For the Animals
An Argument Guide PT

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This guide gathers the arguments used to justify animal exploitation or reject veganism, organized so you can find the answer you need without reading everything.

The underlying criterion

If a being is sentient, that is, can be harmed or benefited by what happens to it, its interests count morally. A justification for ignoring those interests is only valid if it survives three tests: logical coherence, empirical support and consistency when applied to equivalent human cases.

Five commitments

  1. Intellectual honesty: present the strongest version of each argument, acknowledge what it gets right and make no empirical claim without a source.
  2. Rigor on three levels: logical (is the argument valid?), epistemological (do the premises have evidential support?) and moral (is the criterion coherent and relevant?).
  3. Sentientism: sentience is the founding criterion of moral inclusion. Species, intelligence, usefulness and human affection are not.
  4. Antispeciesism and justice: similar interests deserve similar consideration, whatever the species of whoever has them.
  5. Parsimony: prefer the simplest criterion that explains our firmest moral judgments, without exceptions tailored to protect habits.

Knocking down straw men would weaken the guide and make it what it criticizes. That is why the strongest version of each argument comes before the answer.

How to use it

  • To debate: find the objection by its code or with the search and follow the map of connections to anticipate the next one. The letter is the family and the number is its position within it.
  • To recognize: the "How it can show up" block shows the other ways the argument is usually said or written.
  • To teach: use the answer for children and the short one. The technical layers are for those who want to go deeper.
  • To debate someone who starts from a political theory: the political objections show, theory by theory, why excluding animals contradicts each one's principle.
  • To research: the fallacies and biases indexes let you cross the catalogue by type of error.

Direct and indirect arguments

Direct arguments (DIR) dispute the moral core: whether animals feel, whether the individual animal counts and whether using or killing that individual is wrong. Indirect arguments (IND) do not face that question: they claim exploitation is necessary, that veganism is unfeasible, harmful or ineffective, or that those who defend it deserve no credit.

Even if an indirect argument were true, it would justify only exceptions, never exploitation in general. That is why Part DIR comes first.

Why indirect arguments are not enough

Indirect arguments do not discuss whether it is right to exploit animals. They discuss health, the environment, the economy, practicality or the credibility of those who defend veganism. Many activists and animal rights philosophers question using this kind of argument to defend animals, because it sidesteps what is important: respect for the animals themselves.

Other social movements do not rely on indirect arguments to defend humans. People fighting for the rights of minorities and of those who are harmed do not need to prove that treating them fairly is good for the environment, for health or for the economy: the fact that they are harmed is reason enough. Even so, veganism is often defended with health or environmental arguments, as if the end of animal exploitation were not reason enough in itself.

Indirect arguments are useful on the level of facts: they show that a practical objection is false, that vegan living is healthy and possible, that animal farming causes harm. But on their own they do not justify the morality of respecting animals. And they can even pull the other way: "sustainable" leather, "sustainable" hunting, organic meat, insect farming and genetically modified animals are defended in the name of the environment and keep or increase exploitation (H13). That is why each chapter in Part IND answers on the argument's own ground, corrects the facts and brings the conversation back to the moral question.

When health, protein or the environment are used to justify eating animals, the reasoning usually fails on two levels. On the level of facts, because the premises are often false: a well-planned plant-based diet meets our needs and causes less environmental harm. On the moral level, because it leaps from what is to what ought to be, the move philosophers call the is-ought fallacy: even if eating animals brought some benefit, that would not show it is just to make them suffer and die to obtain it. Showing the facts is always necessary; stopping there is never enough.

The 11 blocks of a full chapter

  1. Formulation: the everyday phrase and the strongest version, with numbered premises
  2. How it can show up: other forms of the same argument
  3. Answer for children: language for ages 8 to 10, without guilt or shock
  4. Short answer: the central flaw and a question to ask back
  5. Full answer: validity, evidence, the strongest counter-reply and why it fails too
  6. Connections: what usually comes before and after
  7. Reasoning errors: logical, epistemological and moral
  8. Contradictions: where the argument clashes with the person's other beliefs
  9. Biases: the psychological mechanisms that make it convincing
  10. Extrapolations: what would follow if the principle applied to humans
  11. What the argument gets right: the honest concessions

Start with A10, "They're just animals", the root chapter: it is where most chains of objections end.