My Non-Vegan Position

Preface
This page will hopefully catalog the majority of my ethical understandings that relate to the questions posed by veganism. This page does not catalog all my ethical views about everything in life. I'm going to continue to add to it common objections and whether I think they are valid or invalid.

The second important preface to this conversation is to note my understanding of meta-ethics. I am not a prescriptivist, nor do I think we "Make moral axioms." Thus, I'm not bound to what I say as though it is some contract I'm assigning myself. I'm a descriptivist. This means that what I write is what I understand about myself. Maybe I'm wrong, and some challenge to what I write will elucidate that. My self-description being wrong in some way has happened multiple times since debating Veganism. I realize that my previous descriptions are insufficient or incorrect. Perhaps, even, my values change over time.

I offer this up for three reasons: I do not write this so that people it does not resonate with will be rationally convinced they are wrong. I don't think morality works that way. If you read it and think "I disagree! This does not speak for me!" ...okay, fine.
 * 1) So people can challenge me with hypothetical questions, and thus I can reflect upon them and update my position.
 * 2) People can offer an argument against an epistemic claim that I base my values on. If I'm convinced that the claim is false, I will have to reflect.
 * 3) That some may read it and think "That resonates with me and helps me understand myself." (Whether wholly or partially, whether immediately or later on.)

One can also take this article to be an answer to Marginal Cases or its sister argument, Name The Trait. (Assuming it was written better).

The Vegan Question
I take for the purposes of this page to answer the following questions:
 * 1) "What do I think is acceptable to eat?"
 * 2) "What do I think is not acceptable to eat?"
 * 3) "What rights do animals have, if any?"
 * 4) "What sort of values do I hold that underpin my answers to those questions?"

Questions 1 and 2.
There are a couple ways of approaching those first two questions and I'm going to give what I think is the simplest and what I consider the most accurate way of doing so. This is different than the opposite approach of attempting to list everything that you think is acceptable, and if you don't have it on the "acceptable list", it is therefore unacceptable. It is also different than attempting to list everything. This reflects my ethical understanding of "Things are morally acceptable by default, unless you hold a value telling you it's not." This is reflected by arguments I've made in the past, where I don't think it makes sense to search for the quality that playing basketball or taking a walk contains that makes it acceptable. Whether basketball is fun or not doesn't matter, it's acceptable either way. Whether it's good for your health or not, it's acceptable. What I'm actually looking for is something that renders it ''bad. ''Since activites like taking a walk or playing basketball are absent such qualities, they are by default acceptable.
 * One can have a value that says "Don't eat X."
 * One can eat anything they don't have value stating they wouldn't.

Self-Awareness (Specific)
Self-awareness is a value I hold that grants a Right to Life (Aka, it is wrong to kill something with Self-Awareness). I would describe it as: This, to me, isn't something expressed by language, but caused by it (Or, more accurately, is synonymous with it). Hence I don't see how a pre-linguistic concept of self being possible. It is the way language works and holds concepts that allows the building of a self that can value itself.
 * The ability to cognitively understand yourself as a concept/object in the world. Such a concept generally includes understanding your psychology (I am X kind of person!) and your ontology (This is my arm!). The capability allows one to gain or hold such an attribution about oneself such that one thinks "I am constant thing in this world and wish to continue to be so."

Couple of notes: Common Objections:
 * 1) I have not always held this exact definition of Self-Awareness in my values. I used to be more convinced of things like the mirror test, which tests for Self-Recognition, to be a strong inference to Self-Awareness. I don't hold that anymore.
 * 2) There are multiple definitions of Self-Awareness in the literature. Some consider not eating one's own arm to be self-awareness. Like all terms based on mental qualities in psychology and philosophy, there's a lot of different ways to describe and frame them. My definition above should serve as a rudimentary understanding of what I mean. If you find some other, different definitions of self-awareness and then come back and say "Animals are self aware under THIS definition", I don't care. I'm not interested in equivocating my way to values.
 * 3) I don't think human infants are self-aware and this develops over time. No, that doesn't mean babies don't have a Right to Life. Any object is only permissible to kill for food if it has NO value associated to it. Keep reading.
 * 4) If someone is so interested, a similar argument is advanced by Micheal Tooley in Abortion and Infantcide. The paper also addresses animal rights. Tooley, however, sees 'potential' as a non-argument and thinks this value can be a full account for Right to Life.

1) "So you think that anything that uses language is self-aware? Doesn't that mean my phone is self-aware?"

No, a concept is not just the expression of a sound. A concept is a relationship between the arbitrary noise (Or hand gesture, or what have you) and the mental image it represents. Such that, when I say to you: "Picture a red ball", you can have in your mind what that looks like. Self-awareness is the relationship between signifiers and signified where the signified is a mental representation. As I don't think phones have mental representations, their signifiers are just sounds they emit.

2) "If that's the case, then how do you know humans are self-aware? Maybe they don't have mental representations that correspond to the sounds they make either!"

That's not impossible, but I infer the opposite. On one hand, I think it's funny that anyone would argue this against me, as, if I accepted it as true, then I'm not arguing against anyone, I just have a sound-emitter that I'm interpreting as trying to make arguments. I can't really lose an argument to not a person.

But let's take it seriously and talk about why I don't think it's the case. First, I take there to be a material world. We can challenge that premise if we want, but attempting to deny it while arguing for veganism seems like a fool's errand. Second, I take mental states to be reducible to physical states. That's probably the most contentious premise here, but again, if you want to deny this while arguing veganism, I can't imagine how you do it. (In general, animal consciousness is argued through similarity of brains, so if you deny the connection of brains to mental states, I don't know what pieces you're left with.) Other human beings have brains of equal complexity/functionality of my own. If other beings have brains of equal complexity/functionality to my own, then they have a high likelihood of creating mental states. Therefore, they have a high likelihood of creating mental states. Other humans express language that describes mental states. If other humans have a high likelihood of creating mental states and express language that describes mental states, then they are likely self-aware. Other humans are likely self-aware. There you go.

3) "Animals have language and mental states! They must, by the same logic, be thought self-aware!"

Let's put aside the contentious point of animal mental states and just grant it and give you that half. Everything I know about animal communication seems to go against any language that an animal can have to build self-awareness out of.

First, familiarize yourself with The Differences Between Animal and Human Communication.The relevant aspects here are: Keep in mind, I don't think all of these differences apply to all animals. Cultural Transmission is a contentious one depending what animal you are talking about. Koko learned 160 signs and was able to use them to express concepts. Now, keep in mind, that is different than responding to 160 different noises, as though, you roll over when I make noises. Doing a behavior in response to a noise is not the same as using noises to express concepts. Dogs are very good at doing the former, Koko could do the latter.
 * 1) Creativity
 * 2) Displacement
 * 3) Cultural Transmission

The other qualities are relevant for Self-Awareness. First off, the idea of the self is a linguistic construct. (Here I mostly agree with Daniel Dennett on the self.) It's not an object in the world you can point to. Creativity and Displacement are the tools to do so. As far as I know, no animal has ever shown signs of this type of language. (Most, in fact, fail in all categories on that list and couldn't even start the process.) Perhaps we can look to Gorilla's with their ability to learn and express concepts. Or perhaps dolphins with their incredibly vast amount of symbols. The important thing here is that with the animals we do eat, we don't see the starting signs of these abilities. If anything could argue me off eating specific animals, it'd be showing me linguistic capabilities.

4) "Just because you don't see a language in animals doesn't mean they don't have one! Maybe you just don't understand it! Maybe they are keeping it hidden!"

Animal language isn't learned about by having conversations with animals. It's through observation of what could be phenomes, sound and behavior variety and through testing. If none of that bears fruit, then there's no good reason to think animals have it. Additionally, I don't even think human infants have the concepts available for self-awareness. It takes the most cognitively complex organism on this planet over a year to develop self-awareness. Why am I going to attribute more complex tasks to animals who have less complex hardware and nothing behaviorally to support it? Be reasonable.

5) "So what if animals don't have self-awareness! That doesn't matter anyways!"

If this is your objection, you clearly did not read the preface of this article. If you disagree and find something else of value that I don't, then fine, whatever. I'm not convinced by you, you're not convinced by me and we will just leave it at that.

Humanity
This is another value for me that gives Right to Life. (It is wrong to kill something with Humanity.)

Here, I would describe this as: This, of course, comes in degrees. Take, for instance, something that looks, sounds, smells and feels identical to a human, but is somehow not biologically a human. How much would that feel like killing a human? Identically. Great Apes, generally, have some degree of humanity, and often invokes this feeling in some people.
 * That which is biologically human or which I recognize to be human-like. That which reminds me so much of humans that killing it feels like killing a human.

In general, I think this is a value developed by experience. When you co-habitate with something, such a value gets built. Note, however, this is an explanation and not a ''principle. (See Explanation vs Principle) ''I am not stating it must be the case that one co-habituates in order to value something, nor that one would stop valuing something if one stops co-habituating. It's merely how I think such value sensations come to be. Were someone raised by wolves, I would expect them to have such a sensation about wolves and not about humans. In such a situation, what would bridge the gap there is self-awareness and communication.

Common Objections:

1) "What do you mean human-like? That's vague!"

This is by far the most common objection I hear to this claim, though I find this objection somewhat disingenuous. This seems to presume that the person making the objection themselves couldn't tell me what seems human like. Thus, if I presented to such a person, a clone of a human that isn't a biological human and a rock, they ''couldn't tell me which is more human-like. ''I can't take such an attitude seriously. Anyone who I've had this conversation with, I have asked them if they, themselves could tell what resembles a human more than something else never answer straight that they obviously could.

Instead, the move is to ask me to define what is human-like. Which is to say, write a complete cluster of traits that explicate all the potential things that are human like. Of course, things don't work like that, and that's somehow used as some sort of victory. To counter this, I'll give two counter arguments: First, let's acknowledge that neurologically, there is some sort of answer to this question, buried within my brain and how it holds the concept of a human and its related features, that there is feature recognition, and a following moral sensation. The question is: how do you put that into words and am I in any sense required to?
 * 1) Explication isn't required, function is.
 * 2) The same trick in reverse.

Here we have the difference between explication and function. Explication is the ability to give detailed linguistic expressions of concepts. Functions are the ability to usefully apply a concept.

Explication is often found readily available in things like mathematics. One doesn't consider it mathematical knowledge if one couldn't describe, with symbols (numbers and words) what you are doing and how. Explication generally exhausts mathematical knowledge (Though I'm sure there is some degree of intuition)

Let's take things like muscle memory. One might explain to someone that in order to hit a tennis ball over the net, one must throw the ball up with their left hand, and hold the racket in their right hand, while twist-arching over and strike the ball in the air in order to send it to the opposing side. And yet, despite that being exactly what you do, those words will not cause you to ''do it well. ''Only a general, broad understanding can be explicated. The rest is learned through ''doing it. It is the action of building muscle memory, knowing what it feels like.'' Then adjusting that feeling over time. Someone saying "Restrict your external oblique by 2.5% more" might be exactly what you need to do, but its not those words that give you the feeling of doing it. This is a functional knowledge.

Saying "I know how to serve a tennis ball" is not the same as saying "I can explicate how to serve a tennis ball really well." Saying "I can recognize something as human-like" is not the same as "I can explicate what human-like is really well." I would equate this more to muscle memory, than to mathematics. It is my brains ability to take minor details and recognize them through what could be thousands of variables done unconsciously. And let's be honest, we can all do this. I simply do not buy the "You must be able to describe in detail what human-like is" when it is clearly functional knowledge.

Second, the trick can be used in reverse. Imagine asking a vegan if they would save a squirrel or a human. They claim they would save the human. Ask them "How do you recognize it as a human? Give me a detailed description." If they claim a genetic definition (ignoring the fact that most of us have no idea what that would actually be as we are not biologists, and clearly are motivated mostly visually), you could give the following response: Any of these formations made to challenge you can be be redirected to challenge a vegan in a "choose one" scenario, or other analogous scenarios. See my Double-Edged Sword article. If your answers are not valid, then they are analogously not valid in these scenarios for the vegans use. If they ask you "Would you value something that is a human with a tiny tail", you can ask them "Would you save a squirrel over a baby with a tiny tail, just because it now has a tiny tail?"
 * What if it looked identical to a human but was not genetically a human? Would you then not choose it?

The point here, is that we all use these functional understandings, of things we recognize but can't explicate. I don't find it genuine when a vegan plays stupid, acting like they can't do it, nor when they would use a functional understanding when lobbied against them, but demanding of higher explication of you when used against you. I've never heard a motivating reason that functional understandings can't be used as moral evaluations, especially when they are so genuinely shared amongst people.

2) "Isn't this analogous to racism/sexism?"

Not in any relevant way. Historically, racism and sexism were based on epistemic assumptions of the capabilities/personalities of other races/sexes. They were thought to be incapable, stupid, weak, animalistic/brutish, etc etc. Claims, which under scrutiny, turned out to be false. In general, the actual differences between races (such as melanin in the skin, slight visual changes) are not the reason people had a problem with other races. If it was the reason that people were racist, then yes, it may seem analogous. But for the most part, it isn't.

The other point to offer here is that having a value for your race isn't necessarily a problem. It's really only problematic when it's ''to the exclusion of something else important. ''For instance, in a job interview, we take the principle of merit, the ability of the person to be what is most important. We don't take race to be a relevant factor to a job. And yet, if a black person attended a Black Pride rally and took general interest in their history, we wouldn't be crying "racism" if they didn't equally apply their interests. If they put the duty on themselves to clean up black neighborhoods, that also wouldn't be problematic, simply because no one expected them to clean up ANY neighborhoods. Extra duties are not problematic.

The other analogous comparison is to that of your family. As human beings, your parents are likely to be regular and ordinary folk, containing no special property about them other than your relationship to them. And yet, we would expect that when your parents/children fall on hard time, that you would be there for them and would think you were a bad person if you expressed indifference to this relationship. Saying "I'm not attending my mother's funeral, I had plans to go to the movie instead" is repulsive, despite the lack of ontological special properties your parents have. This, to me, is the species-relationship argument. There is an expectation to develop values for those you co-habituate with, and not doing so is concerning.

3) "So what? I don't think humanity is important!"

Read the preface.

Conscious Experience - Negative and Positive Sensations
This value gives rise to a Right of Utilitarian Calculus.

Historically, this is a value I've moved position multiple times since exploring the vegan position. I've started out by simply disagreeing we can say animals are in fact conscious, supported by Higher-Order Thought Theories of consciousness. (See Carruthers.) Now I've simply moved to skepticism. I still think HoT theories are strong, if not the strongest theories, but on considering alternative models, I'm willing to grant the possibility. I've also previously tried to state that animal rights were based on intentionalist accounts for self-aware creatures. (See Me vs VG). I think those intentionalist accounts still matter, but can't fully account for animal rights.

I would describe this value as: This value grants Utilitarian Calculus, not full Utilitarian Perfection. It simply means that the experiences should be weighed against other values and other utilitarian situations for near-optimal results. As a heuristic, I've claimed that from this follows the following:
 * The capacity to have an in-the-moment negative or positive phenomenological experience.

"An animal being farmed for resources should have a utilitarian life equal to or greater than what nature normally provides."

That is to say, we look at the normal distribution of what we can expect an animal in nature to experience for pleasurable and negative states, and our caretaking at least matches that, if not, improves upon it. Keep in mind, this does not grant a right to life. Having future pleasurable states is not a concern of in-the-moment negative or positive consciousness. The duty is only to the experiences themselves and not to securing future states of them.

Common Objections:

1) "Animal agriculture conditions are horrible though! There's no feasible way to provide good conditions and still keep up with demand!"

My first counter-objection may just be due to my own ignorance, but I'm not so convinced that all factory farms ''are horrible. ''If your entire knowledge base comes from documentaries like Earthlings/Dominion, I'd make sure to confirm that you're being shown accuracy. Note, I'm not saying they aren't, just that I uphold a level of skepticism. Still, if they are horrible, this position is clear: don't buy from factory farms. That, of course, doesn't make someone vegan. (See Articles Practical vs Principle or Minimal Non-Veganism.) This doesn't preclude anyone from buying meat, it just means they must source it from places with acceptable conditions.

The second half of this counter is to claim there is no feasible way to actually provide meat from farms with acceptable conditions. I have worked on a farm with good conditions myself and know they are financially feasible. There is an increased cost to the consumer, of course, but it only ranges about 60-100% more. That can be expensive, but it's not an impossible purchase. To the point that we can't keep up the current demand, I simply don't care. Where is it in the non-vegan doctrine that the amount of meat we eat must be equivalent to how much we eat now? Just eat less, that's fine by me. Cut it by half or 3/4. Reductionism would not only be a consequence of improved welfare, but also an environmental boon. If there's a need to impose stricter welfare laws, do it, and if that hikes up the price and lowers consumption, then so be it.

2) "If you buy from factory farms now, you're a hypocrite!"

As I said before, I'm not convinced that the factory farms are all horrible. Maybe if I'm shown they are, I would be a hypocrite. Perhaps I would stop buying from that source immediately. Though, it always seems like I'm screwing over something whenever I make any purchase. There are lots of horrible conditions where things I buy are being made. Some of it fairly non-essential and possible to source elsewhere. I don't think I'd be a bigger hypocrite here than anywhere else. However, I think that's a challengable claim. Maybe it IS a bigger hypocrisy. I'm unsure.

3) "How do you know what an animal finds positive or negative? Maybe they prefer being out in nature more than any farming method."

This form of skepticism is really odd to deal with. If we are going to be so skeptical that we can't know that feeding them regularly, providing shelter, freedom from disease/predators might actually be worse, then why don't we just go full out and say that maybe killing them ''is what they want. ''How would we know? If your response is "It's obvious they don't want that!", I think I have the same response as your original objection. It's obvious that free food/shelter/protection is better than dealing with scarcity and predators.

4) "I think this value should grant Right to Life."

I don't.

Addressing the Reductio's
Most common reductio's can be shown not as arguments against this position, but in fact, strengthening the position.

Imagine the following challenge:

"What if we took the consciousness (Assuming this question makes any bloody sense) of a marginal case human (Such that it had identical to animal mental life) and put it into a cow. Is it okay to kill it for food now?"

That might initially, on the face of it, seem like a legitimate challenge to the position. However, contrast it with this question:

"What if we took the consciousness of a chicken and put it into a cow. Is it okay to kill it for food now?"

Well, that's an easy yes for the non-vegan.

What makes the two questions actually different? Why might one cause hesitation and the other be an easy answer? Well, the difference is the word "human". The point of the question was to show that "humanness" doesn't matter, and yet, the word "human" in the question is doing all the work. Remove it, and the question falls flat. Almost all reductios follow this pattern. The valence comes from the understanding of human, and trying to retain some degree of it in the new hypothetical being. Ask a vegan to not use a "human" in their sentence to challenge your views, and still appeal to non-self-aware creatures, and see if any successful reductio can be done. If they refuse to exclude "human" from their questioning, then you can conclude that "human" and "human-like" ''was the trait. ''

Conclusion
I just want to reiterate that this is ''my position. ''If it resonates with you, great. If you want to disagree with some epistemic statement, please do. If something needs more clarification, let me know. If you want to say you disagree with my values without offering epistemic criticisms, okay, but I don't really care.