There seems to be a steady increase in people becoming vegans—or at the very least vegetarians—which I think is very good! But there is also still a large proportion of people who think that vegans are the platonic form of crazy! To back this up, they of course have super strong arguments! At least, that’s what people will tell you. Once you actually hear the arguments, most of them are incredibly stupid. Here I want to address one that I find particularly outrageous: Buying meat is permissible in X circumstance, so it is permissible to buy meat.
So I will be speaking/writing with someone, and I say some completely crazy and irrational stuff like “you shouldn’t torture and kill animals for small amounts of taste-pleasure and convenience”. Luckily, they are not going to be fooled by word-games and rhetoric so easily! Their 10 trillion neurons all fire simultaneously, letting them cut through my folly with nothing but pure facts and logic: “What if I was on a deserted island, about to die of hunger, as I stumble upon a pig—already covered in Sweet Baby Ray`s Original BBQ Sauce—with four broken legs and a depression; left for dead. Would I not be allowed to put an ending to its suffering and put it on the (conveniently placed) grill?” Having conclusively proven ethical veganism wrong, they lick the rest of the meat off the spareribs from a pig who lived its entire life on less than 1 square meter of concrete.
If ethical veganism is interpreted in the most braindead way possible (namely that it’s never, under any circumstances, permissible to eat animal products), this would be a good reason to reject it. But then again, you can easily reject any position if you interpret it in the most braindead way possible. Luckily, most vegans don’t hold the stupidest possible version of the view. Rather the view is more something like: It is impermissible to buy animal products under ordinary circumstances. Here ordinary circumstances just means what most people usually do—that is, go to the supermarket, pick up a carton of eggs, scan it, and pay for it. Finding a pig who is ready to jump on your grill, just as you are about to die of hunger is not ordinary circumstances (at least not where I live).
Imagine if we were instead arguing about whether it’s permissible to murder people for fun. I say something stupid like “you should not murder people for fun, all else being equal”. I could of course never have anticipated the brilliant thought-experiment you were about to unleash on me: “What if someone was threatening to blow up the earth unless I murdered Hitler?” After proving that murder is permissible once and for all, you go into town and begin gutting random passersby with your chainsaw. That would of course be completely idiotic: When the thing under dispute is whether it is permissible to do X in circumstance A, it will not have any bearing on the argument if you show that it is permissible to do X in circumstance B, where there are morally relevant differences between A and B.
The examples I have given here are of course on the extreme end, but many people will use the same structure of argument, pointing to things like roadkill or people who need to eat meat due to some strange medical condition. But such cases have no bearing on whether it’s permissible for a regular person to go to a regular supermarket and buy a regular pack of factory farmed meat under regular conditions—and this is the thing the vast majority of people who eat meat do. In fact, I am pretty sure that almost no one I have ever talked to about this stuff have had celiac disease or been living entirely off of roadkill. And yet, many of them bring these sorts of things up as justifications for why they eat meat.
Oftentimes, arguing with people who give these sorts of arguments against veganism is like building a house of cards on a running washing machine—as soon as you think you have made some progress, they reach maximum memory capacity and fall back to saying “well, if Putin was threatening to blow up Earth (the city in Texas, that is), unless I nibble a steak, I would do it”. (I guess this is really just what it’s like to argue with most people).
I know this is sort of low-hanging fruit, but I still think it’s fun to talk about—and there are actually people who say this stuff. Besides, I have been pretty busy these last couple of weeks, so I just wanted to get something out there which didn’t require too much time to think about.
A lot of people just don't understand ethical vegetarianism; that's one of the main reasons for their coming up with such dumb objections.
How about this argument for the broadly general permissibility of killing animals for food:
First, I require the Premise "It's not the case that killing animals is something that you should do". If you grant me that, I'm ready to construct the proof:
1. (Definition, for shorthand/convenience) Let C = "Killing animals is something that you should do"
2. (Premise) Not C
3. (From 2) Not C or H (for any statement H)
4. (From 3) Not (Not C) implies H
5. (From 4) C implies H
6. (From 5) C only if H
7. (Definition) Put H = "You are hungry"
8. (From 1, 6, & 7) Killing animals is something you should do only if you are hungty"
The derived statement saying you should only kill animals if you're hungry seems pretty permissive to me