Veganism and Beyond : Food, Animals, Ethics

A.P.P.L.E., Queen’s University, Kingston, ON

Workshop organized by Josh Milburn and Will Kymlicka
10 juin 2017

Veganism as a social justice movement : the efficacy of our individual

commitment to the ideology of animal liberation

Hello everyone, it is such a pleasure for me to be here with you all to learn about food
ethics. I wish to thank Will and Josh for this kind invitation, I am deeply honored to take
part in this workshop with so many of the researchers who have my utmost admiration
for their dedicated work in the field.

Undoubtedly, veganism is severely criticized by human supremacists who believe that

human beings are not only fundamentally different from other animals, but that they are
superior to them, and morally authorized to use them, as they wish, for their many
purposes.

What is perhaps more surprising is that veganism is also criticized by animal advocates
who are often vegans themselves, but who think that we should not focus our activism on
the promotion of veganism. Some go as far as demanding “the abolition of veganism1”.
What I would like to do in the time allocated to me is to address two key objections to
veganism that are “internal” to the animal movement. As part of my tentative responses
to those challenges, I will present a conception of veganism as a social and political
movement.

And just so you know, this comes from the work my colleague and I did while preparing
a very short and very general introduction to veganism, which will soon be published in
the encyclopedic collection Que sais-je?, in France.

Like many of you perhaps, I personally believe in the moral equality of all sentient beings
and I’m opposed to speciesism. But today, I will focus on a more modest position: that is
the opposition to the exploitation of nonhuman sentient animals, or what I consider to
mean the same thing, the stance for animal liberation.

I chose to focus on this more modest position because veganism, as I understand it, doesn’t
necessarily exclude the possibility of attributing higher moral value to some individuals
and less to others, based on their specie’s membership. What veganism does exclude,
however, is carnism2, the ideology that conditions us, humans, to perceive nonhuman
animals as food or clothing supplies or as companions, and to act on these perceptions.

1See, for instance, W. Hsiung, « Boycott veganism » on line.

2Here I follow Melanie Joy’s devinition of carnism in M. Joy, Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs, and Wear Cows,
Newburyport, Conari Press, 2011.

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More precisely, the notion of veganism that I am using is twofold: 1) the stance one takes
against animal exploitation; and 2) a commitment to put the ideology of animal liberation
in “practice”, in one’s own life3.

I am aware that some people think that veganism can be motivated by prudential reasons
or by ecological ones. It is certainly true that many vegans talk about the health and the
environmental benefits of a plant-based diet. But I am under the impression that most of
the people who are on a plant-based diet for the medical advantages it offers wouldn’t
really consider themselves “vegans”, unless they also oppose animal exploitation. I could
be wrong, but I assume that most people understand veganism as excluding wearing
leather or going to the zoo, for instance.

And if I am wrong, if the assimilation of “veganism” to a “plant-based diet” is increasingly

common in the English-speaking community, it can hardly be the case in the French-
speaking one, at least. Indeed, we use, in French, another word “végétalisme” to describe
an exclusively plant-based diet. Also, veganism recently appeared in all major French
dictionaries and is defined as the lifestyle excluding all the products (services are also
sometimes mentioned) that come from animals or their exploitation. Just like Lesli Cross
from the Vegan Society in 1949 did, francophone vegans (at least) should normally
understand veganism as the day-to-day commitment to the ideology of animal
emancipation.

That said, a question remains open: While we may agree that veganism involves a
commitment to ending the exploitation of nonhuman animals, is the opposite equally
true? Does opposing animal exploitation imply that we should adopt the vegan lifestyle
and promote veganism?

As I mentioned earlier, I would like to try to respond to two main objections that cast
doubts on the relevance of veganism within the animal liberation movement’s advocacy.

The inefficacy objection

The first objection I have in mind is what is called the “futility objection”, or the “causal
impotence objection” or the “inefficacy objection.”

Nonhuman sentient beings (like us human beings) have fundamental interests that are
violently and unjustly thwarted by the industries that exploit their bodies for the
production of food and artefacts or for different services. The consumption of animal
products and the use of animal services increase the demand for those products and
services, which in turn leads to an increase in the number of animals needed to satisfy
those demands; animals that are ultimately bred to be exploited. Therefore—the

3 Veganism is conceptualized in different ways. Some distinguishes « aspirational veganism » from

« identity veganism » (see L. Gruen and R. C. Jones, « Veganism as an Aspiration » in B. Bramble and B.
Fisher (dir), The Moral Complexities of Eating Meat, Oxford, OUP, p. 153-171, at p. 155-156. Others talk
about « engaged veganism » in order to contrast it with the simple abstention from nonhuman animal
« food » sources (see S. Jenkins and V. Stanescu, « One Struggle » in A. J. Nocella II and al. (dir.), Defining
Critical Animal Studies, New York, Peter Lang, 2014, p. 74-85, at p. 76).

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argument for veganism goes—we ought to avoid consuming those products and those
services, embrace veganism and promote it.

But are vegans right in thinking that they do make a difference for the animals when
refraining from consuming animal products and from retaining animal services?

Lately, many authors have argued that veganism is, as a matter of fact, a very ineffective
means to reducing animal exploitation.

Their reasoning goes somehow like the following:

If I refrain from buying some animal products, no animals will be spared lives of misery.
Indeed, agribusiness is way too large and complex to respond to the behavior of one
consumer. Therefore, I may oppose to the exploitation of nonhuman animals for human
purposes, but I cannot prevent it from happening. Animals’ fundamental interests will be
violated no matter what I do, so I may as well enjoy the taste of their flesh, eggs, or
secretions4.
I am not sure in what measure the reasoning can be stretched to apply to non-food related
types of exploitation….

Of course, it is important to keep in mind that the causal impotence objection doesn’t
contradict the moral necessity of abolishing animal exploitation as a whole, which means
that we should all be vegans. Collectively, our consumerist choices obviously have a
determinant effect on animals and this means that we ought, as a group, to avoid all animal
products and services. The only thing targeted by this objection is our individual
responsibility to become vegans right now.

In the literature dealing with this objection, a lot of attention is given to the “threshold
solution”. Researchers like Shelly Kagan5, Alastair Norcross6 and Peter Singer7 argue
that the expected effect of our individual acts of purchasing animal products is equivalent
to the average effect of all similar acts.

Their explanation is as such (and I apologize to those of you who are familiar with this):

So, even though the market is largely insensitive to individual behaviors, there must be a
number n of purchasing acts that will have the effect of triggering the production. Since
the market is complex and since there is a lot of noise along the supply chains, we can
imagine that this number n is quite high. Let’s imagine that 10,000 chickens need to be
sold before the industry responds by raising and killing 10,000 more chickens. Or, on the
contrary, that 10,000 chickens need to go to waste in a short period of time, in order for
the industry to adjust its production by decreasing it of 10,000 birds. The higher the
trigger number n, the lower the chances of any individual consumer to see its choice make
a difference to the overall production. But, the authors assume, the higher this trigger
number, the higher the number of animals that will be “saved” or “condemned” by this

4 This way of formulating the idea was inspired by A. Norcross, « Puppies, Pigs, and People » (2004) 18
Philosophical Perspectives, 229-245, 231.
5 S. Kagan, « Do I Make a Difference ? », n° 39 (2), Philos. Public Aff., 2011, 105-131
6 A. Norcross, op. cit.
7 P. Singer, « Utilitarianism and Vegetarianism » (1980) 9 Philosophy & Public Affairs, 325-337.

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individual choice (n X 1/n), if it turns out to be the one that tips the scales. Therefore, a
small probability for a consumer to have an impact on the production is compensated by
the importance that this impact would have, if it was triggered. Each time one is about to
choose whether or not to buy 1 chicken, she faces the probability of affecting the life of
exactly 1 chicken. The marginal utility is equivalent to the average utility.

The philosophers Julia Nefsky8 and Mark Budolfson9 both offered a critique of this
explanation. They not only demonstrate that the chances for each consumerist act to
make a difference are small enough to be considered infinitesimal, but that we have no
reason to expect that the difference one could make (if one were to win the lottery and hit
the tipping point) would be important—in other words, we shouldn’t assume that it would
be equivalent to 10, 000 chickens (or n chickens); it could be considerably less.

Budolfson goes as far as suggesting that the expected effect of our individual acts is so
insignificant that, from a utilitarian point of view, we ought to consume animal products
if it would give us even just a little bit of gustatory pleasure, since the effect of doing so
would be, on balance, positive!

Recognizing the strength of Budolfson’ critique, many authors have suggested

responding to this objection by invoking non-instrumental reasons to be vegan. Julia
Driver10, Adrienne Martin11 or Tristram McPherson12, to name just a few, focus on a
problem of voluntarily participating to what, collectively, cause a harm to someone—even
if one’s own contribution has no causal role in the production of this harm. They argue
that it is wrong to associate with those who raise, kill and sale sentient beings; or even
less directly with the group of consumers who–in signaling a demand for animal products
and services - is responsible for the subjection of nonhuman animals. They insist that
benefiting from the exploitation of animals (by enjoying the taste of animal products, for
instance) is wrong. The same goes for the failure to participate to a group that tries to
put an end to an unjust industry.

But other types of solutions have also been offered. When I was—with a few other people
in this room—in Oxford last summer attending a summer school on the ethics of eating
animals, I had the chance to hear Steven McMullen presenting on a paper he is co-writing
with Matthew Halteman on the expected utility argument. McMullen and Halteman are
trying to demonstrate that the market of animal products is much more sensitive to the
demand than what is assumed by Budolfson in particular. I think that their paper will be
an important read. I hope it will come out soon.

8 J. Nefsky, « Consequentialism and the Problem of Collective Harm : A Reply to Kagan », (2011), 39
Philosophy & Public Affairs, 364-395, p. 369-371.
9 M. Budolfson, « The Inefficacy Objection to Consequentialisme and the Problem with the Expected

Consequence Response », forthcoming, Philosophical Studies.

10 J. Driver, « Individual Consumption and Moral Complicity » in B. Bramble and B. Fisher (dir.), op. cit. p.

67-79.
11 A. M. Martin, « Factory Farming and Consumer Complicity » in A. Chignell, T. Cuneo and M. C.

Halteman (dir.), Philosophy Comes to Dinner, New York, Routledge, p. 203-2014.

12 T. McPherson, « Why I am a vegan (and you should be one too) », ibid., p. 73-91. See also E. Harman,

« Eating Meat as a Morally Permissible Moral Mistake », ibid., p. 215-231 and Neil Levy, « Vegetarianism :
Toward Ideological Impurity », in B. Bramble and B. Fisher (dir.), op. cit., p. 172-184.

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Other authors put it in dynamic terms and talk about the effect of speeding or delaying
the happening of each threshold, which can have a huge impact – in the end – on how
many animals will have been exploited for food.

That said, I am not sure that the expected utility argument is the best way to approach
the problem. My impression is that there is something problematic with assuming that
the responsibility for the outcome of a collective action should be entirely placed on the
last person to act before the threshold is reached. I am not sure that we have good reasons
to focus on the chances each one of us has to accomplish the 10 000th purchase precisely
when, in fact, each one of these 10,000 acts (or n acts) all contribute—the first just like
the last—to reaching the tipping point and affecting the number of chickens that will be
produced for human consumption. Following someone like Alvin Goldman13 who
discusses the “voter paradox,” I am tempted to think that, when a threshold is reached,
each single act that contributed to reaching it counts. So the question would become how
much chances do my actions have to causally contribute to the reaching of the tipping
point. And those probabilities are obviously much higher than 1/n.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that an opportunity to contribute to causing a desired

outcome automatically gives us reasons for action, as our act could be superfluous for
instance. As Julia Nefky14 explains, if you know that the threshold will be reached no
matter what you do, the desire to see that outcome produced won’t necessarily give you
any reason to act in order to produce this result. But on the other hand, Nefsky adds, as
long as you are not absolutely certain that the threshold will be met whatever you do,
you have excellent reasons to act. As she convincingly demonstrates, if you could help to
bring about a good result by acting in a certain way, you have reasons to act that way. Doing
so is doing “something significant toward affecting the desired outcome”, even if things
end up not turning on your action (even if as a matter of fact your action doesn’t, in the
end, “make a difference”).

With this conception of causation in mind and with this distinction between possibility of
“being part of the cause” and the possibility of “helping to bring about a good outcome”,
we should start to seriously doubt the inefficacy objection. It is not necessarily true that
each of us cannot make a non-superfluous causal contribution toward sparing animal lives
of misery. Therefore, it is not true that even though we are morally opposed to animal
exploitation, we don’t individually have to become vegan.

The idea behind this is that the individual choices vegans make shouldn’t be taken in
isolation. Being vegan doesn’t mean making consumer choices in a vacuum. By becoming
vegan, an individual is not by herself changing the outcome, but she might still be (as
Nefsky puts it) “taking a significant step toward change”15. A change that can, of course,
only happen if many other people act in a similar way.

13 A. I. Goldman, « Why citizens should vote : A causal responsibility approach », (1999) 16(2) Social
Philosophy & Policy, 201-217.
14 J. Nefsky, « How you can help, without making a difference », (2016) Philosophical Studies, doi

10.1007/s11098-016-0808-y
15 J. Nefsky, « Consumer Choice and Collective Imact », in A. Barnhill, M. Budolfson and T. Doggett (dir.),

The Oxford Handbook of Food Ethics, forthcoming

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In embracing veganism, individuals don’t have the ambition of directly, immediately and
significantly affecting the production of animal products and services, as much as joining
a group that they hope will do considerable good for animals. They make the decision to
commit to veganism hoping or counting on the fact that others will do as well. And
collectively, vegans (who, by the way choose to avoid animal products numerous times over
their lives), have very good chances to affect the production because of the aggregative
effect of their number…. and, also, because of their individual influence on the behavior
of others.

Indirect effects vegans have on other consumers’ choices

Even by simply choosing some products and avoiding others, vegans can have, indeed, an
indirect influence on the behavior of other consumers through what Ben Almassi calls a
mechanism of “social contagion16.” Indeed, when the demand for meat, dairy and eggs’
substitutes increases, the prices of these alternative products goes down and those
products get more visibility on restaurant menus or on the shelves at the grocery store,
which in turn leads to more sales. Also, we can expect companies to be increasingly
interested in investing in the development of other products of the same type instead of
products made out of meat, dairy of other animal-derived ingredients. We might also be
hopeful that as the range and variety of alternative products increases, non-vegan
consumers might be more tempted to try some of them (in place of the non-vegan ones),
and people who are considering becoming vegan will find it less daunting to adopt a vegan
lifestyle.

So when we measure the causal role played by the individual vegans on the production of
animals for food and other purposes, we have to take into account not only the
probabilities that their behavior will have a direct effect that production, but also the
indirect effect it might have, through their influence on other consumers’ choices. And
when their behavior is accompanied by a certain moral or political discourse, this effect
can be magnified. When vegans eat or otherwise consume publicly, they are constantly
required to explain or even justify their choices. They then talk about animal exploitation
and about the reasons why they refuse to participate to it.

More voluntarily, many vegans actively look for occasions to use the market as a political
arena, in the goal of changing the institutions and the commercial practices they condemn.
In the literature on political tactics employed in social movements, the strategies based
on consumerism are well studied. Boycotts and buycotts have limited effects, as Michele
Micheletti and Dietlind Stolle (two political scientists) explain, but it is not the case when
the political motivations behind those strategies are publicly stated. So when vegans wear
t-shirts showing ad-busting slogans like “Mc-Cruelty” for instance, their refusal to eat at
McDonald’s can be understood as a statement against the restaurant chain in defense of
animals other than humans17. And this can get people to question the morality of eating
factory-farmed animal products.

16 B. Almassi, « The Consequences of Individual Consumption : A Defense of Threshold Arguments For

Vegetarianism and Consumer Ethics » (2011) 28(4) Journal of Applied Philosophy, 396-411, p. 404-407.
17 See, for instance, M. Micheletti et D. Stolle, « Consumer Strategies in Social Movements », in D. Della

Porta et M. Diani (dir.), The Oxford Handbook of Social Movements, Oxford, OUP, 2015, p. 478-493 ; or M.

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The individual contribution to building a social movement

That said, veganism shouldn’t be reduced to a political type of consumerism. Vegans

employ many other tactics or strategies to spread their anti-exploitation message.
Because veganism is both the practical result of moral and political convictions, as well
as a tool for transforming the society in the direction designated by those convictions,
vegans rarely limit themselves to modifying the way they consume. Many of them do
much more. They sign petitions, they participate in demonstrations, they leaflet, they
write articles, they organize conferences, they get involved in political parties… they act
in a wide variety of ways to advance the cause. And they do all of this not only as animal
liberationists, but as vegans as well, since both commitments are intrinsically linked.

Perhaps more precisely, what vegans have done, and continue to do, is to build and sustain
a social and political movement through their collective engagement. Their countless
ordinary and less ordinary acts of transgression of the dominant social norms have a
subversive potential and can help to weaken the hegemony of the carnist ideology.
Veganism is a kind of prefigurative activism in that it is “the embodiment, within the
ongoing political practice of a movement, of those forms of social relations, […] culture,
and human experience that are the ultimate goal.”18 Vegans are the “living proof” that it
is possible to live and to even thrive while largely avoiding the products and services
obtained from the exploitation of other sentient beings. They contribute to pulling
nonhuman animals out of the categories of what is edible or otherwise usable. They
“normalize” another—more peaceful—way of living. The vegan ideology is in fact a
counter-ideology, one that opposes and try to replace the dominant carnist one.

The vegan lifestyle is, for these reasons, essentially political. Thus, by insisting on
changing the mentalities, the culture, the ethos, vegans are changing the social conditions
that need to be changed before we can hope to obtain some of the profound institutional
and legislative modifications that justice requires.

Because of the long-term goal vegans have when they build their community (their
movement), we must take into consideration, when evaluating the efficacy of veganism,
all the animals who could (who will) be spared in a distant future precisely because enough
individuals commit today to veganism.

The purity objection

Beside the worries regarding the potential impotence of veganism, there is another
« internal » objection that I would like to quickly tackle. One that those of us who

Micheletti, A. Follesdal et D. Stolle (dir.), Politics, Products, and Markets, New Brunswick, Transaction
Publishers, 2006.
18 C. Boggs, « Marxism, prefigurative communism and the problem of workers’ control » (1977) 11(6),

Radical America, 99-122, 100.

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promote veganism must also take very seriously and that is not entirely distinct from the
inefficacy objection, in fact. What I have in mind is the purity objection.

Vegans are accused of focusing more on their own virtue than on the fate of the nonhuman
victims of domination. When they carefully read labels in order to avoid all trace of any
animal-derived ingredients or when they refuse to consume an animal product that would
be wasted anyway, vegans can come across as more preoccupied by what they put in their
body (or by avoiding having blood on their hands) than by the actual impact of their
behavior on other animals. In shifting the attention away from these animals, they
therefore contribute to giving the impression that veganism is a matter of personal
preferences, rather than one of justice. And in depoliticizing the cause that way, they make
it less effective for the animals.

Worse, the behavior of vegans who focus on every little detail could be counterproductive
as it presents veganism as a black or white option where, if you cannot commit to
perfection, you might as well make no effort at all as you will be excluded from the select
group of the true vegans, no matter what.

A common problem among vegans who view themselves to be morally superior is that
they themselves (often without realizing it) adopt behaviors that have a considerably high
harm footprint. We only have to think about how their cereals and vegetables are grown
with manure; or about the small mammals that are killed by the machinery in the fields
which harvest crops; or about abuses of human animals that often lie behind fraudulently
labeled “cruelty-free” goods that they consume with a clear conscience.

In response to this important objection, I’d like to note first that trying to be a good
person (not to have too much blood on our hands) is something admirable. For someone
to go out of her way to avoid encouraging even indirectly the practices that she condemns
is certainly not, by itself, a bad thing. If vegans sometimes give the impression of
exaggerating or even obsessing with details, it is perhaps simple because they take the
question of animal exploitation extremely seriously. Of course, it becomes a problem if
they end up forgetting about the victims in the process! Vegans who would only worry
about their own purity would obviously miss the point. Personal excellency is certainly
not what should be placed at the core of the movement. But I am under the impression
that even the most zealous of vegans is probably not as concerned with her own perfection
than she is with the fate of the animals.

That said, it is extremely important, of course, that vegans don’t delude themselves in
thinking that they succeed in avoiding completely to contribute to the harm done to
sentient animals. We have to keep in mind that veganism can only be an ideal or, as Lori
Gruen and Robert C. Jones argue, it can only be “aspirational”19. Nobody, indeed, can be
perfectly vegan. However, I do not believe – as some authors seem to20 – that recognizing
this fact means that we should give up on the conception of veganism as a moral
imperative.

19 L. Gruen et R. C. Jones, op. cit.; R. C. Jones, « Veganisms », in J. Castricano et R. R. Simonsen (dir.),

Critical Perspectives on Veganism, Basingstocke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016, p. 15-39.
20 On the subject, see R. Twine, « Ecofeminism and Veganism : Revisiting the Question of Universalism »

in C. J. Adams and L. Gruen, Ecofeminism, New York, Bloomsbury, 2014, p. 191-207.

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Jones himself notes that “to see that veganism is only aspirational is not to see veganism
as merely an aspiration. To call oneself a political vegan while continuing consciously and
without necessity to act in ways that condone animal exploitation (e.g., proclaiming your
aspiration to vegan commitments while ordering a cheeseburger at your favorite fast-
food restaurant) would be to disingenuously appropriate the language of veganism and,
[…] be inauthentic and act in bad faith21.”

I believe that we should resist the reasoning leading us from the fact that nobody can
avoid all animal products and services to the idea that it would be completely arbitrary to
decide who is vegan and who is not, and that we should therefore accept that nobody is.

The reason why I prefer to keep a certain divide between vegans and non-vegans is
perhaps close to the reason why I want to be able to distinguish between feminists and
non-feminists, even though it is possible that nobody can perfectly avoid contributing to
patriarchy. We should definitely worry about the potential counterproductive effect of
putting the bar so high that people give up trying entirely. But we shouldn’t lower it so
much that people stop identifying as vegans (or feminists for that matter) and lose their
motivation to stick to some principles22. It is my understanding that the label, on the one
hand, gives personal motivation to limit the number of exceptions one will do and, on the
other hand, contributes to give a collective identity to a group of people, which is a crucial
aspect of the so-called “new social movements.”23

Saying this doesn’t mean we have to be insensitive to the particular difficulties some face
regarding this obligation. The duty to be vegan is certainly not equally easy to satisfy for
everyone. Some of us have religious beliefs that are difficult to reconcile with veganism.
Some finds themselves surrounded by people (friends, colleagues and family members)
who are particularly hostile to veganism. Others live in food deserts where vegan options
simply don’t exist. In those cases, I think it is reasonable to refrain from blaming the
individuals and shift part of the responsibility (and the attention) toward the institutions
that deny individuals and communities equal access to the vegan way of life.

In my opinion, conceptualizing veganism as a social and political movement dedicated to

the abolition of the exploitation of all sentient animals offers many advantages. Firstly, I
think that it is not too late — at least in the francophone world — to hope for this
definition to be largely adopted. Secondly, it corresponds not only to what Watson and
Cross had in mind when they coined the term, but also to how most vegans, I think, truly
regard their own commitment (and if it is not the case—if it is empirically false—this is
how we should convince them to conceive it!). Thirdly, it seems to me to be the most
philosophically sound conception since it allows for the possibility, in a zootopia, that we

21 R. C. Jones, ibid., p. 30.

22 In H. Rothgerber, « Can you have your meat and eat it too? Conscientious omnivores, vegetarians, and
adherence to diet » (2015) 84, Appetite, 196-203, the authors argue that consciencious omnivores make more
exceptions to their own dietary commitments than vegetarians do. On that subject, see N. Levy,
« Vegetarianism : Toward ideological impurity », in B. Bramble and B. Fisher (dir.), op. cit., p. 172-198, p.
180-181.
23 A. Melucci, « The Symbolic Challenge of Contemporary Movements » (1985) 52(4) Social Research, 789-

816.

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may consume some animal products and benefit from some animal work, as long as it is
not obtained from the exploitation of animals. It also provides the right explanation for
why it is or it is not ok to eat the flesh of animals killed by accident (depending on the
instrumental effect of it in the long run 24) or from animals that are not sentient. Fourthly,
it invites us to see the animal liberation project as a matter of justice for all animals
(human and nonhumans—after all, vegans insist that humans are animals) and therefore
encourage the activists to care, in their advocacy, about the other social justice movement.
It invites them to see all the problems of oppression as having common roots, to value
intersectionality and to adjust their tactics in order to avoid backlash effects on some
human animals, particularly the most vulnerable ones. Fifthly, and finally, it largely
avoids some of the most powerful “internal” objections, like the inefficacy and the purity
ones.

To conclude, I would like to insist on the fact that even though veganism can sometimes
seem to be “asking too much”, it is generally the very minimal thing we should do and
demand. It is obviously far from being enough; as Sue and Will have persuasively argued,
our duties of justice toward nonhuman sentient beings, just like our duties toward human
beings, largely exceed the negative ones. We should definitely go beyond veganism.

Thank you!

24Eating “roadkill” could be considered as: 1) Something morally beneficial. Just like dumpster diving or
the purchase and consumption of the flesh of non-sentient animals like mussels perhaps, it can help
educating people by showing them that veganism is not about attributing value to a mere biological
characteristic (i.e. being an animal), but about the harm caused to conscious beings; 2) Something beneficial
because it doesn’t have any negative effect on other animals and can replace vegan foods that come at some
cost (for the environment and the animals); 3) Something that can be detrimental to animals as it keeps
them in the category of what is edible, which reinforces the distinction we make between them and us, as
we usually don’t perceive the flesh of other human beings as a potential source of protein.

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