I'm confused - are you saying that moral behavior is generally optional if it's inconvenient or unpleasant? Is there a unit of measure for the two dimensions, in order to minimax the "easiest minimal morality"?
There is no unit of measure, I am arguing for the directional principle.
The wording of "generally optional if inconvenient/unpleasant" is basically correct, though undersells the proportionality aspect. Unpleasant is a deep hole. It may be moral to give a dollar to a beggar, but if doing so would cause you excruciating pain, then it would be optional.
Without a sacrifice constraint, all beneficial actions are obligatory. This is the reason for the "practicability" qualifier vegans affirm.
Keep in mind, the way I'm using the term moral/immoral here is slightly nonstandard:
The goodness or badness of an action, which is a function of the action’s harm and/or benefit, and mitigators/intensifiers, weighted by the moral consideration of the affected entities.
The factors that determine whether abstaining from a practice is obligatory are twofold: the sacrifice it would impose on the abstainer, and the immorality of the action. These jointly determine which side of the obligation threshold an action falls on.
There are others. For instance, abstaining from a practice might weaken you in a way that makes you less able to accomplish other good.
I've seen people arguing about this regarding AI, for instance. "Should we use AI to make our web site? We could make it look fancier if we do. But, AI is kind of evil. Yet if we reject AI, our web site will be less fancy."
If a particular person tries a vegan diet and discovers that it makes them anemic and depressed, that will not only cause them suffering; it will also impair their ability to do other good things in the world. They may reasonably think, "Sure, I could be vegan if all I needed to do all day was lie in bed. But if you want me to go out and save the world, bring me cheese."
I address a similar point here:
If one argues that a person would be obligated to eat to such an extent that it causes a net-benefit relative to merely abstaining from food[1], such as by being an advocate, this concedes there is no act/omission distinction relevant to one’s obligations - one must act to eat, one must act to advocate, one must act to afford the seeds. Therefore, such a position produces unbounded act-based consequentialist obligations, like sneaking into as many factory farms as you can to free animals. All the while, ruthlessly optimising your calorie intake so as to never scrape above the threshold of absolute necessity.
Additionally, per the definitions, I'm using sacrifice throughout to mean:
"voluntary, self-imposed harm for the sake of benefiting moral patients",
Where "harm" means "(causing) a dispreferred result" - so, decreasing your capacity to do good is a sacrifice, and falls within this two factor framework.
My comment is slightly harsh-toned, because the concept of moral "obligation" tends to rub me slightly the wrong way. Either I appeal to your kindness in the hope you'll WANT to be good, or I have the WHIP to materially impose something on you - philosophical "obligation" in the abstract sense in between feels often unhelpful, which strikes me as part of the issue in OP.
An original sin is your shallow definition of obligation. "A thing one must (or must not) do" is too thin, the crucial question is who obliges whom if there is a 'must', and leaving this open makes the whole argument nearly a question of definition. Different sources of obligation - a community's claim, one's own commitments, institutions - would give different verdicts on exactly the cases your argument leans on.
Key point re core logic though: Your key point is about parity, and it's intuitively super appealing but imho as bottom line actually misguided; too theoretical and ignoring randomness: by your own numbers, practices we accept to kill animals in the same ballpark as meat-eating (driving: 75 vertebrates per lifetime; windowed houses: hundred of birds; power lines another handful), so by parity meat should be fine too, and this may hold esp. when using relative personal benefit/overall harm type ratios. But parity needs those other practices to actually be 'permissible' (using similar type of language as the philosophical 'obligation'), not just currently accepted. In a super brutal and slavery-tolerant society, "don't hit your wife slightly" wouldn't stop being an obligation just because much worse usually goes unchecked - doesn't pass my smell test. Moral progress is uneven and a bit random across domains, our psychology individual and collective is patchy about what it tolerates. Maybe driving and electricity are domains we're just still backwards on, not proof the practice is fine. In sum, a ton of evil things being seen as 'permissible', would not mean 'that other less evil thing' should 'thus also' be permissible; let's not hold us back on moral progress if in some domain we really manage to socially somehow - yes weirdly - we happened to be able to make it.
In sum: lacking operational definition of "obligation," and a relevant insight about uneven moral demands imho overinterpreted due to ignoring, more interestingly, a crucial point about flexibility and randomness of domain-specific (or even detailed question-specific) moral progress.
Note: My comment should not be misinterpreted as to saying anything as to whether or not society ought to impose veganism or higher farm animal welfare standards; I agree with you simply that animal welfare is a super important topic, and my personal opinion is that regulating morally relevant things is very much the domain of democratic decision making, but it's of course a super complex topic tooo.
our key point is about parity, and it's intuitively super appealing but imho as bottom line actually misguided; too theoretical and ignoring randomness: by your own numbers, practices we accept to kill animals in the same ballpark as meat-eating (driving: 75 vertebrates per lifetime; windowed houses: hundred of birds; power lines another handful), so by parity meat should be fine too, and this may hold esp. when using relative personal benefit/overall harm type ratios. But parity needs those other practices to actually be 'permissible' (using similar type of language as the philosophical 'obligation'), not just currently accepted.
I am pointing out that, to be consistent, you must either:
- Accept these widely accepted practices are, like meat, obligatory to abstain from.
- Accept that eating meat is, like these practices, permissible.
Much of this permissible/obligatory framing is an internal critique of the vegan view, which is essentially that the distinction between obligatory and permissible is mediated by "practicability".
Veganism is Virtuous, but not Obligatory
Tl;dr: Here, I argue that eating meat is morally acceptable. The central point is that every argument for abstaining from animal products being a moral obligation is also an argument for more extreme levels of obligatory abstinence. The “as far as is practicable” constraint vegans often assert either permits omnivorous diets, or entails extreme obligations that nearly all vegans fail to fulfil. I view abstaining from animal products as a virtuous, supererogatory act - similar to building free houses for the homeless. It is something that is beneficial and kind, but regarding it as obligatory seems indefensible under a consistent view of ethics.
Upfront acknowledgments: Factory farming is despicable and I would gladly see it abolished. Animals have moral worth. I support vegans, particularly on policy. The animal industry is bad for the environment. Eating animal products is not necessary for a long, healthy life.
Terminology: I use slightly nonstandard meanings of certain terms (eg: virtuous = supererogatory) in this essay, and have taken care to use terms consistently throughout. Definitions are available in the appendix.
Obligation vs Virtue
There is a distinction between an obligatory action and a virtuous action.
Obligation: Something you must (or must not) do
Virtuous action: Something that is moral to do, beyond one’s obligations; supererogatory.
The factors that determine whether abstaining from a practice is obligatory are twofold: the sacrifice it would impose on the abstainer, and the immorality of the action. These jointly determine which side of the obligation threshold an action falls on.
There are many cases where an action causes substantial harm to moral patients, yet is permissible. Two actions can have equal expected harm, yet differ in permissibility.
Consider the following hypothetical:
Anne has one laptop. It contains treasured photographs and videos of her late family, who died in a car accident. The laptop is broken, preventing copying or backing up of files through either external drives or the internet - it is her only way of preserving the memories of her loved ones, and is her most treasured possession. However, every time she charges the laptop, she causes some harm to the environment, since the grid relies on fossil fuels.
John has an identical laptop. He uses it as a paperweight for papers he doesn’t use, but because he thinks the light emitting from the screen looks slightly interesting, he keeps it on, and charges it using the same grid, with equal frequency to Anne. This causes the same harm to the environment.
In this case, John has (or is far more likely to have) an obligation to abstain from using the laptop. For Anne, using the laptop is clearly permissible, despite equal expected harm produced by their actions.
Rejecting the principle entails the conclusion that John and Anne are equally obligated to abstain from charging the laptop in order to avoid harming the environment - an absurd conclusion.
If sacrifice doesn’t free you of an obligation as long as harm is brought to moral patients, then eating a vegan diet is also unacceptable, as it carries an expected lifetime burden of counterfactually killing numerous small creatures as an unavoidable side effect of crop farming.
Most vegans acknowledge this principle by implication. The vegan position is broadly that one ought to “reduce animal suffering to the greatest extent possible, or practicable” - implying that highly impractical or gratuitous sacrifices are not part of one’s harm reduction obligations, but feasible, non-extreme sacrifices are.
Furthermore, just because an action (such as a vegan diet) is less harmful than many alternatives, doesn’t justify it as permissible. All actions that are harmful are less harmful than alternatives. Eating typical quantities of meat is less harmful than eating enormous quantities of meat, which is less harmful than massacring millions of animals. If one holds that an action being less harmful than many alternatives is adequate to justify it as permissible, then virtually all actions, including extreme, gratuitous violence, are permissible.
There is no Principled Distinction Between “Need” and “Want”
Invoking “need” is central to many arguments made by vegans. If a vegan aims to differentiate not eating meat and, for instance, not using electricity, on the basis that you “need” to use electricity, they must provide a clear distinction between what is a need, and what isn’t.
I argue that needs are exclusively instrumental to some wanted thing, and there is no such thing as a terminal “need” that is different to a terminal “want”.
One “needs” something only if it produces a result that they want. In every case of a need, the needed thing facilitates, or is equivalent to, a desired end state. Absent a preference for the end state, need dissolves without exception. A person who doesn’t care to live, doesn’t need to breathe, for example.
Therefore, a “need” is equivalent to: “A thing that results in something we want (for its own sake)”, and is thus entirely subjective.
Contra the “Survival” Framing of Need
Commonly, a need is defined as: “A thing without which you will die”
A literal reading of this definition faces an obvious problem: we will all eventually die. So, strictly, this entails we need everything in existence, rendering the term functionally meaningless.
A steelman of this framing is “A thing without which, you will die earlier than otherwise”. This does not withstand scrutiny either.
Consider a hypothetical supplement that would extend your lifespan by a single hour per sixty years of daily use. If you miss a single day, the clock resets.
Under the definition of “a thing without which you will die (earlier than if you had it)”, this supplement qualifies as a thing you need. It seems clearly absurd to call this a “need”, and thus the definition fails to capture the true meaning of the word.
There is no mind-independent threshold of lifespan addition beyond which this supplement would suddenly become a “real” need versus an optional luxury. At 1 hour of extra lifespan per 60 years, or 1 day per 60 weeks, or even eternal life after a single dose, there is no point at which it transforms into an inarguable, mind-independent need.
On “Proper Function” and “Natural Kinds”
To avoid bloating this essay, I will not argue for the position of anti-realism about natural kinds and related concepts like “proper function” - I am flagging it here as a background premise.
In brief, I reject the position that there are objective facts about the “correct” functioning of humans, animals, or any other organism or object. I maintain that these are merely observations about “things that tend to be true of X” rather than “things that X should have”. The second cannot be objectively derived from the first.
Contra the “Harm Avoidance” Framing of Need
The supplement hypothetical shows longevity is insufficient to ground a distinction between need and want. However, one may argue for “need” being sustained in both cases by the opposing harm involved. The supplement is bitter and inconvenient. These are forms of harm.
So, can “that which avoids or mitigates harm” serve as an objective distinction between “need” and “want”?
This distinction collapses to equating need with want, and relies on smuggling “wants” into the definition via the word “harm”.
What does “harm” mean in the context of this framing, if not “a thing producing unwanted consequences"?
Some may invoke an outside view of harm: something like “an adversely impactful divergence from the typical or proper function of a thing”.
This invokes “proper function”, which as noted, is taken to be an invalid concept. Additionally, the work of this definition of harm is being done by the word “adverse”, which means “harmful”, making it a circular definition. Without the word “adverse”, this definition reduces to “a divergence from the norm”, and a person being transformed into Superman would be considered harmed.
Therefore, the outside view of harm is either circular or absurd.
Eating Meat is Less Immoral Than Killing Animals by Virtue of Many Mitigators
The distinction between eating meat and killing animals is one that is often glossed over in arguments about animal ethics, where the two are treated as equivalent - purchasing one chicken equals killing one chicken. I argue this is a false equivalence.
Eating meat is not as morally bad as killing animals because it is significantly less direct in every important regard.
By directness, I mean: having a close causal or mechanistic relationship to something, absent intermediary mechanisms or ambiguating factors.
Directness is a spectrum: the less time, intermediary mechanisms, and unpredictability connecting an action to its outcome, the more direct it is, and vice versa. For example, shooting a man is slightly more direct than paying someone to poison him, which is significantly more direct than starting a podcast that advocates for violent crime in his local area. This is orthogonal to outcomes - even if the expected value of human lives lost is the same in all three cases, they differ in directness.
I argue that a harmful action that is more direct is more immoral than a harmful action that is less direct. I argue that the direction of this difference universally favours eating meat over killing animals.
Directness being rejected as an intensifier leads to absurd conclusions
If directness is held to be irrelevant to the morality of an action as long as the expected outcome is the same, this leads to indefensible conclusions.
For instance:
Approximately 365 million vertebrates are killed by cars on roads each year in the United States. There are approximately 240 million licensed US drivers. Therefore, the average driver is expected to kill ~1.5 vertebrates per year. Assuming a driving window of 50 years, this entails that the average driver will kill roughly 75 vertebrates in their lifetime.
A vegan who rejects indirectness as a mitigating factor must concede that driving a car in typical conditions today is no different morally than buying a car that is (through hypothetical technology) completely harmless to animals on the roads, but is sold to you on the condition you personally crush 75 live vertebrates underfoot before being handed the keys.
This position is untenable, and the vast majority of vegans would consider this to be grossly immoral in a way that general car driving would not, despite identical expected harm. Thus, a rejection of indirectness as a mitigator is reduced to absurdity.
Per-Instance Probability Is Relevant to Morality Even with Equal Expected Outcome
In cases of equal expected value, I argue the absolute per-instance probability of a bad outcome remains relevant, and that lower probability bad events are more moral choices to higher probability bad events, ceteris paribus.
Consider the hypothetical:
A mother of 10 children must either (A) sacrifice one of her children, or (B) accept a 1/10 chance that all ten die.
I maintain that the 1/10 chance is a more moral choice, and that a woman who would willingly forgo a 90% chance of total safety in such a scenario would be acting immorally.
Inverting the principle seems unacceptable, committing one to sacrificing their child for the sake of avoiding an unlikely, proportionally severe event.
Ambivalence is suspect - it seems to call for a preference for one case or the other, particularly given the apparent unacceptability of option A. Few would waive their right to deliberate in this scenario.
Indirectness of mechanism: Variance in the supply chain
If you go to a grocery store and buy a chicken, the store owner does not immediately notify a chicken farmer of your purchase and order exactly one chicken to replace it. Instead, the grocer may take inventory every two or three days to see how many chickens have sold (with some inaccuracy given the inevitability of misplaced stock, theft, administrative errors, etcetera). Let's say it's 187, so he puts in an order for 200 chickens. He might sell more next week, and it's better to have a slight surplus than to run out of stock.
Further still, the number of chickens ordered doesn't have a 1:1 relationship with the number of chickens that are raised and killed by the farmer, because a single grocer ordering 200 chickens is analogous to a single customer buying one chicken from the grocer - the effect compounds. From the perspective of the chicken farmer, who may service several grocery stores, he could get orders for chickens ranging in size from 1200 in a week to 1400 in a week. Again, the cost of slightly overestimating is far less than the cost of slightly underestimating (reputation, lost profits, scalability, etc.), so he aims to produce 1400 chickens, perhaps 1500 for good measure.
We now have a situation where the individual purchase is removed from its cumulative effect by several degrees of imprecision. If you abstain from buying chickens this week, the most likely outcome is that the grocer still rounds up, the farmer still overestimates, and the same number of chickens meet the axe.
Importantly, the expected outcome of buying a chicken, on average, is still approximately "1 chicken dies'', but its effect is ambiguated by what is now a lottery system. Rather than causing a chicken to die every time you buy a chicken, you have something like a 1 in 200 chance of counterfactually causing the deaths of 200 chickens every time you buy a chicken.
This is a simplified illustration of the high-variance processes connecting your purchase to its harmful effect. In reality, this 200 figure is conservative. For most economies, there are more middlemen in the picture than this simplified example describes. Each stage enlarges variance and increases the size of the thresholds. These include:
The mechanisms connecting your purchase of a chicken to the death of a chicken are significantly less direct than killing a chicken yourself by virtue of probabilistic lottery-style impact rather than certain per-purchase outcomes, and numerous imperfectly efficient agentic intermediaries.
The “hitman” objection
A common objection to the premise that indirectness ameliorates immorality, is the reductio of hiring a hitman.
“If it’s true that indirect harmful actions are less immoral than more direct actions, this means that hiring a hitman would be better than killing someone directly. Further still, you can hire a man, to hire another man, to hire a hitman, and so on, washing your hands of the crime with each stage. This is an unacceptable conclusion and reduces the position to absurdity”
This fails to reduce the position to absurdity. Paying a hitman is slightly less bad, because it is slightly less direct. The degree of indirectness remains relevant. The mechanism is clear, and there are not many intermediaries.
Either the case being posited is a realistic hitman (or hitman hirer) with imperfect efficiency, or a hypothetical ideal hitman (or hitman hirer) with perfect efficiency.
The “realistic” middleman case: If the reductio posits realistic conditions for the hiring process, and realistic reliability of the intermediaries, then it fails to show the action is equally immoral. Each stage of the “hiring” chain involves leakage - there is an increased chance they fail to complete their task, get caught, or renege on the deal at every stage. Therefore, with each intermediary, the expected outcome gets less bad. At 0 intermediaries, the murder is near certain. With many intermediaries, the outcome is far from certain. Therefore, the expected harm occasioned by initiating this lengthy chain sequence of hitman hirers is predictably much less, and the action is therefore less immoral.
The “perfect” middleman case: If the reductio posits that there is no drop-off from intermediary to intermediary, then this raises the question of what constitutes an intermediary versus the same mechanism. The “perfect” middleman must have no counterfactual agency, and be deterministically tied to the subsequent events with complete in-advance certainty. This is disanalogous to the case it attempts to refute. In the case of buying meat, there is counterfactual agency, significant variance, and there is not complete in-advance certainty of the outcome. The outcome of an indirectly harmful act, though equal in expectation, is ambiguated by numerous rolls of the dice, whereas the perfect hitman eliminates this salient factor. It is hard to argue that these middlemen are actually separate causal entities at all. In the same way, one can argue that a person shooting someone is employing many intermediary mechanisms - millions of neurons must fire in sequence, each a “middleman”, their muscles must pull on their tendons, which pull on bones, which pull on the finger-facing molecules of the trigger, which kinetically influence the adjacent molecules, and so on. The principle that distinguishes a middleman from a single causal mechanism in this context is ambiguity and variance. If there is no, or negligible ambiguity or variance in the outcome, then it is not a valid analogy for indirectness.
Time lag
A component of indirectness is time lag. That which has an immediate effect is more direct than that which doesn’t.
In the case where an intentional harmful act causes harm later rather than immediately, it is less immoral than the reverse, as long as the harm eventually occasioned is equal in expectation.
Buying a chicken to eat involves a substantial time lag from the moment of purchase to a counterfactual chicken being killed. Therefore, buying a chicken is less immoral than killing a chicken.
Intention
I argue intention affects how moral an action is, independently of its expected outcome.
An action that is done with the intention of bringing about a harmful result, is worse than an action that is not done with the intention of bringing about a harmful result, all else equal.
For example, extending the vehicle analogy:
A woman driving a car intends to get to work, and accepts the incidental expected harm of pollution, collision risk, and roadkill as an unfortunate, unavoidable compromise. However, a man who drives in exactly the same way, but for whom getting to work is just a bonus, and whose primary goal is to legally kill animals that happen to wander into his car’s path, is acting more immorally than the first person.
This is true even if the expected outcome is exactly the same. In some cases, it is even enough to offset substantially greater expected harm.
For instance, a woman who drives in a heavily forested area with many creatures wandering across the roads is expected to run over far more squirrels and frogs and snakes on her way to work than a man who lives in a desert. But, the man in the desert, who prays for small animals to wander across the road during his daily commute so he can relish their deaths, is acting more immorally than the woman, who intends merely to get to work, and regards the vertebrates she kills as an unfortunate, unavoidable externality.
Rejecting the principle, taking the position that intention makes no difference, and that the moral calculus is purely consequential, entails that there is no difference in morality between someone driving so they can get to work, and someone driving so they can see the blood of innocent creatures decorate their car, as long as they drive in the same way.
“Name the trait”-style reductios are disanalogous by virtue of mitigators
Either mitigators such as directness and intention decrease one’s obligation to sacrifice, or they don’t.
If they don’t: Then all actions with equal expected consequences are treated as morally equivalent. In this case, the “name the trait” challenge collapses under the same argumentation.
Recalling the vehicle analogy:
A typical American driver will kill (crush) ~75 vertebrates in their lifetime. Under the view mitigators such as directness are irrelevant, this is morally equivalent to personally crushing 75 vertebrates underfoot.
To hold consistently to the framing of “name the trait”-style reductios, a vegan driver must name the trait true of animals that, if true of humans, would justify crushing them underfoot in order to drive.
Clearly, no trait true of animals applied to humans would permit crushing a human underfoot for the sake of being able to drive. Therefore, either driving is morally unacceptable, or the position that mitigators do not decrease one’s obligation is reduced to absurdity.
If they do: Then “name the trait that permits you to kill an animal” is disanalogous to the case of purchasing meat. Purchasing meat is less direct, less intentional, involves high variance, many causal intermediaries, and substantial time lag before counterfactual harm occurs. These are the same mitigators that differentiate driving a car from crushing vertebrates underfoot. The extent and significance of these mitigators is subjective and arguable for both cases. I would argue the driving case actually has fewer and less extensive mitigators than purchasing meat - you are not ever likely to be in the same room as a slaughtered animal, but you are virtually guaranteed to personally crush a squirrel or a frog, for instance.
This issue is not resolved by constraining the challenge to consumption, i.e., "Name the trait true of animals that, if true of humans, would justify buying their meat.". The constrained form has the same logical structure as the original, and the same structure can be turned on driving: "name the trait true of small vertebrates that, if true of humans, would justify driving in a manner that near-certainly crushes 75 of them in a lifetime." No such trait exists in either case. So the constrained challenge condemns driving exactly as the unconstrained one does. Since vegans generally regard abandoning driving as beyond one’s obligations, they must concede that the absence of a distinguishing trait is not sufficient to establish impermissibility. Constraining NTT to consumption therefore fails to establish that buying meat is unacceptable.
Humans are Worthy of Greater Moral Consideration than Animals
If one assigns moral value on the basis of capacity for suffering, pleasure, intelligence, meaning, social exchange, or anything else humans generally value, humans as a group outperform animals on these metrics. The degree of value difference will vary depending on the weights you assign to each of these traits, but the direction of the net difference is obvious. Almost all vegans will readily concede that humans are more valuable, in general, than animals.
Without some hierarchy of value anchored on morality-relevant traits, instead viewing moral relevance as binary contingent on meeting a threshold of traits, absurd conclusions result.
Imagine, for instance, a choice between certainly killing an ant that has the minimum level of moral traits needed to satisfy the threshold, or a 99% chance of killing a creature that possesses morally relevant traits to a vastly greater degree than humans. A threshold view entails that no matter how intensely this creature feels suffering, how richly it experiences positive emotions, or how intelligent it is, near-certainly killing it to save a threshold-clearing ant is the optimal moral choice - an evidently absurd conclusion.
Therefore, all else equal, harm occasioned to animals is less immoral than harm occasioned to humans.
Dietary Veganism is a Significant Sacrifice that Varies Between Individuals
Dietary veganism requires most people to give up or markedly diminish valued aspects of their lives for the sake of reducing expected harm to animals. It thus involves a sacrifice.
Vegans commonly argue the extent of the sacrifice involved is minor. However, I argue the sacrifice involved for most non-vegans is significant, and varies substantially between individuals.
Taste/pleasure
For most non-vegans, a major factor motivating their consumption of animal products is that a diet including these products is tastier and more enjoyable than a diet without. The stated and revealed preferences of the vast majority of humans clearly indicate that eating animal products makes their lives more enjoyable. Therefore, to abstain from eating animal products involves sacrificing a degree of the all-things-considered enjoyableness of one’s life.
The scale of this sacrifice varies. For some, animal products are disgusting, and thus it involves essentially no sacrifice to abstain from eating them. For others, animal products are a source of immense satisfaction, and plant-based staples are disgusting. The latter group must make a markedly greater sacrifice to the overall enjoyment of their lives in order to be dietary vegans.
For the typical non-vegan, the taste/pleasure sacrifice is considerable. Taste consistently ranks as a primary reason people give for not reducing meat consumption. Additionally, the most common reason for relapse from vegan diets is food dissatisfaction. So, even among people actively motivated to abstain from meat, taste is often a prohibitive sacrifice by revealed preference.
Available evidence on stated and revealed preferences points strongly to the taste value of animal products being a significant factor in most people’s lives, and should therefore be regarded as a considerable sacrifice by default.
Nutrition
Because a vegan diet is a subset of an omnivorous diet, it necessarily narrows the range of available foods.
I do not argue that animal products are essential for a healthy, long life. However, the sacrifice involved comes in the form of greater difficulty, and a considerably narrower range of ways to meet nutritional needs.
Additionally, without careful dietary planning and/or supplementation, there is an elevated risk of essential nutrient deficiencies like B12 and iron. Factors like protein quantity and source variety become a greater consideration as well due to the diminished bioavailability and variable amino acid profile of plant proteins.
Thus, there is an unavoidable tradeoff between risk of dietary mismanagement and time investment (research, meal planning) to ensure nutritional sufficiency.
Convenience/time
Another sacrifice associated with veganism is that it is inconvenient. Despite the trivial connotations of the word “convenient”, convenience is a strongly valued aspect of most people’s lives, and a legitimate object of concern.
Some (non-exhaustive) ways veganism results in lost time or convenience include:
It is worth noting this aspect of sacrifice is a catch-all category which trades off against the other sacrifices. To achieve a level of enjoyment closer to that of an omnivorous diet, one must spend a greater amount of time and effort learning and practicing how to make tasty vegan food. To achieve more complete nutrition and a lower risk of deficiencies, one must spend more time and effort learning and organising their diet.
Social
Social difficulties are among the most common reasons for vegan diet lapses, and a major barrier to veganism for many people.
Vegans are disliked by the general population, and face widespread discrimination. A prospective vegan must not only accept restrictions on their nutritional options, meal enjoyment, and convenience, but also risk being ostracised or mocked in social settings. This is particularly the case in settings involving communal eating.
Communal eating is a near-universally cherished aspect of human experience. It is valued to such an extent that sharing meals with friends and family predicts happiness and wellbeing comparably to income. Even marginal encroachments on this aspect of life therefore merit serious consideration.
On balance, veganism has a clearly negative expected effect on one’s social life.
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The nature and extent of the sacrifice veganism requires varies, however, by revealed preference, the vast majority of people do regard it as a sacrifice (since it is worse than their preferred default). For people with strong social ties to omnivores and anti-vegans, high taste affinity for animal products, limited nutritional knowledge, or strong preferences for convenience and variety, the sacrifice is substantial.
Veganism Either Entails Extreme Conclusions or Permits Eating Meat
The most commonly cited definition of veganism, from The Vegan Society, is as follows:
"Veganism is a philosophy and way of living which seeks to exclude—as far as is possible and practicable—all forms of exploitation of, and cruelty to, animals for food, clothing or any other purpose; and by extension, promotes the development and use of animal-free alternatives for the benefit of animals, humans and the environment. In dietary terms it denotes the practice of dispensing with all products derived wholly or partly from animals."
First, the terms “exploitation and cruelty” decompose to harm. Roughly, “exploitation” means “harm in order to benefit”, and “cruelty” means “harm for its own sake”. These two terms are thus functionally inclusive of all forms of foreseeable harm, and will be treated as an equivalent concept.
The contentious aspect of this definition comes from the qualifier: “possible and practicable”. Since practicable is a subset of “possible” (all practicable things are possible), practicable is the only relevant component to address.
The term practicable maps directly to the sacrifice framing established in this essay: That which is practicable involves a level of sacrifice that is below a certain acceptable threshold. That which is impracticable exceeds this threshold.
For example: a person living in a food desert for whom dietary veganism would result in an unhealthily restrictive diet. It is a contentious topic among vegans whether such a person would have an obligation to go vegan at all, or if the financial and logistical challenge of moving to a more abundant area (or tolerating malnutrition) is too great a sacrifice.
This “practicability” framing produces two possibilities: Either "practicable" is a threshold that constrains obligation, or it isn't. I will first briefly address positions absent a practicability constraint, before discussing the dominant practicability-constrained view.
Possibility 1: Practicability does not constrain one’s obligation to abstain from harmful practices. This commits vegans to unbounded, extreme levels of abstention.
The spectrum of potential acts of abstinence is continuous, and has no principled stopping point.
Consider these escalating possible acts of harm-reducing abstention:
At the first stage, financially and socially supporting stores that sell only meat is a stronger per-dollar causal contribution to animal harm than buying equivalent products from general grocers. Thus, it’s possible to reduce harm by abstaining and seeking alternatives.
Buying vegetables from general grocery stores does little, but not nothing, to facilitate the meat industry - the grocery store does not compartmentalise revenue with perfect efficiency, and in expectation, your contributions will fund the meat-producing functions of the store to an extent.
Further, buying from a vegan store (that has some omnivore employees) is less harmful, but still contributes to the animal industry via the wages paid to employees who will buy meat.
Continuing with possible sacrifices, you can further reduce harm by growing your own vegetables, ensuring the seeds are sourced from vegan stores with vegan employees. Even in this case, there is nonzero monetary leakage into the meat industry - it is impossible to entirely isolate your purchase from downstream contributions to the broader economy.
The progression does not stop there. With no threshold of sacrifice or “practicability”, this commits you to abstaining from the economy entirely, choosing instead to grow your vegetables from seeds that you have found through foraging, with fertiliser you have made yourself.
No mechanism under this view constrains your obligation to make further concessions beyond that which is “possible”.
Ultimately, this position seems to entail suicide by starvation, the maximum possible degree of abstention.
If one argues that a person would be obligated to eat to such an extent that it causes a net-benefit relative to merely abstaining from food[1], such as by being an advocate, this concedes there is no act/omission distinction relevant to one’s obligations - one must act to eat, one must act to advocate, one must act to afford the seeds. Therefore, such a position produces unbounded act-based consequentialist obligations, like sneaking into as many factory farms as you can to free animals. All the while, ruthlessly optimising your calorie intake so as to never scrape above the threshold of absolute necessity.
The demandingness of this view makes it an untenable position, and entails that the vast majority of vegans fall short of their obligations. Because of this, a practicability constraint is the majority view among vegans.
Possibility 2: Practicability does constrain one’s obligation to abstain from harmful practices.
This licenses the view that abstaining from animal products is supererogatory, and that omnivores are eligible as vegans.
A typical omnivore already abstains from practices that are harmful which don’t involve inordinate sacrifice - i.e. to a practicable extent. The popularity of “free range” eggs demonstrates omnivores are often willing to sacrifice money for the purpose of reducing their causal contribution to animal suffering, for instance. An omnivore may abstain from eating live octopus, despite otherwise finding it an amusing cultural experience - another practicable sacrifice.
Given this, the obligations produced by this position hinge entirely on what is “practicable”.
As previously argued, there is no principled, objective distinction between “need” and “want”, thus, this cannot serve as a valid definitional basis for practicability.
What remains is a sacrifice threshold view: that there is a continuous spectrum of “wants” that can be sacrificed to greater or lesser degrees, and there is a threshold beyond which further sacrifices are supererogatory.
Importantly, whether a given abstention is obligatory (practicable) varies even with identical sacrifice willingness. One can be willing to sustain a level of subjective suffering that is exactly the same as that of a dietary vegan, and yet remain an omnivore, because sacrifice is contingent upon variable subjective affinities and aversions for the tradeoffs involved.
Consider the following hypothetical case:
Lisa and William both fully accept they should reduce their contribution to animal suffering to the greatest extent practicable - they are both willing to make sacrifices of abstention to the point of moderate discomfort and inconvenience, but not beyond. William is in a great position to do so: his family and friends are vegan and he never much cared for the taste of meat, eggs or dairy. Lisa, however, lives in the heart of Texas - barbecue is a cherished part of her culture, she loves the taste of meat, can hardly stomach most plants, and her friends and family are ardent conservatives who openly express contempt for vegans and vegetarians. For William, eating entirely plant foods falls well below the threshold of practicability, barely registering as a sacrifice at all. For Lisa, even moderate reductions in her animal product consumption risks great discomfort, distressing identity dissonance, and being ostracised by her loved ones.
In this case, if they both abstain from eating animal products altogether, Lisa is making a vastly greater sacrifice that exceeds practicability, whereas William is making virtually no sacrifice, and would be obligated to abstain further in order to reach the point of moderate inconvenience and/or discomfort - otherwise, he isn’t abstaining “as far as is practicable”. For them to make the same sacrifice, Lisa will either give up trivial amounts of meat to match William's negligible discomfort, or William will need to make major additional sacrifices to match the distress Lisa faces by giving up meat entirely. It is not possible for Lisa and William to have the same level of sacrifice-mediated practicability, while also adopting the same lifestyle.
Without a categorical distinction between “need” and “want”, there is no principled argument that Lisa is obligated to abstain from eating meat that is not also an argument for William to abstain from other things such as electricity, driving, and general economic activity to the point of intense discomfort. As established, no such categorical distinction exists.
Therefore, positions on this threshold either skew towards permitting many omnivores, or entailing untenable obligations. There is no threshold at which practicability unambiguously prohibits eating meat for Lisa that does not also entail extreme compromises for William.
The reasonable threshold of practicability is modest
There are many strong reasons to believe the threshold of obligation is relatively low for abstaining from animal products, both in principle and by precedent.
In principle:
Given the abundance and extent of mitigators distinguishing eating meat from the expected harm eating meat entails, the obligation to abstain from the practice is considerably reduced. Consuming animal products involves many layers of indirect mechanisms with high variance, many agentic intermediaries, significant and variable time lag, and views harm as an unfortunate consequence rather than a desired result.
These mitigators are powerful, not trivial. Driving a car ad libitum for 8 months is vastly less immoral than crushing a squirrel underfoot, despite equal expected harm and fewer, less extensive mitigators than buying meat.
Given the level of immorality is an input that distinguishes an obligatory sacrifice from a merely virtuous one, a greatly reduced level of immorality entails a greatly reduced degree of obligatory sacrifice.
Given humans at minimum match, and near-universally exceed animals on commonly weighted factors such as lifespan, capacity for social connection, and intelligence, actions that harm groups of animals and insects are significantly more likely to be permissible given equal harm.
The group-level difference in moral consideration is significant. This is hard to quantify, however even in the strongest case where a cow is otherwise trait equalised with a human, their natural lifespan is roughly 5X shorter, for instance. Factoring in other trait differences such as social and intellectual capacity points to a very significant overall difference in moral consideration.
Most vegans acknowledge humans are, on the whole, worthy of substantially greater moral consideration than nonhuman animals.
Since consuming animal products primarily harms animals as opposed to humans, the action is less immoral than for the human equivalent.
Given lesser immorality entails lesser obligations, the threshold of practicability therefore must concomitantly decrease.
By Precedent:
Residential buildings contribute to a surprisingly large number of bird deaths. Birds mistake windows for open passages, crash into them, and die. An estimated one billion birds are killed by colliding with buildings every year in the United States alone, the majority of which are small residential buildings. Some estimates are as high as several billion. On average, using conservative figures, roughly 3 birds are killed per house per year this way.
However, residences in bird migration hotspots frequently kill 10-20 per year once factors like scavenging are accounted for. A person who lives in a house in a high-bird-traffic area is therefore contributing to approximately 500-1000 bird deaths over a lifetime by virtue of merely living in a dwelling with windows[2].
Further still, having a 2-storey tree in the yard of a property increases the rate of bird collisions by 3.6X. A person in a high bird traffic area who does not give up their tree in the front yard is accepting several additional bird deaths (and many injurious nonfatal collisions) per year.
It is not typically considered practicable to avoid buying or renting properties that have large windows, or trees close by. Nor is moving to a low bird traffic area to minimise one’s economic contribution to bird deaths considered practicable despite a death toll that, in many regions, potentially exceeds the impact of a moderate meat eater.
Many (possibly most) omnivores would prefer to move to a low-bird-density area than to give up animal products, implying the sacrifice involved is comparable.
Given this precedent, where the feasible, yet inconvenient burden of limiting residential options is not considered practicable, it seems likely that the standard of practicability is fairly low to an extent that permits animal product consumption for many people.
The vegan position that accepts a practicability limiter is thus constrained to two views:
If 1: This is highly demanding and entails that the vast majority of vegans fall short of their obligations.
If 2: Then the threshold of practicability with respect to a lifestyle that kills 500-1000 birds falls short of relocation. Therefore, a meat eater who would eat 500-1000 (animals comparable to) birds in their lifetime, who would rather limit their residential options than give up animal products, would be making a greater sacrifice in doing so than the practicability threshold demands. Therefore, this view permits eating meat to an extent equivalent to hundreds of bird deaths.
Using electricity is widely considered to be permissible, including by vegans. This is despite the fact that all major methods of electricity generation are environmentally deleterious, and in most cases result in direct animal deaths. For instance, power lines alone in the United States kill approximately 30 million birds per year via collisions and electrocution - implying an individual electricity user counterfactually causes approximately 5-15 bird deaths in their lifetime. Ad libitum electricity usage is common among vegans, and abstaining from, or drastically reducing one’s electricity consumption is not typically considered practicable or obligatory.
As discussed, driving carries a lifetime burden of ~75 vertebrate deaths as a conservative estimate. Abstaining from driving is typically considered impracticable, despite it being technically feasible in most cases to use alternate means of transportation. A person who commutes 20 minutes by car to work can typically bike to work and accept a more challenging hour-long commute. However, the inconvenience this involves ostensibly crosses the threshold of impracticability, despite it providing a near total reduction in roadkill.
Vegan advocates themselves near-universally claim that abstaining from animal products is easy. In doing so, this admits they are not typically making a significant sacrifice by eliminating animal products. If that is the case, and no further (difficult) sacrifices are obligatory, this further indicates the threshold of obligation to sacrifice is modest. Therefore, it is far more likely that interpersonal subjective variation on issues like taste will distinguish whether a given act of abstention is practicable. To obligate omnivores for whom it is difficult to switch, “don’t worry, all you need to do is make easy sacrifices”, does not suffice.
Conclusion & Summary
Abstaining from animal products is a practice that reduces harm, and therefore doing so is a virtuous practice. However, a practice being harm-reducing is not sufficient to justify it as an obligation - this neglects the crucial factors of the sacrifice required to perform that harm-reducing action, and mitigators that may diminish the immorality of the action.
The sacrifice involved in abstaining from a given practice is subjective, and a major determinant of whether abstention is obligatory. The greater the personal sacrifice required to forgo something, the lesser one’s obligation to forgo it. In the case of consuming animal products, the harm a typical omnivore faces by abstaining is significant: enjoyment, nutritional sufficiency/ease, and convenience/time accumulate to a considerable sacrifice, affecting its obligatory status.
Mitigators - factors that ameliorate the immorality of an action orthogonally to harm, drastically affect obligations in many areas of life. Cars, electricity, housing and economic participation all result in considerable harm, yet are considered permissible by virtue of their indirectness, lack of intentionality, or delayed, distributed effect. The act of consuming animal products is ameliorated by these mitigators as well.
Animals, though moral patients, are worthy of less moral consideration in general than humans because they possess morally relevant traits to lesser extents. Given this, harming animals is less immoral than harming humans. Given the aforementioned sacrifice/immorality model of obligation, this lesser immorality further shifts the designation of dietary veganism towards being supererogatory rather than morally required.
Vegans typically acknowledge a threshold of obligation themselves that is functionally identical to the framing of sacrifice vs immorality by their call to: “[abstain from animal products] as far as is practicable”. Without a practicability constraint, the view that one should abstain from practices harmful to animals entails unbounded, extreme abstention. With a practicability constraint, the threshold of practicability is either low enough to permit omnivorous diets, or it is high enough to demand unrealistic lifestyle compromises.
There are compelling reasons to believe “practicable” abstention from animal products is a low threshold rather than an extreme one. In principle, there are many mitigators present which decrease its immorality relative to harm, as well as its harm being concentrated among animals, which are of lesser moral consideration. By precedent, economic participation, driving, electricity usage, and residential windows all cause animal deaths, yet are “impracticable” to abstain from. Vegans themselves widely claim that the practice of dietary veganism is easy - further suggesting the standard of “practicable” is not very demanding.
Given many principled and precedent-based reasons to view a “practicable” sacrifice as one that is relatively easy and painless, and the strong reasons to believe abstaining from animal products is, for most omnivores, far from easy and painless, the standard vegan position that one ought to abstain from animal products to the greatest extent practicable, permits most omnivores to continue eating omnivorous diets while definitionally and morally qualifying as vegans.
Therefore, veganism - as in abstaining from consuming animal products such as meat, eggs, and dairy - is virtuous, but not obligatory.
Appendix
Definitions:
Moral patient: An entity worthy of moral consideration
Harm: (a thing) Producing a result that is dispreferred by moral patients
Benefit: (a thing) Producing a result that is preferred by moral patients
Morality (moral/immoral): The goodness or badness of an action, which is a function of the action’s harm and/or benefit, and mitigators/intensifiers, weighted by the moral consideration of the affected entities.
Mitigator: A thing that decreases the moral weight of an action independently of its harm or benefit.
Intensifier: A thing that increases the moral weight of an action independently of its harm or benefit.
Obligation: A thing that one must (or must not) do.
Permissible: Lacking an obligation to abstain (from something).
Sacrifice: A voluntary self-imposed harm accepted for the purpose of benefiting other moral patients
“permitted” is insufficient - this acknowledges a practicability constraint
Bird-deterring window films do not solve this problem particularly well. Independent studies suggest roughly a 40-70% reduction in collisions, and only if the window film is applied on the outside, which requires more frequent reinstallation and is a much more difficult (expensive) process to complete. Full external installation of window film for a medium-sized house costs in the thousands of dollars, and needs to be replaced every 5-10 years. Most vegans do not do this, and do not consider it an obligatory sacrifice.