Veganism, Moral Progress, and the Expanding Circle
How embracing veganism can help us see our relationship with animals and food in a new light
Animals Are My Friends and I Don’t Eat My Friends — George Bernard Shaw
Gandhi remarked that the greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated. Charles Darwin, in his 1871 book The Descent of Man, noted a pattern in human evolution based on the continual expansion of “those objects worthy of our social instincts and sympathies.” The list of scientists, artists, and philosophers espousing similar sentiments goes on and on.
This article discusses the moral benefits of a plant-based diet. If new to a plant-based diet, these reasons may give you moral fuel to get through the initial hard times when veganism may be inconvenient, uncomfortable, and invite social or moral ridicule from peers.
Egoism & Altruism: The Standard Views
Altruism stems from the French autre and literally means for or to others. But the idea of sacrificing immediate units of pleasure for the sake of an anonymous other is a conundrum for some thinkers because these “others” may never reciprocate. Many have few common interests with us and possess no means of communication with us, either.
If you’ve ever taken an economics class or dabbled in game theory, this sounds backwards. Rationality is defined as maximizing one’s subjective expected utility. Surely we don’t want to be labeled “irrational.” Yet the supposedly irrational altruist takes a more expansive view. The altruist keeps open the possibility that what he currently believes most benefits him, actually — when viewed from a sufficiently large perspective — could be hurting him.
Altruism is often contrasted with egoism. Egoism comes in psychological or ethical flavors. The psychological variant is descriptive and claims all behavior is at its core self-interested; the ethical variant is prescriptive and claims that all behavior should be self-interested. The key distinction between altruism and egoism is about the motivations one has for (or against) undertaking action for the sake of others. The altruist acts in order to benefit others, possibly at cost to himself. Altruism is about motives for action, not their consequences. If you intend to save a drowning infant and jump in after her, but both you and the infant end up drowning, this is still an altruistic act.
The psychological egoist, in contrast, claims that such acts are ultimately done for one’s own benefit. Hence, altruism is really just disguised egoism, hidden beneath a veneer of self-righteousness. So says Nietzsche, at least.
Moral Progress via Expanding Moral Circles
In The Expanding Circle: Ethics and Sociobiology, philosopher Peter Singer describes the human tendency to regard some members of society as fundamentally different from the dominant group, and therefore outside the scope of one’s normal moral duties. Humans (and other mammals) first only cared about themselves and their children, then extended this care to their tribesmen, nation, species, and now — other species. Despite the occasional hiccup, the evolution of morality in humans appears to involve the generalization of feelings of empathy and care to an increasingly greater variety of beings.
Moral Communities: Who’s In and Who’s Out?
The expanding circle metaphor describes the gradual expansion of criteria for membership into a shared moral community. A moral community is a group in which the entities that constitute it possess equal moral standing. Moral standing — much like having legal standing in court — confers upon one a right to participation and reasonable consideration of one’s interests in decision-making, including a correlative duty to reciprocally extend this consideration to others. Moral standing doesn’t imply that one’s interests outweigh those of all others, but that one is simply recognized as having “skin in the game.”
Moral communities are democratic. Community members are mutually obliged to expend a reasonable effort in interpreting and understanding the interests of the others, who are on the receiving end of their actions. Moral communities can also be diverse. We all participate in the community, though perhaps in different ways, provided there is a morally relevant difference justifying differential participation.
Within the moral community, failure to perform our duty of reasonable consideration of the interests of others results in internal pangs of moral conscience known as shame and guilt. External social blame and praise can also be attributed to those who fail or succeed in discharging their moral responsibilities. Whether we feel such moral emotions or engage in such social practices of responsibility attribution when a member’s interests are harmed is a useful test of the inclusivity and limits of our current moral community.
Spontaneous Moral Entrepreneurship
Given our egoistic tendencies as rationally self-interested animals, moral communities don’t typically spontaneously appear. They require moral entrepreneurs. Some members of the “dominant class” must acknowledge — altruistically, spontaneously, and with some risk to their own interests — duties towards those previously deemed their “inferiors.” This is an altruistic act because it costs valuable resources: attention, time, money, or social status.
We can’t seem to predict who will be a moral entrepreneur any better than we can predict who will solve the greatest outstanding conjectures in mathematics (or how). Both math and morality appear to be open systems; there’s no algorithmic procedure telling us which moral or mathematical conjectures will admit of verification. Hence, moral entrepreneurship, much like theorem proving in math, seems to require a spark of human intuition or insight, plus hard work.
But the concept of a moral community raises difficult questions. Who belongs in it, and on which criteria should membership rest? Self-consciousness, the capacity for feeling pain, or the ability to exhibit purposive, adaptive behavior? I’ll leave this question for future moral entrepreneurs to answer.
Seven Reasons to Go and Stay Vegan
Everyone already knows about the health, longevity, and environmental benefits of a plant-based diet, so I’ll focus on its lesser-discussed moral benefits. These benefits are listed roughly in increasing order of their appeal to altruistic motives.
Reason 1: Reduce the Spread of Cross-species Pandemics
OK, I lied. This isn’t really an intellectual or moral benefit. This is a pure play to self-interest, but one I don’t see mentioned enough.
Several of the worst pandemics in human history, including the Black Death, the Spanish flu, HIV, avian and swine flu, West Nile virus, SARS, and possibly also COVID-19 (hypothesized as coming from bats), are the result of pathogen transmission from non-human to human hosts.
When animals are kept in unsanitary, tightly crowded spaces, the opportunity for disease outbreak grows. Factory farming methods put selection pressures on viruses to develop mutations adapted to the conditions of new hosts. Although some viruses are predominantly harbored in wild animal populations, such as wild pigs, contact with domestic livestock populations is a major source of pathogenic transmission. For instance, viruses in the droppings of infected birds can easily jump to chickens, and then to humans. By not supporting large-scale animal agriculture (“big meat”), we reduce economic incentives that foster conditions ripe for the zoonotic transmission of viruses.
On top of this, eating animal flesh can uniquely expose us to a variety of viral and prion diseases, such as Creutzfeldt-Jacob.
Reason 2: Be Mindful & Learn to Get More From Less
As lottery winners and accident victims know, humans are cognitively adaptive creatures. The level by which we judge our relative pleasure can shift after new experience and education. By embracing more altruistic values with a plant-based vegan diet, we can take more pleasure in small things and hone our gustatory and moral sensitivity. Those currently “bland” things we eat can give more units of pleasure with training. By excluding animal products and eating more non-processed grains, legumes, fruits and vegetables, we can re-train our sensitivity to natural levels of salt, sugar, and fat.
Scarcity can also foment appreciation through learning to appreciate what is already there, but often overlooked due to noise and distraction. Similar ideas related to self-restraint and mindfulness can be found in Zen Buddhism and Japanese aesthetics. As William James once wrote, “The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.”
In machine learning, we call this “dimension reduction” and “attention.” When neural networks — and our brains are very complex biological ones — learn to focus on the signal and ignore the noise they make better and more accurate predictions. This principle of less is more can apply to our lives as well.
Reason 3: Improve Executive Function and Self-regulation
We all face temptations, and vegans are no exception. Compared to the standard American diet, a plant-based diet might seem overly restrictive, and adhering to one’s values sometimes might even require skipping a meal. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Many people choose to do it.
Fasting is a ritual common to many religious and spiritual traditions. Fasting achieves a symbolic “purifying” effect by forcing us to reflect on our “natural” impulses and habits related to food. Only by denying ourselves immediate gratification can we realize how much time we spend thinking about, finding, preparing, chewing, and cleaning up food.
The experience of fasting can thus help us appreciate how much of our behavior is automatic, non-conscious goal directed behavior, shaped by evolution. Effectively zombies on autopilot, we are only occasionally interrupted by momentary “blinks” of self-conscious awareness, according to philosopher Thomas Metzinger. Fasting reminds us of our humanity and capacity for consciously choosing to act contrary to these evolutionary adaptions for energy acquisition.
Reason 4: Reduce Cognitive Dissonance Due to Carnism
Why has our particular culture developed moral norms around the prohibition of eating dog and the acceptability of eating pig? Why do we follow this particular norm while rejecting others? Resolving contradictions through examining our beliefs and behavior can relieve repressed psychic pressure and help us discover a more free-thinking and authentic self.
For instance, many of us claim to love animals, yet eat them daily as snacks. This results in paradoxical creations such as Subway’s Chicken Lover’s Sandwich. That is a strange kind of love! Critical examination of our carnistic behaviors reveals that when we say we “love” animals, we really mean to say we only love some, not all, and only conditionally, depending on their instrumental value and ability to be shaped into tasty nuggets for our immediate pleasure.
Freud’s genius was to describe how psychotherapy functioned to uncover the hidden sources of conflict within our psyche, to make explicit and rationalize what was repressed and implicit within, and which guided our (sometimes destructive) behaviors. More recently, psychologist Melanie Joy coined the term carnism to describe the cognitive dissonance underlying the cultural convention to treat dogs as pets and pigs as food, despite pigs having no morally relevant difference in their underlying biology justifying such treatment.
Of course, modifying our moral beliefs and eating habits to make them more consistent with our explicit values is not easy. And the society in which we’re born into may also endorse norms that conflict with our individual values. In that case, we might look for another, more-fitting society (perhaps one based on Buddhist values) or work to change the attitudes of our friends and compatriots in a thoughtful and respectful way. Think “therapist,” not political partisan.
Reason 5: Develop a Moral Identity & Train Our Moral Judgment
Finding meaning in our actions — seeing them as concrete expressions of abstract normative commitments — is increasingly difficult in our postmodern lives. Though it requires reflection, being vegan can strengthen our moral identities and bring enhanced coherence and meaning to life. Whatever we give up in immediate satisfaction, we gain in greater understanding of our commitment to a set of abstract values, which together constitute our moral identities. Our moral identities are bound up with the moral communities we view ourselves as participating in and the abstract values that we identify with as proper reasons for action.
Yet acting consistently takes self-control in light of our unique dual status as self-conscious survival machines. As vegans we are constantly tasked with making dietary choices — acting — in a morally consistent way despite biological impulses to do otherwise. Consistency in action implies certain principles or rules guide our choices, which we endorse as reasons for action as part of our moral identity. Examples might be one should act in way X when confronted with situation Y, or that entity X deserves consideration of its interests in light of moral property Z.
Eating a vegan meal can be viewed as a sign of commitment to a basic value, such as justice or beneficence. From values general principles are derived, and from principles rules of action in specific situations can further be deduced. Eventually, we must decide to act (or not). We are morally responsible for those acts we choose to do, and sometimes even for those things we fail to do. Importantly, being vegan can hone our moral intuition and skill in moral judgment: the ability to perceive moral features, deal with conflicting principles and weigh them appropriately, and apply the most fitting one to the context at hand. Aristotle called this practical wisdom.
For instance, while eyeing a hamburger, a commitment to the value of justice for bovine members of our moral community leads us to realize we owe it to them to weigh both our and their interests. Using the principle of utility, we might conclude that our interests in immediate pleasure do not outweigh a cow’s interests in not meeting an early and violent death after being held in stressful and overcrowded conditions. We decide to eat a salad instead.
Reason 6: Find New Meaning in Life by Joining a Chosen Community with Shared Values
Philosopher Hilde Lindemann Nelson refers to groups based on shared moral identities as “chosen communities.” Members construct morally self-defining narratives that challenge dominant narratives of “found” communities of class, gender, or nation. For example, we might challenge the “found” convention that dogs and cats are pets, but pigs, cows, and chickens are food.
By joining a community of people who also believe in the value of altruism, we join others and thereby strengthen our moral resolve. This shared moral identity imbues life events with newfound meaning and can help build moral character. As John Stuart Mill once said:
A person whose desires and impulses are his own — are the expression of his own nature, as it has been developed and modified by his own culture — is said to have a character. One whose desires and impulses are not his own, has no character, no more than a steam-engine has character…
Reason 7: Enjoy a More Comprehensive View of the Universe
Developing a sense of empathy for the suffering of others can improve our capacity for perspective taking and help us to access new forms of knowledge. I’ll call this process increased understanding through charitable interpretation.
What may appear initially as another person’s irrational behavior may be due to epistemic, not ontological, uncertainty on our part. In other words, our judgment of person’s act as deficient, erroneous, or irrational may be due to our own ignorance. With more comprehensive knowledge, we see the behavior of others in a larger context and thus grasp its purpose. For instance, assuming human spatio-temporal scales of movement prevented biologists from recognizing the adaptive and intelligent behavior of plants. Similarly, slime moulds have challenged the assumption that brains are needed for adaptive behavior.
Facts inform our values, and vice versa. Greater scientific understanding can foster moral sensitivity to the needs, interests, and goals of non-human entities. In their book Brilliant Green: The Surprising History and Science of Plant Intelligence, Stefano Mancuso & Alessandra Viola argue that scientists have tended to view plants as mere “passive beings, without sensation or any capacity for communication, behavior, or computation.” They go on to explain how plants’ alternative evolutionary strategy, immobility, led them to develop sensory analogues to our senses of touch, taste, sight, sound, and smell.
As a vegan, our endorsement of altruistic values is reminiscent of the Copernican principle. We and the human species of which we’re a part are not special or even necessary, despite it seeming as though we were the center of the universe and that we had to exist. This is a terrifying thought to some, but emancipating to others. We can recognize this absurd state of affairs and choose to develop the courage to face the absurdity of our existence on this little rock, floating and spinning through cold space. Vegans are moral entrepreneurs, after all.
The Copernican principle can also be applied to our eating habits. Cultural norms around eating certain animals are path dependent; they are happy accidents that solidified over time as others began to cater to these norms, thereby reinforcing them. They are thus contingent and not necessary. Re-run history with slightly different initial climate and economic conditions and Americans might well be eating dogs instead of cows.
Why do we steadfastly defend habits which are essentially accidents of history?
Adopting a plant-based vegan diet is an opportunity to learn to train our impulses, develop our moral identities and powers of judgment, and reflect on the values that we wish to guide our conscious actions and influence our personalities. Having a robust moral identity infuses our lives with new and greater purpose and provides a moral compass for our future plans. Becoming vegan can confer on our lives what philosopher Alisdair MacIntyre calls greater narrative unity.
A genuine moral commitment to live consistently with our self-determined ideal values gives us a reason to live. It gives us an end, a function, a telos, a goal, a purpose as persons, even if we never quite manage to live up to these ideals. The paradox is that without presupposing the existence and importance of such values, we might not be motivated to act at all.
