Why Vegans Can Eat Roadkill

Being vegan is about reducing the amount of harm done to animals. That's it. If a practice harms animals more than the alternative, it's not vegan. If it doesn't, then it is.

Unfortunately, since the key mechanism by which veganism reduces harm to animals is in the procurement -- and hence consumption -- of food, non-vegans so often insist on reframing it as a diet. A "diet" here is a food practice whose guiding principle is regulating what things go into your mouth and down your throat. A person with a peanut allergy avoiding peanuts is on a diet -- they don't care if the world is buried in a 2-foot layer of peanut butter, so long as none of it ever passes their lips. As it's been explained to me, keeping kosher is a diet -- observant Jews don't care how much shrimp is produced and eaten, as long as *they* aren't among the eaters. Veganism, however, is just the opposite*. Keeping meat out of their mouth is only an instrumental act for a vegan, aimed toward reducing the demand for and hence production of things that involve animal harm. That's why it makes no sense, for example, to tell a vegan to go ahead and order the full breakfast combo and just give their bacon to someone else -- once the bacon is ordered, the contribution to harming
animals is done, and it doesn't matter whose belly the product ends up in.

I was reminded of this issue by a recent post by belledame222, who recounted a story told to her by a diner cook who was smug about sticking it to an annoying vegan customer:

"Oh, yeah, he's going on and on about how he's a vegan, and I'm thinking, I didn't say it, those french fries you're eating? Were fried in the -same- oil as the scallops, the chicken...and I was like, haha, I win."

Cooking french fries in oil that has been used for meat does not in any conceivable way cause more harm to be done to animals. Assuming that there's no way to stop those scallops and chicken from being produced in the first place, I would *want* my fries cooked in the same oil, just so the diner isn't wasting oil. So the joke's on the diner guy -- his gotcha is based on a false understanding of the thing he was gotcha-ing.

Roadkill raises a similar issue. Setting aside health concerns and second-order effects (e.g. that eating roadkill implicitly endorses eating all meat), there's nothing un-vegan about eating roadkill. Refusing to eat it won't bring the roadkilled animal back to life, nor will it reduce the likelihood of future animals being hit by cars. Because veganism is fundamentally about keeping suffering out of animals, not about keeping animals out of our bellies.

*The issue is a bit confused because there are actually people for whom veganism is a diet, either instead of or in addition to the harm-reduction motivation. For the sake of brevity I'll use "vegan" to refer to people who avoid animal products solely for animal rights and/or environmentalist reasons, not those who do it to lose weight or reduce the risk of colon cancer.

Several Species of PUMAs

I find it frustrating, albeit not entirely surprising, that so much of the commentary (in the mainstream media and blogs) has a lot of trouble conceiving that disgruntled supporters of Hillary Clinton who aren't sold on Barack Obama come in more than one flavor. I count at least three. (I should note that the vast majority of Clinton's supporters have gone over to Obama, but this is an election that will hinge on small shifts of opinion.)

First are the "feminists" (by which I mean "feminist disgruntled Clinton supporters," not "all feminists" -- and mutatis mutandis for the other category names). These are voters who were primarily drawn to Clinton because they saw her as having strong, progressive positions on the issues, particularly "women's issues." They aren't sold on Obama because they think he's too centrist and doesn't care enough about fighting sexism. Clinton's gender played a mostly derivative role -- it explained why she is better on "women's issues" and gave some confidence that she'd follow through once in the White House. These folks are thus definitely not interested in voting for McCain, because he is clearly even worse than Obama on the issues (though they may occasionally fantasize about how an Obama loss would teach the Democratic Party a lesson about ignoring women's concerns). They're planning to either sit out the election or vote for a left-wing third party candidate such as Cynthia McKinney.

Second are the "moderates," the classic swing voters. These are folks whose issue positions lie in between the two major parties -- either because they think that's the objectively right policy, because their personal identity is wrapped up in proving their independent-mindedness by taking whatever happens to be the middle-of-the-road position, or because they haven't put much thought into the issues. Moderates would be up for grabs between the various candidates, but for many women Clinton's gender was the thing that tipped the balance in the primaries. They thought "I don't necessarily agree with how any of these candidates would govern, but it would be really cool, and make me feel good about my country, to see a woman in the White House." And I think this kind of affirmative action voting is a good thing if you think the candidates are otherwise close to equally good on the issues (this is why I never seriously considered supporting John Edwards -- he would have had to be much better on the issues to trump "First black/Latino/woman president"). Now that Clinton is out of the race, this group has been distributed among the truly undecided and soft supporters of Obama or McCain.

Finally there are the "double agents." These are people who are committed Republicans, but who took up the Clinton banner for strategic reasons -- to destroy Obama outright in the primaries, and/or to set themselves up to be effective concern trolls once she lost. Most of these folks probably would have voted for McCain anyway even if he was running against Clinton (either secretly in the voting booth, or after an overwrought public statement about how Clinton has betrayed them). So it's no surprise that they're solid McCain voters now. Most of the PUMAs that the media focuses on fall into this category, because their McCain support and shrill rhetoric make for better copy.

So if you want to ask, for example, how McCain's pick of Sarah Palin as VP will affect his standing among disgruntled Clinton supporters, you have to break it down. Feminists will be unswayed, because while an affirmative action vote may have some appeal when choosing between very similar candidates like Clinton vs Obama vs Edwards, Palin's vagina can't make up for her staunch opposition to abortion (among other issues where she's a doctrinaire conservative). Double agents won't be swayed because they were already committed to McCain. But it's quite likely that there will be a number of centrists -- possibly even a decisive number in a key swing state -- who are undecided between Obama and McCain on the issues and will find Palin's gender to be the small push they need to vote McCain.

(I should point out that I fall into none of these categories, though I have sympathies with the feminist position. Being an Independent I couldn't vote in the Arizona "presidential preference election," but if I could I probably would have voted for Obama.)

Monism Vs. Pluralism

One of the great debates in moral philosophy -- particularly environmental ethics -- is monism versus pluralism. Monism refers to ethical philosophies that posit one overarching value. The archetype here is classical utilitarianism, which says that all ethics comes down to promoting the greatest happiness, and other supposed values are valuable only if they're instrumentally useful in achieving happiness. Pluralism, on the other hand, holds that there are multiple incommensurable values -- say, happiness, freedom, beauty, etc.

Pluralism has a certain prima facie plausibility -- it does seem like there are lots of different things we care about. But does that intuition represent a fundamental moral truth, or is it just the product of being socialized in a culture that does not have one clear and consistent moral philosophy? A sense of the answer, I think, has to come from asking what we do when two of our ostensibly different values conflict and we're faced with a choice between them.

The most obvious response is to set up some sort of tradeoff. We can say, for example, that we're willing to accept a loss of X amount of beauty if it gains us Y amount of happiness. But as soon as such a tradeoff rule is established, we're on the express train to monism. If two values trade off at a defined rate, then we can express this in terms of them being measurable in a common underlying quantity. And making the tradeoffs vague, denying the ability to precisely define either the tradeoff ratio or the values of particular choices, simply weakens the ethical system's ability to give clear answers without eliminating its monistic implications. Granted, there's still a distinction to be made between substantive monism and abstract monism. Substantive monism, like classical utilitarianism, reduces all values to some real phenomenon -- such as the psychological state of happiness -- by examining the causal connections between other things we value and the phenomenon in question (e.g. the value of freedom is determined by the amount of happiness it leads to). Abstract monism posits some conceptual metric, perhaps just called "value," in which the relative worth of different substantive things can be expressed. Abstract monism need not even posit the ontological reality of this common metric -- "value" can be a pragmatist device for moral calculation, rather than a Platonically real Idea. But it is still effectively monism. Tradeoff rules, while immensely useful in guiding actual action, deprive us of the high-minded refusal to make comparisons or sacrifice one thing for another that is at the root of much of pluralism's appeal.

Another option is lexical ordering. We can rank the values, and then in any situation the first value must be equal before we consider the second. For example, if freedom is our primary value, then we always pick the option that maximizes freedom. But if two or more options are equal in terms of freedom, then we ask how they stack up on our second value (perhaps beauty). And if there are still two options equal in both freedom and beauty, we might move down the list to happiness. Etc. This works best if our values are yes/no characteristics (e.g. "are anyone's rights violated?") or satisficing ("ensure everyone has Z utils of happiness -- extra happiness above Z is not morally of concern"), rather than maximizing continuous variables. Otherwise it's highly unlikely you'll ever get to use even the #2 value -- making your system monism in practice even if conceptually there are other values out there. And even if your values are satisficing, the chance of a value ever having an impact on your choices quickly becomes vanishingly small as you move down the list. So while lexical ordering technically avoids tradeoffs, it goes in the opposite direction from where the pluralist intuition guides us.

So let's say we have multiple values, which are incommensurable (can't be traded off) and equal (can't be ranked). One common claim is that when faced with a value conflict, rather than following an ethical rule (which is usually implied to be a slavish, mechanical form of action), we should make a choice that expresses our character-- "look at me, I'm the kind of person who will sacrifice happiness for freedom." This strategy maintains pluralism at the global level by sanctioning relativism at the individual level. That is, each person's character drives them to be a monist, or at least a lexical orderer, even though different people are different sorts of monists. This raises the question of on what basis a person chooses what kind of value-promoting character to express. Assuming it's not chosen entirely at random, nor is it a not-open-for-debate product of their genetic or socialized temperament (talk about slavish and mechanical action!), a person presumably has reasons for their choice -- reasons that could be used to judge others as having bad character and/or to exhort them to express the proper character. But if that's the case, we're back in full-on monist territory (albeit with a two-level structure that allows us to signal some uncertainty about the precise form of the monism while engaging in meta-discussion).

Finally, we could deny that ought implies can. This discussion has been assuming all along that in any situation, at least one option is morally justified. We can always discern a lesser evil -- or else we're justified in picking a greater evil because no lesser evil is available. But perhaps pluralism means that there are situations in which every option is wrong, in which you're damned if you do and damned if you don't. An analogy to physical incommensurability makes me think this is the most internally consistent form of pluralism. The human body's nutritional needs are pluralist. We need both iron and zinc, for example, but we can't trade them off in terms of some higher measure of nutritiveness. No amount of iron will make up for a zinc deficiency, or vice-versa. So if we were to find ourselves in a situation where we had fatal iron and zinc deficiencies, and we had the opportunity to take just one pill -- either an infinite iron supplement with no zinc, or an infinite zinc supplement with no iron -- there's no choice that would save us. But while my analogy here comes from science, the appeal of this form of pluralism is usually couched in humanities terms. No-win moral dilemmas are often framed as having a sort of tragic grandeur, more deep and noble than monistic philosophies that can crank out an answer to any moral dilemma you give them. I find this defense absurd. It seems to be a product of considering moral questions only as matters of abstract philosophizing, in which case insoluble dilemmas have a sort of interestingness and humbling blow-your-mind-ness. But as I see it, ethics is a pragmatic pursuit aimed at telling us how to act. While ethical systems may run into genuine problems, to praise the production of such problems as a virtue of an ethical system and denigrate other systems for giving answers is contrary to the whole purpose of ethics. It's as if Bill Gates started telling us that the blue screen of death is an important feature of Windows, and he feels sorry for those Mac users whose computers narrow-mindedly respond to their commands, depriving them of the tragic wonder of a system crash that destroys their data*.


*In my admittedly limited experience, I've actually had Macs crash about as often as Windows machines.