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The Vegan's Dilemma

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 April 2020

Donald W. Bruckner Open the ORCID record for Donald W. Bruckner [Opens in a new window]
Donald W. Bruckner*
Affiliation:
Penn State University, New Kensington
*
Corresponding author. E-mail: donald.bruckner@psu.edu
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Abstract

A common and convincing argument for the moral requirement of veganism is based on the widespread, severe, and unnecessary harm done to animals, the environment, and humans by the practices of animal agriculture. If this harm footprint argument succeeds in showing that producing and consuming animal products is morally impermissible, then parallel harm footprint arguments show that a vast array of modern practices are impermissible. On this first horn of the dilemma, by engaging in these practices, vegans are living immorally by their own lights. This first horn can be avoided by assuming that morality requires not minimizing harm, but only keeping the harm of our actions within some budget. On the second horn, however, we recognize that there are many ways of keeping our harm footprints within budget other than through our dietary choices. On the second horn of the vegan's dilemma, therefore, veganism is not a moral requirement.

Type
Article
Information
Utilitas , Volume 32 , Issue 3 , September 2020 , pp. 350 - 367
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2020

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References

1 Bruckner, Donald W., Small-Scale Animal Agriculture, in The Routledge Handbook of Animal Ethics, ed. by Fischer, Bob (New York: Routledge, 2019), pp. 198–210CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 See Bruckner, Small-Scale Animal Agriculture, pp. 200, 203, 205.

3 While the assumption that we ought to minimize harm is usually implicit in harm-based arguments for veganism, sometimes it is explicit. For instance, Michael Allen Fox claims that “one of the guiding ideals of ecologically informed thinking is that we ought to minimize the harmful impact of our lives . . . on the biosphere” and that this principle of “minimizing harm . . . certainly seems to be about as basic a moral principle as can be imagined” (Vegetarianism and Planetary Health, Ethics and the Environment, 5 (2000), 163–74 (p. 166).

4 DeGrazia, , Moral Vegetarianism from a Very Broad Basis, Journal of Moral Philosophy, 6 (2009), 143–65 (p. 155)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 DeGrazia, p. 150.

6 DeGrazia, p. 147.

7 Hooley, Dan and Nobis, Nathan, A Moral Argument for Vegetarianism, in Philosophy Comes to Dinner: Arguments about the Ethics of Eating, ed. by Chignell, Andrew, Cuneo, Terence, and Halteman, Matthew C. (New York: Routledge, 2016), pp. 92–108 (p. 99)Google Scholar.

8 Hooley and Nobis, p. 93. For another argument in this spirit, which is supposed to appeal only to weak assumptions everyone accepts, see Engel, Mylan, The Commonsense Case for Ethical Vegetarianism, Between the Species, 19 (2016), 2–31Google Scholar.

9 Singer, Peter, Animal Liberation (New York: Harper Collins, 1975)Google Scholar.

10 Other instances of this argument form include Tristram McPherson, Why I am a Vegan (And You Should Be One Too), in Philosophy Comes to Dinner, ed. by Chignell, Cuneo, and Halteman, pp. 73–91; Fox, Vegetarianism and Planetary Health; Ben Bramble, The Case Against Meat, in The Moral Complexities of Eating Meat, ed. by Ben Bramble and Bob Fischer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), pp. 135–50; Stuart Rachels, Vegetarianism, in The Oxford Handbook of Animal Ethics, ed. by Tom L. Beauchamp and R. G. Frey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 877–905; Singer, Peter and Mason, James, The Way We Eat: Why Our Food Choices Matter (Emmaus, PA: Rodale, 2006)Google Scholar.

11 Versions of this response have been offered by Norcross, Alastair, Puppies, Pigs, and People: Eating Meat and Marginal Cases, Philosophical Perspectives, 18 (2004), 229–45 (pp. 232–33)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Singer, Peter, Utilitarianism and Vegetarianism, Philosophy and Public Affairs, 9 (1980), 325–37 (pp. 335–36)Google Scholar; Kagan, Shelly, Do I Make a Difference?, Philosophy and Public Affairs, 39 (2011), 105–41 (p. 124)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and DeGrazia, p. 158.

12 Norcross, p. 233.

13 Complicity arguments for veganism have been offered by Julia Driver, Individual Consumption and Moral Complicity, in The Moral Complexities, ed. by Bramble and Fischer, pp. 67–79; Adrienne M. Martin, Factory Farming and Consumer Complicity, in Philosophy Comes to Dinner, ed. by Chignell, Cuneo, and Halteman, pp. 203–14; and McPherson, Why I am a Vegan, pp. 83–85. For a sophisticated examination of complicity arguments, see Mark Budolfson, The Inefficacy Objection to Deontology: What it is, Why it is Important, and How to Respond to it, Version 2.6, unpublished manuscript, <http://www.budolfson.com/papers/BudolfsonDeontologyFactoryFarms.pdf> [accessed 19 December 2019].

14 Another reply is skeptical and claims that one does not act wrongly by participating in a collectively harmful practice when one's participation does not make a difference. Nefsky, Julia surveys the state of the debate more broadly in her Collective Harm and the Inefficacy Problem, Philosophy Compass, 14 (2018), 1–17Google Scholar.

15 This first horn of the dilemma may be seen as a sort of demandingness objection, so that part of the contribution of this article is to point out that this popular and influential argument that veganism is obligatory has to confront this well-known objection.

16 Bruckner, Small-Scale Animal Agriculture, p. 206.

17 Mark Budolfson is the first philosopher (of whom I am aware) to give serious consideration to the human worker harm associated with various vegan staples. See Mark Budolfson, Consumer Ethics, Harm Footprints, and the Empirical Dimensions of Food Choices, in Philosophy Comes to Dinner, ed. by Chignell, Cuneo, and Halteman, pp. 163–81 (pp. 164, 168, and 171–72) and Budolfson, Mark, Food, the Environment, and Global Justice, in The Oxford Handbook of Food Ethics, ed. by Barnhill, Anne, Budolfson, Mark, and Doggett, Tyler (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), pp. 67–94 (pp. 88–89)Google Scholar.

18 Okin, Gregory S., Environmental Impact of Food Consumption by Dogs and Cats, PLoS ONE, 12 (2017), 1–14 (p. 7)CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

19 Michel, Kathryn E., Unconventional Diets for Dogs and Cats, Veterinary Clinics of North America: Small Animal Practice, 36 (2006), 1269–81 (pp. 1275–77)CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

20 The work that started much of the conversation about harm to field animals among philosophers is Davis, Steven L., The Least Harm Principle May Require That Humans Consume a Diet Containing Large Herbivores, Not a Vegan Diet, Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics, 16 (2003), 387–94CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For the state of the discussion on field animal harm at present, see Fischer, Bob and Lamey, Andy, Field Deaths in Plant Agriculture, Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics, 31 (2018), 409–28CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

21 One author who can be read as making this response is Lomasky, Loren, Is it Wrong to Eat Animals?, Social Philosophy and Policy, 30 (2013), 177–200CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

22 Oliver Klimek, The Environmental Impact of Alcoholic Drinks Production, Dramming: Everything Whiskey (August 22, 2014), <http://www.dramming.com/2014/08/22/the-environmental-impact-of-alcoholic-drinks-production/> [accessed 19 December 2019].

23 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Alcohol-Related Disease Impact (ARDI) Application, (2013), <www.cdc.gov/ARDI> [accessed 19 December 2019].

24 For the accounting, see Bruckner, Donald W., Gun Control and Alcohol Policy, Social Theory and Practice, 44 (2018), 149–77 (pp. 164–65)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

25 Working as a professor (rather than in social services, for example) seems like a failure to benefit rather than a harm. Yet, some have argued that some failures to benefit are indeed harms (Feit, Neil, Harming by Failing to Benefit, Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, 22 (2019), 809–23CrossRefGoogle Scholar). Moreover, philosophers employing the harm minimization argument for veganism often treat failures to benefit as on a par with harms, for example, in failing to use agricultural land more efficiently by producing more food to benefit humans rather than food for animals that humans then consume. Space precludes exploring these and other complications.

26 Thanks to Bob Fischer for this point and this way of putting it.

27 Mark Budolfson also rejects harm minimization arguments (though for different reasons) and introduces the idea of a harm budget. See Budolfson, Consumer Ethics, p. 167. Budolfson's work emphasizes the self-defeat of veganic harm minimization reasoning in support of a veganic diet, because a careful omnivorous diet has a lower harm footprint than typical vegan diet. By contrast, my emphasis is on the overgeneralization of harm minimization to other modern lifestyle practices more generally.

28 See The World Bank, Fertility Rate, Total (Births per Woman), <https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.TFRT.IN> [accessed 19 December 2019].

29 If we continue to the next generation, one will be 50% responsible for one's child's 50% responsibility for her child's 50% responsibility for 1.7 children, or (0.5)(0.5)(0.85). A little mathematics shows that if we continue indefinitely, the total number of humans one is responsible for producing by having just one child is (0.5) + (0.85)((0.5) + (0.5)2 +  (0.5)3 + . . .) = (0.5) + (0.85)(1) = 1.35 humans.

30 Thanks to Bob Fischer for helping me see this point about the size of one's harm budget and for raising the objection immediately following.

31 I said in 3.2 that my argument here does not depend on any assumptions about allocating the harm of procreation, but here I am allocating the harm of a person's child to the parent, which may not be warranted if my response to the objection there does not succeed. But I need not allocate all of the harm of a person's child to the parent here. The reasoning here will go through even if we only allocate to the parent the harm footprint of the child until the child reaches the age of majority, say.

32 An anonymous referee raised this objection, using many of these same words.

33 Again, thanks to an anonymous referee for this objection.

34 Thanks to Bob Fischer, Doug Portmore, Travis Timmerman, and anonymous referees for helpful written feedback and to Lynne Dickson Bruckner and Andrew Fenton for discussion. Thanks also to the participants at the conference ‘The Future of Protein’ at the University of Ottawa in October 2018 for discussion.