The Vegan Imperative

The Vegan Imperative

Animals, Humans and the Future of Life

by J. C. Bradshaw

[Updated 13/09/2017]
Most recent updates in red.

Introduction

Our planet is the only one we know where life exists.  There are trillions of others in our vast and almost entirely inaccessible universe.  Perhaps billions of these are teeming with life too - with millions of lifeforms much like those here on earth - or on thousands of other worlds with life unimaginably alien: but, at least for now, we are alone.  It may be this way forever.  Perhaps the universe had no beginning.  So it may have been this way forever already.

Every living creature is what it is because its ancestors adapted to the world as they found it, and survived to pass on its genes to another generation.  With each generation life continues this process, without any apparent purpose or end other than to perpetuate itself.  While life tends to diversify into ever more complex species, its essential drive remains always the same: to exist.  The meaning of life is life itself.  A recent development is the discovery by the human species that came to exist through this process, of the existence of that process, which we call "evolution".  From a certain perspective, the scientific discovery of evolution could be said to be the most significant moment in the history of evolution itself.  As Richard Dawkins assets in the opening of his seminal work, The Selfish Gene, "If superior creatures from space ever visit earth, the first question they will ask, in order to assess the level of civilization, is 'Have they discovered evolution yet?'"  If horses had gods they would look like horses, quipped Xenophanes - and when evolutionary biologists imagine aliens, they imagine alien evolutionary biologists.  Perhaps this anthropomorphism of any extraterrestrial tourists advanced enough to have mastered interstellar travel to the point where it can be used for satisfying casual intellectual curiosity is facetious - in any case, we may have to master it ourselves in order to ensure our very survival - but the point stands.  The discovery of evolution by any species, anywhere, is something very special indeed.  This is the moment in history at which life becomes aware of the process by which it came to be at all.  It is the beginning of a new kind of collective consciousness.

Human beings have not adjusted well to this.  For most of our history, our sense of place in the world has depended upon the idea of being somehow unique as a species, both on the earth and in the grander cosmic scheme of things.  We are hardly to be blamed for this.  Time was when the cosmos was much, much smaller, with we and the world we lived on right in the centre.  It was a comforting perspective, rigid and all-encompassing - a 'worldview' we call such a thing today - manifest in every aspect of life, personal and political, literal and metaphorical.   The world was thought to be fixed in space with the "heavenly bodies" (the sun, moon and what we now know to be planets like ours) revolving around us - a fact not merely demonstrating but also expressing our unique status as created beings made, as Church and Culture taught, "in the image of God".  As above, so below.  Simple and certain and written in the stars.

Slowly, in human terms - but quick as a flash relative to the multi-billion year history of the universe - this worldview became unstuck.  Darwin's theory of evolution was only a part of that process, and by no means the beginning, nor the end of what we call 'modernism'.  Ideas have no real beginning as such: in some, not quite Platonic, sense, they have always been there.  Sometimes it seems to be luck, historical accident, that an idea finds expression in the work of one person at one time; other times, just as mysteriously, an idea seems to emerge out of the cultural ether, with congratulations (or blame) owing to no-one.

One such idea is veganism.  This is defined as the refusal, by humans, to use non-human animals for purposes other than their own.  This includes the use of their bodies as a source of nourishment, either after death (as "meat") or while still alive (as with eggs, milk, honey and other bodily excretions).  It also extends to their use (alive or dead) as commodities: a source of labour, in any form of captivity, as  subjects of scientific experiment, or for any other purpose that they would not willingly consent to, regardless of their ability (or lack thereof) to express that consent.   The foundation of this idea is that of non-human animals as persons - that is, as subjects with the capacity for experience, for pain and pleasure, an ability to choose, to have any kind of subjectivity at all.  In other words, veganism is the claim that there is no categorical distinction between homo sapiens and animals of other species that has any bearing on their value as individuals.  Accordingly, animals are endowed with inalienable rights in just the same way and for just the same reasons that we say that homo sapiens - the species you and I happen to belong to - are.  Increasingly, this is coming to be understood as "an idea whose time has come".  This book asks the questions of how and why it might have taken so long to arrive; and now that it has, where we might go next.



[...]


For the past twenty-five centuries or so, the Eurasian, monotheistic, 'Abrahamic' religious humans of the Western world found their place as one link in a 'great chain of being'.  Everything else in the cosmos - a created order whose structure and purpose was manifestly self-evident - found its place there too.  First link in the chain was Almighty God; the transcendent, perfect, immaterial creator of all things. Next came the spiritual beings - the angels and the demons who would speak for God (or his adversary) and influence the lives, for good or ill, of the beings on the next link down: human beings; or, "man" - us.

Below man came the animals; and "below" is what they were, in every sense of the term. In the words of the 13th-century Roman Catholic giant St Thomas Aquinas, animals are "dumb" - they, "neither understand nor reason..[A]ll animals of the same species behave alike" and within them, "there is no craving after perpetuity of being except in the form of perpetuity of the species".  In no sense are animals what we would call individuals.  One cow, chicken, or horse is indistinguishable from any other cow, chicken or horse. Through the famously dry process of Scholastic philosophizing, Aquinas took these (now demonstrably false) observations as sufficient reason to assert a categorical distinction between human beings and every other species. Since animals have no conception of immortality, such a privilege will not be granted to them.  Human bodies, by contrast, while as mortal as those of animals, are possessed of an immortal and immaterial soul, in which consists their connection to the immortal and immaterial God who created them. Human beings sit comfortably above every other species in the cosmic pecking order. The suggestion that animals might enjoy the same spiritual privileges as humans - specifically, entry into heaven after death - is enough to stir controversy among Catholics even today. [1]


[...]


One consequence that remains prescient for many people is the effect of the theory of evolution on the religious perspectives that have survived the Enlightenment. While you are unlikely today to hear anyone refer explicitly to the Great Chain of Being in defence of the view that animals do not deserve moral consideration, the idea of the categorically distinct nature of homo sapiens as the only species of moral concern remains implicit even among those who do not profess any religious faith. Among those who do, there is the dogmatic rejection of the theory of evolution known as 'creationism', and which some even try to pass off as 'creation science', though of course any credible scientist will tell you that this is oxymoronic (or just moronic). While the non-fundamentalist majority of Christians are usually only too happy to distance themselves from their dogmatic cousins, however, they remain part of the same family. In the extended family of monotheism and its (dis)contents, adherence to metaphysical religious doctrine may be on the decline (and this includes adherence to the doctrines without which a person could not meaningfully be said to be 'religious' at all) but the underlying philosophical assumptions about ourselves - that we are more than 'just' animals, that history is going somewhere (and for some reason we did not necessarily chose) and therefore that what we do as individual members of our species matters - remain essentially intact. A worldview, a culture, an ideology, a family - these things are never easy to let go, no matter how much they may have hurt or hindered us. The psychedelic 20th century polymath Terence McKenna was fond of describing cultures as being like operating systems - and how often do any of us change our operating systems? Again, who has the time? If it ain't broke, don't fix it, our conservative instincts tell us, glossing over the fact that not being broken isn't a particularly high standard to which we might hold such a thing as the very means by which we engage with reality. "If it ain't broke, upgrade it" might be a better principle by which to navigate through our ever-complexifying world.

Today, when so many of us have little respect for the arbitrary, dictatorial gods of our predecessors, we are more inclined to opt for the more fluid spiritualisties on offer in free marketplace of strange ideas. Only a zealot would have the capacity to declare this phenomenon 'good' or 'bad'. It is what it is. Ideas have a life of their own; like us, they too evolve. Just as with the evolution of biological life, no conscious mind guides this process. It just happens. The purpose of life is to keep on living. Analogously, the purpose of ideas is for us to keep on having them.

What this means, of course, is that there is never a shortage of bad ideas. And as with biological evolution, the success of good ideas is something that manifests itself very slowly, step by painstaking step, with each new generation.

[...]

In this book I argue that veganism, far from being the extreme lifestyle choice that it often portrayed as by its critics, is in fact the inevitable, logical end point of ideals that the we as the inheritors of the Enlightenment already hold. But it is also an issue that runs deeper than logic alone, deeper even than 'morality' in the abstract, rule-oriented sense of that term. To be vegan is a kind of calling, and I mean that in the least otherworldly sense possible. To be vegan is to engage with the world as we now find it: on the brink of possible, even likely, environmental catastrophe. The impact our species has made on the planet has taken us already beyond the 'point of no return' as concerns the ecological price we will have still to pay for technological progress. The global economy that emerged from the industrial revolution cannot be sustained much longer. The assumption that we could continue to extract and exploit the earth's resources indefinitely, without any real restrictions (indeed even the conception of the earth as something that consists of 'resources') is now known to be incontrovertibly, demonstrably false. And yet we continue to run our economies on the same faulty premise.

To be vegan is to accept that we are one species among many, sharing one planet among many, a planet that was not created for us, in a universe indifferent to our presence, with no one to guide our evolution but ourselves, if we so choose, with nothing to give life meaning but the brute fact that we are alive  - and no one to blame but ourselves if the whole project goes apocalyptically, and finally, wrong.

Veganism is rooted in the ideals of individual rights, of the primacy of personal experience against the dominance of ideologies and institutions, and the belief in the possibility of a moral and social progress, rooted in empirical science, that is both collectively and individually beneficial. It is remarkable in that from a philosophical as well as a practical point of view, there are simply no good arguments against it. This, of course, will be a controversial claim for some readers but it is one I think can be given a reasonable and entirely consistent defence.

Veganism is defined as the abstinence by human beings from all animal products. The definition of "animal products" is a little fuzzy but always includes meat and dairy, and usually extends to fur, leather, wool, down and other materials derived from animals that cannot be extracted without killing or harming the creatures concerned. As such, veganism differs from vegetarianism in that while vegetarians make what is essentially a dietary choice (usually motivated by the same factors as vegans) to be vegan is to make a "lifestyle choice". Veganism is a coherent moral stance, whereas vegetarianism is not (or not necessarily). A working definition I use in discussing veganism is that veganism is the refusal to use animals for purposes other than their own, and for the same reasons that we refuse to use human beings for purposes other than their own. I use this definition in the hope of being as explicit as it is possible to be, as well as to invoke the Kantian injunction against of using individuals as "mere means", which found its expression in his Categorical Imperative. The title of this book is an invocation of the same. In so far as we understand animals as individuals (which when arguing for veganism, is the real point of contention) a Kantian-inspired, modernist and secular moral code is all that is required for the acceptance of the vegan imperative. In short, I am against the use of animals as food and property for exactly the same reasons as almost everyone is against the use of humans for those purposes.  To eat meat and to use animal products is wrong in just the same way as cannibalism and slavery are wrong. (Of course, if you don't accept that cannibalism and slavery are wrong, then I have nothing much to say to you, and neither does the rest of the civilised world).



Notes


[1] See, for example http://www.christianpost.com/news/pope-francis-says-theres-a-place-for-pets-in-heaven-while-conservative-catholics-preach-animals-have-no-souls-131124/