It’s rare one finds such a delightful cocktail of ignorance and arrogance as one does when they encounter the large percentage of the population that sneers at vegans. Vegans are mocked routinely for not participating in the worst industry ever, one that causes tons of animal cruelty. The thing that’s especially amusing about those that sneer at vegans is severalfold. For one, they seem totally unaware of the relevant literature. One can find lots of people sneering vegans, yet philosophers never seem to.
They also seem totally unaware of what actually goes on in factory farms. When one is aware of what goes on, it becomes abundantly clear that they’re indefensible. The position that one shouldn’t pay for pigs to be forced into gas chambers and live their entire lives in feces or for baby chickens to be ground up in blenders isn’t an extreme position — it’s obvious to anyone with even a modicum of sense or decency.
Then, one hears the arguments they use to dismiss vegans. These arguments are insanely idiotic, belying the fact that the speaker is either sufficiently cognitively impaired that they can’t argue for eating animals based on animals’ limited cognitive ability without endorsing a principle that permits being eaten themselves or has never spent more than two seconds pondering the issue. Whichever is the case seems irrelevant — they think they’re fit to pontificate on a subject that’s mostly settled in the minds of serious philosophers after thinking about it for only two seconds.
The arguments that they make are always obviously fallacious. For example, they’ll appeal to nature, while being unaware of why no philosopher takes that seriously. Lots of things that are natural are terrible like smallpox, cancer, rape, murder, and dying at a young age, while other unnatural things are good like toilet paper, industry, computers, and much of medicine. Also, the way we eat meat in the modern era isn’t natural.
Or sometimes they’ll point out the fact that we can eat meat and have molars to eat it, while providing no argument for why that exonerates it. Even if, for example, there was some appendage that we evolved to make rape easier, that would not justify rape. Causing tons of unnecessary suffering isn’t justified just because we evolved to do it.
Then, the people will often go off in a weird, rambling way, responding to absurd arguments that vegans virtually never make. For example, they’ll point out that they think humans matter more than animals. Vegans virtually never deny this. However, just because entity A matters more than entity B does not permit entity A to eat entity B. Einstein matters more than most people, but he shouldn’t eat people. It’s not a choice between people and animals, it’s a choice between pleasant taste for people and horrific agony for animals.
The lack of self-awareness is baffling. The critics of veganism will come in swinging, before making a series of elementary logical errors so foolish that one wonders how they don’t realize they’re making them. And then they act like vegans — who argue that we shouldn’t cause tons of suffering for trivial reasons — are the extreme ones. This is not to say that there’s nothing debatable about veganism — though I would say that the moral case for veganism is totally obvious to anyone without a warped brain or conscience. It’s merely to claim that if you’re a random person who knows no philosophy opining about veganism, the things you’re saying are probably insanely stupid.
you doing okay? :)