Hail Seitan!
There Are Seven Fundamental Tenets:
I - One should strive to act with compassion and empathy toward all creatures in accordance with reason.
II - The struggle for justice is an ongoing and necessary pursuit that should prevail over laws and institutions.
III - One’s body is inviolable, subject to one’s own will alone.
IV - The freedoms of others should be respected, including the freedom to offend. To willfully and unjustly encroach upon the freedoms of another is to forgo one’s own.
V - Beliefs should conform to one’s best scientific understanding of the world. One should take care never to distort scientific facts to fit one’s beliefs.
VI - People are fallible. If one makes a mistake, one should do one’s best to rectify it and resolve any
harm that might have been caused.
VII - Every tenet is a guiding principle designed to inspire nobility in action and thought. The spirit of compassion, wisdom, and justice should always prevail over the written or spoken word.
Since in the modern age we can obtain all of the nutrition we need from a well-planned plant-based diet, by buying & consuming animal products, we participate in unnecessary cruelty to sentient beings
I can make an argument that being non-vegan in the modern age is violating all seven of these tenets
Tenet I : It’s neither reasonable, nor compassionate or empathetic, to needlessly exploit & take the life of a creature when we have moral agency & alternatives, unlike other animals.
Tenet II : It’s true that it’s legal to exploit & unalive animals today, but it was also legal to own slaves in the past. Just because we’re legally allowed to do something doesn’t mean we should.
Tenet III : One’s body being inviolable and subject to their own will alone should extend to all sentient beings. If it doesn’t, Name The Trait in a way that doesn’t lead to contradiction or absurdity
That is - Name The Trait different between humans and other animals that makes it okay to do things to other animals that we wouldn’t be okay with being done to humans.
I.e. justify the speciesist discrimination and double standard and differential treatment.
Tenet IV : We should be free to tell people they’re hypocrites for loving dogs & eating cows, or even for participating in the exploitative pet industry instead of adopting/rescuing companion animals.
Even if this is offensive to people. It’s freedom of speech and necessary for the activism and the struggle for justice that should prevail above laws and institutions (Tenet II).
To willfully and unjustly encroach upon the freedoms of other sentient beings, is to forgo your own right to be respected like you would be if you first gave respect to other individuals (animals).
Tenet V : Insisting we need to eat meat or animal products to be healthy despite that disagreeing with scientific consensus, is distorting scientific facts to fit your beliefs,
& not conforming beliefs to your best scientific understanding of the world.
It’s denying reality,
burying your head in the sand to avoid confronting the truth,
& living in ignorance & delusion & the willfull, unnecessary destruction & oppression of others, self, & planet.
Tenet VI : Assuming that we are already perfect & couldn’t possibly be doing anything wrong or unjust, despite every historical society participating in normalized injustice, is not recognizing humans
are fallible.
And, when confronted with your mistake, in the form of what your kind have raised you to traditionally participate in regarding unnecessary systemic exploitation & violence to sentient beings,
if your response is to deflect, close your ears, & refuse to take personal responsibility or change any behavior, is to not do one’s best to rectify it & resolve any harm that might have been caused.
then that is to not right the wrong and fundamentally unjust relationship between humans and other animals and resolve it into one of harmonious and respectful coexistence.
Rather than one of needless exploitation, domination, violence, cruelty, and oppression.
Finally, Tenet VII : To claim that because these tenets do not specifically mention an obligation to not exploit & harm non-human animals unnecessarily & to be vegan, that means it isn’t entailed by
the values underlying them, is to not let every tenet serve as guiding principles designed to inspire nobility in action & thought & not allow the spirit of compassion, wisdom, and justice to prevail
over the written or spoken word.
Lol, nice strawman. I never said plants didn’t matter. You can care about humans and other animals as well as plants and the environment. It’s not either-or.
What you said is the typical knee-jerk response to the arguments for animal rights/veganism (or one of the about 10 different vegan bingo cards), so common that it’s been termed as the “ad plantarum fallacy” - appealing to plants.
There are 2 main reasons this argument fails. 3 depending on what your exact reasoning is - that is, if you acknowledge it’s better to thrive on plant based foods than to unnecessarily exploit animals, but you insist that that option isn’t optimal or beneficial simply because it isn’t perfect and nothing ever can be, that’s a nirvana fallacy of letting perfection be the enemy of the good.
1 of the 2 main responses is to acknowledge the scientific consensus that at least the majority of non-human animals (and yes, humans are animals) are sentient, since they demonstrate the mechanistic (brains & central nervous systems) and behavioral evidence that is expected & consistent with them being sentient beings. Plants lack any such features, and speculation about their possible sentience remains pseudoscientific, quite heavily debunked in multiple papers, ignores the burden of proof, & fails to substantiate any of its claims or provide a mechanistic explanation for how they could be sentient. Furthermore, even if we acknowledge science doesn’t always have all the answers, we know with as much certainty as we can know anything, that the non-human animals we exploit & kill unnecessarily are conscious, feel pain, have thoughts, emotions, feelings, interests, etc. and we lack the same evidence for plants. So by default it’s more reasonable to prioritize animals - or any entities we know are sentient - over plants on that basis. Most already intuitively - including young children - understand why it’s more compassionate to eat a plant than it is to hurt an animal. And in a house fire, no one is going to be saving the houseplant over the dog - for good reason. The dog is known to be sentient and we understand that dog has a similar experience to us - and a subjective experience, period.
That all said, even if we thought plants and animals were equal in moral value, being vegan would still be logically entailed as the most morally preferable option. We harm a lot more plants by farming/exploiting & killing animals, in most cases unnecessarily, than by simply farming plants to feed humans directly. The caloric conversation rate of turning plants into animals is inefficient due to the the second law, which states that energy is lost at each trophic level, resulting in a decrease in energy availability as you move up the food chain. Therefore we ultimately grow and feed much more plants to feed non-human animals than if we just consumed/used them ourselves, & used the land to prioritize nutritious plant based crops & foods, and other products like clothing, textiles & medicines, we can make from them. Clearing and maintaining the land required to grow food for, feed, house, farm, & “process” non-human animals to create commodities, foods & clothing products from their bodies, also causes more deforestation than any other industry on the planet. People point to crops without realizing the vast majority of many of these crops - and in all cases much more crops than would be needed if we just used them directly ourselves - are grown as livestock feed, and huge amounts of land is cleared to grow them as well as for pastureland & animal farming infrastructure. This causes significant destruction to natural habitats & ecosystems, species extinctions & biodiversity loss, & pollution, in turn greatly reduces carbon sequestration potential of the environment and exacerbates greenhouse gas emissions and climate change and wreaks upon the natural world, including organisms of all kinds - sentient or otherwise - animals, plants, fungi, algae, bacteria, etc. If you really cared about any of these organisms - especially animals or plants - you would be vegan to reduce your harm to all of them.
Some sources:
“Plants Tho”:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33196907/
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1360138519301268
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32880005/
https://www.wellbeingintlstudiesrepository.org/animsent/vol8/iss33/15/
Do we harm more plants/environment? No, much less:
https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets#%3A~%3Atext=In+the+hypothetical+scenario+in%2CNorth+America+and+Brazil+combined.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/325532198_Reducing_food's_environmental_impacts_through_producers_and_consumers
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aaq0216 / https://josephpoore.com/Science 360 6392 987 - Accepted Manuscript.pdf / https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29853680/
Your username glorifies the murder of plants.
You think plants aren’t sentient because they don’t show signs of sentience that animals show.
So, do you think that if we care about plants, we should harm significantly more plants (upwards of 10x as much directly harvested to produce products of animal exploitation, & much more indirectly in land-clearing & maintenance & environmental/climate devastation of animal agriculture), than if we just used them directly?
That said, I would prioritize animals over plants (not that we actually need to, since helping/respecting one helps/respects the other, so the point is moot), because I value sentience/subjective experience, and I do think plants most likely aren’t sentient (though I didn’t say this before now, just that there’s no reason to believe they are and every reason/much more reason to know most animals are sentient) because that’s the general scientific consensus, and because there isn’t any meaningful evidence that they are or could be sentient. I don’t believe in things without evidence, so I don’t believe in plant sentience just like I don’t believe in a higher power, or invisible fairies that I can’t prove don’t exist, or Russel’s teapot (look it up). “That which can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence”. That isn’t to say it’s false, but with the current information, the belief hasn’t been justified, so I will remain agnostic on any kind of firm belief with regards to plant sentience unless something upends our understanding of biology - which is possible, but again, being vegan would still be the best thing we can do, short of future food systems that could be entirely 3D printed/lab grown/etc. And right now, we know animals are sentient. The same credence doesn’t exist for plants.
You didn’t respond to any of my arguments, and are now just making ad hominems. Ok, I enjoy eating delicious & healthy plant-based foods, which I know are also far more sustainable, efficient, & ethical, including being lower-impact on plants themselves and animals/sentient beings. So what? This isn’t about me. It’s about the arguments against animal exploitation. You don’t need to have my username to be vegan. I don’t think you’re engaging seriously.
Are you really acting in the spirit of reason, scientific understanding, empathy and compassion to dismiss the avoidable suffering & misinfortune of non-human sentient animals at human hands by attempting to frame the ethical choice as hypocritical simply because it can’t be perfect despite being significantly better than the alternative?
I am not taking you seriously because initially I thought you were a troll. You are clearly putting in enough effort that you are actually a vegan crusader trying to gain sympathy from a random group by completely misconstruing the tenets to mean what you want them to mean.
I will continue to not take you seriously, because you have a comical online based understanding of veganism that is indistinguishable from trolling.
Vegan is a great thing to strive for, sure. But it approaches some things as harm reduction and others as absolutes, and that is where it falls apart as a rigid ideology because it isn’t actually internally consistent overall even if the goals are noble in intent.
http://www.candidhominid.com/p/veganism-defined.html?m=1
This essentially aligns with the general understandings/definitions/descriptions of animal rights theory, abolitionism, animal liberationism, etc. Which you can read about on Wikipedia for example.
That said, I am a descriptivist (or rather something like “progressive prescriptivist”/descriptivist, not sure if there’s a precise term for my view), rather than a “traditionalist” prescriptivist. That is, I’m fine with the word vegan being redefined, re-used, re-interpreted in principle, however I also do have certain preferences and beliefs about what definition for the word would be most appropriate or beneficial or serve the most utility, and I lean towards any of the Vegan Society’s definitions from 1951 to present, excluding the definitions before 1951 which had failed to include the full scope of animal exploitation and focused only on food (which is part of why to this day some people still think veganism is a diet). So I don’t really agree with the assessment that I have a “comical understanding” of the word, or that it’s necessarily even possible since to a degree all definitions are valid, at least in theory/in a vacuum & removed from other considerations. Regardless if you disagree with the definition(s) and understanding(s) of veganism that I used/presented, we can at least understand that I’m describing a concept which I am defining the way I have & labeling as veganism, even if we need to use a substitute word to be on the same page, or call it “my definition of veganism” or whatever. I’m saying my definition/understanding of veganism, the one I’m talking about, is entailed by TST tenets. 5. This is sort of too vague an objection to even respond to. I appreciate you said that veganism(/animal rights, as I define it), is a great thing.
I’m not reading that wall of text either.