I am a pretty committed vegan advocate, and have been for over six years ever since I started engaging with animal ethics.
I wanted to say that I share your frustrations exactly, and that solider veganism has been driving me up the wall ever since I joined the vegan community. Seeking truth and justice is what led me to veganism in the first place. It disgusts me when solider vegans seem to believe that veganism cannot survive truth-seeking. There are very obvious trade-offs, compromises, constraints, inconveniences, annoyances, costs, learning curves and sacrifices involved in veganism. An infinite number of ideological assurances and hand waving won’t stop a new vegan from confronting them in the real world. As for persuasion… the truth is enough. People will either hear about these trade-offs from vegans or from anti-vegans, who could seem more truth-seeking by contrast.
I go back and forth between thinking that this problem is especially bad in vegan advocacy, and thinking it’s just sturgeon’s law—where 90% of everything is crap, including communities such as vegan advocates, with no exception for EAs. I’d like to know others thoughts about this.
I can see that you’ve been getting a lot of flak for your posts on veganism, including that they might have negative consequences. My best guess is that they would have overwhelmingly positive consequences for farmed animals. You’ve presented pro-vegan arguments in their most informed and defensible version. To the extent that people identify the dominant naive arguments as being ‘the case for veganism’, they will be less persuaded to adopt veganism, their veganism will be at high risk of being unsustainable, and their views on veganism will be vulnerable to basic factual challenges. This naive culture will also pollute the data on the epidemiology of veganism, making veganism look worse than it should be.
If you think it would be beneficial to how vegan advocates receive your work, I would be happy for you to add to your posts that you’ve received support from extremely grateful vegan advocates, who are absolutely fed up with naive/​soldier veganism.
I am a pretty committed vegan advocate, and have been for over six years ever since I started engaging with animal ethics.
I wanted to say that I share your frustrations exactly, and that solider veganism has been driving me up the wall ever since I joined the vegan community. Seeking truth and justice is what led me to veganism in the first place. It disgusts me when solider vegans seem to believe that veganism cannot survive truth-seeking. There are very obvious trade-offs, compromises, constraints, inconveniences, annoyances, costs, learning curves and sacrifices involved in veganism. An infinite number of ideological assurances and hand waving won’t stop a new vegan from confronting them in the real world. As for persuasion… the truth is enough. People will either hear about these trade-offs from vegans or from anti-vegans, who could seem more truth-seeking by contrast.
I go back and forth between thinking that this problem is especially bad in vegan advocacy, and thinking it’s just sturgeon’s law—where 90% of everything is crap, including communities such as vegan advocates, with no exception for EAs. I’d like to know others thoughts about this.
I can see that you’ve been getting a lot of flak for your posts on veganism, including that they might have negative consequences. My best guess is that they would have overwhelmingly positive consequences for farmed animals. You’ve presented pro-vegan arguments in their most informed and defensible version. To the extent that people identify the dominant naive arguments as being ‘the case for veganism’, they will be less persuaded to adopt veganism, their veganism will be at high risk of being unsustainable, and their views on veganism will be vulnerable to basic factual challenges. This naive culture will also pollute the data on the epidemiology of veganism, making veganism look worse than it should be.
If you think it would be beneficial to how vegan advocates receive your work, I would be happy for you to add to your posts that you’ve received support from extremely grateful vegan advocates, who are absolutely fed up with naive/​soldier veganism.