Debunking Half a Dozen Ridiculous Anti-Vegan Talking Points

Non-vegans have no good arguments on their side

When confronted with the horror of the meat industry and the fact that they’re paying for vast amounts of suffering for trivial reasons, people often, as part of a strange and perverse intellectual defense mechanism, vomit out a bizarre orgy of terrible defenses of eating meat. This pattern has been borne out over and over again—it’s as certain as death and taxes.

Most of these arguments are so bad that they take a sentence or two to refute. Here, I’ll refute them in droves. This will be a relatively short article, because these arguments are too idiotic to require much time to refute.

1: Eating meat is fine because it’s natural.

This argument relies on a bizarre perversion of reasoning. For one, lots of things are natural but bad; for example the following things are natural but bad: torture, starvation, dying at a young age, being eaten alive, not using technology, having tribalist prejudice, and slaughtering neighboring tribes. Even if you think those things aren’t actually natural, if they were natural, they’d still be bad. There’s a reason the appeal to nature is widely seen as a fallacy, not as a source of legitimate reasoning. Additionally, even if this argument is sound, it wouldn’t justify factory farms, which are unnatural.

2: IT’S THE CIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIRCLE OF LIFE

The circle of life describes that there are predators and prey and the predators eat the pray. Thus, it is claimed that this justifies eating animals.

Problem: the mere existence of the circle of life is merely descriptive—it doesn’t justify anything. The mere fact that stronger animals tend to eat weaker animals doesn’t justify whatever we want to do. Might doesn’t make right.

To illustrate this, let’s imagine that there was a different species that resembled paralyzed humans. For centuries it had been a ciiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiircle of life—we attack them with chainsaws. It’s the circle of life: they eat plants, we attack them with chainsaws. This reasoning thus justifies attacking beings exactly like paralyzed humans with chainsaws—it is thus not a good argument.

It also would justify strong aliens torturing us all to death—they conquer weaker creatures; it’s the circle of life.

As Gary Yourofsky says “no, it’s the circle of torture and death.”

The circle of life argument, if formalized would resemble the following.

1. There’s a circle of life where strong animals eat weak animals.

2. If there’s a circle of life where strong animals eat weak animals, it’s okay to eat from factory farms.

3. Therefore, it’s okay to eat from factory farms.

Problem: 2 is obviously false. There is no conceivable argument for 2. Even if this somehow exonerated general eating of meat, it certainly doesn’t exonerate factory farms.

3: Animals eat animals so we can eat animals.

This has a lot of problems.

1. The fact that a being does something doesn’t justify us doing it to them. For example, it’s wrong to torture in the cruelest ways imaginable those who torture others.

2. Most of the animals we eat are vegetarians. The fact that other animals eat meat certainly doesn’t justify us eating the animals that don’t eat meat.

3. It’s certainly wrong to do horrible things to beings after bringing them into existence if they lack moral concepts. For example, it would be wrong to bring tons of severely mentally disabled giants into existence—giants who would step on lots of humans if given the chance—before torturing them to death, because they’d kill us. It’s sometimes fine to do bad things to those who do bad things, but the reason for that is because they are immoral people who might deserve mistreatment—but it’s certainly wrong to create bad beings that deserve mistreatment just for the purpose of mistreating them.

4. This would justify eating humans, because humans eat animals. If the claim is one can eat an a being if it eats other animals, then it’s fine to eat humans, for humans eat animals. In fact, it would be okay to factory farm humans, because humans factory farm other animals.

4: We can mistreat animals because they are very dumb.

There are lots of very dumb humans, some even less intelligent than animals. It would still be wrong to factory farm them. In fact, human babies are dumber than animals, so this justifies eating them. Now, one might claim that it’s only wrong to harm babies because they turn into adults over time, but this would justify torturing terminally ill babies for trivial reasons.

5: If you were on a desert island would you eat a pig to survive?

Yes, but I’m not, so I don’t need to eat pigs to survive. You can think

1. Animals are less important than humans.

2. It’s wrong to cause thousands of animals to be tortured in the worst way imaginable on factory farms over the course of your life for taste pleasure.

6: But plant agriculture also kills animals.

1. Plant agriculture kills far fewer animals, in far less horrible ways.

2. Animals eat plants—thus, if you want to minimize plant agriculture deaths, you should avoid meat. The chart that I linked finds literally every animal product causes more deaths from plant agriculture—by causing the animals to eat plants—than every plant product.

3. Plant agriculture doesn’t produce the types of torture chambers that factory farms do. Even if the deaths were similar, the conditions are much worse.

If anyone else has any anti-vegan arguments they’d like me to reply to, feel free to post them in the comments.

These arguments are pretty standard. While none of them are made by serious philosophers, they’re worth refuting, because they’re among the most common anti-vegan talking points.