An opinion piece in The Daily Beast by Brian Kateman is making the rounds on Vegan Twitter. The headline - which I understand is not typically chosen by the author - is already provocative: “Veganism Is Impossible, Because People Aren’t Perfect.” His Twitter commentary is also provocative, declaring that “true vegans are imaginary” and that they “don’t exist.”
The response from vegans has gone about as I expected, and can be summarized as “no one ever said that veganism requires perfection.” Others have said “doing your best is all that is required of vegans.”
But it is still fair to ask: what makes a vegan? What counts as “doing your best”? Kateman attempts to provide an answer but in my opinion fails to do so. I want to critique his piece fairly, without the vitriol or assumptions of bad faith that often accompany such discourse. The provocation to assume the worst is certainly there, but is there substance to the position he takes?
I’m not going to do a line-by-line dissection here, but I am going to contrast two statements he makes. First:
If people felt empowered to practice veganism in a way that works for them, without the pressure of being perfect, the result could be a major reduction in animal suffering.
This appears to summarize his position, at least for me. Vegans can be a contentious lot; some in the community are quick to judge first and ask questions later, if ever. Some of us do understand that everyone is at a different place in life, and that the more we attempt to codify veganism as an ethic, the more exclusive it necessarily becomes.
But there has to be a line, somewhere, between a cult of exclusion and an inclusion so broad that it negates the very meaning of the word “vegan.” Every religious, political, cultural or ethical movement is going to face this dilemma. And what Kateman goes on to say crosses the line over into an inclusiveness that I find negating:
For some, veganism might mean abstaining from animal products all year long, except for eating turkey on Thanksgiving. For some, it might mean indulging in some chicken wings on Fridays after a night out, but skipping animal products the rest of time.
I’m afraid this just doesn’t work. Nor does the suggestion, implied throughout the piece, that our inability to avoid participating in systems that harm animals somehow rationalizes these clearly unnecessary “indulgences.” In the piece and on Twitter in the replies, Kateman employs the same talking points that anti-vegans have always employed: crop deaths, of course, but also say taking a drive that results in bugs getting squished or even accidentally stepping on bugs during a walk you didn’t need to take.
We need to be able to make distinctions if we are going to make our way ethically through the world and our lives. We need to be able to distinguish between what is necessary and what is unnecessary, what is avoidable and what is unavoidable, what constitutes direct participation versus indirect participation, what we rationalize versus what our consciences are actually saying to us.
In the case of veganism, we should also be able to distinguish between sentient and non-sentient life. This real and empirical distinction, fraught as it may be with grey areas (especially around invertebrate organisms), has to be central to our discourse. If we are going to argue on secular grounds, as opposed to say, the idea that God made some species worthy of moral consideration and others unworthy, what else can we look to but sentience - the capacity to experience pleasure and pain?
Because sentience exists to different degrees among species (and also within them), I have never liked the word “speciesism” to describe the set of beliefs that rationalize anti-vegan positions. I prefer “anthropocentrism” - the notion that human beings or Homo Sapiens are the only species worth of moral consideration. Sentience is a gradient; it is not exclusive to humans, and some animals possess more than some humans. Some living organisms do not possess it at all. If veganism were just about “life” and not sentience, we would be forced to consider our relationship with bacteria as a moral dilemma. This would obviously be absurd.
I think bearing these distinctions in mind we arrive at a “golden rule” approximating something like this: a vegan holds that it is unethical to directly participate in unnecessary harms inflicted upon sentient beings.
“Direct participation” means paying for products that are the primary products of the CAFO system of abuse, torture, murder and ecocide; it cannot mean paying for any product that uses the byproducts of this system, as they have found their way into countless industries that manufacture things we require to live in contemporary society.
“Unnecessary” means you don’t need it to either physically live, or for a baseline of social participation, by which I mean the ability to have a job, do your job, go to your job, and care for your family or other dependents.
“Sentient” means the capacity to experience pleasure and pain, which requires certain anatomical equipment to existence in a meaningful way. Some of the most intense and divisive debates among vegans take place at the margins of sentience. Insects, particularly bees. Shellfish. Oysters. Some vegans insist that insects are sentient and that consuming them or their byproducts is antithetical to veganism. I will admit that I don’t think the science is conclusive, but I personally err on the side of presuming sentience. I do not condemn as “not vegan” those who do not (which may earn me a condemnation of “not vegan” by some vegans, alas).
So let’s consider Kateman’s examples. Turkey on Thanksgiving? Chicken wings on Friday? If you’ve been paying attention, you should be able to pass this quiz. These acts are not vegan. You cannot “indulge” (a word which denotes unnecessity) in the direct products of the CAFO system of torture and death and call yourself a vegan.
But does that mean I would necessarily scream and yell at and condemn a person who did? If you avoid animal products most of the time, but once in a while “indulge”, I think you are doing better than most of the people out there - but you are not a vegan. I will say “good for you” when you avoid direct unnecessary participation, but I will not pretend that your “indulgence” was somehow earned or justified by your prior abstinence.
Imagine someone in the antebellum United States who owned just one slave. Not a whole plantation full of slaves, complete with thugs armed with whips to maintain compliance, but just one slave. Compare that person to someone who cannot afford clothes unless they buy them made from cotton picked by slaves, or even the regular consumer who wants to live a reasonably comfortable life but can’t do so without the products of slavery. There is no doubt that both the plantation owner and our single slave owner are one side of a line, and that our two consumers are on the other side of that line. The regular consumer is perhaps closer to the line, and could perhaps do without a few of their slave-made products. The poor consumer is nowhere near it. Their participation is indirect and possibly unwilling, and would choose an alternative if one were available.
The point here is: while all are participants in a system of evil, some are direct and willing participants, while others are indirect and unwilling participants. No one in a slave society has to cross the line from simply buying the products to actually going out and buying a slave. When we are discussing veganism, the line is a bit different, especially now in the 21st century with a plethora of alternative consumer choices. No one in our society has to cross the line from buying products that contain the industrial byproducts of the CAFO system, or that may have caused animal deaths in the process of harvesting, to products that are the direct, intentional result of the CAFO system.
If someone wants to insist that any participation is either unethical or equally ethical with any other kind of participation, and that because of this distinctions (which we seek to create with labels such as “vegan”) are impossible, they’re not making a serious argument: they’re simply negating the possibility of ethics. They’re declaring that ethics don’t matter. And if ethics don’t matter, well then of course there are no vegans. Because veganism is an ethical position, and ethical positions require us to make distinctions and navigate through the rocky waters of less than ideal alternatives as we make our way through life.
At the same time, I do believe vegans have an obligation to advocate for agricultural systems that do not cause millions of sentient creatures to die from poisoning, culling or combine harvesters. We should oppose the political system that props up mechanized, chemicalized monocropping, support alternatives when and where we can. What should distinguish us as vegans is that we do not believe, as carnists do with respect to meat, that we have an absolute or divine right to do whatever we want to whomever we want - that we needn’t question systems that aren’t necessarily designed to harm animals as CAFOs are, but which harm them all the same. Agriculture without pesticides, culling, or destructive machinery is possible. But until it is everywhere, and enjoys the political support that the current methods enjoy, we are allowed to eat.