How the Ethical Argument for Veganism Fails and One Possible Way to Fix It

Last month I interviewed Jack Norris of Vegan Outreach. I began the interview with this quote from Matt Ball, the co-founder of that group:

Ultimately, the bottom line is: Reduce Suffering. Everything has to answer to this. I can’t emphasize this enough: the only thing that matters is to reduce suffering. If you accept this as the What, the next question is, How? At this time, in this country, we choose to promote veganism. However, veganism is not an end in and of itself. We don’t promote veganism because ‘veganism is good.’ Veganism is merely a tool to reduce suffering.

“The Vegan Shuffle”



Reading that speech by Matt Ball made me wonder why Vegan Outreach was so intent on promoting veganism. If their only concern was suffering reduction, what about non-vegan ways to reduce suffering (eating eggs from rescued hens, eating bivalves, eating insects), some of which reduce suffering more than veganism? So I asked Norris about this. Here was his response:

We want a way to reduce suffering that is sustainable. I have no problem with people eating eggs from rescued hens, but that’s not a realistic model to promote for most people. I don’t think bivalves are conscious of suffering, but there would be environmental concerns with promoting bivalve-based diets for everyone. If someone has a hard time being vegan and eating bivalves does the trick for them, I would have no qualms. I just blogged about some researchers who think insects might be able to feel pain. I doubt that most species of insects can suffer and if it came between someone eating chickens or insects, my vote would definitely be for them to eat the insects. It’s hard for me to see how hunting mammals or birds can result in less suffering than eating vegan. I tend to think that for many species, like those who live in packs or who are monogamous, you cause indirect suffering to the animals who are left behind – possibly even more than to the animals you kill. As society evolves toward being more concerned about the suffering of animals, plant farming will be done in a way that harms as few animals as possible.

One thing to take from this response is that veganism is the easiest way to reduce suffering. It is not the only way to reduce suffering, and it may not necessarily even be the best way (though Norris didn’t grant that), but it’s the simplest message to convey and for people to follow, so it should lead to the greatest suffering reduction overall.

Extrapolating from that, it’s not that each of us must reduce suffering to the maximum amount we possibly can, since that would require suicide (which Norris rejects as a necessity), freeganism (eating only foods that would otherwise go to waste), not having kids or any other option that reduces suffering more than the consumer veganism that vegans promote.

This logic suggests we have no obligation to be vegan. For one thing, there are better ways than veganism for individuals to reduce suffering (freeganism being an indisputable case of this). Furthermore, because there are these better ways and vegans still insist that giving up animal products is enough, this shows that it is okay to reduce suffering to some extent without going all the way. The only obligation is to cause less suffering than the maximum amount of suffering you could cause. You don’t even need to reduce suffering as much as vegans do, then, because the suffering reduction level that satisfies them is arbitrary, since they haven’t reduced it to the max.

So hunting is okay, right? That causes less harm than factory farming, and it might even reduce suffering more than veganism if you are hunting an overpopulated species or an invasive species that is destroying the ecosystem and killing other animals. Not so fast. Norris countered this sort of thinking (though not this example in particular) by saying:

While suffering matters more to me than rights, I do view many species of animals as having rights. Most people agree that humans have a right to life, and the species of an individual should not matter in this regard, only that individual’s characteristics. So if we had the ability to breed humans to have awareness similar to pigs and raise them and kill them humanely, but we do not do so because we think it would violate their rights, then we should not be breeding and killing pigs.

So now it’s not just suffering reduction, it’s that animals have rights. But if it’s wrong to kill an animal because it has rights, how do we justify the deaths of animals in plant agriculture? Not only are animals accidentally killed in the production of crops (ground up by wheat threshers, poisoned from pesticide runoff, or unable to survive because their habitat has been destroyed), they are intentionally killed as well. “Pest” animals are poisoned and shot to protect crops. What happened to their sentience, the basis of their rights? Once they got in our way, they stopped having interests and a capacity for pain?

Vegans cannot claim self defense (one justification they give for killing animals), because these are mostly herbivorous creatures who pose no direct threat to humans. There’s not even immediate survival at stake, as in someone trapped on an island with no edible food other than fish, another life-or-death scenario that vegans say makes eating meat okay. If we believe that animals have rights, killing them for eating or threatening to eat crops constitutes capital punishment for petty theft or even just suspicion of future petty theft, which is an outrageous travesty of justice.

Only a speciesist would differentiate between killing an animal for eating crops and killing a human for doing the same, but most of us would agree that it is wrong to kill a hungry human for getting too close to somebody’s garden or farm. On top of that, a crop-thieving human knows they’re committing a crime and can thus be seen as guilty, unlike animals who don’t grasp our concept of property rights. What, then, makes it okay to kill an animal merely for taking food or even just getting too close to our food, if that animal has the same basic right to life that we do?

I asked Norris a question related to this. Why did Vegan Outreach call vegan foods “cruelty free,” when there is inevitably accidental and intentional death to animals involved in these foods? The gist of his response was that it is most likely the case that vegans cause less harm than even humane meat eaters. In other words, forget about animal rights now, because veganism is about harm reduction again.

Okay, but what if I could reduce harm more by hunting invasive Asian carp than by being vegan? Nope, say vegans (not Norris specifically–I didn’t think to press this line of questioning further), it’s wrong to kill Asian carp because now animals have regained their rights.

You could call this “the vegan shuffle.” It is impossible to insist on consumer veganism with a consistent rights argument. And it is impossible to insist on consumer veganism with a suffering reduction argument. That’s why vegans flip-flop between the two until they manage to arrive at the conclusion of veganism.

Problems with the rights basis for veganism

Animal rights runs into trouble as soon as vegans have to ignore the very rights they supposedly champion. The animal rights violations that result from crop production are the most obvious instances of this. Purchasing vegan foods contributes to the deaths of animals. Even vegans admit this. There are a few ways they try to get around this conundrum:

1. These rights violations are “necessary.” It is impossible to eat without killing animals, and we need to eat something, therefore it is okay to kill animals for crops. This begs the question. If it’s okay to kill animals if you must do so in order to eat, why is it okay to kill animals so we can eat vegetables, but it is not okay to kill animals so we can eat meat?

“Humans have a biological need for vegetables but not for meat,” vegans might counter. A debatable claim, but even if we grant it, it doesn’t remedy the frivolousness of the distinction since there is no human biological requirement for any one specific food we might be protecting from animals. It may not be necessary to eat beef, as vegans prove, but neither is it necessary to eat wheat, as celiacs prove, or many fruits and vegetables, as those with fructose malabsorption prove.

Yes, food is necessary. But since everyone is able to cut something out of their diets, indeed some must because of allergies or other dietary restrictions, there is no particular food that humans absolutely have to eat out of necessity. It is a non sequitur, then, to say that corn is necessary and deer steak is not, since both are foods. Which means that if necessity is a justification for violating animal rights, and food is considered necessary, this should apply to all foods, not just vegan foods.

This forces the vegan out of rights and into a suffering reduction argument (there is less suffering when you kill animals for vegetables than for their meat). Therefore, this doesn’t redeem the rights argument.

2. The intent/accident argument. The intent argument states that yes, you must kill animals in order to eat vegetables, but it’s okay for animals to die due to the destruction of their habitats, pesticide runoff into the water, or getting caught in harvesting machines as long as those deaths are not our intended end.

Unfortunately, this works for meat eaters too. Meat eaters don’t necessarily want to kill animals. It just so happens that you must kill animals in order to eat meat. Since meat is the intended end, not the killing of animals, it is okay to eat meat.

A vegan might argue with this by saying, well, at least the deaths of animals in vegan agriculture are accidental, whereas you must purposely kill an animal to get meat. They might illustrate this point by distinguishing between intentionally stabbing someone to death and accidentally hitting someone with your car. A problem with this is this is that yes, the intentional murder is worse, but involuntary manslaughter is a crime too. So why is involuntary manslaughter an offense when committed against a human, but involuntary animalslaughter is morally neutral? That only makes sense if you believe that the death of an animal matters less than the death of a human, a speciesist belief that allows for the possibility of willful animal slaughter.

From an animal rights based perspective, mowing over animals with your wheat thresher is no different than falling asleep at the wheel of your car and plowing into a crowd of people. Even worse, possibly, because the farmer knows animals are going to be killed and proceeds anyway. What if a farmer saw humans in the wheat field she was about to harvest? Would we have no problem with her harvesting this wheat, knowing that a lot of humans were going to die? Would this not be at least somewhat of a rights violation?

If we believe that animals have rights, the intent argument makes no sense because it implies that animals have the same rights we do as far as not being murdered, but for some reason their rights go away when it comes to accidental deaths. If we are going to be so inconsistent with the rights of animals, what keeps us from killing them for food?

Except the intent argument doesn’t even give animals the same rights as humans as far as not being murdered, because there is still the direct, intentional, non-accidental killing of animals in agricultural production to contend with -– Farmers exterminate animals that pose a threat to their crops. Somehow vegans think this is okay as long as humans aren’t eating those animals. Yet these killings are not motivated by self-defense or even immediate survival and would be seen as repugnant if humans were the targeted food thieves.

So why be more strict with animals than we would be with humans, especially since the hungry animals don’t even realize they’ve committed a crime?

Sometimes in Brazil, ranchers and farmers who want to develop the Amazon will kill an entire tribe that lives on land they want to use. To most people this seems like a clear and indefensible rights violation. But this is exactly what happens to animals whenever anybody develops new land. If animals have rights, there is no way to justify extending agriculture unless you manage to safely relocate all the animals, which is impossible. The only way vegans can justify these deaths is reverting back to a harm reduction argument (fewer animals suffer and die if we eat vegetables rather than meat). So rights falters yet again.

3. “In the more enlightened future, when most people are vegan, it will be possible to avoid all or most animal deaths in crop production. But for now, since it’s too difficult for me to live up to my own high standards, I can violate the same rights that I criticize you for violating.” This is nothing but a confession to immorality and hypocrisy with a flippant rationalization tacked on. And it’s another argument that works for non-vegans too.

Let’s say that I don’t like tofu, seitan or tempeh. I often find grains and beans difficult to digest–if brown rice is slightly undercooked it doesn’t break down at all and even peanuts make me gassy. I may (hypothetically) think it’s wrong to kill animals, but animal products are the only significant protein sources that work for me, and I feel weak if I don’t get enough protein. Therefore, it’s too hard for me to thrive on a vegan diet. Maybe it will be easier in the future for me to be moral once there is lab-grown meat. For now it’s okay for me to eat animals, though, because lab grown meat doesn’t exist yet.

To use a slavery comparison, since vegans always appreciate a good slavery analogy, a slave master might have said that he knows slavery is wrong and would like to stop, he really would. But it’s too hard to do all that work by himself, and he can’t afford to pay for workers. Maybe technology will make slaves obsolete one day. But for now, with society being so racist and technology being so rudimentary, it’s too hard to be moral, so it’s okay for him to go on owning slaves. Also, he gets to call other slave owners immoral rights violators because they don’t even wish for the possibility of giving up their slaves.

As this line of argument is an admission from vegans that they are rights violators, this does nothing to redeem the rights argument. Just because it seems like veganism theoretically could potentially avoid violating rights (this new way of growing plants in China gives some idea of how this might happen) doesn’t mean anything if it violates rights in actuality. Meat eating could potentially not violate rights as well, thanks to the prospect of test tube meat. Does that make eating meat today okay too?

4. “Nobody claimed veganism was perfect, so why critique veganism for violating rights and causing harm?” This would be like a human rights advocate murdering someone or accidentally running over someone and then saying “Well, nobody said human rights are perfect. At least I kill fewer humans than some other people I know.” This is another appeal to harm reduction and makes no sense from a rights perspective.

5. Kind of a side issue: most vegans are okay with neutering, spaying or even euthanizing animals in some situations. This only makes sense from a harm reduction rather than a rights perspective, since animals cannot consent to any of these… alterations. And it seems obvious that animals have an interest in having sex, which spaying and neutering violates.

6. An ultra-strict freegan lifestyle might be a way to live without infringing on animal rights (as long as you exclude insects), but this can’t work for the entire world, since freegans rely on the waste of people who don’t respect animal rights. A world of freegans would have to stop being freegan and figure something else out. Freeganism is still an option for individuals in a world with waste (in other words, it will always be an option), but freegans should be under no delusion that this is an actual solution, or that they aren’t in some way benefitting from rights violations.

A note on “the argument from marginal cases”

This is the argument that if we give human babies and the mentally handicapped rights, then we must give rights to animals too, since the only possible basis for rights for humans with no capacity for morality (save for speciesism, a no-no) is sentience, which animals also have.

This is a major foundation of the argument for animal rights. But since giving consistent rights to animals is unworkable, the result of this argument is to take away rights from humans and mandate cannibalism of babies and the mentally impaired in order to avoid speciesism. So this argument doesn’t help veganism either.

Problems with suffering reduction as a basis for veganism

Too bad suffering reduction doesn’t work as a justification for veganism as a minimum standard of decency either. One flaw is that if suffering is your whipping boy, this permits the slaughtering of animals so long as it is painless or nearly painless. For instance, it is possible to instantaneously knock a pig unconscious by hitting it on the head with the butt of an ax, and then drain it of blood while it is knocked out. If suffering is all you’re worried about, isn’t this okay? A vegan might say, “What about the emotional pain of the pigs left behind who miss their friend?” Okay, then, painlessly kill them too.

Naturally vegans try to get around this by saying, “Wait, you can’t do that because it’s not suffering that matters but animal rights.”

But the main problem is that veganism is not the only or even the best way to reduce suffering. And since vegans don’t feel a moral obligation to take suffering reduction to its logical conclusion (suicide, or, to be less demanding, possibly freeganism), that means any spot we pick on the harm reduction continuum will be arbitrary. If vegans don’t have an obligation to be freegan, since there is no need to maximize harm reduction, then vegetarians don’t need to be vegan, humane meat eaters don’t need to be vegetarian, and so on. Even factory farm meat eaters might be okay if they’re at least not torturing humans. Quit veal and you’ve satisfied the vague notion of “suffering reduction,” even if you haven’t satisfied vegans.

It’s impossible to measure the suffering-related consequences of all of our actions, which makes any look at suffering reduction unscientific (another problem with using it as a guide). But based on some reasonable guesses, here are some ways to reduce suffering more than veganism:

Eating elevation-raised bivalves instead of grains. Most bivalves have no central nervous system and thus are probably not conscious of pain. If they do experience pain, then it is through some mechanism we don’t fully understand, and it would be equally possible for plants to feel pain. Ethically, then, eating bivalves is at least as good as eating plants. Better, really, because if farmed properly, these bivalves can actually be good for the environment by improving the quality of their water. Also, if raised in elevated nets, you don’t have to scrape up the sea floor to get them.

Planting, growing and harvesting grains can lead to the deaths of mammals, insects (which have brains and thus might be sentient) and fish (pesticide runoff or using fish habitats to irrigate crops), while farming oysters mainly leads to the death of non-sentient oysters and possibly some fish. Overall, with oysters, fewer sentient beings are harmed.

Also, grains don’t provide much that vegetables and fruits don’t already offer. Bivalves, on the other hand, contain omega-3s, vitamin D and B12, nutrients that vegans typically have to supplement. Someone eating vegan except for bivalves could potentially cut out supplements and supplemented processed foods entirely; not buying nutrient extracts in plastic bottles is another way this diet would cause less harm than veganism.

If vegans are eating grains instead of oysters, then, they are not reducing harm as much as they could be.

To this vegans either say “Fine, whatever, but oysters are gross,” or they say that oysters have rights by virtue of being animals, and even if it causes less suffering overall to eat them, it is inherently wrong to kill them. So either they admit that veganism is not the only way, or they abandon harm reduction and go back to rights.

Killing destructive or overpopulated animals for the overall good of animals and humans. Animals dying slowly of starvation suffer more than animals who are shot and die more quickly. Animal populations are sometimes manipulated to create this overpopulation (humans killing the predator animals to leave more prey for themselves, for instance), but many times hunting will lead to less suffering than not hunting would. This is the basis of Jackson Landers’ “locavore hunting,” which strives to kill animals as painlessly as possible, and in a way that reduces suffering for the surviving animals, thus providing nutritious food for humans with minimal impact.

This is even more clear-cut when there is an invasive species that is harming the ecosystem and killing other (sometimes endangered) creatures. Feral pigs are one example. While a vegan individual attempts to inch toward suffering neutrality, actively hunting harmful animals manages to go further and be a net gain for the world.

But even if this reduces suffering for sentient beings overall, vegans object that the rights of the individual invasive or overpopulated animal are being violated. Therefore, it’s time to abandon suffering reduction in favor of rights again.

Not having kids. There is nothing non-vegan about spawning nine screaming, suffering causing offspring. Even if you raise these kids as vegans, there’s a chance they won’t all stay vegans for their entire lives. And then what about their kids? No doubt a childless meat eater will have less of an impact than a vegan who has a couple of kids who grow up to be meat eaters. Since living as a vegan has an impact too, it’s even conceivable that the childless meat eater might cause less harm than a vegan who has a single vegan kid who stays vegan for life. Yet the childless meat eater is still blameworthy because they eat meat while the vegan with nine kids, some of whom are meat eaters, is not.

Eating insects instead of grains. Even if insects do suffer, eating insects could still cause less suffering overall than eating grains. You have to kill insects to eat them, but you have to kill insects and mammals to raise crops.

This distinction may not always exist if the insects are farmed. You have to feed insects, so if you grow grains to feed insects, you may not have accomplished much. However, it is easy for individuals to efficiently raise insects themselves, with scraps of food waste. And some insects eat substances that humans cannot, such as wood. Eating wild insects certainly reduces suffering more than veganism, and eating farmed insects could as well.

And like bivalves, insects are nutrient dense, containing the vitamins and minerals that are often lacking in a vegan diet. Someone who is vegan except insects, then, could avoid packaged supplements and processed supplemented food, another way they would be decreasing harm further than as a consumer vegan.

To this vegans either say “fine, whatever, but insects are gross” or they say that insects have rights and even if it causes more suffering to avoid eating them, it is a rights violation to intentionally eat them. So either they admit that veganism is not the only way, or they abandon harm reduction and go back to rights.

How vegans attempt to salvage the harm reduction basis

The main way vegans get around the fact that veganism is not the best way to reduce harm, besides reverting back to rights, is to say that veganism is the most practical way to reduce suffering, even if it’s not the ultimate ideal.

All the ex-vegans who really did try makes me skeptical that this is true. Putting that aside, this argument is fine for explaining why Vegan Outreach and other groups choose to promote veganism, but it cannot explain why an individual should choose veganism over freeganism, locavore hunting, insect eating or bivalveganism if they were interested in reducing harm. And it doesn’t explain how anyone can claim veganism is the mandatory starting place for morality – the “moral baseline” – and criticize others for reducing harm only an arbitrary amount when vegans themselves only reduce harm by an arbitrary amount.

Another tactic to salvage harm reduction, just like with rights, is to insist that the amount of suffering caused by veganism (whatever that may be) is “necessary” whereas any amount of suffering over that is “unnecessary.” Meanwhile, any amount of suffering that is less than what veganism causes constitutes going above and beyond – praiseworthy but not obligatory. Yet there is no cogent explanation for why the harm that consumer veganism causes is necessary if it’s possible to cause even less harm and survive, while any harm above the level of consumer veganism is unnecessary.

Vegans plant themselves at this arbitrary point in the harm reduction continuum and proclaim that everyone causing more harm than them is acting improperly, and everyone causing less is being better than they have to (unless vegans deem that those causing less harm are violating rights, such as those hunting invasive species, in which case vegans are still superior while causing more harm). The only way vegans can pull this off is by mixing and matching rights and suffering reduction arguments until they arrive at the answer of consumer veganism.

Here’s what this rights/suffering reduction mashup might look like in chart form:

As much as vegans claim to love moral and logical consistency, this chart is a philosophical catastrophe. Sure, you can argue with my placement of the various diets, since it’s impossible to truly gauge the suffering caused by what we do, but that’s not my fault – vegans are the ones who settled on amorphous “suffering reduction” as one of their guiding principles.

One of the bigger problems I see with this chart is that there is no rationale for deeming harm “necessary” once we hit consumer veganism, since there are ways to reduce suffering more. If the argument is that it’s too much of a hassle to reduce suffering more than veganism does, vegans are guilty of the same ethical compromise they criticize in omnivores (basing diet choices on taste, habit, convenience or tradition rather than morals). Starting “necessary suffering” at veganism is a cheap ploy that attempts to hide that veganism is just a spot on a line of harm reduction and that from a suffering perspective the choice of veganism is arbitrary.

Nor is it clear why invasive species hunters, locavore hunters and the primatavist hunter-gatherers are guilty of rights violations while vegans are not, even though animals must be killed for consumer veganism too. If this is because it is okay to contribute to animal death indirectly, but not to kill an animal yourself, that justifies any diet where you buy your dead animals rather than killing them personally. If this is because of intent/accident/etc., it becomes a suffering reduction argument, which doesn’t help because veganism reduces suffering less.

What is to be Done, Veganism?

Contrary to what Vegan Outreach may claim, veganism is not the easiest way to reduce suffering in your diet. If your principle is “reduce suffering,” all you need to do is say “no thanks” to a single Slim Jim once in your life and you’ve accomplished your goal. If your principle is “Reduce suffering to the maximum amount possible,” you need to kill yourself or at least go freegan. If your principle is “reduce suffering to the exact level that consumer veganism does,” then you better not judge someone whose principle is “reduce suffering to the exact level that turning down a single Slim Jim does.”

And if your principle is “don’t violate animal rights,” and you give animals a right to life, you’ve made it impossible to adhere to your own beliefs unless you come up with exceptions that are designed to let veganism and only veganism off the hook for rights violations.

Why are vegans so attached to this lifestyle that is not the best way to achieve what they say they want to achieve anyway? The reason appears to be mostly symbolic – it seems like veganism shouldn’t harm animals, even if it really does. If it were possible for there to be a no harm diet, it would look like veganism: that much is true. The thing is, a no harm diet is not possible, and to treat veganism symbolically as one obscures this reality.

This is why vegans tend to focus on “what is seen” (no meat on their plates) and gloss over “what is unseen” (all the animals that died anyway). If you call them out on this, they respond with the suffering reduction/rights shuffle, but this is a smokescreen to mask that veganism is not really what vegans wish it could be –- a diet that causes no harm.

Recently vegans have been retreating from the health and environmental arguments for veganism and zeroing in on ethics as the only consistent argument for veganism. But what do they mean when they say they are “vegan for ethical reasons”?

In most cases they mean that it feels wrong to them to hurt animals. But since “I like animals and it pains me to see them tortured and killed” fails to convince anyone who doesn’t feel much for animals, and it doesn’t explain what to do about the less apparent animal deaths that don’t take place in slaughter houses, vegans feel the need to logically “prove” that slaughtering animals is wrong and these less apparent animal deaths are not. And they accomplish this through a rights/suffering reduction tag team that creates the illusion that vegans have an answer for everything, when really they just keep changing the rules and distracting you from problems in their previous argument that they’ve now temporarily abandoned – only to be picked up again when the new argument stops working.

This cannot form the foundation of a coherent, meaningful philosophy.

But might there be a consistent principle that actually would justify veganism?

Anti-exploitation: the only coherent basis for veganism?

Vegans kill animals and cause animal suffering, which makes it silly for them to criticize others for killing animals and causing animal suffering. But there is one thing that veganism doesn’t—or at least potentially doesn’t—do: exploit animals. If vegans were to single animal exploitation out as the motivation behind their cause, they just might be able to make a case that isn’t contradicted by their own actions. This would, however, change a few things.

By exploiting animals, I mean breeding, confining and raising them for your own ends. Having a rescue pet isn’t exploitation, but getting your cow pregnant so you can take her milk is. Because nonhuman animals cannot formally consent, it is not possible to prove that any demanding arrangement we have with them is mutually agreed upon, so any use we get out of them while they are alive could be considered exploitation. I cannot see how veganism could ever avoid killing animals or causing animal suffering, but vegans theoretically could avoid animal exploitation.

Currently they don’t because most of them buy crops that are fertilized with animal manure. But if they figure out a way around this through effective veganic fertilizer or using human manure, they could honestly claim to have an animal-exploitation-free diet, as long as humans weren’t exploited either. The downside is (at least for vegans who like to think they have the only possible moral diet), they wouldn’t be alone.

If it’s animal exploitation rather than animal suffering and death that is the problem, this means it’s okay to kill animals and even cause animal suffering. No matter what, vegans have to be okay with killing animals and causing animal suffering – since vegans kill animals and cause animal suffering – but if they were to openly excuse these harms and base veganism on an objection to exploitation, they would have no way to criticize other lifestyles that cause death and suffering but don’t rely on animal exploitation, such as locavore hunting, invasive species hunting, or eating wild-caught fish or insects.

Could a vegan ever accept that eating wild-caught salmon sashimi might be okay? The vegan instinct here is to rage “That’s harming the environment and killing fish!” Yes, but guess what the agriculture that vegans support does – harms the environment and kills fish. “But eating fish does that even more!” Then why aren’t you freegan or dead? If vegans stuck to exploitation as the villain and let us have our wild-caught Portuguese sardines, they could avoid these contradictions.

There just appears to be no consistent moral basis for veganism that excludes all alternatives that include animal products. If vegans want to base their philosophy on a solid principle instead of a misleading ethical shell game, they will have to accept the validity of other lifestyles. Do vegans really need veganism to be the sole valid lifestyle, anyway?

Besides, an anti-exploitation veganism will mostly be accepting these meaty alternatives as a technicality. Even the most principled invasive species hunter is unlikely to care if animal manure fertilized their crops.

Here is what a chart of exploiting diets and non-exploiting diets might look like. The diets are in no particular order within their categories because they either exploit sentient beings or they don’t:

Why vegans should like the anti-exploitation basis for veganism

* This resolves the vegan inconsistency over animals accidentally and intentionally killed in agriculture. As long as these animals are not exploited, these harms are justifiable. It also addresses the problem that veganism is not the only or the best way to reduce suffering. Since suffering reduction is not the goal, it doesn’t have to be.

* Factory farming and most of the ways that people get animal products currently are still forbidden, as is animal testing and bestiality.

* Zoos, circuses and rodeos aren’t allowed either.

* Wool still belongs to the sheep and animal skins are only okay if from wild-hunted animals.

* Dairy is out unless it is from human milk or freegan, so vegans still get to hate vegetarians.

* Vegans no longer have to be pro-life to be consistent. Abortion may harm sentient beings but it isn’t exploiting anything, so rock on.

* With rights and suffering as the basis of veganism, suicide is the logical conclusion because that is the best way to reduce animal suffering and the only way to avoid infringing on animal rights. Under that paradigm, the best vegan is one who was never born. With exploitation, this is no longer the case. You either exploit animals or you don’t, so there is no self-destructive race to making your overall impact as minimal as possible.

* Reducing your participation in a wrong is not as satisfying as opting out of a wrong entirely. If the wrong is suffering or animal rights violations, vegans are doomed to be mere reducers like the rest of us. If the wrong is animal exploitation, vegans at least have hope of completely washing their hands of it. This is especially true for vegans who are less concerned with the environment, since that allows chemical agriculture.

* Vegans could still make slavery comparisons. However, they would have to lose the Holocaust analogies. Those never worked anyway because the Holocaust was an attempt to wipe out groups whereas animal farmers perpetually replace the animals they kill. If you must apply a Holocaust analogy to animals, a better one would be vegetable agriculture or letting invasive species run rampant, both of which kill animals without replacing them, sometimes to the point of extinction.

* Ending sentient being exploitation gives vegans a more defined goal. Instead of vaguely saying “Future people will figure out how to not kill animals,” vegans could focus on something tangible – a workable veganic fertilizer or “green manure,” a system for collecting and utilizing human manure, or an improved artificial fertilizer.

* It kind of seems like exploitation is what vegans hate the most anyway. That’s basically what they mean when they say, “There is more suffering in a glass of milk than in a steak.” But they should say, “There is more exploitation in a glass of milk than in a steak” because if they want to play the suffering game, there is more suffering in a soy protein burger than in a plate of oysters.

Why vegans might not like the anti-exploitation basis

* Vegans who go by exploitation can no longer say “No animal products ever, no matter what, sorry world.” But the only way they are able to say that now is by somehow attributing virtue to killing animals but not eating them, because that is essentially what consumer veganism does.

* Mainly because of the manure issue, most vegans feast off exploitation along with the rest of us. Knowing this, they would have to admit that they do not live up to their own ideals. But they do not live up to their own ideals under animal rights, nor can they ever. At least this ideal could potentially be reached.

* Vegans would have to articulate why it is okay to kill animals accidentally and intentionally but not to exploit them. “Because it’s impossible not to kill animals” is a practical issue, not a moral argument.

* They would also have to explain why it’s okay to kill animals but not to kill humans. They have to do this now anyway, if they wouldn’t approve of shooting humans for eating crops or legalizing involuntary manslaughter. (And if they would approve of killing humans to take their land for agriculture, why do they have all this compassion for animals?) The only out I see for vegans here is, “Okay, we admit it, we’re speciesists too.” But vegans don’t want to say that.

* This prioritizes chemical fertilization over organic, which would strike a lot of people as backwards. However, eco-minded anti-exploitation vegans would be motivated to perfect organic alternatives to animal manure.

* Unless veganic farming ever gets popular, it would be virtually impossible for a consistent anti-exploitation vegan to ever eat out. Then again, if animal rights vegans were consistent, they wouldn’t eat at all.

* Anti-animal exploitation is not always as intuitive as anti-animal killing. Vegans better get used to defensive exploiters asking, “I get why you’re against factory farming, but why manure?”

* Vegans could no longer see a piece of meat on a plate and immediately conclude that something immoral transpired. In fact, vegetables at an organic restaurant would be more suspect than a whole fish at a small restaurant in a coastal town. (Of course vegans are only able to see meat as automatically immoral now because they overlook or excuse the animal death and suffering involved in their plant foods.)

* There are fewer people for vegans to hate, especially if organic vegans have to concede to being exploiters too. Really, though, this is an advantage, since most vegans don’t enjoy thinking everyone is evil.

* There is no way to definitively prove that animal exploitation is inherently, objectively wrong. But that’s a hurdle for all moral beliefs.

Conclusion

There may be irresolvable problems with the anti-exploitation basis that I haven’t considered yet (I just started thinking about this two days ago). That’s fine. I don’t have a problem with the exploitation of nonhuman animals, so I am not personally promoting this model. I only bring all this up because as far as I can tell, neither suffering reduction nor rights work as a consistent moral basis for veganism, and anti-exploitation is the only thing I’ve thought of that might.

However, even if anti-exploitation does turn out to be stronger than rights/suffering reduction, it only makes sense to adopt this basis if it honestly is your reason for being vegan. If you’re okay with eating an egg from a rescue hen or wearing a wool shirt from a sheep you know was treated well, you might not be against animal exploitation. Why pretend to be against the use of animal manure or honey just for the sake of logical consistency? If you start with veganism and then work backward, testing all the ways you can think of to defend that, I have to wonder why you are so stuck on this self-denying lifestyle if you’re not even sure why you follow it.

For now, if vegans go with the anti-exploitation argument, we are all exploiters and vegans will have to stop thinking of themselves as blameless and the rest of us as immoral. Talk to us when you stop exploiting animals for their shit, vegans, and maybe we’ll invite you to hang out with us as we hunt some feral pigs. Or if you’d prefer to stick with a jury-rigged combo of rights and suffering reduction, that’s fine too, but don’t fault anyone else for not committing to your arbitrary, inconsistent ethical system.