If Steiner really wants to show his commitment to veganism, he should commit suicide and let his holier-than-thou remains be composted, because really, that’s the only way to do it with the correct degree of purity.

I think in this case he’s using “lapidary” to mean “concise” (because it was used to describe inscriptions on buildings), and he’s wrong about that, too.

I am steal - er - adopting “Eat a bowl of organic soy-dicks” as my new battle cry.

I bow to you man[n], your radical mocking skills exceed even mine.

Just last week I was told that those little comfort strips on most razor blades contain animal fat.

Do I need to point out how much fun you could have with someone who is that gullible?

Didn’t think so.

existence as “a child of God” and the “holy creature” scuffling about on the floor in front of him.

Dude, a mouse that doesn’t run away when you flip on the lights is rabid.

gil, if only it were possible to tell which animals had gone through Temple Grandin-designed slaughterhouses.

Vegans seem to think that death isn’t inevitable for all living creatures. They should all live into their decrepitude, to painfully trudge their way past the nurses’ station, down urine-scented hallways adorned with guardrails and pastel landscapes.

Meanwhile, let us wear our pleather jackets, the chemicals from the manufacture of which are leaching into the nervous systems of third-world children, and feel righteous.

I’m a vegetarian and a philosopher and I was both bored to death and profoundly annoyed by Steiner, so I was happy to see you do a brutal analysis. But there’s a couple things that are bugging me here.

First:
But hey, what’s the point of a philosophy degree if you can’t minimize the huge utilitarian gains made by people who majored in real subjects?

That’s a dick move. Peter Singer, arguably the best known living philosopher, has had a profound real-world effect through his ideas. As annoying as the vegans can be, it was him sticking his neck out 30 years ago that laid the groundwork for people like Grandin to be sensible to the wider world. You praise the long slog of cultural negotiation but shit on the people who push the issue. Did Michael Pollan just erupt from the ground like a wild chanterelle or did he reevaluate his choices because some vegan called him a hypocrite?

Besides, it’s better to be a philosopher with little effect on the world than an economist specializing in screwing everyone else, IMAO.

Second:
Steiner is absolutely right that meat-eaters can be just as self-righteous as vegans. I’ll admit to being one of the self-righteous varieties in my youth, but you build up a defensive posture when others are constantly taking your very existence as a profound judgement on their life without any prompting or judgement from you. Some people never learn how to drop that posture, others prefer to live that way. I don’t know how I would feel now if I didn’t live in a veggie friendly place.

Oblomova, your position is just as facile as Dr. Shitferbrains. There’s not a vegan on the planet that wouldn’t prefer we kill every single food animal today (which will be done eventually anyway) and not grow anymore tomorrow over the proposition that we should continue growing food animals indefinitely because then we won’t have to kill them now. 63 billion animals is a lot less than infinity animals.

That’s the kind of stump-stupid argumentation that anyone who takes an ethical stance about what they eat is used to hearing. Like, can you eat pussy if you’re a vegetarian?

Preach it, brother mann.

The Argument from Some Famous Person Who Agrees With Me is my second-least favorite logical fallacy.

Your first-least-favorite is presumably the Argument from Some Famous Person who Agrees With Me and Mentions Hitler?  I saw the blurb for this on the NYT webpage, and couldn’t bring myself to click.  I was not man enough to wade into teh stupid.

Loneoak, Steiner’s own words:

And how can people continue to eat meat when they become aware that nearly 53 billion land animals are slaughtered every year for human consumption?

So slaughtering them now is okay? If the slaughter of animals is wrong because it is the slaughter of animals, as Steiner clearly argues, then his arguments in favor of veganism are of the “destroy the village in order to save it” variety.

There are a number of good arguments in favor of reducing or eliminating meat consumption. Steiner isn’t making them, and I’ve yet to meet a vegan who actually will come out and acknowledge that if everyone adopted veganism, many species would become endangered or extinct. Is it okay to eliminate farm animals in order to save wild ones? Possibly. But Steiner isn’t talking about that. Not when he says “The simple answer is that most people just don’t care about the lives or fortunes of animals.”

If Steiner and other vegans are perfectly comfortable with slaughtering billions of animals in a one-time holocaust in order to “save” animals of FutureLand, it’s clear that he doesn’t particularly care about the lives or fortunes of those actual animals. But he obviously cares quite a bit about his po widdle damaged vegan fee-fees. Which is really what his article is about at heart, as Gil has so aptly demonstrated.

if we all stop eating farm animals, they will all become extinct.

Which I’d argue would be for the best if the only alternative was factory farming. And yeah, in ninety-something percent of cases, it is, but if guys like Steiner would get off their high horses (sorry for the mammalphor collision) and vote with their wallets, we could get that number down.

Sez the guy who refuses to eat meat no matter how happy the story behind it, because he gets nauseous just thinking about what it would take to reset his system. I try to make up for it with dairy, but even I can only drink so much coffee.

Doc Twatwaffle

Great, now I wanna eat a bowl of Steiner.

Steve, thanks. I’d love to say I figured it was something like that, but I really couldn’t even hazard a guess.

HTP, you’ll note I only go after my own kind with any gusto; you get the edge for being bilingual. Also, bowing’s the worst thing you can do, I hear.

Meanwhile, let us wear our pleather jackets, the chemicals from the manufacture of which are leaching into the nervous systems of third-world children, and feel righteous.

You’re kidding but yeah, that’s pretty much how I approach it. In my defense, if reflective Airwalks aren’t pimp kicks the term has no meaning.

That’s a dick move.

Well, I’d like to point out that anyone who casually dismisses an entire discipline, regardless of their tone, is most likely being a little tongue-in-cheek, but I really do think the field’s a hotbed of tweedy wankery, so fair enough. And for my money, Peter Singer’s like Paul Erlich—I sometimes wonder if he didn’t do more harm than good, but I can’t fault anyone for stepping up to the plate unless there’s a better batter vying for the spot.

Steiner is absolutely right that meat-eaters can be just as self-righteous as vegans

.

Yeah, if I wrote with any whaddayacallit, clarity, you’d know I agree. I was saying he went from topic sentence to another subject entirely, leaving me to infer.

Hey, you didn’t major in philosophy, did you? It would just be so perfect to tie this up with something about how when it’s your ox being gored, y’know?

As I said to Loneoak, Gil, if vegans would actually cop to the fact that they are, in fact, advocating eliminating farm animals from the planet, instead of couching their arguments in moralistic huffy “Well, I guess I just care about the animals more than you carnivores!,” I’d have a lot more respect for the arguments.

And I don’t want to eat a twatwaffle, but that’s because I’m a self-loathing brain-washed Rumperroast house slave!

That’s the kind of stump-stupid argumentation that anyone who takes an ethical stance about what they eat is used to hearing.

The problem is that there is no absolutely ethical way to eat. Buy local? Sure. But if going to the farmers’ market requires driving, vs. walking to the local grocery store, there’s an environmental trade-off. Whole Foods? Feh. Where are the ethics there (nonunion employees, for one thing)? Grow your own and live off the grid? Generally not something available to most people, especially urban poor people. And Mrs. Polly already pointed out the problems with vegan extremism on the natural environment.

“Ethical eating” simply doesn’t exist in any pure form for humans, but vegans like Steiner simply can’t cop to that. Like every other human endeavor, eating is a trade-off among a series of imperfect options. Which is why I was only half-joking about suicide and composting as the only perfect option for the absolute purists.

Miss Polly, I’ve heard of Conway, but haven’t read that book. Maybe I will.

Look, I’m not a vegan and I hardly believe in vegetarianism. My dissertation is more or less an argument against moral purity in environmental ethics and bioethics. I choose not to eat meat because I mostly don’t like it and I can’t think of any reason to eat it other than liking it. I think the best argument for eating none or far less meat is the downstream environmental damage caused by meat production. If the costs weren’t so heavily externalized, we simply could not grow so much meat. But that argument does not rule out eating meat as such and I don’t begrudge anyone who makes an effort to be conscientious about their choices. But ya’ll should wo/man up and acknowledge that it was the vegetarians and vegans you have encountered that made it impossible for you to not be conscientious even if you disagree with their final conclusions.

I love me some seitan jerky, except for its insane price. My wife (a lifelong vegetarian) makes excellent seitan. I’ll point out that beef jerky has as much packaging as any seitan jerky—that’s not a problem with veganism, that’s a problem with food production. Also, I don’t wear pleather. I’m sitting here in my favorite wool sweater and just took off my favorite pair of leather hiking boots after walking the (rescued, pit-mix) mutt. So I appreciate your general stance, but the oft-repeated canard that “vegans frequently damage the natural world more by their insistance on unnatural purity then do people who recognise man’s place as an omniverous creature among other creatures” is getting trite. Recognizing one’s place does not make one less damaging. Behaving differently does. Vegans might be entirely backwards philosophically, but they do less damage than the vast, vast majority of meat eaters. Conway might have mostly eaten deer and squirrels, but do you? Do you only eat pasture-raised beef and acorn-raised turkey and roadkill deer? Do you never use toxic plastic to wrap your food nor buy non-natural fabrics? No? Then you cause more environmental damage than vegans. I agree purity is morally vapid and annoying, but it’s better than arguing that veganism is worse than hunter-gathering or Medieval pastoralism so therefore we should all keep eating factory farmed meat. There’s a risk in anti-purity, too.

Oblomova, your argument still fails. It is not the vegans’ fault that 53 billion food animals exist now so it would hardly be their fault if 53 billion animals died. Meat eating kills infinity animals. Veganism kills 53 billion animals. If you oppose killing animals, then you prefer to see 53 billion animals die rather than infinity animals die. Your argument that they couldn’t possibly care about the well being of animals that would die because of their philosophy is ridiculous because those animals will die regardless of any philosophy we are discussing and there is nothing anyone can do about it. The stakes are whether we continue to grow animals for food, not whether animals alive now will die. You are not offering a counterargument to veganism here, or at least any form of veganism I have ever encountered. You’re arguing against a straw-vegan.

Please play nice in here folks. I’m only just recovering from having Freepers rifle through my sock drawer for mocking their modern-day Queen Esther.

“Ethical eating” simply doesn’t exist in any pure form for humans,

I think you’re mistaking ethics for fundamentalism. ‘Ethical eating’ does not mean ‘eating without harming anything or anyone’ because ‘ethics’ does not mean ‘never harming anyone.’ Most of the time ethics is the art of balancing or justifying harms. We agree that there is no ‘pure’ form of ethical eating for humans, but no one claims that there is in the first place so who are you arguing with?

Steiner is certainly in good company among philosophers here in the West as regards veganism and the rights / suffering of animals, and I frankly (ha, ha, franks) will make no attempt to try to out Bentham him. But it’s important to remember that the secular ethics behind his decision are hardly the only way to approach human-animal interaction, and the thousands of non-Western cultures around the world who base their subsistence off of the produce (and often meat) of animals would certainly take issue with the notion that their eating practices are cruel and disrespectful. This is, of course, a culturally relativistic assertion, and I am not making the morally relativistic claim that simply because many people do it, it’s just fine and dandy. For my own part, I find the way that factory farming makes animals yet another object of capital, commodities devoid of relationships, really damn unnerving. But the underpinnings of any way of life that seek to render thoroughly separate human culture and nature seem to me to be even more artificial and problematic. In short, veganism strikes me as ethnocentrism par excellence.

You’re not reading Steiner closely enough, Loneoak. His arguments are that killing animals constitutes cruelty, no matter the circumstances. I didn’t say it would be the fault of vegans, but it would in fact be the consequence of the world adopting their preferred diet, and I haven’t heard anyone (including you, btw) form a coherent argument for why that kind of mass extinction somehow doesn’t constitute killing animals. Dead fucking animals in the short term would inarguably be the result of universal veganism, which is what Steiner is adamantly against, at least as his admiring quoting of Gombiner’s meditations on the mouse who “possesses the same dignity that any conscious being possesses.” That dignity can apparently be ignored in order to destroy entire species of domestic animals.

So I’m afraid it’s not a strawman. It’s an uncomfortable position that people who proclaim themselves “strict ethical vegans” (which, like unicorns, don’t exist in reality) get themselves into when they argue that killing animals is always and forever wrong and cruel.

You seem to be under the impression that I am arguing “against veganism,” which is hardly the case. I am arguing against vegans who fail to acknowledge that not eating meat somehow would make the lives of specific actual animals, like the free-range Turkey in the Strawman Steiner cites, better. The animals die, regardless. If Steiner had the balls to say “Let’s kill billions of farm animals now and eliminate these breeds from the planet now, rather than continue to kill them over time,” great. But he lacks the testicularity to say that, preferring to assume the wounded-only-honest-man cloak.

If you want to argue from the perspective of how factory farms damage the environment, you’ll get no counterargument from me. But if vegans like Steiner continue to use the bullshit “animal rights” meme to prop up their dietary choices, they are going to have to man up and say “Yeah, it’s not so much KILLING animals, per se, that bothers me, because I’m totally down with eliminating farm animals from the planet.” (Of course, some PETA members also oppose pet ownership, but that’s another subject.)

I didn’t say it would be the fault of vegans, but it would in fact be the consequence of the world adopting their preferred diet, and I haven’t heard anyone (including you, btw) form a coherent argument for why that kind of mass extinction somehow doesn’t constitute killing animals.

You won’t see me offer a coherent argument about this because it is a non-problem. If both veganism and meat eating cause all 53 billion extant animals to die tomorrow, then there is a functional equivalent between the two until tomorrow. What happens next is the question. Furthermore, there is no form of meat-eating or veganism that causes specific extant animals to have a better life, because all the animals that get eaten are dead and all the animals that never exist can’t die.

I don’t think all relationships of use are exploitation and I don’t think it’s always wrong to kill animals. I also think that there are many valuable ways of life that should be maintained, like shepherding or pastured dairy, that are dependent upon use and killing of animals. What I hate about eating factory meat is the disengagement from one’s world it demands, and I see echoes of that in veganism that demands us to deny the goodness in human-animal relationships. So I’ve had plenty of arguments with vegans exactly about the question of what they think should happen to all the animals we have around. Every single one of them acknowledges exactly what you say they won’t acknowledge: there should be a mass extinction of farm animals and the world would be better off without them.

I think that’s a terrible position to take, but I just get sick of subpar arguments against veganism.

Oy vey, this comment thread makes my head hurt. As a longtime vegetarian, the only thing I hate more than evangelizing vegetarians/vegans are the meat-eaters who feel that my dietary choices are a reflection on their morality and go on long-winded diatribes about how my decision not to eat meat is an attack on them.

To all of the self-righteous windbags of all persuasions, I say please just eat your filet mignon/nut cutlet and shut the fuck up.

Heh. Nut cutlet.

To all of the self-righteous windbags of all persuasions, I say please just eat your filet mignon/nut cutlet and shut the fuck up.

Tee hee.

I guess that’s pretty much where I land. Both embarrassed and glad I’m not a vegan/vegetarian.

And, ummmmm, fuck Ted Nugent.

I don’t think all relationships of use are exploitation and I don’t think it’s always wrong to kill animals.

This, obviously, is what sets you apart from Steiner.

So I’ve had plenty of arguments with vegans exactly about the question of what they think should happen to all the animals we have around. Every single one of them acknowledges exactly what you say they won’t acknowledge: there should be a mass extinction of farm animals and the world would be better off without them.

But Steiner doesn’t acknowledge that situation here, preferring instead to ride the high horse and wax poetic about the souls of mice (“mammalphor confusion”—love it, Gil!) and neither do most official vegan publications/sites that I’ve visited, though I’m sure I’ve missed a few so maybe it’s out there.

Not that anecdotal evidence is worth a lot but when I’ve raised this question with vegans who are being evangelical on the topic without my asking for their advice in the first place (admittedly, something that gets my hackles up), I’ve not ONCE had one say “Yeah, well, inevitably, if everyone ate the way I do, a lot of animals would die in a hurry, and that sucks if you think they are sentient creatures who deserve to live.”

I’m not even saying that killing most factory-farmed animals would be a bad thing—but if one is a hardcore “animals are sentient beings and killing them is always wrong,” it’s just odd that the slippery slope between “meat is murder” and “Oh well, better to kill them off quickly for the sake of the planet” is finessed with so few stops along the way—or absent official acknowledgment about what will likely happen to the sentient farm creatures. Stops like the free-range turkey Steiner sneers at, for instance.

And I suggest we move on to something less controversial—perhaps how childfree-by-choice folks like me are morally superior to those selfish planet-destroying breeders! ;)

(Do I need more fucking emoticons to make it clear that that’s a joke?)

I don’t think all relationships of use are exploitation and I don’t think it’s always wrong to kill animals. I also think that there are many valuable ways of life that should be maintained, like shepherding or pastured dairy, that are dependent upon use and killing of animals. What I hate about eating factory meat is the disengagement from one’s world it demands, and I see echoes of that in veganism that demands us to deny the goodness in human-animal relationships.

If I were more interested in getting thoughts across than slagging granolas, this is basically what I would’ve said. I grew up on farms in New Hampshire, where the cows and pigs and birds were essentially pets that you eat after a while, and it’s a relationship I’m eminently comfortable with. To my mind, veganism and Big Agra are both the opposite of that, not each other.

I try to give credit for hearts being in the right place, but guys like Steiner really are an impediment to my chosen cause. Whine about moral relativism all ya want, but things are relative, and tossing out a line about wool production as though it’s comparable to the hideousness of fur just derails the whole thing and sends everyone back to their corners. It’s like trying to have an honest discussion about the misogyny and abusive practices of the porn industry with someone who thinks it’s just plain wrong to watch people fuck.

But enough about Thanksgiving dinners with my family.

Gil, I didn’t know your dad was Ron Jeremy!

Stops like the free-range turkey Steiner sneers at, for instance.

I really should’ve hit that harder, the thing about “free range” being a marketing ploy. It is, of course, but it’s piggybacking on legitimate humane-treatment gains, and by glossing over that Steiner goes from fuzzy-headed to disingenuous.

And I suggest we move on to something less controversial

Okay, I’ll take the “begins at conception” side. Go!

@karen marie—I’d be inclined to file that under “tangentially-related atrocities that, while horrible, don’t really feed into the discussion at hand.” And to be fair, I’d wager that hardcore vegans are less culpable than most when it comes to filling our oceans with nondegradable crap.

See, this is why I focus on animal welfare and not the more macro environmental concerns—my puny mind can sort of grasp the former, and I can count each mildly-improved life as a win. You’ll know I’ve graduated to big-picture considerations when you see me swinging from a lamppost.

Yeah, I think it’s easy to agree that there is an awful lot of grifter-dom in the marketing claims for “free range” or “organic” or whatnot. I also don’t see what plastic pollution has to do with veganism—as Loneoak pointed out to Mrs. Polly, there’s an awful lot of extraneous packaging with everything, not just animal products or seitan snacks.

So—fewer plastics, more truth in advertising! And a sparkle pony. Definitely the pony.