, rather than to just put it in the bin. But, to be sure, that is my own feeling and I totally understand the hypothesized feeling that cuts the other way.
I definitely was not trying to suggest that morals that do not follow some official rule, like putting material consequences above all else, are dubious.
hi carl, it's hard to say but i'd assume most vegans wouldn't eat it, under the premise you describe.
you're right, for some people this sort of sanctity argument could work the other way. my guess is there's also something going on like: even if this wouldn't harm anybody, i've abstained for so long now, i'm not going to break that pattern.
(This is an interesting exercise i think: it shows how also with vegans there might be not-so-rational arguments at work, just the way there are with non-vegans)
I think the first point to make in response to this sort of question is that “what would I do?” is a poor proxy for “what would be morally better?” Generally morally good people do morally suboptimal things for many reasons. One of these reasons is occasionally that the slightly good action carries strong associations with something that’s generally very bad.
It is sometimes a proxy. Sometimes looking at one is a learning tool for assessing the other. But in this case it was neither. I was specifically asking what people would (say they would) do, or what Tobias thought they would. It was for purposes of drilling down to motivations.
To put your comment in the context of responding to my question, I read you as saying "some people would reason that it was morally neutral to go ahead and eat the food (as the realistic thought-experiment was designed to be, for standard consequentialist morals), or perhaps even slightly morally good by those standards, but would forgo doing so because that act has much in common with something that they consider morally bad." That is indeed a candidate motivation, and I suspect is often the case.
I do not see much daylight between this motivation and the personal purity motivation I posited as the main such family of motives. It is not "I will not desecrate the temple of my body with this" personal purity, but it still is about abstaining from something because it feels bad personally even though you could not translate those feelings into a coherent argument that someone else should not do so.
Thank you for addressing this important topic, Tobias. The critisicism within the movement has bothered me a lot. Mostly because I see it as a waste of energy to criticise practices or opinions that are relatively close to your ideologies, instead of spending it on changing people that are very far from it. We don’t have the privilege to criticise “imperfect” vegans in this massively animal consuming world. The debate among vegans often seems to be more about identity rather than our shared goals and strategies to create a better for world for animals. In my 17 years of being vegan, I have sometimes eaten non-vegan products, and experienced that it is hard to confess and justify that towards other vegans. If I already struggle with the criticism from other vegans for not being perfectly vegan for 100% of the time, what effect will that approach then have on meat-eaters that are probably not even interested in going vegan?
I love the world of difference between the Substack comments and the YouTube comments!🤣 These two platforms definitely attract very different kinds of audiences.
And for the record, I totally agree with what you’re saying. I have also been very annoyed with the black-and-white, dogmatic thinking that assails so many in the vegan community. As a community, we should definitely be striving to emulate the scientific method and come into things without any prior commitments as to what will be the most effective strategy for liberating animals. We should be relying on evidence to give us this ever-evolving picture on how best to accomplish our goals. We definitely don’t have all the answers, and anyone pretending to is full of themselves.
YouTube audience can be a selection bias, as I think David has built up an audience of black-and-white thinking audience based on his earlier content, but know that I and others appreciate and see the value in what what you do, Tobias!
thanks Oscar. yes, there's quite some difference audiences among the vegan/animal movement, and probably in part they follow different channels. I'd be really interested to know what share the more "rigid" ones (to use david's term) represent... Sometimes I don't know if it's worth addressing them and their concerns, other times i think it's highly important. I'm unsure.
Well done, Tobias and David. You both know this already, but I'll be one more voice reminding you that you have a large and growing community around you, trying to put our egos aside every day to focus on practical progress in the midst of vystopia. Om mani padme hum, brothers.
We’re all on a journey and we cannot force the revelation on others that eating sentient beings is morally wrong. Self-righteousness and indignation denies the complexities of being human and, in fact, the interdependence of all living beings.
All activists I know are for the end of speciesism, since we want more activists shouldn't we talk about speciesism?
You say that veganism isn't a goal, but you say you do what you to orient people into a more vegan way so you are still thinking with the veganism consumerist concept. Shouldn't we think about creating not more consumers but more people who have the political opinion that we have to abolish animal agriculture? Animal agriculture will be abolished the day where a majority is for a ban on animal agriculture, so we have to increase the number of citizens who are in favour of this political claim.
I think that’s a very valid path that should be tried in parallel with what i’m suggesting, yes. The “consumerist boycott” is not about the boycott per se, but to increase demand for vegan products, so that it becomes easier to eat vegan, so that it becomes easier to change your mind about animals (i’ve written this out much more extensively in my book).
People who want to vote against animal agriculture do not need to be vegan - this is another reason why it could be observed that we’re over-emphaszing the importance ov veganism.
How could we highlight more speciesism in our work?
And don't you think that you can highlight it more too in yours?
Like you said people don't need to be vegan to be for the end of animal agriculture, but they also don't need to be vegan to be opposed to speciesism. The majority understands when you explain to them that speciesism is an ideology that tries to justify the neglect of the lives and interests of animals and that it is wrong to do so.
I'm glad there is room for these conversations and wise people like you and David to keep us thinking about what strategies are best to reduce animal suffering. So... thank you!
As a vegan and veterinary social worker I am amazed at the amount of judgement that exists among vegans. I have personally experienced my own backlash. For example, one thought very prevalent among some vegans is the notion of diet and health. I am a vegan who has not always been well. I have an autoimmune disease and other physical ailments. Rather than being supported by the vegan community just the opposite occurs. It is as if I have been shunned because I do not have a specific vegan image (I have gained weight due to certain medications)
or being asked “Why do I take or need medication in the first place”?
The notion seems to be that I am somehow doing veganism wrong, because if I were doing it right then I would be the picture of health. As part of my veterinary social work practice I offer vegans and others who are interested in ethical veganism, consultations, and I have found that many of my clients, are saddened that some vegans have trouble extending their compassion to include humans as well. The mentality that veganism is in possession of a magic wand and makes all health issues disappear is unrealistic (and I am by no means denying that some vegans experience improved health). However, there are many vegans who would like to be at the forefront of advocacy but simply put, do not “look the part”. We are unfortunately missing out on a more truthful, and compassionate approach—which is to be or become a more kind and welcoming vegan community for all vegans with all of our flaws and imperfections which makes us human and relatable!!
sorry to hear this - both about your health and the response from vegans. we need to be a lot less rigid about all these things. i wish you all the best
People come to veganism from many different angles. For a long time it seems to me that most of the people who became vegan did so because of woo health reasons (other than those who became vegan for the animals).
A vegan diet is generally healthier, however, since veganism is not widespread and is certainly not taught in medical schools, when things don’t go as expected, there is less research and fewer resources for handling them in a vegan compatible way.
This will change once veganism gains popularity, but we aren’t there yet and we need to be supporting as a community rather than judgmental.
Fortunately, a lot of the woo vegans have become (unsurprisingly) ex-vegans, so I expect the community to be kinder going forward.
It was a pleasure having you on for a second interview. It feels like some people think this movement has already reached its final form, I think it's still very much in its infancy. The thinking definitely isn't done!
Great stuff, Tobias. Even if I did have to deal with YouTube to get the whole thing. (Maybe it is a generational thing, but when given the option of spending half an hour listening to something -- while periodically hitting "skip ad" -- that I could read in four minutes, I usually say nah. So consider that high praise about wanting to hear you.)
The only reason I engage in vegan chatting/politicking is you, thanks to a chance discovery (I forget how) of your work a few years ago. I'm not sure if you recognize my name (I would kinda like the answer to be no; I feel sorry for young people today whose every youthful outburst and entire corpus of half-formed thought becomes part of their permanent record). But I was perhaps the closest thing to what you are now during the 1990s, on the internet and on the American vegan conference circuit. To be sure, I lacked the maturity and gravitas that you display (and that I would like to think I have now).
It is utterly remarkable that so many people resist your tactical advice that is so obviously correct. I mean we are not talking cutting-edge or controversial sociopolitical tactics, but obviously correct stuff that everyone has know is correct forever. I mean, I think Saint Paul would have nodded along and thought, "yup, this guy gets it". The simple observation that combative vegan activism has accomplished approximately nil in the last 30 years should, alone, convince them. To say nothing of what all the formal and informal research about persuasion says. Or, well, just knowing something about people.
The last bit of snark points to the fact that your adamant detractors -- like the loudest critics in many other realms -- are not neurotypical. This is not meant as judgment of their worth as people or the legitimacy of anything they might say; I just note it for its explanatory power. Worrying about the source of some micro-ingredient in a food is not devotion to a material cause, it is obsession. It is akin to the behavior and narrow self-obsessed perspective of gym bros, and not at all like the views of community organizers. Many such people lack the ability to empathize, and are so far from understanding people that they do not even recognize there is something they are missing. Frankly I am probably less vegan now than I would be had I not dealt with them so much in an earlier life. (And anyone who insists there is no such thing as less or more vegan, or pretty much vegan, is right at the crux of this disconnect with the vast majority of people.)
I can understand a trolley-problem type of deontological self-focus if presented with the question, "if by taking up a standard meat-centered diet yourself, you would cause 10 people who were destined to eat that diet for the rest of their lives to become vegan, would you do it?" I can understand why someone's sense of deontology or personal purity might cause them to say no, even though it pained them a bit to do so. (Maybe for 50 too. However, if they insisted on not giving up their personal purity if the stakes were a billion others changing, it would be pretty clear that they do not actually care about any external impact they are having.) There is a second order analysis of the trolley problem that says that even if your deontological notions say that you would not pull the lever, if there is any consequentialism in you at all, and you are watching someone else standing at the lever, you should hope they pull it. Analogy: Someone might say "I'm afraid I just could not bring myself to eat that lasagna, but I am glad that Tobias did so because that is clearly what is best for the cause."
One thing that occurred to me while struggling through listening to real-time chatting (jk!) was that you are dealing with (as I dealt with in an earlier life) people who are behaving in a very right-wing manner with regard to ritual and "it is just obvious!!!" purity. I think you may have actually used the term "right-wing". But the community organizing that could advance the cause is by far most likely to appeal to people who lean more progressive on most things. This disconnect itself is a tactical disaster, even apart from the tactical disasters of convincing people it is all-or-nothing, way too unpleasant to bother with, a cult, etc. The people who are most likely to expand their circles of compassion to worry about factory farming or animal well-being beyond that are the ones who are most likely to immediately walk away when they hear the voices of people who sound just like advocates for, say, denying gay people rights.
A few weeks ago, I was lay leading a service in my church (Unitarian Universalist, so a promising target audience for messages about compassion and circles of concern), and slipped in five minutes about how it is remarkable that people who [...various things about vehemently fighting for the excluded and downtrodden...] would blithely eat factory-farmed food just because it is a bit more convenient, cheap, and/or comfortable. The next week, my son was leading the service and reinforced and added some points about this. Neither of our services as primarily about that topic, but it fit in well. Or perhaps sneaked in well. I have no idea what out material impact was, and probably never will for sure. But I would speculate that those few minutes, with those mild and encouraging remarks that we optimized for the audience, accomplished more than the lifetime accomplishments of any of the people who were calling you "traitor" and such.
Thanks Carl, for your kind words and interesting thoughts (your name does ring a bell but I can’t exactly place it).
I have to say i do not know if there are many people who take such critical and quite black-and-white views. Maybe they are just the loudest. But even if that’s the case, it’s problematic (and actually I think the case is that there are a sizeable number of them).
I think the “not neurotypical” angle (without any judgment indeed) is interesting, although i don’t think one has to be not neurotypical to be very strict about one’s diet. It is really the way we are thought it when we start being vegan, myself included. Today I wouldn’t explore all the additives and e-numbers on a packaging - I think it serves little purpose, but I did in the past. And today I still will not easily make larger exceptions than that. I don’t think it harms animals, but still there’s something psychologically appealing to the consistency (within reason).
Re your trolley problem example, see this thought experiment. It’s a bit less demanding than yours :) https://veganstrategist.org/2015/02/18/would-you-eat-meat-for-a-lot-of-money/
best wishes
Thanks for the reply. I agree that the loudest are not necessarily representative, but they can still make things rather uncomfortable -- especially for potential converts.
There is a lot of appeal in bright-line consistency. I wrote a couple of model-based papers about this point a while ago. (Elevator summary: It is easiest to be at a stable local maximum, in terms of what you have decided to choose, rather than living life on the sloping part of a maximization curve, where you are constantly having to choose whether to move a little bit up or down.)
I like your trolley essay. In that context, my main thought translates into someone saying "I just couldn't eat the steak, despite the assessment that I could convert the result into worldly net benefits, but I hope someone offers that choice to Tobias and he takes the money, because I am confident it would put it to good use."
Following up after thinking more here, have you (Tobias or anyone reading this) every collected responses to what I think is an interesting and real-world thought experiment: If you as a vegan had a meat dish put in front of you by accident (the damage from factory farming and such is done), and you knew with certainty that the food would just be discarded and destroyed if you did not eat it (so no attenuation of the damage is possible, by possibly displacing someone else's future eating of other meat), would you eat it? To make this as clear-cut as possible, let's posit that you are quite hungry and have no alternative available (say, on an airplane), believe it would be aesthetically appealing to eat, and would not cause you any physical distress from eating something your body was not used to.
It seems to me that a "no" at that point is a self-centered (personal purity) statement, not one about consequences. Even my son, who is more vegan that I am, says he would say yes. But perhaps there is another argument.
To take this one further, embellish the thought question with: you thought you had been served a close-imitation veggie burger like Beyond, and you have eaten a bite or two of it, and are then informed it was accidentally actually a beef burger. Would you finish eating it? Now perfect spiritual (or whatever) purity is off the table for the day, but there is still room for purity of deliberate actions or some such.
I think these are probably more revealing about someone's motivational morals than the "getting paid" scenario, which brings up complexities of effective giving and such. And it really happens sometimes.
Any thoughts?
assuming that one is indeed not disgusted, i think for many vegans there still would be something like respect or whatever at play for many vegans (respect for the animal). Like, if no one would see you damage a human body somewhere on a cemetery, and no one is harmed, you probably wouldn't do it either. Not exactly the same, but I assume similar things are at play. I would agree there's no harm done in your examples, but i guess our morals are not always rational. I might do it if really really hungry, or if i get paid for it and can donate the money. I guess that's not entirely rational, but so be it :-)
I wasn't trying to argue for a particular judgment with what I said, though I realize it might have come across that way because of an "well, I know what *my* answer would be" vibe. Or perhaps I seemed to be condemning personal purity motives, when really I was just trying to sort them out from consequentialism. I was genuinely interested in what the views about it might be among people you know.
I get your point, that some vegans would feel it was a desecration. So that is another sensible candidate reason for refusing. Interestingly, speaking for just my personal feelings, reasoning along those lines would push me in the other direction: something like, it honors what the animal endured better to consume it's body, make use of it, rather than to just put it in the bin. But, to be sure, that is my own feeling and I totally understand the hypothesized feeling that cuts the other way.
I definitely was not trying to suggest that morals that do not follow some official rule, like putting material consequences above all else, are dubious.
Thanks.
hi carl, it's hard to say but i'd assume most vegans wouldn't eat it, under the premise you describe.
you're right, for some people this sort of sanctity argument could work the other way. my guess is there's also something going on like: even if this wouldn't harm anybody, i've abstained for so long now, i'm not going to break that pattern.
(This is an interesting exercise i think: it shows how also with vegans there might be not-so-rational arguments at work, just the way there are with non-vegans)
I think the first point to make in response to this sort of question is that “what would I do?” is a poor proxy for “what would be morally better?” Generally morally good people do morally suboptimal things for many reasons. One of these reasons is occasionally that the slightly good action carries strong associations with something that’s generally very bad.
very well put
It is sometimes a proxy. Sometimes looking at one is a learning tool for assessing the other. But in this case it was neither. I was specifically asking what people would (say they would) do, or what Tobias thought they would. It was for purposes of drilling down to motivations.
To put your comment in the context of responding to my question, I read you as saying "some people would reason that it was morally neutral to go ahead and eat the food (as the realistic thought-experiment was designed to be, for standard consequentialist morals), or perhaps even slightly morally good by those standards, but would forgo doing so because that act has much in common with something that they consider morally bad." That is indeed a candidate motivation, and I suspect is often the case.
I do not see much daylight between this motivation and the personal purity motivation I posited as the main such family of motives. It is not "I will not desecrate the temple of my body with this" personal purity, but it still is about abstaining from something because it feels bad personally even though you could not translate those feelings into a coherent argument that someone else should not do so.
Thank you for addressing this important topic, Tobias. The critisicism within the movement has bothered me a lot. Mostly because I see it as a waste of energy to criticise practices or opinions that are relatively close to your ideologies, instead of spending it on changing people that are very far from it. We don’t have the privilege to criticise “imperfect” vegans in this massively animal consuming world. The debate among vegans often seems to be more about identity rather than our shared goals and strategies to create a better for world for animals. In my 17 years of being vegan, I have sometimes eaten non-vegan products, and experienced that it is hard to confess and justify that towards other vegans. If I already struggle with the criticism from other vegans for not being perfectly vegan for 100% of the time, what effect will that approach then have on meat-eaters that are probably not even interested in going vegan?
This is so needed, Tobias! We can be our own worst enemies.
Thanks, Tobias!
If the debate is over, oh boy, are the animals screwed. :-E
I love the world of difference between the Substack comments and the YouTube comments!🤣 These two platforms definitely attract very different kinds of audiences.
And for the record, I totally agree with what you’re saying. I have also been very annoyed with the black-and-white, dogmatic thinking that assails so many in the vegan community. As a community, we should definitely be striving to emulate the scientific method and come into things without any prior commitments as to what will be the most effective strategy for liberating animals. We should be relying on evidence to give us this ever-evolving picture on how best to accomplish our goals. We definitely don’t have all the answers, and anyone pretending to is full of themselves.
YouTube audience can be a selection bias, as I think David has built up an audience of black-and-white thinking audience based on his earlier content, but know that I and others appreciate and see the value in what what you do, Tobias!
thanks Oscar. yes, there's quite some difference audiences among the vegan/animal movement, and probably in part they follow different channels. I'd be really interested to know what share the more "rigid" ones (to use david's term) represent... Sometimes I don't know if it's worth addressing them and their concerns, other times i think it's highly important. I'm unsure.
Well done, Tobias and David. You both know this already, but I'll be one more voice reminding you that you have a large and growing community around you, trying to put our egos aside every day to focus on practical progress in the midst of vystopia. Om mani padme hum, brothers.
thank you J. "In th emidst of vystopia" is very true indeed.
We’re all on a journey and we cannot force the revelation on others that eating sentient beings is morally wrong. Self-righteousness and indignation denies the complexities of being human and, in fact, the interdependence of all living beings.
All activists I know are for the end of speciesism, since we want more activists shouldn't we talk about speciesism?
You say that veganism isn't a goal, but you say you do what you to orient people into a more vegan way so you are still thinking with the veganism consumerist concept. Shouldn't we think about creating not more consumers but more people who have the political opinion that we have to abolish animal agriculture? Animal agriculture will be abolished the day where a majority is for a ban on animal agriculture, so we have to increase the number of citizens who are in favour of this political claim.
I think that’s a very valid path that should be tried in parallel with what i’m suggesting, yes. The “consumerist boycott” is not about the boycott per se, but to increase demand for vegan products, so that it becomes easier to eat vegan, so that it becomes easier to change your mind about animals (i’ve written this out much more extensively in my book).
People who want to vote against animal agriculture do not need to be vegan - this is another reason why it could be observed that we’re over-emphaszing the importance ov veganism.
How could we highlight more speciesism in our work?
And don't you think that you can highlight it more too in yours?
Like you said people don't need to be vegan to be for the end of animal agriculture, but they also don't need to be vegan to be opposed to speciesism. The majority understands when you explain to them that speciesism is an ideology that tries to justify the neglect of the lives and interests of animals and that it is wrong to do so.
Shouldn't activists participate in the World Day For the End of Speciesism (30 August - every year the last saturday of August)?
I'm glad there is room for these conversations and wise people like you and David to keep us thinking about what strategies are best to reduce animal suffering. So... thank you!