I’m an ethical vegan. I think standard meat consumption is grossly immoral and that factory farming is significantly worse than any crime ever inflicted on humans. But there are a number of lines that vegans often trot out that I think are both incorrect and counterproductive. Sometimes, these involve making really bad arguments. Other times, they’re correct but make it harder to persuade people.
Often when vegans are explaining why it’s wrong to drink milk, they will say “cow’s milk is meant for the mother cow’s babies. But you’re not a baby cow.”
Now, the second sentence is certainly true. But this is a dumb argument against consuming dairy. The reason it’s wrong to consume dairy is that it causes harm to cows—dairy cows are repeatedly forcibly impregnated, have their babies snatched from them, are mutilated, and suffer various other horrors. Whether their milk is “meant” for their babies is irrelevant. If drinking milk didn’t harm cows at all, then it would be fine even if it was “meant” for their their calves in some way. Seeds and grains are “meant” for turning into plant offspring, but nonetheless, they’re obviously fine to eat.
This line is also very ingroupy. Non-vegans are obviously not going to be convinced by the argument. But it gives you a line that permits you to signal about how weird and gross animal products are. As vegans, we have good arguments. We don’t need to make bad ones.
Often vegans refer to the mass killing of animals as a holocaust. Now, for what it’s worth, I don’t think this is an inaccurate term given one way the word can be defined. Often holocaust just means “mass killing”—e.g. when people talk about a nuclear holocaust. I’m also aware that holocaust victims like Alex Hershaft have themselves drawn the comparison. There are some nuanced settings in which I think the comparison might be okay to make.
But in general, I think we should be wary about using the term for purely persuasion-related reasons. I have a faint recollection of seeing a Faunalytics study years ago presenting empirical evidence that it generally makes people less persuaded, though I haven’t been able to find it, so maybe I dreamed it up.
In any case, the basic reason that I think you should not use the word holocaust is that it makes your position more controversial than it needs to be. The core case for veganism is really very simple: you shouldn’t hurt others a lot for small personal benefit. Nearly all animals undergo nightmare conditions that we’d call torture if inflicted on a dog—so you shouldn’t fund the operations that produce more creatures in these horrifying conditions.
There aren’t any good objections to that position. Thus, non-vegans are always looking for a way out—some controversial premise that they can disagree with. I’m not suggesting they’re being deliberately deceptive; I’m just noting that people are motivated to find flaws in arguments for conclusions that they reject. Non-vegans will constantly start talking about other issues like whether it’s okay to slaughter a pig on a desert island.
In light of this, you should try extremely hard to stray away from controversy. You should only defend the most minimal premises needed for your conclusion. By using inflammatory language of debatable accuracy, you turn the dispute into one about whether the term “holocaust” is appropriate, rather than about whether it’s okay to eat meat in standard settings.
This is also why, even if you’re a utilitarian, you shouldn’t argue for utilitarianism when defending veganism. Utilitarianism is way more controversial than the idea that you shouldn’t hurt others a lot for small personal benefit. That’s the only premise you need to establish that most meat-eating is wrong. So you shouldn’t stray into excess controversy.
I even think it’s a bad idea to talk about the in-principle wrongness of meat-eating. Most people reject that meat-eating is wrong in-principle. However, most people think that it’s wrong to eat animals that were tortured for their whole lives (why they oppose foie gras and veal). So to convince people that meat eating is wrong in 99% of cases, you just need moral premises that the people already accept conjoined with true factual premises.
If someone asks about, say, eggs from backyard hens, the thing to say is “that might be okay, but obviously that won’t be relevant to the vast majority of meat-eating—so let’s try to get agreement on the standard cases before we talk about weird edge cases.” When making a moral argument, defend the minimum claim needed to establish your conclusion, rather than volunteering controversial claims that aren't necessary.
Meat is bad for the environment. Often, vegans present this as a main argument as a reason not to eat meat. I generally think this is a bad idea.
First of all, it’s not enough to establish the impermissibility of meat eating. People do other things all the time that are worse for the environment, like take flights. This will establish some reason not to eat meat, but not a reason that’s decisive overall.
Second—and this is the bigger problem—if people buy this argument, it might make their meat consumption much worse. The animal products that emit the most are beef and lamb. These are, incidentally, the ones that cause the least suffering. Chickens are small. The average meat eater consumes about 2,400 chickens, 11 cows, and 30 sheep. Chickens are treated much worse than cows and sheep.
If you’re going to eat meat, it’s a lot better to eat red meat. However, environmental arguments encourage people to eat less red meat and more non-red meat. This means its effects are likely negative. This is also why I’m wary about making health-based arguments for veganism. If people are convinced by them, they’ll eat less beef and more chicken.
Often, vegans have scorn and mockery directed at those who reduce their meat consumption. A common line you’ll hear is some variant of “I went from beating my wife ten times a week to only five times—yay, progress!”
This is counterproductive. If everyone reduced their meat consumption by 20%, that would reduce production as much as if 20% of people went vegan. A period of reduction very often precedes complete elimination of animal product consumption. In general, it’s bad to condemn people doing rare actions that are very good—even if they fall dramatically short of what they ought to do.
Now, I agree that eating meat occasionally is seriously morally wrong, just like torturing puppies occasionally is seriously morally wrong. But if almost everyone tortured puppies 10 times per week, and someone started only doing it twice per week, and said they were trying to completely eliminate their torture of puppies, I would praise them, not condemn them.
Sometimes, vegans promote weird and fringe diets. Some vegans argue that you should only eat fruit or only raw food. Often these lead to a host of serious health conditions that pose major risks to people.
Vegans should try eating a normal diet. If you only eat a narrow category of foods, you’re likely to face serious nutrient deficiency. Promoting these diets isn’t just bad for health but is also counterproductive. If people encounter serious health issues after going vegan, they’re a lot likelier to go back. For this reason, I think we should be pretty clear that these diets are alarming and dangerous and should definitely not promote them.
That humans are omnivorous is confirmed by anatomy, archeology, features of our jaws, and features of our intestines. The contrary arguments are very bad. Normally these just involve highlighting features that humans share with herbivores (e.g. sweating through our pores) without explaining any kind of principled connection between those features and being herbivorous.
Aside from being false, it’s also a giant distraction. Whether humans are biologically meant to eat plants isn’t relevant. Obviously we are capable of eating both plants and animals. When people say that it’s alright to eat meat because we’re omnivores, the obvious premise to dispute is the ridiculous moral premise—that it’s okay to eat meat because we can—not the factual premise which is on much firmer ground.
If people make an argument with a true factual premise and an unbelievably idiotic moral premise, dispute the moral premise, not the factual premise.
A line you hear decently often is that ex vegans “were never really vegan.” This line has always seemed weird and culty to me. People can be ethically vegan at one time and then stop being at a later time.
It also seems to misunderstand how morality works. Sometimes people change their mind about moral issues, even in dumb ways. The fact that people are correct about an issue at a time doesn’t mean they can’t be incorrect at later times. Other times, people start doing wrong things when doing the right thing is costly or difficult. What are we, once saved always saved evangelicals?
I’ve suggested that vegans should stop saying a bunch of things that they often say. The main thing these lines have in common is being false. The ones that aren’t false make it harder to persuade people. In general, when defending veganism, one should avoid making extreme claims.
We’re already making extreme claims: most times people eat food, they’re doing something wrong. Those extreme claims happen to be supported by decisive arguments. We don’t need to make weird extra claims like that meat consumption technically counts as a holocaust. Instead, one should aim to say what’s true in as plain and uncontroversial a way as they can muster.
