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I was thrilled to receive this thought­ful com­ment on my last post on my vegan experiment:

Com­ment from abeala

I have some dis­jointed things to say in response.

First of all, yes, it can def­i­nitely be dif­fi­cult to have a sig­nif­i­cant other who does not eat the same way as you. Around the time I started test­ing the veg waters, my now-husband and I became engaged. He was very sup­port­ive, but had no inten­tions of going veg him­self. Hon­estly, I was at least a lit­tle dis­ap­pointed that he was not respond­ing to the moral argu­ments that had moved me.  Depend­ing on the cou­ple, the dynam­ics of this kind of sit­u­a­tion can go a thou­sand dif­fer­ent ways. So that is at least one respect in which being veg can dis­rupt even healthy social relationships.

There is a prob­lem with the argu­ments for veg*ism that is rel­e­vant but which nei­ther of us has brought up yet, and that is the col­lec­tive action prob­lem. As the argu­ment goes, no ani­mal food pro­ducer is lit­er­ally sen­si­tive to the change in demand caused by one per­son ceas­ing to buy their prod­ucts. So, the pro­duc­ers con­tinue to raise the same amount of ani­mals as they were rais­ing even before you were veg. Although veg peo­ple like to talk this way, it is not true that you are sav­ing any ani­mals by being veg, strictly speaking.

At this point, a per­son can bite the bul­let, and agree it is a col­lec­tive action prob­lem, but then she would need to quit talk­ing as if she her­self were sav­ing any ani­mals by being veg. Or, a per­son can argue that being vegetarian/vegan/flexitarian is a sym­bolic ges­ture more than one intended to affect change in the ani­mal indus­try. In that case, it is prob­a­bly less blame­wor­thy than we had pre­vi­ously assumed to fail to adopt any of those eat­ing pat­terns, because sym­bolic ges­tures are supereroga­tory or at least not as morally press­ing as pre­vent­ing suf­fer­ing that is within your con­trol. Pre­vent­ing the suf­fer­ing is –not– really within your con­trol, at least not unless you are a famous vegan activist.

I don’t think we need to say that human flour­ish­ing *requires* sup­port­ing an indus­try that tor­tures sen­tient beings. If peo­ple could make meat in a lab­o­ra­tory, or if there were enough social stigma sur­round­ing meat con­sump­tion, then that would be false. Peo­ple who flour­ish are those who make wise judg­ments regard­ing what they can do with the life cir­cum­stances they’ve been handed, includ­ing the states of affairs they inhabit and their pre-existing qual­i­ties of char­ac­ter. Some peo­ple, because of their tem­pera­ment and their social cir­cles, are prob­a­bly well-suited for being vegan, and do well that way. But many oth­ers will come to the all-things-considered judg­ment that veg­an­ism is bad for them, and I think we [peo­ple who care about ani­mals, but not at all costs] should take that seri­ously instead of just say­ing “oh, you don’t care enough,” or “oh, you didn’t try hard/long enough.”

Some actions are bad enough that a wise per­son would not engage in them even at great social cost (par­tic­i­pat­ing in the Holo­caust, per­haps). I don’t think ani­mal food eat­ing falls into this class of actions. There is still some­thing bad and regret­table about using ani­mals for these pur­poses in the cur­rent man­ners, and a morally sen­si­tive per­son will real­ize this. But that doesn’t nec­es­sar­ily mean that he will suc­cess­fully become vegan and stay that way hap­pily for life. Assum­ing that a per­son rejects consequentialism/utilitarianism for what­ever rea­son, then at least some of her judg­ments will be made not strictly on the basis of whose wel­fare out­weighs whose. An indi­vid­u­al­is­tic read­ing of virtue ethics can issue the result not that we merely assign our own inter­ests greater weight in the util­ity cal­cu­lus, but that we see things from a dif­fer­ent point of view entirely, in which wise moral deci­sions can­not be made accord­ing to any rules or procedure.

There are some options for trans­lat­ing moral con­cern for ani­mals into action other than by becom­ing vegan. I try to pur­chase most of our ani­mal foods from Whole Foods, which to my knowl­edge has the best ani­mal wel­fare stan­dards of any gro­cery store (although of course they are not as high as many peo­ple would like). These prod­ucts cost more, but I like to put my money where my mouth is. In fact, I won­der whether pur­chas­ing these prod­ucts actu­ally sends a stronger mes­sage to the food indus­try than abstain­ing from ani­mal foods alto­gether. It’s also a good idea to cut back on meat con­sump­tion, for health rea­sons in addi­tion to ani­mal wel­fare rea­sons. As I recall even PETA has said, two flex­i­tar­i­ans is as good as one vegan, from the per­spec­tive of over­all ani­mal suf­fer­ing. Finally, I encour­age you to adopt home­less com­pan­ion ani­mals instead of buy­ing them in pet shops or from breed­ers. You can make a big dif­fer­ence in those ani­mals’ lives, at least.

Moral of the story: Being a flex­i­tar­ian because you think ani­mals’ suf­fer­ing doesn’t mat­ter, or because veg­e­tar­ian food weirds you out, is prob­a­bly not morally com­mend­able. But we can’t infer a person’s qual­ity of char­ac­ter from what she puts on her plate. Rea­sons to be, or not to be, veg*n are more com­pli­cated than most peo­ple inter­ested in such mat­ters seem to realize.

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