Ethical veganism Ethical veganism is based on opposition to
speciesism, the assignment of value to individuals based on (animal) species membership alone. Divisions within
animal rights theory include the
utilitarian,
protectionist approach, which pursues improved conditions for animals. It also pertains to the rights-based
abolitionism, which seeks to end human ownership of non-humans. Abolitionists argue that protectionism serves only to make the public feel that animal use can be morally unproblematic (the "happy meat" position). Of
bloodsports, he has said that "to kill creatures for fun must be the very dregs" and that
vivisection and
animal experimentation "is probably the cruelest of all Man's attack on the rest of Creation." He has also said, "
vegetarianism, whilst being a necessary stepping-stone between meat eating and veganism, is only a stepping stone." Several animal rights activists, including
Isaac Bashevis Singer,
Gary Yourofsky and
Karen Davis, have
compared the cruel treatment of animals in
CAFOs and
slaughterhouses to the
Holocaust. Law professor
Gary Francione, an abolitionist, argues that all sentient beings should have the right not to be treated as property, and that veganism must be the baseline for anyone who believes that non-humans have intrinsic moral value. Philosopher
Peter Singer, a protectionist and
utilitarian, argues that there is no moral or logical justification for failing to count animal suffering as a consequence when making decisions, and that killing animals should be rejected unless necessary for survival. Despite this, he writes that "ethical thinking can be sensitive to circumstances" and that he is "not too concerned about trivial infractions". An argument by
Bruce Friedrich, also a protectionist, holds that strict veganism harms animals because it focuses on personal purity rather than encouraging people to give up whatever animal products they can. For Francione, this is similar to arguing that, because human-rights abuses can never be eliminated, we should not defend human rights in situations we control. By failing to ask a server whether something contains animal products, we reinforce that the moral rights of animals are a matter of convenience, he argues. He concludes from this that the protectionist position fails on its own
consequentialist terms. Plumwood wrote that animal food may be an "unnecessary evil" from the perspective of the consumer who "draws on the whole planet for nutritional needs"—and she strongly opposed factory farming—but for anyone relying on a much smaller ecosystem, it is very difficult or impossible to be vegan.
Bioethicist Ben Mepham, in his review of Francione and
Garner's book
The Animal Rights Debate: Abolition or Regulation?, concludes, "if the aim of ethics is to choose the right, or best, course of action in specific circumstances 'all things considered', it is arguable that adherence to such an absolutist agenda is simplistic and open to serious self-contradictions. Or, as Farlie puts it, with characteristic panache: 'to conclude that veganism is the "only ethical response" is to take a big leap into a very muddy pond'." He cites as examples the adverse effects on animal wildlife derived from the agricultural practices necessary to sustain most vegan diets and the ethical contradiction of favoring the welfare of domesticated animals but not that of wild animals; the imbalance between the resources that are used to promote the welfare of animals as opposed to those destined to alleviate the suffering of the approximately one billion human beings who undergo malnutrition, abuse and exploitation; the focus on attitudes and conditions in Western developed countries, leaving out the rights and interests of societies whose economy, culture and, in some cases, survival rely on a symbiotic relationship with animals. In pursuit of abolishing suffering, Pearce promotes
predation elimination among animals and the "cross-species global analogue of the welfare state". Fertility regulation could maintain herbivore populations at sustainable levels, "a more civilised and compassionate policy option than famine, predation, and disease". The increasing number of vegans and vegetarians in the transhumanism movement has been attributed in part to Pearce's influence. A growing
political philosophy that incorporates veganism as part of its
revolutionary praxis is
veganarchism, which seeks "total abolition" or "
total liberation" for all animals, including humans. Veganarchists identify the
state as unnecessary and harmful to animals, both human and non-human, and advocate for the adoption of veganism in a
stateless society. The term was popularized in 1995 by Brian A. Dominick's pamphlet
Animal Liberation and Social Revolution, described as "a vegan perspective on anarchism or an anarchist perspective on veganism".
Direct action is a common practice among veganarchists (and anarchists generally) with groups like the
Animal Liberation Front (ALF), the
Animal Rights Militia (ARM), the
Justice Department (JD) and
Revolutionary Cells – Animal Liberation Brigade (RCALB) often engaging in such activities, sometimes criminally, to further their goals.
Steven Best, animal rights activist and professor of philosophy at the
University of Texas at El Paso, advocates this approach, and has been critical of vegan activists like Francione for supporting animal liberation but not total liberation, which would include not only opposition to "the property status of animals" but also "a serious critique of capitalism, the state, property relations, and commodification dynamics in general." In particular, he criticizes the focus on the simplistic and apolitical "Go Vegan" message directed mainly at wealthy Western audiences, while ignoring people of colour, the working class and the poor, especially in the developing world, noting that "for every person who becomes vegan, a thousand flesh eaters arise in China, India and Indonesia." The "faith in the singular efficacy of conjectural education and moral persuasion," Best writes, is no substitute for "direct action, mass confrontation, civil disobedience, alliance politics, and struggle for radical change."
Donald Watson has said he "respects the people enormously who do it, believing that it's the most direct and quick way to achieve their ends." Some vegans also embrace the philosophy of
anti-natalism, as they see the two as complementary in terms of "harm reduction" to animals and the environment. Vegan social psychologist
Melanie Joy described the ideology in which people support the use and consumption of
animal products as
carnism, as a sort of opposite to veganism.
Exploitation concerns The Vegan Society has written, "by extension, [veganism] promotes the development and use of animal-free alternatives for the benefit of humans." Many ethical vegans and vegan organizations cite the poor working conditions of slaughterhouse workers as a reason to reject animal products. The first vegan activist,
Donald Watson, has asked, "If these butchers and vivisectors weren't there, could we perform the acts that they are doing? And, if we couldn't, we have no right to expect them to do it on our behalf. Full stop! That simply compounds the issue. It means that we're not just exploiting animals; we're exploiting human beings."Environmental vegans focus on
conservation, rejecting the use of animal products on the premise that
fishing,
hunting, trapping and farming, particularly
factory farming, are environmentally unsustainable. According to a 2006 United Nations
Food and Agriculture Organization report, ''
Livestock's Long Shadow'', around 26% of the planet's terrestrial surface is devoted to livestock grazing. The report also concluded that livestock farming (mostly of cows, chickens and pigs) affects the air, land, soil, water,
biodiversity and
climate change. Livestock consumed 1,174 million tonnes of food in 2002—including 7.6 million tonnes of fishmeal and 670 million tonnes of cereals, one-third of the global cereal harvest.
Paul Watson of the
Sea Shepherd Conservation Society called pigs and chicken "major aquatic predators", because livestock eat 40 percent of the fish that are caught. It proposed a move away from animal products to reduce environmental damage. diet. A vegan diet would be given a value of about 1 on this graph. A 2015 study determined that
significant biodiversity loss can be attributed to the growing demand for meat, a significant driver of
deforestation and habitat destruction, with species-rich habitats converted to agriculture for livestock production. A 2017
World Wildlife Fund study found that 60% of biodiversity loss can be attributed to the vast scale of feed crop cultivation needed to rear tens of billions of farm animals, which puts enormous strain on natural resources, resulting in extensive loss of lands and species. In 2017, 15,364 world scientists signed a
warning to humanity calling for, among other things, "promoting dietary shifts towards mostly plant-based foods". A 2018 study found that global adoption of plant-exclusive diets would reduce agricultural land use by 76% (3.1 billion hectares, an area the size of Africa) and cut total global
greenhouse gas emissions by 28%. Half of this emissions reduction came from avoided emissions from animal production including
methane and
nitrous oxide, and half from trees re-growing on abandoned farmlands that remove carbon dioxide from the air. The 2019
IPBES Global Assessment Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services found that
industrial agriculture and
overfishing are the primary drivers of the extinction crisis, with the meat and dairy industries having a substantial impact. On 8 August 2019, the IPCC released a summary of the 2019 special report which asserted that a shift towards plant-exclusive diets would help to mitigate and adapt to climate change. A 2022 study found that for high-income nations alone 100 billion tons of carbon dioxide could be removed from the air by the end of the century through a shift to plant-exclusive diets and re-wilding of farmlands. The researchers coined the term
double climate dividend to describe the effect that re-wilding after a diet shift can have. But they note: "We don't have to be purist about this, even just cutting animal intake would be helpful. If half of the public in richer regions cut half the animal products in their diets, you're still talking about a massive opportunity in environmental outcomes and public health". A 2023 study published in
Nature Food found that a vegan diet vastly decreases the impact on the environment from food production, such as reducing emissions, water pollution and land use by 75%, reducing the destruction of wildlife by 66% and the usage of water by 54%.
Dietary veganism Some people follow a vegan diet but not other aspects of veganism. Dietary veganism is limited to following a plant-exclusive diet. Dietary veganism is in contrast to ethical veganism which is defined as a philosophical belief that is a protected characteristic under the UK's
Equality Act 2010. Authors like
Richard Twine and
Breeze Harper argue that dietary veganism cannot be called veganism, as veganism is more than a diet.
Gary L. Francione has argued that the promotion of "dietary veganism" lacks the moral imperative expressed by Leslie J. Cross, an early and influential vice-president of The Vegan Society, who said in 1949 that veganism was "the abolition of the exploitation of animals by man". The Vegan Society of Canada have criticized dietary veganism stating, "since veganism is not a list of ingredients there is also no such thing as a dietary vegan. Veganism cannot be split into sub-components; this is a case where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts". Others have suggested that the arguments for dietary veganism can be extended to support ethical veganism.
Feminist veganism Pioneers One leading activist and scholar of feminist animal rights is
Carol J. Adams. Her premier work,
The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory (1990), noted the relationship between feminism and meat consumption. Since its release, Adams has published several other works, including essays, books, and keynote addresses. In one of her speeches, "Why feminist-vegan now?"—adapted from her original address at the "Minding Animals" conference in Newcastle, Australia (2009)—she said, "the idea that there was a connection between feminism and vegetarianism came to [her] in October 1974". Other authors have echoed Adams's ideas and expanded on them. Feminist scholar Angella Duvnjak wrote in "Joining the Dots: Some Reflections on Feminist-Vegan Political Practice and Choice" (2011) that she was met with opposition when she pointed out the connection between feminist and vegan ideals, even though the connection seemed more than obvious to her and other scholars.
Animal and human abuse parallels One of the central concepts that animates feminist veganism is the idea that there is a connection between the oppression of women and the oppression of animals. For example, Marjorie Spiegal compared the consumption or servitude of animals for human gain to
slavery.
Capitalism and feminist veganism Feminist veganism also relates to feminist thought through the common critique of the
capitalist means of production. In an interview, Carol J. Adams highlighted "meat eating as the ultimate capitalist product, because it takes so much to make the product, it uses up so many resources". This extensive use of resources for meat production is discouraged in favor of using that productive capacity for other food products that have a less detrimental impact on the environment.
Religious veganism Streams within a number of religious traditions encourage veganism, sometimes on ethical or environmental grounds. Scholars have especially noted the growth in the 21st century of
Jewish veganism, as well as
Jain veganism. Some religious interpretations, such as
Christian vegetarianism,
Hindu vegetarianism, and
Buddhist vegetarianism, also recommend or mandate a vegan diet. Donald Watson argued, It connects the use of nonhuman animals with other social justice concerns such as
racism, and with the lasting effects of slavery, such as the subsistence diets of enslaved people enduring as familial and cultural food traditions. Dietary changes caused by the
Great Migration also meant former farmers, who had previously been able to grow or forage vegetables, became reliant on processed foods. According to Shah, the area where most vegans of colour feel the greatest rift with mainstream veganism is in its failure to recognize the intersectionality with other social justice issues, such as
food access. == Politics and activism ==