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On this topic, I have an (admittedly pedantic) pet peeve. The pro-vegan, animal rights movement often use the phrase "cruelty-free", referring to cruelty-free diets, cruelty-free lifestyles, cruelty-freee products etc. The idea is that anyone who eats meat or uses cosmetic products which were tested on animals is therefore complicit in cruelty, unlike people who don't do these things.
I accept that people living plant-based diets are complicit in less cruelty than people who eat meat. But they are not living cruelty-free lives: the amount of cruelty in which they are complicit is far from zero. Agricultural farmers still have to clear land to grow crops, which means exterminating the vermin occupying said land. (Maybe I've just reinvented the "no ethical consumption under capitalism" meme.)
I think that level of imprecision is pretty darn normal when describing preferences. It’s not a technical term like “gluten-free” or “kosher.”
Hell, even the latter is subject to complex edge cases.
It's a massive implicit value judgement like the egregious slimeball that successfully argued Just Mayo as in "justice" is acceptable.
I don't care about calling pea-protein-derived spread "mayo." I do care about abusing multiple definitions of the word "just" in misleading ways, and someone should regularly egg Josh Tetrick's house for this offense against language and decency.
"Just" go ahead and label it "we're the good guys, neener neener."
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Is it, though?
All of these concepts are simple enough that a child can understand them. They get misused by people for stolen valour reasons, but that's not to say the concepts themselves are imprecise.
Sure they are. Some more than others.
You’re treating “cruelty-free” like it’s “vegan,” which has an obvious single condition to meet. But it’s more like “pescatarian,” an awkward wastebasket taxon that doesn’t quite match the literal name. It’s just that most people don’t bother distinguishing oysters from lobsters from tuna even though they are happy to draw the line at whales. We could add prefixes until we partitioned out the 12 principled pescatarians, but it is not generally considered relevant.
The partition for “Cruelty-free” means not complicit in a subset of acts which are considered cruel. It’s not exhaustive, and you can catch practitioners in weird edge cases. But 99% of the time you can get them to agree, hey, that thing they do to male chickens is in the “cruel” category, right? Then they’re supposed to avoid it.
How is this different from asking pescatarians if whales are fish?
This is even more complicated because ‘cruelty free’ sometimes gets used as a label for animal products produced in more humane conditions eg free range eggs. It’s just a bad term for expressing anything in particular.
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