Why Veganism Matters, by Gary L. Francione (introduction)

Introduction

DO WE HAVE a moral obligation to be vegan?

Many people, including those who think that animals matter morally, are mystified as to why some people are vegan and, for moral reasons, do not eat, wear, or otherwise use animals.

They think of veganism as an extreme position. They certainly do not think that they have a moral obligation to become a vegan.

In this book, I am going to argue that, if you think that animals matter morally, then you are committed to being a vegan.

There is nothing extreme about it. Indeed, I am going to argue that what is extreme—in the sense of being extremely inconsistent—is to believe that animals matter morally and yet not be vegan.

Notice that I said, “if you think that animals matter morally, then you are committed to being a vegan.” Let me be crystal clear from the outset that this book is addressed to those who agree that animals matter morally. So if you are of the view that animals have no moral value and that they are not the sorts of beings to whom we can have moral obligations, then you probably should not bother reading further because I am not going to try to convince you otherwise. I am going to argue that, if you 1

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are one of the many people who think that animals matter morally, then you are committed to not using animals exclusively as resources. You are morally obligated to be a vegan.

Persons, Things, and Animals

The moral universe, as I will describe it, is populated by two entities: persons and things.

Persons are entities who matter morally and to whom we can have moral obligations. Persons have moral value. They may be said to have “inherent value,” which means that they have moral value by virtue of the sorts of beings they are. Depending on one’s philosophical views, persons are also entities that can have rights. Things are everything out there that isn’t a person.

Things have no value other than what we accord to them; things have “extrinsic value.” Things cannot have moral rights. This is, of course, not to say that we do not regard some things as very valuable. The Mona Lisa is a thing, albeit a very valuable one. But the value of things lies in the fact that we—persons who do matter morally—value them. If we all came to the conclusion that the Mona Lisa were a terrible piece of art and decided to destroy it, we could do so without doing anything immoral to the painting itself. One cannot have moral obligations to a thing. The Mona Lisa cannot have a right to not be destroyed.1 We can have obligations that concern things, but we cannot have obligations that we owe to things. For example, I can have an obligation not to throw a stone at you but that is not an obligation that I owe to the stone; it is an obligation that I owe to you and that only concerns the stone. I may have a moral obligation not to destroy the Mona Lisa because you love that painting. But that is an obligation that I owe to you, and not to the painting.

There is a tendency to think that “human” and “person” are synonymous. They aren’t. “Human” is a matter of DNA. “Person” 2

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is a matter of morality. When we ask whether someone is human, we are asking a biological question; when we ask whether someone is a person, we are asking whether that being has moral value and is a being to whom we can have moral obligations.

Being a person carries distinct advantages. They are entitled, by virtue of their being persons, to certain protections. We feel compelled to justify imposing pain and suffering on them or otherwise harming them. But the most important aspect of personhood is that we take seriously the interest of persons in their continued existence. For example, the philosopher Michael Tooley defines personhood as the characteristics that one needs in order “to have a serious right to life.”2 We don’t use persons as slaves, nonconsenting subjects of biomedical experiments, or forced organ donors. To be a person means that one receives some sort of protection for one’s life. We don’t regard persons exclusively as resources, or otherwise use and kill them to benefit others. If we are going to kill them, we need a very good reason.

What makes a person?

Ethicists generally associate personhood with certain cognitive or mental characteristics or abilities. These cognitive characteristics include (depending on the theorist) self-awareness, a sense of past and future, rationality, the ability to engage in reciprocal relationships, the ability to think in abstract concepts, and so forth. For example, the bioethicist Joseph Fletcher, in what may be the most cited essay on personhood written in the past one hundred years, proposed fifteen characteristics of personhood: minimal intelligence (an IQ above twenty); selfawareness; self-control; a sense of time; a sense of the future; a sense of the past; the capability to relate to others; concern for others; communication; control of existence; curiosity; change and changeability; a balance of the rational and emotional aspects of existence; idiosyncrasy; and neocortical functioning.3 The philosopher John Locke (1632–1704) was more succinct, describing a person as “a thinking intelligent being, that has reason and 3

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reflection, and can consider itself, as itself, the same thinking thing in different times and places.” 4 We can see from this that personhood as a moral concept (as opposed to a legal one)5 focuses on characteristics that we associate with humans, or at least those humans who are able to participate in social institutions and to interact with others in a minimal way.

But what about nonhuman animals? Do they have moral value? Are they persons? Or are they just things?

The short answer is that they are both, or at least that is what we think is the case.

On one hand, our conventional wisdom about animals is very clear: Animals are not just things. They have at least some moral value. Most of us think that it is morally wrong to inflict unnecessary pain and suffering on them and that we have an obligation to treat them humanely. To inflict unnecessary pain on them and to treat them in a cruel manner are wrongs to them. That is, our obligations don’t just concern them, they are owed to them. Our conventional wisdom is considered to be so uncontroversial that it has long been contained in criminal laws that require that we treat animals “humanely” and prohibit inflicting “unnecessary” suffering on them. This view—the animal welfare position—can be traced to a nineteenth-century paradigm shift that supposedly resulted in animals being included as members of the moral and legal community.

On the other hand, although we claim to recognize that animals have morally significant interests in not suffering, we do not recognize that they have an interest in their lives. They certainly care about not being slaughtered in a painful way, but that is a function of their having an interest in not suffering as a general matter and not any concern they have about their life per se. They live in a sort of “eternal present” and have no sense of the future. As long as we treat them well and kill them in a relatively painless way, we don’t really harm them because they have 4

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no interest in living—no interest in the future—that we can adversely affect. Therefore, we do not accord protection to their lives, which is the hallmark of personhood status. We regard them as commodities for our “humane” use. They have the status of property; they are, quite literally, things that we buy and sell. We own them and use them exclusively as our resources. We kill them for our benefit.

We think of nonhuman animals as constituting a third category we may call quasi-persons. They are not persons but, at least according to our conventional thinking, they are not just things. They have a morally significant interest in not suffering, but they do not have a morally significant interest in their lives.

The problem is that we cannot have it both ways. I was serious when I said that the moral universe includes only two categories—persons and things. I will argue that quasipersonhood does not work; the property status of animals means that animals are nothing more than things. They have no moral value; they have only the economic value we accord to them. To the extent we protect their interests in not suffering, we do so for the most part only to the extent that it is necessary to use animals in an economically efficient way. For example, we require that large animals who are being slaughtered be stunned before slaughter because stunning reduces costly damage to their carcasses and reduces injuries to workers, which results from terrified animals flailing around. We generally protect animal interests to the extent that we get a benefit—usually a financial one—from doing so.

There may be certain instances in which we accord a higher value to animal interests but these instances are not exceptions to what I have said thus far about animals as property—they are illustrations of it. For example, some of us live with pets. Our pets are our property. We may choose to accord them a higher value and treat them as beloved members of our families. But, because they are our property, we have the right as property 5

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owners to decide to accord them little or no value and kill them, dump them at a shelter where they will be killed if a new owner is not found, or take them to a veterinarian to be killed.

Moreover, because animals are property, we will be unable to apply the moral norm that we claim to accept—that it is wrong to impose unnecessary suffering on animals—in a coherent way.

We generally will not ask whether particular uses of animals are necessary. Instead, we will ask whether it is necessary to impose particular sorts of pain and suffering on animals to accomplish those uses, even if those uses are themselves unnecessary. But if a particular animal use is not necessary, then all of the suffering incidental to that use is unnecessary. Despite claiming that we regard animals as having moral value, we allow animals to be used exclusively as resources even in situations where there is no plausible argument that there is any need to use them.

In any event, the concept of “humane” treatment is, in several respects, a fantasy. Its primary purpose is to make us feel better about exploiting animals. Animals receive precious little protection under the animal welfare laws and their status as property ensures that welfare standards will be driven primarily by economics and not morality. We are not likely to accord a very high moral value to the interests of animals who are commodities that we buy, sell, use, and kill.

Is there a solution? Of course there is, or there would be no book! If we agree that animals are not things and have moral value, we should not use them exclusively as resources for our benefit—however supposedly “humanely” we may do so. We should recognize that nonhuman animals are persons—beings who have a morally significant interest in their lives. Indeed, there is no good reason not to do so. We recognize that humans who lack some or even many of the characteristics that we associate with normally functioning humans are still persons. That is, personhood theory aside, we actually recognize that there are two sorts of human persons.

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There are moral agents, or those who possess all of the characteristics of normally functioning human persons, such as rationality, self-awareness, and so forth, and who are thereby accountable for their actions and have obligations to others. Moral agents are persons who can participate fully in our social, political, and legal institutions. They can, for example, vote and make contracts. They are responsible for their criminal actions. And there are moral patients, human persons who do not have all of the characteristics of personhood, or do not have them to the degree that they are possessed by normally functioning human persons, and who are not accountable to others but who are, nevertheless, not things. Moral patients are not normally functioning persons; they cannot participate fully, if at all, in our social, political, or legal institutions. Some moral patients— children—will usually become moral agents at some point in time. Some—those who are cognitively disabled—may be permanent moral patients.

Although moral agents may have the characteristics of personhood in varying degrees, they all share in common the possession of these characteristics to a greater or lesser degree. Moral patients, on the other hand, represent a more diverse group as they lack completely some or most characteristics of personhood or have those characteristics in degrees that are insufficient for moral agency. Is there an absolute minimum required to be a moral patient? I believe it uncontroversial to say that we believe that any human who is sentient—that is, is subjectively aware and has conscious experience—has moral value irrespective of their level of cognitive sophistication. We don’t believe that treating any subjectively aware human exclusively as a resource is morally acceptable. We would find using any human as a forced organ donor, as a nonconsenting subject of a biomedical experiment, or as the property of another human to be morally reprehensible. All human moral patients, including those who are merely conscious, are persons. We recognize that all human 7

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persons, whether moral agents or moral patients, have a morally significant interest in their lives. A human with late-stage dementia who lives, as much as a human can, in a sort of eternal present is very different from a normally functioning human. But both are persons. Although we may not—should not—treat them the same in all respects, we recognize that they are equal in one respect—we cannot justify treating either exclusively as a resource.

A central idea in this book is that we have overlooked that sentience provides all we need to justify personhood for nonhumans as it does for humans. The conscious experience of sentient beings serves to distinguish all beings with interests from all of the other things in the universe that do not have any interests. All sentient beings are beings concerning whom there is something it is like to be that being. There is something it is like to be a human; there is something it is like to be a giraffe; there is something it is like to be a fish. Sentient beings may be very different from one another if we consider their characteristics beyond sentience but, as a class, they are all the same in that they differ from everything in the universe that has no consciousness. There is nothing it is like to be the Mona Lisa or a coffee cup. Any sentient being has some sort of mind and has interests, and is thereby similar to every other being who has a mind and has interests, and dissimilar from everything that does not have a mind and has no interests. Cognitive characteristics beyond sentience may be relevant for all sorts of reasons, but are irrelevant to the question of whether we should use sentient beings exclusively as our resources.

In recent years, there has been a great deal of human thinking about animal thinking. It is not controversial to say that there is a growing consensus that animal minds are much more like human minds than we have previously thought. But it is also the case that there is still a great deal of controversy about the

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nature of animal minds. There is, however, general agreement that many animals are sentient and have some sort of conscious experience. In Can Animals Be Persons?, the philosopher Mark Rowlands identifies four conditions that nonhuman animals must satisfy to be persons: consciousness, cognition, selfawareness, and other-awareness.6 He regards consciousness as the easiest condition to satisfy and the least controversial. According to the Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness, all mammals and birds are undoubtedly sentient as are cephalopod mollusks such as octopuses.7 There has long been scientifically sound evidence of the sentience of fish8 and fish sentience is now widely accepted.9 There are philosophers who find consciousness to present all sorts of puzzles,10 and there are still a very few who deny that animals are conscious,11 but there is no serious controversy about the existence of animal consciousness.

That animals are conscious should come as no great surprise.

Our conventional wisdom—that animals matter morally and that we have an obligation to treat them “humanely”—is based on their being conscious, sentient beings. We have had no trouble for the past two hundred years or so understanding that anticruelty laws do not apply to rocks or plants or paintings. If animals were not sentient—if they did not have a mind that preferred, desired, or wanted not to experience suffering—we could not be cruel to them.

I will argue that it is only our anthropocentrism—the rather arrogant view that we humans are the central or most significant entities in the universe—that stops us from seeing sentient nonhumans as persons who are no different from merely conscious human moral patients. And if nonhuman animals are persons, we can no longer justify using animals—however supposedly “humanely” we do so—as resources for our benefit. We cannot justify using and killing them as our property.

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A Note About Rights

I am going to be talking here and there about rights. There is nothing mysterious or particularly complicated about what a right is. It is simply a way of protecting interests. To say that interests—whether of humans or nonhumans—should be protected even if failure to protect those interests would have good consequences for others is another way of saying that those interests should be protected by rights. For example, to say that my interest in contributing to the marketplace of ideas by expressing myself should be protected even if others are made unhappy by the content of my speech is another way of saying that I have a right of free speech. The protection of my interest in speaking is generally not determined by the consequences of my speech.

I am going to argue that, if animals matter morally, they must have a right not to be treated as things and hence not to be used as property. They must have a right to personhood. This is another way of saying that their status as persons must be protected even if it would benefit humans to ignore that status.

If their status as persons is not protected in this way, then it follows that they will risk being treated as things whenever humans think that they will benefit from doing so. If we recognize that animals have a right not to be treated as property, that does not mean that we have an obligation to protect animals from all suffering and death or to intervene to stop a fox from killing a rabbit. It does mean, however, that we have an obligation to protect animals from all suffering that is incidental to their use exclusively as our resources.

Please understand that in talking about rights here, I am talking about moral rights—actually one moral right, the right not to be property—and not legal rights. I am not talking about giving animals the right to vote (although the world’s political situation would probably improve greatly if we did) or the right to drive cars and so forth. I am talking about a 10

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fundamental change in our moral thinking about animals and our acceptance as a moral matter of the view that animals are not things but persons. If enough of us recognized the moral right of animals to not be used as property, the law would recognize a legal right that would support and enforce this moral right. But the legal right of animals not to be used as property will never be even a possibility until the paradigm shifts and we accept the personhood of nonhuman animals as a moral matter.

The United States Constitution prohibits slavery, but this legal protection could never have happened if there had not been a widespread moral recognition that it is very wrong for humans to own other humans. If a significant number of us were to recognize that the moral significance of animals required our recognition of the one moral right of animals not to be things, it would lead to a rejection of using animals for human purposes and the institutionalized exploitation of animals would end.

We would no longer use animals exclusively as resources. We would be vegans.

Veganism

If nonhumans are persons and have a right not to be used as property, we must abolish our institutionalized exploitation of them—all of which assumes that they are our property. At the present time, social discourse focuses for the most part on treatment—making animal exploitation supposedly more “humane.” The discourse needs to change and to be focused instead on whether we can justify the use of nonhuman animals for food, clothing, entertainment, sport, research, and so on.

Let’s begin with a definition of veganism. This is the one that informs the analysis in this book: veganism involves not eating, wearing, or using animals or animal products to the extent practicable with the goal of abolishing all animal use because such use cannot be morally justified.

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There are at least three things about this definition that require elaboration from the outset.

First, although we can talk about a “vegan diet” as one that excludes animal products completely, and although we usually talk about veganism in the context of eating animals because we use and kill so many for this purpose (at least seventy billion land animals and at least one trillion sea animals annually) and eating animals is the primary way we relate to them, veganism is more than a diet. It involves not participating directly in any animal exploitation to the extent practicable. Vegans do not eat, wear, or use animal products. They do not go to circuses, zoos, or rodeos. They do not use products that contain animal ingredients. And veganism is different from vegetarianism. There is no morally coherent distinction between meat and other animal products. They all involve suffering. They all involve death.

In any event, being vegan and consuming a plant-based diet are different things.

There are certainly very powerful arguments for having a plant-based diet that involve the environment, human rights to food, and human health. I agree with those who maintain that rejecting animal agriculture is the most important thing we can do to mitigate the undeniable disaster of global warming.

Eating only plants is something we can all do right now—it involves no technological innovation or regulatory or legislative action—and it would reduce global warming significantly.

Without a global movement rejecting animal agriculture, it is unlikely that we will be able to avoid climate catastrophe. A world in which we ate plants and not animal foods is also the most effective way to reduce human starvation and malnutrition. We could feed everyone if we abolished all animal agriculture, and we would actually use less land to grow all the plants we would need because it takes so many pounds of plants to produce one pound of animal products. And the evidence of the health benefits of a plant-based diet is increasingly clear.

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But this book is not about ecology, the human right to food, or human nutrition. It is about the moral status of nonhuman animals and our obligations to those animals not to eat, wear, or otherwise use them as resources for our benefit.

Second, by “practicable,” I mean “feasible” or “possible.” Veganism involves not participating directly in animal exploitation to the extent that it is feasible or possible to not participate.

Indirect participation is impossible to avoid. For example, given that we kill so many animals every year, animal by-products are ubiquitous and cheaply available. Therefore, there are animals in road surfaces, plastics, and just about everything else. It is simply not possible to avoid walking on roads or coming into contact with anything plastic. It is, however, completely possible to not eat or wear animals. It is also completely possible to use personal care items that do not contain animal products and to avoid rodeos, circuses, zoos, hunting and fishing, and so forth.

“Practicable” does not mean “when convenient” or “unless we really want to consume animal products or otherwise exploit animals.” There are people who call themselves “flexible vegans” who avoid animal products except when they don’t. For example, a “flexible vegan” may consume animal products if they are eating out or at someone else’s home, or dining in Paris or some other exotic place. They may be “vegan before 6 pm” but consume animals after that time. I do not regard “flexible vegans” as being vegan. Indeed, given that no one eats animal foods 100 percent of the time or wears animal clothing 100 percent of the time, everyone can be considered to be a “flexible vegan,” and this in itself renders the expression meaningless.

I maintain that a vegan is someone who takes veganism seriously: that is, someone who, whenever faced with a choice, chooses not to participate directly in animal exploitation.

Third, as veganism represents a rejection of the unjust use of nonhuman animals and does not depend on whether our 13

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treatment of animals is “humane,” it represents a moral imperative.

If animals matter morally, we cannot use them exclusively as resources, irrespective of how supposedly “humanely” we treat them. Being vegan is something we have a moral obligation to do.

To not be vegan involves treating nonhuman animals unfairly and, therefore, unjustly. There are some who maintain that we do not have an obligation to be vegan as long as we are engaging in some activity that supposedly reduces animal suffering. I disagree with that position. Although less suffering is better than more suffering, I will argue that we cannot justify morally any suffering imposed pursuant to using animals exclusively as resources.

Let me emphasize why I think it is more important to talk about the moral issue. We know and have known for a while that there is significant evidence that animal agriculture is harmful to the environment and that eating animal products in anything but small quantities is detrimental to human health. Yet, animal exploitation continues pretty much unabated. During the time that I was writing this book, we became aware of the covid-19 virus, which has now changed our lives in all sorts of ways—and has ended the lives of many.

Covid-19, like most emerging diseases, including most pandemics, stems from the transmission of pathogenic agents from nonhumans to humans and, although we may not understand completely the factors that mediate this process, it is clear that the transmission occurs because humans come into contact with nonhumans—and contact is often facilitated by using animals for food. The environmental and health elements may cause us to modify our behavior in that we may eat fewer animal products (at least temporarily). But I have never met anyone who maintained a completely vegan diet for environmental or health reasons alone. And these reasons do not address our other uses of animals. We will not stop using and killing animals for food and other purposes until the paradigm shifts and 14

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we recognize that our use of animals—however supposedly “humane”—cannot be morally justified.

An Outline of the Book

Chapter 1 discusses how, in the nineteenth century, an ostensible paradigm shift occurred in that we rejected the idea that animals are just things and we embraced the idea that animals have moral value. But we did not accord personhood to them.

They were reconceptualized from being things to being quasipersons. This gave rise to the animal welfare position, which characterizes our conventional thinking about animals. I will argue that this approach has failed. Despite our claim that we think animals matter morally, the property status of animals ensures that they remain as things.

In chapter 2, I will consider how two important animal ethicists—Peter Singer and Tom Regan—have addressed animal personhood.

In chapter 3, I will argue in favor of an approach to personhood that recognizes all sentient, or subjectively aware, beings as persons. They are not equal for all purposes, but they are all equal in that they all have a morally significant interest in not being used exclusively as resources, however supposedly “humanely” they are treated.

In chapter 4, I will argue that saying that all subjectively aware beings are persons is another way of saying that they should have a basic moral right not to be used as property.

In chapter 5, I will argue that, just as accepting the personhood of all humans requires that we rule out using any humans as chattel slaves, forced organ donors, or forced biomedical subjects, the personhood of nonhumans requires us to rule out using animals as commodities and commits us to recognizing veganism as a moral imperative. Veganism is a necessary consequence of recognizing that animals have moral value. To continue to eat 15

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them or products made from them, or to otherwise use them exclusively as resources, is to deny their moral value. I also argue that we cannot justify continuing to cause domesticated animals to be produced for human purposes.

What This Book Is and Isn’t

This book is not intended to be an exhaustive examination of all of the issues and debates involved in animal ethics. It is a relatively brief and informal essay.12 Given the extent of animal exploitation—the daily killing of millions of animals—public discussion and engagement are crucial if there is ever going to be any meaningful change. For too long, consideration of the moral status of animals has been either confined to academia or framed by animal charities or groups. Most academic discussion tends to focus on issues in technical ways that only specialists can appreciate and usually ignores the pervasive reality of animal exploitation in favor of inquiries that are tantamount to asking how many animals can dance on the head of a pin. Animal charities/groups avoid critical thinking and rational discourse about the issue because fundraising is better served by street theater or shock, and by characterizing the issue as how we can exploit animals in more “humane” or “compassionate” ways.

My goal here is to explore veganism as a moral issue in a way that is simple but not simplistic and that provides a starting point for the public discussion of nonhuman personhood. This was not an easy task. Any complexity inherent in the issues— and there is a fair amount of that—has been greatly exacerbated by self-interest. The desire of humans to eat and otherwise use and kill animals has provided a most powerful incentive to generate some unjustifiable justifications for that conduct, and part of my goal will be to show why those justifications do not work.

In any event, it is clear that there is a group of people that cares about animals and regards them as having morally significant 16

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interests. It is also clear that there is a group that regards animals as things with no moral value.13 I am assuming that since you’ve gotten this far, you are in the first group, which I believe to be much larger than the second. The goal is to convince you and others similarly situated that, if you agree that animals have moral value, you cannot justify continuing to consume or otherwise use them as commodities, and that veganism is a logical consequence of what you already believe.

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“Gary L. Francione clearly and accessibly argues that veganism is a moral imperative. Why Veganism Matters advances our understanding of just how much animals are owed.”

—DAVID BENATAR , AU THOR OF THE HUM A N PREDIC A M ENT: A C A NDID GUIDE TO LIFE’S BIGGEST QUESTIONS

“Francione offers a clear and compelling argument that animals have the essential right not to be treated as property and used merely as a means to others’ ends. No one who admits that animals merit moral consideration should ignore the force of his argument.”

—STEPHEN R . L. CL ARK , AU THOR OF C A N W E BELIEVE IN PEOPLE? HUM A N SIGNIFIC A NCE IN A N INTERCONNECTED COS MOS

“Veganism is not extreme. Abolition of all animal exploitation is now a global movement, thanks to Francione’s vision. He saw animals truly as persons, not things, not property, when so few others did.”

—SUE COE, ARTIST

“Francione argues with great force and clarity for radical change in our relations with animals. This is a gripping and deeply challenging book, every page of which conveys the significance of the moral stakes.”

— COR A DI AMOND, AU THOR OF RE A DING W ITTGENSTEIN W ITH A NSCOM BE , GOING ON TO ETHICS

“In this inspiring work, Francione, one of the most powerful voices against the oppression of nonhuman animals of our time, provides a compelling argument for recognizing the moral status of nonhuman animals and a profound and critical call for abolishing our institutionalized commodification of them.”

—DAVID A . NIBERT, AU THOR OF A NI M A L OPPRESS ION A ND HUM A N VIOLENCE: DOM ES ECR ATION, C A PITA LIS M , A ND GLOB A L CONFLICT

GARY L. FRANCIONE is Board of Governors Distinguished Professor of Law at Rutgers University and visiting professor of philosophy at the University of Lincoln (UK). He is the author of many books, including Animals as Persons: Essays on the Abolition of Animal Exploitation (Columbia, 2008).

Columbia University Press | New York | cup.columbia.edu CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES ON ANIMALS: THEORY, CULTURE, SCIENCE, AND L AW Cover design: Milenda Nan Ok Lee Cover image: Rein Jannson / © Adobe Stock