Veganism and animal ethics don't depend on liking animals or on any particular ethical theory. They depend on a few principles almost everyone already accepts in other contexts. When those principles are taken seriously, the conclusion comes with them. When they're abandoned, it disappears, and other just causes tend to go with it.
What supports it
| Principle | What it says | Where it appears in this guide |
|---|---|---|
| Critical reason and logical consistency | Accepting the conclusions that follow from premises we already accept, and treating like cases alike | Fallacies, A11 |
| Relevance | A criterion can only decide who is harmed if it's related to the capacity to be harmed. Species, colour or intelligence aren't | A1, A10 |
| Impartiality | Judging as if we didn't know which position we'd be born into: the veil of ignorance | A21 |
| Universality | A moral rule applies to all like cases, not only to those that suit us | A13, A24 |
| Sentience and interests | Whoever can have good or bad experiences has interests that count, wherever the harm comes from | A5, family M |
| The moral circle and progress | Moral history is, to a large extent, the inclusion of those who were once excluded | A9 |
| Justice | Not imposing serious harm on others to obtain small benefits | J11 |
| The common good | Thinking about everyone affected, including those who don't vote, can't speak and aren't born yet | M11 |
What weakens it
| Attitude | How it weakens | Where it appears in this guide |
|---|---|---|
| Merely instrumental rationality | Using reason only to get what one wants, without asking whether the end is just | J11, E12 |
| Logical inconsistency | Accepting a principle in one case and rejecting it in a like case when the conclusion is uncomfortable | E8 |
| Escaping what is relevant | Swapping the question "does this harm someone?" for others: tradition, taste, health, who is speaking | Part IND |
| Partiality | Giving greater weight to the interests of those who resemble us | A21 |
| Relativism | Treating the question of harming others as a matter of taste | E2 |
| Views in conflict with sentience | Anthropocentrism, environmentalism as a moral view and biocentrism put something other than the capacity to feel at the center | Antispeciesism and sentientism, M7 |
| Moral and cultural stagnation | Taking current custom as the limit of what is right | D1 |
| Making abstractions sacred | Treating as sacred something that doesn't feel, such as "the natural", a system, a tradition, or concepts like species and ecosystem, and placing it above beings who feel | M2, M7, A18 |
| Shielding ideas | Protecting certain beliefs from any revision. This moral conservatism prevents seeking what is best for all sentient beings, because it rules out new proposals in advance, such as helping wild animals or using science against suffering | M5, M10 |
| Lack of motivation and weak will | Knowing what is right and not acting, because habit, pleasure or social pressure win out over moral belief | E12, E8 |
| Injustice | Accepting that the stronger use the weaker because they can | C6 |
| Tribalism | Dividing the world into "us" and "them" and reserving morality for one's own group | A13 |
| Selfishness | Measuring everything by one's own interest | E1 |
| Ableism | Measuring someone's worth by intelligence or ability, the same criterion that excludes disabled people | A1, A11 |
Why this matters
The principles in the first table are the same ones that support human rights, the fight against racism, sexism and ableism, and care for future generations. The attitudes in the second table are the same ones that, throughout history, have served to exclude humans from the moral circle. That's why defending animals doesn't compete with other just causes: it rests on the same foundations and faces the same adversaries.
Knowing isn't enough, but it helps
Some people know animal ethics well and still eat animals. That doesn't show moral beliefs motivate no one. It shows they don't decide behavior on their own: a person may think the wrong isn't serious, may have stronger competing motivations, such as habit, pleasure and social pressure, or may simply choose not to act. As Luciano Carlos Cunha argues, emotional persuasion faces the same limits, and rational persuasion has the advantage of explaining why a practice should be rejected. That's why, besides arguments, it helps to create conditions that make action easier: environments, habits and groups that make it easier to do what one already knows is right.
It's also why choosing arguments well is worthwhile. An argument that persuades someone through selfishness, tribalism or anthropocentrism can win a conversation and, at the same time, strengthen exactly what weakens the cause. That's the subject of the page Restraint with indirect arguments.
Sources and further reading
- The argument from relevance
- The Expanding Circle
- Moral Tribes
- Crenças morais, motivação para agir e o caso de especialistas em ética animal que consomem animais (in Portuguese)
- Beasts of Burden: Animal and Disability Liberation
- Eclipse of Reason
- A Theory of Justice