Why Should Philosophers with an Interest in Social Justice Care about Veganism?

An Introductory Post to a Series on Veganism

by

Tracy Isaacs

As a feminist philosopher who works primarily on theories of collective action, collective responsibility, and collective obligation, I have spent a great deal of my career thinking about structural injustice and the ways in which it supports privilege and disadvantage on the basis of social group membership. It is likely not necessary to explain to most readers of BIOPOLITICAL PHILOSOPHY the idea that oppressive social structures normalize social hierarchies in ways that facilitate unearned social and political privilege and promote undeserved social and political disadvantage.

In recent years, I have turned my attention to a particular issue in the area of applied collective responsibility/obligation: namely, veganism as a response to the facts about both animal suffering and environmental/climate impact of factory farming, the latter of which accounts for 99% of animal products consumed globally. The requisite facts are readily available with a few clicks around the internet, so I will not belabour them here. Few people endorse the actual level of suffering that factory farming involves. Furthermore, many of us now associate “plant-based” food choices with the idea of “sustainability,” broadly construed.

[Description of image below: one of Tracy Isaacs’s photos. A bowl of almonds, a bowl of berries, and three pine cones are surrounded by three tulips and their long leaves and stems.]

Veganism in response to widespread animal suffering and the environmental impact of factory farming is a collective-action issue in the sense that it is the solution to a set of problems that require collective effort. A handful of people changing their approach to food choices and the use of animal products in their lives more generally will not instigate the system-level change that is ultimately required.

My question for today’s post is, “Why should philosophers care?” Given that a collective-action solution is required, there is an obvious material sense in which everyone should care. It is not simply a philosophical puzzle to be solved in the abstract. Trillions of non-human land and sea animals live miserable lives of suffering and die horrible, terrifying deaths every year to feed humans. Therefore, we should ask: What are some of philosophical dimensions of veganism that warrant our attention as philosophers with a concern about unearned privilege and undeserved disadvantage?

1. Human Supremacy over Non-human Animals—Speciesism—as an Ideology. Humans dominate over animals and in the minds of most humans that domination is an unquestionable entitlement based in the natural order of things. This deeply held assumption about human superiority serves to prioritize even the most trivial human taste or preference over the well-being and, indeed, the very lives of non-human animals.

2. The Implications of Capabilities/Capacities Defences of Speciesism. Philosophers defend approaches that prioritize the moral status of humans with speciesist claims about capabilities and rationality. These approaches and the claims that comprise them have historically yielded ableist conclusions that justify giving moral priority to some humans over others. In short, these approaches and claims devalue the lives of disabled people who are perceived to “lack” some of the prized capacities and capabilities. In addition, speciesism has historically been used to marginalize women and members of racial, ethnic, and religious minority groups, who have purportedly failed to embody some of the allegedly higher-order capacities and capabilities.

3. Comparisons of Groups of Humans to Non-human Animals are Used to Dehumanize Humans and Justify Atrocities. Given the casual nature of the ways in which humans dismiss the harsh treatment and suffering of non-human animals, a long-standing tactic in pitting human against human has been to dehumanize other people by equating them with non-human animals. During the Holocaust, for example, the Nazis referred to Jewish people as rats. In the Rwandan genocide of 1994, a radio campaign that likened members of the Tutsi group to cockroaches helped to pave the way for the massacre of 800,000 people of the group in 100 days. Slaveholders justified their use and treatment of slaves by likening them to animals. In settler colonialism, the descriptor “savage” has been used to equate Indigenous people with “wild animals,” undomesticated and uncivilized. This tactic—which continues to be frequently employed to marginalize members of racial groups in the social and political context of white supremacy—is an effective means with which to entrench structures of social and political hierarchy precisely because speciesism is a widely-assumed truth: (some) humans serve as the yardstick by which the status of all other beings are measured.

4. Climate Change Has a Disproportionate Impact on Vulnerable Populations. Studies show that climate change affects poor people more intensely on a number of basic measures, including health, access to food and water, education, and working conditions. The United Nations reports that climate change threatens human rights among more vulnerable populations: “Persons in vulnerable situations – owing to factors including geography, poverty, gender, age, indigenous or minority status, national or social origin, birth or other status and disability – may experience heightened exposure and vulnerability to climate-induced human rights harms.” Given, as I have noted, the significant contribution of animal agriculture to climate change, the disproportionate impact of climate change on vulnerable humans demands the concerted implementation of a global social-justice framework that includes the reduction of animal products, if not their complete elimination.

5. The Sexual Politics of Meat. Over 30 years ago philosopher Carol Adams opened her book, The Sexual Politics of Meat, by remarking that “In some respects we all acknowledge the sexual politics of meat. When we think that men, especially male athletes, need meat, or when wives report that they could give up meat but they fix it for their husbands, the overt association between meat eating and virile maleness is enacted” (13). She goes on to say: “It is the covert associations that are more elusive to pinpoint as they are so deeply embedded within our culture” (13). Her work, and the work of others (including more recently C. Lou Hamilton’s Veganism, Sex and Politics: Tales of Danger and Pleasure [2019]) explores meat-eating as profoundly embedded as a foundational element of patriarchy. This feminist analysis goes a long way to explain why renouncing meat is considered such a threat to the status quo of patriarchal privilege.

I will take up this last point in a subsequent BIOPOLITICAL PHILOSOPHY post. This post has aimed to demonstrate that more is at stake than the most obvious surface-level urgent (and more obvious) ethical and environmental reasons for the reduction or elimination of our use of animal products. Indeed, the areas of inquiry that I have outlined in this post, themselves often relegated to the margins of philosophy, help to explain why veganism is often rejected out of hand as an extreme, unthinkable solution, despite the many compelling reasons in its favour.

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Tracy Isaacs is a Professor of Philosophy and Special Advisor to the Provost on Gender-Based and Sexual Violence at Western University. She blogs twice a week on the philosophical and practical dimensions of a vegan lifestyle at veganpractically.com, with the goal of inspiring curiosity by making veganism seem more approachable (and she warmly invites you to subscribe).

{Description of image below: photo of Tracy Isaacs, a brown-skinned mixed-race woman with short grey hair. She is smiling widely and wearing a fantastic multi-strand beaded necklace.]