3 doubts about veganism
I keep thinking about what kind of identity would be useful for building a powerful animal advocacy movement. Here are 3 features of veganism that I often think about which make me doubt its usefulness.
Too maximalist
The official definition of veganism by the inventors of the term is the following:
“Veganism is a philosophy and way of living which seeks to exclude—as far as is possible and practicable—all forms of exploitation of, and cruelty to, animals for food, clothing or any other purpose”
This basically amounts to “avoid doing bad things as far as possible.” The threshold sits right below what is impossible. I think that is way too ambitious. Doing your best to avoid harm at every circumstance shouldn’t be the criterion for inclusion to a social movement. We don’t expect human rights activists to avoid all forms of exploitation and cruelty as far as possible to qualify as human rights activists.
Some activists respond “No, veganism is the bare minimum. The ‘as far as possible and practicable’ part means it’s not about being perfect.”. But when I ask for examples of gratuitously harmful actions that veganism doesn’t forbid, at most I hear about instances of accidental uses of animal products without knowing. What these activists mean by “bare minimum” is that veganism doesn’t require you to become an activist and actively help animals. But in the end they think veganism covers everything harmful to animals.
Compare this with identities like “strictly plant-based,” “conscientious objector,” or “environmentalist.” None make such strong claims about acting rightly at every instance.
Here are a few concrete problems I see happening related to this:
Debates over whether celebrity vegans are really vegan because of horse-riding, botox, or animal products in their clothing. In those debates, the exclusionary activists are correct that these acts are not vegan and therefore these celebrities are not vegan. But I don’t want to give up on the visibility and credibility these celebrities provide. So I’m not happy about excommunicating them.
When plant-based protein companies test new ingredients on animals for regulatory approval, prominent infighting erupts about whether their products are still vegan. The exclusionary side is technically correct, but fighting against these products seems morally wrong.
Generally, there is way too much infighting about which actions are really vegan. Because the definition is too maximalist, there is no easy way to shut these debates off.
People in animal advocacy circles fear being too permissive and condoning harm to animals. But being too prohibitive is also a danger to a movement’s political goals. Successful social movements recognise that. Sometimes I hear religious scholars saying things like “Smoking is a terrible thing to do and I strongly advise you against it but I will never ever claim that smoking is haram”. They are vigilant against declaring things haram without sufficient grounding.
When you are too prohibitive and especially vaguely prohibitive, your people constantly bicker about what’s halal and haram. Organised religion solved this problem by having official authorities on what’s permitted. Vegetarianism was also pretty clear about what’s forbidden and what’s not. Veganism is both too vague and too maximalist.
No space for sinners
In Sunni Islam, these two statements can both be true:
• It’s forbidden to drink alcohol
• Some Muslims drink alcohol
But try this with veganism:
• It’s forbidden to eat eggs
• Some vegans eat eggs
It doesn’t work. People will object to the second statement.
I find it regrettable that veganism expects perfect compliance. We need space for people to say: “Yes, this is wrongful behavior, but I am a human being with moral failings, and in this case I acted against my values”—without being immediately excommunicated. Islam did succeed in reducing alcohol consumption to the lowest levels in the world without having to excommunicate all alcohol-drinking members.
Too behaviour-focused
Veganism as an identity combines behavior and belief: you should avoid certain actions because of certain beliefs about animal ethics. But in practice, the behavioral part overshadows the belief part.
Other political identities like feminist, socialist, environmentalist focus more on political goals. Of course certain actions would disqualify someone from being a feminist, but when you hear someone is a feminist, your first thought isn’t about whether they meet a behavioral standard. You perceive them by how they view the world and their political goals.
This creates concrete problems:
1. We’re missing many ideologically aligned people who don’t satisfy the behavioral standard.
2. Our debates shift toward feasibility of behavioral standards instead of focusing on whether we genuinely care about animals, feel sorry about their suffering, and want a better world for them.
When pushed, I say I am “approximately vegan” or “mostly vegan,” which is just typically “vegan” for short, and most people don’t push. If a vegan gives me a hard time about the particulars, which essentially never happens, I stop talking to them 😃
IMHO we would benefit from a clear label for folks who aren’t quite vegan but who only seek out high-welfare animal products; I think pasturism/pasturist is a possible candidate.
One could argue that from an effectivity viewpoint (helping as many animals as possible), veganism is not behavior-focused enough. Within (strict) veganism, it is better to never eat any meat and dairy and do nothing else than to sometimes eat dairy and donate $10.000 to effective AW charities. In this case, it is better to shift behavior, but veganism is too belief-focused.
I also wonder whether this discussion distracts from what is really important. Most vegans I know in real life (including myself) are somewhere between 95% and 99.5% vegan, and do not push each other to increase that percentage further, since there are more impactful things to focus on. In other words: there are circles in which veganism is already loosely defined. I don’t know how common this is though.
I agree. Maybe we can just say that veganism focuses on the wrong behavior? In addition to donating, I think voting can be more important than your individual diet. Many animal advocacy or rights organizations seem to recognize this, and refer to animal advocates or animal rights advocates to be more inclusive. They certainly do this for events where they seek to attract a lot of people, like animal rights marches. But for sure, veganism continues to be emphasized too much.
I also agree that the definition given in the post doesn’t reflect popular usage, which is probably something like:
Vegans avoid causing harm to animals, and so avoid purchasing or consuming animal products.
This doesn’t seem particularly maximizing. The first part reflects the moral commitment, and yes it’s possible to be perfectionist about it, but it’s not fundamentally. The second part demands evidence of that moral commitment, and it’s also far from maximizing, since not consuming animal products is very achievable for most people. So, as long as this definition is interpreted in a reasonable way, it doesn’t seem particularly maximalist.
I feel like Clearer guidance, fewer purity tests, and more strategic compassion could really strengthen animal advocacy instead of fracturing it.
I think it’s important to differentiate between perfection as a requirement and perfection as a North Star.
As North Star it simply is a direction of travel. Every ethical system, from Islam to secular humanism, has an awareness that there is an ideal we may never fully embody, but still orient toward. The point is not “being perfect” but continually aligning, step by step, as a verb, not a noun. This makes it not exclusionary but clarifying, and gives dignity to everyone. In religion, mysticism, spirituality it’s all about the continued cleaning of your heart and being, you never just “are clean”. That’s the same here.
Where I agree with you is on accessibility. If the goal is to include more people then the invitation should not be “become 100% vegan immediately,” but more to join a path of intentional reduction, with a clear ethical horizon where we all commit to continually aligning—there are ofc better ways of communicating this. This framing avoids both false equivalence (“all reductions are the same”) and purity culture. In a practical sense, you do need to use “vegan” in a clearly defined way to be able to order food or get what you need. For movement building, more spaciousness could help but could clash with egos and functionality.
Agreed, Emre! In addition, I have little idea about whether veganism increases or decreases animal welfare due to effects on soil animals. I would be curious to know your thoughts on this.
As a utilitarian, my first impulse is to suggest the term “animal welfarism,” since it focuses on what I actually care about, namely well-being.
This term maximizes the scope of what one cares about to include both wild animal suffering and factory farming. It also allows for a diversity of actions such as changing one’s diet, engaging in political action, or donating money as @Erwin Rossen mentions.
I would also guess that people who identify as animal welfarists are less likely to have the all-or-nothing attitude that it seems like some vegans have.
Agree entirely (and I have MORE doubts, even as i have been a vegan for almost 30 years).
It is indeed a very narrow and demanding identity (and even more so when other progressive issues are presented as part and parcel of the vegan lifestyle).
It’s noteworthy that the founders of the vegan society in the 1940′s welcome everyone who was looking in the same direction, even if they weren’t “practitioners”.
Thank you for this post, I find it interesting and it ties in with some questions I had already asked myself.
Firstly, I would say that my reflections have led me to consider a form of opposition between consequentialist veganism and deontological veganism, in the sense that the consequences for animal suffering will most likely remain unchanged if a vegan eats 10g of cheese in a year, or even meat, so for me this should not have much impact from a consequentialist point of view. Of course, this is just an example, and one could argue that doing this, given human psychology (at least mine), greatly increases the likelihood of doing it again because the boundary becomes quite intangible, thereby increasing the consequentialist risk.
My example is imperfect, but I simply want to point out an idea of consequences, and it seemed relatively relevant to me.
An analogy I like is that of ecology.
For example, let’s say we want to have an impact on climate change.
One approach I like and which seems reasonable to me is to calculate the CO2 equivalent cost of each action likely to have a significant cost and ensure that at the end of the year we are around <2-3 tonnes of CO2 equivalent (tCO2eq), or another target if necessary or specific.
This could also include donations to high-impact organisations, as mentioned in this comment, even if this becomes more difficult to quantify.
A conceptual way of approaching this for veganism, because unfortunately quantifying suffering and the intensity of suffering is a complicated and rather difficult subject, even if I try to approximate it qualitatively, would be to replace the target of [<2-3 tCO2eq/year] with a target of [less than so much intense animal suffering].
Unfortunately, without quantification, we cannot do this as neatly, and so a final target is difficult to visualise clearly, but at least as a representation it speaks to me and I try to visualise it.
This last paragraph leads me to my second point:
Secondly, this sentence struck me:
Because I also had the opposite thought: I find it unfortunate that there is no term to describe trying to be ‘exemplary’ (which could be consequentialist, as mentioned above, so I realise that this is not exactly the idea behind this quote) from a humanitarian point of view.
We could invent the term ‘hugan’ or ‘ethan’, I don’t know? (Perhaps this already exists and I am not aware of it?)
And so the idea would also be not to consume products whose production chain involves a lot of human suffering, or to donate to high-impact charities, or other things that do not increase or decrease human suffering in the world.
And to have a term of identity associated with this, which is rather strict in terms of consequence, which seems to me to be a good idea of the concept of ‘vegan’, if it is made consequentialist.
This kind of ‘an’ concept seems interesting to me for creating a kind of strong behavioural representation on a given cause.
Another thing I thought about when I read this sentence:
is that there is a word for this, which is ‘anti-speciesist’, I think?
Perhaps it would be interesting to create notions of intensity? A bit like there are vegetarians and vegans?
In response to your “no space for sinners” argument, I would say that the prohibition of alcohol in Islam is quite different to the prohibition (if we want to call it that) of animal product consumption in veganism. It is my understanding that alcohol is banned to protect human interests—it is a sin, but based on the idea that it harms the individual, is bad for society, can lead to addiction etc. To commit a harm against oneself is different than to commit a harm against another. If we conclude that animals are worthy of moral consideration, then to consume animal products is a harm against another. Someone may want to take a health risk and consume drugs, but that doesn’t mean they could morally justify, to themselves, giving dangerous drugs to someone else.
I believe the situation is similar for harms to others. Acts that make you a non-Muslim are a much narrower set compared to sinful actions. A thief still remains a Muslim/Christian/Jew as far as I know. Even murderers are still considered as believers depending on the denomination.
That seems to be true, you’re right. In that case, maybe the difference is that a vegan is defined by their refusal to consume animal products. If a vegan does consume animal products, they are no longer vegan, as they no longer fit the definition. A Muslim, a Christian, or a Jew is not defined by their refusal to harm others (based on what you have said). Someone can be a murderer and a Christian; they might be a bad Christian, but still a Christian. You can’t really be a bad vegan by eating animals—you just wouldn’t be a vegan anymore. I’m thinking out loud so I don’t know if my point is clear, but it feels like vegans are necessarily defined by refusing to consume animal products.
I agree!
I’m actually surprised by how relaxed the official definition is.
It’s strange for someone to implicitly allow “practical” exceptions to their moral code.
‘It’s not practical’ usually means ‘I didn’t feel like being consistent’.
If animals are sentient, then it’s immoral to harm them. Full stop.
I believe that it is “practicable” rather than “practical”. Veganism asks that we avoid harm to animals as much as is reasonably possible, not reasonably sensible. Buying a vegan burger than is much more expensive than a meat burger may not be practical but, provided one has enough money, it is practicable.
I did get the word wrong, thanks for pointing that out. I just double checked the definitions of both ‘practical’ and ‘practicable’.
Imagine you cannot afford the vegan burger. Then I think you should skip a meal and wait for the next meal with vegan options. It’s practicable (ie doable) to go hungry for a couple hours in exchange for saving an innocent soul.
If the official definition is compatible with that, then I’m on board.
I suppose the maximalist aim could legitimately depend on an empirical result that maximalism achieves the best results all things considered.
imo, “Identity Veganism” has shortcomings.
Common vegan practice today is not the best pursuit of its actual ethical aims.
Veganism as a rough rule of thumb may function as a useful mental health salve for some people.
But enforcing sharp demarcations with indignation is unjustifiable in light of arbitrariness and various moral uncertainties.
A more holistic, consequentialistic, sentiocentric reducetarianism (that is more consequentialistic) might better track veganism’s underlying aims.
But it would still face foundational philosophical problems.
https://kungfuhobbit.medium.com/animal-ethics-36027802b457#0882
Is Barack Obama black? Technically, no; he is bi-racial. But he identifies as black, and most people—when asked—would say he is black (Wikipedia concurs).
I think veganism should be treated the same way. You don’t have to be 100% perfect for you or others to consider you vegan.
Being pedantic about definitions does not help reduce suffering, IMO.
I feel like in the real world 98% vegans are completely accepted as vegans. I have never been called non vegan because I bought a pair of leather shoes or because I eat mussels. And I have a lot of vegan friends.
I was responding to the No space for sinners section above, where the author claims the opposite.
Among people who call themselves vegans who I’ve met irl, about a third were actually some form of reducetarian already. One ate dairy and eggs that had some form of ethical certification, one ate fish (I believe only certain wild-caught species) and honey, and another was a strict vegan for a while (I think?) but then shifted to identifying as plant-based and eating chicken. Some of them were more vegan for health reasons than for animal welfare reasons, and for some I know health concerns were why they weren’t strictly vegan. So I think that this is more a debate for highly online/enfranchised vegans, while a lot of people have already gone ahead and adopted looser standards for veganism.
Interesting to here you say that, as most vegans I know in-person indeed do their best to adhere to a plant-based diet 100% of the time. Those that don’t will call themselves “mostly vegan” and still eat vegan 95%+ of the time.
Not here to claim you are not telling the truth, but rather to add a different set of anecdata to the conversation.
Yeah I forgot to mention that this seems heavily split by where I knew the people from, your anecdata seem true among younger/more educated people I know.