The strategy that vegans employ for their cause has bothered me for a while.
1. Vegans often use weak arguments to justify their position.
I am not saying this in defense of animal consumption. I do believe that the ethics of food is more complex and subtle than vegans often portray it. Consider the blog, http://unpopularveganessays.blogspot.com/2009/06/plant-sentience.html . In this article, we see many of the same tired arguments that vegans always use. For example, the criticism that considering plants sentient goes against common sense and science. Here the argument is one based on authority (the same authority that the vegan will later on use an emotional argument to supersede). Perhaps the vegan should read articles on plant intelligence, memory, communication, information centralization, risk analysis, by botanists such as Baluksa, Mancuso, Trewavas and others before making claims on behalf of science. Perhaps the vegan should consider more deeply what sentience is, how it might more likely be a property of a sensory-motor being, such as any cell, and look into the theory of autopoiesis a little more. The problem is this: the vegan chooses what to eat or not eat based on sentience. In order for the vegan to live, he or she must clearly eat. Therefore the vegan must draw an absolute dividing line between what is and isn't sentient. Because humans cannot eat rocks, the vegan must erect this great divide between living beings. They then blind themselves to the vast similarities between kingdoms, and promote speciesist norms, while projecting the belief that they alone maintain a truly ethical position.
Another common vegan argument that the author of the stated blog also replays for us is the famous argument that animals require 10 times their weight in vegetable to produce their own weight. If we all eat just plants, the argument goes, we end up saving 10 (I guess actually 9) times as much plants, so even the non-scientific believers in plant sentience will be more effective in saving plants by eating them directly. It is not often considered that, by killing the animal, the non-vegan is actually preventing it from further consumption of plants. And we gradually realize that the vegan's argument only really works if those animals stop existing!
What is particularly distressing about the said author's arguments are his confounding sensitivity with computational power, his placing computers as ethically closer to humans than plants, and his strange application of the law of parsimony to plant sentience. Applying the law of parsimony leads behaviourists to deny feelings in all living things not just plants. Occam's razor is not a fact about the universe. It is a method to achieve simple scientific theories. There is no metaphysical reason why a simpler theory is a more accurate representation of the universe than any other. But more importantly, there is no reason to assume that there even exist two different theories that have precisely the same explanatory power and effect in the world. There are a lot of studies that would never be conducted and therefore knowledge not produced were we to ignore the possibility that plants are sentient because it is simpler to just consider them reflex machines. What is most disturbing though is the assumption that a tool to produce scientific theory can be used as a tool to make ethical claims. I sincerely hope vegans do not follow this lead.
I repeat: I have nothing against veganism. I just think many vegans use arguments that are not only problematic, they are also actually counterproductive to their own motivations, which are at bottom (I hope) ethical.
2. The manner in which vegans promote their cause often immediately closes off others.
I also believe that many vegans do injustice to their cause because they have such a firm conviction that what they are doing is "right". It is much more attractive for a would-be convert to sense that the vegan is struggling with their own ethical dilemmas, as unsure and falliable and open as anyone else. Ultimately the invitation is to explore morality not to impose specific morals.
Are any of us really sure that we are doing is "true"? Even Gandhi, who put his life on his line repeatedly for what he believed, always proclaimed that the ethical truth was not attainable by mortal humans, and the closest we could get to it was by seeking truth. The act of struggling to find something is what keeps us ethical, not the act of finding it, worshipping what we have found as fundamentally real, and condemning those who aren't in line with what we have found. Vegans might find more supporters if they stopped putting everything in absolute categories and continued trying to figure out what they should do in the world. They often think that they should model their practice and convictions and that they can be a force of change in the world because others will learn from their modelling. Others do learn. But they don't often learn to be vegan. They learn what the vegan is REALLY modelling: fundamentalism, close-mindedness, self-righteousness. And it is with these same three bricks that the nonvegan closes him or herself off to the vegan.
Finally, I want to apologize if you are a humble, open-minded vegan who does not fit the description or use the arguments I have put forward in this blog post. I have nothing against vegans and I actually want to see them educate more effectively. Hopefully by identifying some of the weaknesses in their approaches, they can work to establishing a more ethical and educationally inspirational movement.
