I'm Not Vegan Because I Support a Farmer's Right to Choose

I solemnly believe that every farmer, as well as every slaughterhouse worker, and even every consumer out there, they all have the right to self-determination, which means getting to choose what they do with their own bodies. No one has the right to tell a farmer he's not allowed to hold a cattle prod in a certain way, and subsequently wave his arm around in various different ways in order to achieve various different results. It's his arm, his choice, gosh darn it! End of subject! As far as the business side of things goes, no one has the right to tell a CEO that he's not allowed to live his best life, making whatever socioeconomic decisions most benefit him and his family and his second family. And as far as the individual consumer goes, no one has the right to tell anyone else that they're not allowed to buy whatever they want at the supermarket. So if you're not prepared to financially provide for that that farmer, or that CEO, or that random consumer for that matter, then you have no right to tell any of them how to live their best lives, and you most certainly do not have the right to limit their bodily autonomy. You simply have no right to tell anyone else what they can and can't do with their own bodies... And what happens inside my stomach stays between me and my bathroom, thank you very much.

But I hear ya though... It's not really the farmer's body that's in question, it's obviously the animal's body. Well, yeah sorta, but an animal can't feel pain, or if it can't then it doesn't matter, and an animal has no heartbeat, or if it does then it doesn't matter, and an animal has no consciousness, or if it does then it doesn't matter. At the end of the day we always have to assume that a living farmer is simply more important, and therefore his choices are superior to the animal, which I should henceforth refer to as a zygote, regardless of how small or how big it is, regardless of whether it exists inside or outside a womb or egg or cocoon, regardless of, well... anything really. But because zygote is a weird word I'll take a page from the vegan textbook and refer to them as an individual, or even a mother and child reunion, which is funny since vegans ain't never in no rush to use similar terminology for an actual human pregnancy... Anyway, as I was saying, even if it is another body, does that body matter? I submit that it doesn't, I submit that a farmer's right to choose should always be given priority. In the words of the great philosopher Andrew Ryan – A farmer chooses, a vegan obeys.

But let's wrestle a little bit with the combined ideas that the animal is a distinct body and that it possesses an inherent moral worth which comes from I dunno where exactly... Still, let's say the animal's body isn't just a clump of cells, let's say that, regardless of whatever traits the animal has, regardless of its current stage of development, regardless of its anything at all, come rain or come shine, the animal still has moral worth. Are we then justified in bringing it into existence, raising it in wicked conditions, torturing it, killing it and then doing whatever we'd like with its flesh and skin and secretions? Yes, because.

It sounds like an incomplete sentence but it actually comes across as rather sturdy to me. Whatever reasons you may have to disregard the inherent value of an unborn human life are the same reasons, or at least similar ones, that I will use to disregard the inherent value of an animal life. And if you choose a criteria that maybe doesn't apply, depending on who you ask of course, I could just simply not consider it, I could just say that it is your own premise, that it is your own ruler by which you measure things, not mine, I did not sign up for it, I did not agree to it. And I say this because I don't know or agree that suffering or the capacity to suffer should be the be-all and end-all in this matter. It seems to me that just because it could be that an embryo suffers less than a chicken, that doesn't then mean it is worth less to kill the embryo rather than the chicken, as so many vegans kinda appear to believe. So for all the talk of expanding the moral circle it sure does seem like the moral circle of veganism has one big hole in the middle. For all intents and purposes, the vegan moral circle is a doughnut.

Do I then truly believe that farmers have the right to choose to kill an animal? No, not exactly. It is a silly argument of course. The point is that I fail to see how it is not inconsistent for vegans to hold animals in such high esteem but they don't give much of a damn about human beings at an early stage of development. We're not allowed to differentiate between humans and non-human animals, more commonly known as animals, but we are allowed to differentiate between a human who was born yesterday and a human who will not be born for another couple-a weeks? I fail to see how this makes any sense... If as a vegan your heart trembles for the suffering of cows, pigs, chickens, and even fish, which are animals few people feel truly sorry for, and if, as some vegans claim, you feel sorry and want to help even wild animals, even those rather nasty ones such as creepy crawly xenomorphs, then how can you not care about the most defenseless and, by definition, the most innocent of human beings?

I dunno, it's just a funny thing to me. Call me crazy, call me naive, but when I first heard tell of veganism I genuinely thought to myself that at least these fellas would be pro-life. How could they not? But upon finding out that they aren't I came to realize that abortion is actually a rather powerful argument to put them on the defensive a little bit, unlike most mild-mannered people who engage in street epistemology with them. Because whatever criteria you may have to say that an embryo is a lesser human being, I will likewise use a similar criteria to defend that an animal is a lesser being, and whatever criteria you may have to say that in some situations it is okay to kill an embryo, I will likewise have a similar criteria to say that in some situations it is okay to kill an animal. This whole thing is thus rather like a tug of war in which one of us has to be forced to move towards the other, but I'm not about to move towards a direction where my moral circle would increase so much to the point of collapse, and be left with a great big void in the middle.

And would you kindly refrain from giving me the obvious thought that I could go vegan and still be pro-life? Apart from other reasons I have I'm sure you'll exsqueeze me for not being in a big hurry to join a club that would for the most part despise me. And if that's not enough then I leave you with the words of your own guy, Earthling Ed, who says,

Sometimes things are difficult and sometimes things are inconvenient, but almost every moral change that's happened in society has inconvenienced those who were benefiting. In this scenario we are the oppressor, you know, we're the one who is benefiting from this. So it of course is an inconvenience for us but it's also a morally obligated thing to do to reduce suffering. So what has higher value – the suffering of others, or our convenience?

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