A Materialistic Problem with Veganism

Artist: Sue Coe

The concern and desire to minimize suffering in all of its forms is the fundamental ethical expression. But diametric or even somewhat overlapping ethical perspectives seemingly possess wildly disparate preferences to which forms of suffering ought to be diminished first.

Christians, for instance, so often accused of anthropocentrism and cosmic self-involvement, have, however unjustifiably, relented to the basic, universal omnivory that serves a species-wide preservationistic function. And while the New Testament is cited for lifting dietary restrictions as they relate to meat-based diets, the predominating Christian theological tradition has exceeded a position of allowance and became synonymous with the man-centric pretext that undergirds the global, and specifically American, meat industrial complex and consumerism. The creation myth alone, whereupon animals are "given" to humanity, is powerful enough of a driving force to maintain the momentum of ethically validated meat-eating. In this particular and wide-ranging Christian ethical perspective, the perpetual human ailment that is hunger and starvation supersedes the axiomatic suffering that is fundamental to the predator-prey paradigm of the Animal Kingdom. The soul and authority granted to humanity by God are coalesced to serve as the basis of man's superiority over animal, and, consequently, the justification to eat meat.

The vegan ethical perspective, as I will refer to it (since it's the aptest descriptor of a system of thought subscribed to by moral agents unable to justify the slaughter and consumption of animals), directly opposes the Christian ethical perspective. The eco-ethics of the vegan moralist, for instance, weave together the position that seeks to reduce suffering (in terms of slaughter-based violence, typically) of all living creatures. The slaughter and quasi-torture that invariably occurs in factory farming, then, is incompatible with all manifestations of ecomoralism. Beyond this categorical malpractice and immorality, however, which is condemned by many (human) meat-eaters as well, the vegan moralist believes killing animals for nutrition is unnecessary and therefore inhumane. The vegan ethical perspective thus prioritizes the life and well-being of animals over the convenience and preference of mass dietary patterns. Ecomoralism, moreover, denounces the consumption of animal flesh in its broader biocentrism. Overlooking the inconsistency of promoting biocentrism while simultaneously denouncing meat-eating -- since animals eating other animals is the maxim of nature -- the vegan biocentric viewpoint offers a bit more intellectual consistency in its wider-ranging ethical denunciation of death and suffering.

But a fuller intellectual consistency would come from the absolutist condemnation of violent consumption -- or eating -- in general. Consistent with most variations of biocentrism and ecospirituality is the belief that plants are alive, and living such that they may, in fact, possess consciousness. And this isn't so out of the question, for what is life? What is consciousness? Depriving plants of these designations is to anthropocentralize perspectives on life and consciousness, rendering those perspectives definitionally inaccurate. Assuming that this is the case, that we are insufficiently equipped to define or even characterize life or consciousness, how can we hope to adequately determine the precise nature of death, violence, or torture on a macrocosmic, biocentric scale? What is phyto-cide? Or herbi-violence? How does a plant die and who are we to impose our own criteria for suffering? Would you consider uprooting and disconnection from home and sustenance suffering?

If we categorized suffering, then, as negative response activity on nerve-endings and as understood by a cerebral cortex -- pain, for instance -- which we'd have to do in order to more accurately describe anthropocentric suffering, then we are more preoccupied with pain than with death. Again, though, on an ecosystemic scale, death is infinitely more consequential than pain. And, what's more, if we are unable to characterize consciousness, how are we to determine how pain and suffering function as they relate to alternate consciousnesses?

Therefore the vegan ethical perspective, if this context is indeed appropriate, is more equivalent to ethical emotivism such that (mostly) mammalian suffering makes us feel bad, so we interpret it as immoral. Since corn doesn't scream or bleed when it is harvested, it therefore must not suffer, or even be able to experience suffering. But, materially speaking, if there is no moral objectivity and there is a mereological equivalency between all matter -- inanimate or not, conscious or not -- then there is no consequential difference between herbivorous animals raised in an industrial farmhouse and autotrophic, photosynthesizing plant matter collected in a combine harvester.

This understanding is not necessarily in defense of meat-eating. In fact, it accomplishes something much broader. It establishes a severe dichotomy that is modeled like so: if materialism absolutely and accurately defines universal functionality, then the vegan ethical perspective fails to retain any consistency because suffering would not exist, or, if it did, everything would suffer equivalently and simultaneously since pain is inconsequential and matter is randomly and perpetually tossed by entropy. If, on the other hand, there exists any sense of abstract, moralistic reality, and moral objectivity is real, then an ethical distinction between animate and inanimate matter could be realized that would exceed the one created by emotionalism and establish one that counteracts materialism. The only way in which the vegan ethical perspective does not dissolve, then, is by bearing the context of immaterial, objective ethics. The materialist and the vegan moralist would have to be mutually exclusive.

Now whether or not it is objectively moral to eat meat is not the question at hand. Rather, the focus remains on the vegan ethical perspective, which is only tenable or at all functionally and morally expressive if it operates within a larger moral framework of objectivity. Even under the holey umbrella of moral relativism, the vegan moralist can only find partial self-affirmation at best, and nothing much more than a cultural, pseudo-ethical existence.

I don't think a moral fight ought to exist among disparate diets and nutrition-getting, but one against objectively immoral corporate animal torture would be rather valuable.