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:
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.
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:
We’re missing many ideologically aligned people who don’t satisfy the behavioural standard.
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?
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?