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Just because they're annoying doesn't mean they're wrong - a meta-discussion
A few months ago a wild vegan appeared. He was almost self-parodically stereotypical: short, mid thirties, college-educated, and into endurance sports. He posted a reasonably well-argued case that veganism was not harmful to sporting performance, with the usual smug boasting of his numbers in endurance sports. At the end of his post, he finished with "what's your excuse?"
The entirety of his well-reasoned post was ignored, and he was dogpiled for that one final sentence.
Mottizens could immediately detect what was going on - he actually found the killing and eating of animals to be immoral, but didn't think that would be a convincing argument, so he tried to achieve his goal with another argument.
Both positions are actually worth considering. I'm open to the possibility that killing animals for food is wrong, and I'm open to the possibility that a vegan diet is not harmful to athletic performance. Hiding behind one to advance another, however, is deceitful.
I've actually tried to engage seriously with these ideas, and in my desire to see their own steelmen, I have tried to read some vegan sites. Usually I give up quickly, as they are full of the above argumentation - shifting goalposts, emotional appeals, hiding behind one argument to advance another, etc.
I wish I could say I have rejected vegetarianism because I engaged with their best arguments and found them wanting. Instead, I found their argumentation so annoying I ceased to engage with them.
I've had similar experiences with people who hate cars. Like anyone else who can do math, I have often found it absurd to use two tons of car and two liters of fuel to get two bags of groceries. I've also tried to mitigate some of these by moving to a New Urbanist development (with an unpleasant HOA, sadly), and I've got an electric car and solar panels on my roof. Sadly, this doesn't lead to any productive discussion, as I've discussed before.
Years ago, I remember a similar circular argumentative style among supporters of the ACA. They would say that people are afraid to start companies because they won't have health care, to which I'd reply "sure, how about two years of subsidized COBRA?". Then they'd point to catastrophic expenses, to which I'd say "sure, how about a subsidized backstop for all 1MM+ expenses for anyone who has a 1MM plan?", to which they'd change the argument again.
Of course, there's a pattern here. From what I can tell, many vegetarians have an (understandable) response to the raising, killing, and eating of animals. Some people seem to be terrified of owning and operating large machines, and they find private cars and single family housing to be socially alienating. Some people are emotionally disturbed by other people suffering from the health consequences of a lifetime of bad choices.
What these groups all have in common is a strong ability to signal these things emotionally to people similar to them and form a consensus, but also a generally terrible ability to discuss these things reasonably.
We don't have many vegans, anti-car people, or socialists here at The Motte - but that's not because their arguments are invalid, it's because the people attracted to those ideologies don't fit well with our particular discursive style. On the flip side, we have plenty of white nationalists, who seem to be able to adapt.
I'm confident that white nationalists are wrong. I have engaged with their best arguments, and found them wanting.
I'm only confident that vegans are annoying, because they are so annoying that I find it hard to engage with their arguments.
I think that's a blind spot for The Motte.
One question for vegans is that pretty much any industrial sized farming (needed to support our population) will involve killing a lot of animals in collecting farm products. That is, killing a cow and eating it may involve less animal death compared to eating bread.
This can be solved via two ways: (1) is that animals killed during farm are less advanced and therefore their death is less morally wrong or (2) intent matters.
The problem with (1) is it undermines the entire vegan argument. The problem with (2) is that at a certain level of recklessness the moral consequences are similar.
Therefore, to live means other animals will die. I am on board with not torturing other animals (eg I wont eat veal, I buy pasture raised eggs) as that seems just unnecessary. But at the same time I don’t have qualms with eating meat.
There's a third solution. A field mouse living in a wheat field lives a normal field mouse life until one day it's instantly shredded by a thresher. That doesn't resemble the life of the vast majority of farm animals in the US, who are typically raised in very poor conditions and then are slaughtered in more or less stressful environments.
inb4 "I only buy meat from my uncle's farm": good for you, but again, that's not reflective of the reality of factory farming which produces most meat.
A normal field mouse lives in constant fear of being eaten alive by a dozen different types of predators, and their population is kept in check either by being relentlessly hunted by perpetually hungry overpopulated predators or hideous, agonizing plagues if their population density gets high enough.
The un-hunted deer where I live all caught a wasting disease that rots their brains as they grind their teeth out and and wander in circles. I watched a baby fawn starve to death next to the already-skeletal body of her mother.
Nature is horrifying. Man is kind.
And how long did the death from starvation take? A few weeks, maybe a month at most? Meanwhile human will force human into a prison to suffer for decades. I would much, MUCH rather starve in a month or two.
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To me this gives away the whole game. When someone says “This is cruel and inhumane!” The natural follow up question for someone interested in actually understanding the truth of the matter is “Compared to what?”
For actions between humans it’s incredibly easy to find alternative contexts and thus possible to make judgements about what’s moral and what is not.
But the life of animals, with or without human intervention, is just one rolling atrocity after another, forever and ever, without end.
I think it’s no accident this ideology only came into being after it became possible for people to live lives so alienated from wild nature that their only real experience of it is through a Disney-fied, highly sanitized lens.
And the natural follow up answer is "compared to not raising those pigs at all".
Then you’d be effectively saying that it would be better for domesticated pigs to have never existed at all, which is a whole other can of worms. Comparing not existing in the first place to existing is largely a fool’s game.
But it also belies almost a closed system of philosophical belief. Barring extreme and probably impossible human action, animals will exist. Their existence will consist of some amount of suffering. So the question isn’t “will animals suffer?” it’s “how much, and for what purpose?”
I understand if you, personally, don’t wish to participate in any action that causes animals to suffer. That has been a relatively common personal and religious choice throughout history. But the idea of systematically lessening animal suffering through collective human action is more than a little farcical.
As compared to human suffering, which while it waxes and wanes throughout the ages and will likely never be eliminated, we are able and have been able to really dull the edge of the lovecraftian horror that is the state of nature.
Veganism always reminds me of anarchism for this reason, an utopian vision of erasing a somewhat tragic aspect of the universe by radically decontextualizing it, then arguing it can be eliminated by ignoring all context.
We don't need to solve every problem in existence, but if we find ourselves in a hole we should stop digging.
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Nature is horrifying, Man is part of Nature. Life itself might be described as self-organizing horror.
Yes, the conversation had me trying to remember Land's "Hell-Baked," from one of his lighter meth binges.
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