https://strawpoll.com/poy9kl5VPgJ
If you’re vegan, please answer the poll question in the link above.
If you’re not vegan, please don’t answer the question. I’m only interested in hearing what vegans think about this.
To be clear, I don’t judge any vegans for believing that humans matter more than other animals. You’re already doing the right thing by being vegan, so that’s fine. It probably wouldn’t affect your actions or decisions in any situation, aside from hypotheticals that are extremely unlikely to happen. So I think that being vegan is compatible with what some may call speciesism or human supremacy etc - or favoring/prioritizing members of your own species - without placing a value judgment on that. As we all know, you don’t NEED to consider all sentient beings as mattering equally, in order to recognize that non-human sentient beings matter more than “your tastebuds” - or your particular fashion preference or whatever - or than your mostly arbitrary habits that you can easily change, and when you can replace and meet all your needs with alternatives.
That said, personally I think all sentient beings matter equally. I’m willing to accept any supposed reductios that extend logically from this view - though I don’t consider them absurd, I find them to be logically sound & I actually find it to be impossible to logically defend speciesism without that leading to even “worse” reductios that the majority of people would be even more appalled by, and which would be far more arbitrary and less benevolent/empathically oriented. But I’m not here to debate that. I just wanted to state what my opinion is on the matter.
I also think that the antispeciesism argument is a great and very convincing/effective argument for veganism/animal rights - it’s convinced many people to go vegan, especially the “Name the Trait” thought experiment etc - so it’s interesting to me when people are vegan despite not agreeing with those antispeciesist arguments, and I really respect that since it indicates to me that you extend compassion to other sentient beings without it needing to be logically proven why you should or why it would be contradictory if you didn’t - it’s just natural empathy.
Plus, of course, we often tend to associate veganism with antispeciesism, and speciesism with carnism/animal exploitation - since they very often go hand-in-hand, and I think speciesism is kind of a risky ideology for a society to believe in while simultaneously significantly devaluing nonhuman animals - to a status lower than a human’s arbitrary desire to eat a particular candy for example, seeing it as a “personal choice” and “right of the human consumer” to do whatever they want to other sentient beings provided they aren’t a more legally protected species like humans, dogs or cats - but we must remember that this doesn’t have to be the case and it is perfectly possible to be vegan without thinking humans and other animals are equally important/hold equal intrinsic moral value, etc. Now, equal moral consideration - or equity - is certainly possible either way, even if you don’t think they hold equal absolute worth.
Very interested to see the poll results, since I’m actually not sure whether most vegans think humans and other animals matter equally or not.
I personally think that humans do “matter more” than most other animals, but I’m not a human exceptionalist. I think there’s a spectrum of neurological complexity (for lack of a better term) that determines a lifeforms ability to experience complex emotional life. The more sophisticated that machinery is, the more moral consideration a being deserves.
One of the benefits of this is line of reasoning is that it also rejects speciesism for a more fundamental categorisation, but still fairly trivially answers questions like: Why can’t animals vote? Or, should killing a sentient animal (an ant, or bee, perhaps) deserve the same punishment as killing a human?
I also think that there is some threshold where there’s essentially no complex emotion processing capability. This, to me, provides a clear and consistent answer to why it is OK to kill some life (plants, microbes) for our own survival, but not others.
Of course there are some problems. The “emotional capacity” or “neurological complexity” measure kinda hand waves away a lot of tough questions about the nature of consciousness that’s at or beyond the limits of our current sciences.
If you asked me to elaborate, in the “name the trait” scenario, and kept digging, I’d quickly run out of my depth, because it’s not my area of expertise.