Is veganism about reducing as much harm as practically possible to all animals?

Abstract:
Veganism as an indiscriminate principle of harm-reduction to all animals (farmed and wild) is not supported by the VeganSociety definition of veganism, nor can it be inferred from the general behaviour of vegans. Instead it's an ethical stance against the exploitation/commodification of animals and a rights issue.

I'm writing this only to address what seems like an unending critique of the way vegans express what veganism is about.

Argumenting for veganism as minimization of harm to animals

Here's a common line of argumentation:

"But what about crop deaths? Surely rodents and other small animals are killed during harvest, bugs killed with pesticides to protect plants. To claim animals don't get killed for your food is simply false and dishonest."

"We do acknowledge those deaths - but veganism is about reducing suffering as much as practically possible to animals. Currently, while vegans would not choose to do agriculture this way, it's not practically possible for us to avoid this. And remember, farm animals eat way more crops! So this is the option with least harm caused by humans to animals."

Now, while I think this is a fair response, I do see some issues with it.

If we listen to the VeganSociety definition of veganism, we can begin to understand how it doesn't support the idea of veganism as a general reduction of harm to animals.

"Veganism is a way of living which seeks to exclude, as far as is possible and practicable, all forms of exploitation of, and cruelty to, animals for food, clothing or any other purpose."

The keywords here are "exploitation", "cruelty" and "for food, clothing or any other purpose".

Exploitation or cruelty in the definition

1) If the VeganSociety definition of veganism entails reducing as much harm as practically possible to animals, then every action that causes harm to animals must be either exploitative or cruel.
2) It's not the case that every action that causes harm to animals is either exploitative or cruel.
C) Reducing harm as much as practically possible to animals is not entailed by the VeganSociety definition of veganism.

So, to answer whether veganism definitionally is about reducing as much harm as practically possible to animals, we could ask ourselves whether any harm done to animals, directly or indirectly, that is unnecessary for our survival (or otherwise practically possible to avoid) must be regarded as either exploitation or cruelty. Because if we find actions that cause unnecessary harm but aren't exploitative or cruel, then veganism doesn't tell you what to do about those harms - and thus it can't be about reducing harm across the board.

Exploitation: "treating someone unfairly in order to benefit from their work"

I think this is a fair representation of what exploitation means in this context. In the animal context, it would mean to treat an animal unfairly in order to benefit from their body or whatever else we see or take as value in them.

So if we define exploitation this way, then we can probably conclude that some harms that befall animals as a consequence of our unnecessary actions are definitely not exploitation. We're not benefiting from the animals that would die in crop harvests. They aren't exploited, they just happen to be victims of circumstance.


Cruelty: "behaviour that causes physical or mental pain to others and makes them suffer, especially deliberately".

I think in this definition, we should think of cruelty as the deliberate and needless harm to an animal or a violation of an animal's interests, when it's not needed to ensure the survival or decent health of whoever is responsible for the harm.

Certain things like driving to the store instead of walking and flying instead of taking a train, all cause harm indirectly to animals and are often not necessary for decent health or survival. On one hand, such a person probably doesn't deliberately harm animals by doing those things.

But what about negligence? If you know with practically full certainty that one action will harm more animals than others, and yet choose to do it, then perhaps it's not so easy to say that it's not cruel to the victims.

Most vegans will respond that it's to do with our intentions and mindset. Perhaps you are neglecting some animals by choosing a more convenient option, but it is nonetheless not deliberate to exploit them or be cruel to them. As little as that matters to the victim, I do think that is an important distinction when determining what should be considered to be "cruel".

Finally, there's "for food, clothing or any other purpose". I think the best way to interpret this is that it's to do with how we use animals for our purposes, and not just any action that is to some degree cruel to animals, such as negligence of unseen victims. Such a form of cruelty (crop deaths during harvest for instance) isn't something that is done to gain some kind of benefit from the animals themselves, for our own purposes, so essentially specifying "for food, clothing or any other purpose" is just an elaboration on exploitation. It seems to specify the nature of the harms that animals are exposed to, in particular the ones that we expose them to because of exploiting them.

Even if we should regard crop deaths as cruel, I'm sure we can think of at least some harms that aren't of a cruel or exploitative nature. Some humans die in traffic, but it's rarely cruelty that leads to it. It shouldn't automatically be different when animals are victims.

The widely practiced veganism

Arguing definitions and semantics in order to know whether something is vegan or not is perhaps not fair. So I'll also be taking into account how vegans actually behave, and infer how veganism should be understood from that behaviour.

 1) If veganism entails reducing as much harm as practically possible to animals, then all actions that cause more harm to animals than practically possible alternative actions cannot be compatible with veganism.
2) Some actions that cause more harm to animals than alternative practically possible actions are still compatible with veganism (e.g buying unneeded vegetables with higher footprints than others).
C) Veganism doesn't entail reducing as much harm as practically possible to animals.

 First of all, practically no vegans actually try to literally minimize harm to non-human animals as far as is practically possible. This needs to take into account all the animals that are harmed indirectly by our habits, preferences and convenience. Some non-essential but vegan foods may be more harmful than others. Not living a zero-waste lifestyle, buying new instead of used, not dumpster diving for certain commodities, driving instead of walking, complying with society's aggressively increasing reliance on smart phones. I'm sure we can find something that is just very convenient, but harmful, that we can practically give up. Most importantly, we may try our best ourselves and appeal to the "as far as possible and practicable" clause in the definition (who decides what's far enough?), but I'm sure we wouldn't take our fellow vegans and hold them to the same standard in order to consider them vegan.

Well, just because we're not perfect, that doesn't mean we ought not to try at all? Of course not, but imagine if someone said that while buying a product containing cow's milk, when they really could just not. No vegans would consider this behaviour compatible with being vegan.

Vegans, as I know them, are principled humans when it comes to the exploitation of animals. That is to say, there is a zero-tolerance in the purchasing of commodities, as is commonly seen in the vegan community, where they make sure there are no obscure ingredients that stem from the exploitation of animals, no matter the amount used.

However, vegans don't tend to regard each other as non-vegan for flying in airplanes, stepping in the grass on a rainy day, driving to the store even if it's technically walking distance. Perhaps not behaviours that should be advocated for, but we still think of them as being compatible with veganism.
Now, when it comes to the harm caused to animals, flying almost certainly harms more animals than buying a product that just had a tiny bit of milk in it. 0.01%. Just a tiniest bit. Yet one is vegan, the other is not.

 

The commodity status of animals in our society

So what do we make of all this? Vegans don't support the unneeded exploitation of and cruelty to animals and are principled against it, but sometimes neglect animals by choosing products that are consequently worse for animals than other products, or do other unnecessary things that cause harm - even if they don't intend to cause the harm. If the harm was intended, it would be cruel. In other words, many actions by vegans that harm animals are neither exploitative or cruel.

1) If veganism is a rights movement, then veganism only entails minimizing all suffering that follows from a lack of animal rights.
2) Veganism is a rights movement.
C) Veganism doesn't entail reducing as much suffering as practically possible to animals.

However, vegans recognize that animals have a commodity status in our society. It's to do with how we view these animals as products who can be used as a means to an end, when the end usually is nothing more than a preference that prevails through our long cultures of breeding animals for human consumption with little regard for their preference to live, be free and have families and friends of their own to live their lives with.

We don't grant many basic rights to animals (in particular farmed ones), they can be traded, used as what in the human context would be slaves, killed for economic concerns, put in gas chambers, take complete control of their reproductive system, control when and what they eat, when they die, and most importantly, people still want to consume them. And that's why we keep breeding them.

So we recognize that how we view animals must change drastically in order to take the issue of animal ethics seriously. I think rather veganism should be understood as a rights movement that wants rights and justice for animals, similarly to other rights movements. That doesn't mean that you have to start caring about rights more than suffering to be a vegan. One could say that we have veganism to minimize suffering to farmed/exploited animals - being vegan is a part of the puzzle of reducing suffering across the board, but a specific movement exists for the exploited animals because not all problems are solved the same way.

It can also be seen as an equality movement, and as an answer to speciesism - the discrimination of individuals based on species. Equal in this context would mean equal concerns for their interests regardless of species membership.

Veganism rejects the idea that animals are here for us to use, and want to turn the trends of society and make sure the message is clear: animal products aren't compatible with basic animal rights, no matter the amount of milk in those crackers. Zero tolerance is used to make sure everyone gets the memo.

 

An analogy

If you still maintain that veganism primarily is about indiscriminately minimizing harm to animals, then let's apply that consistently. Then it should also be the case that women's rights are about minimizing harm to women. And that LGBTQ rights are about minimizing harm to LGBTQ people.

Imagine if you support gay rights, and you learn that a consumer choice has a more negative impact on humans than another product. Among those humans, some will be gay. So by choosing this product, you're causing more unnecessary harm to gay people than if you chose the other product, so you're not minimizing harm to gay people.

But of course, that's not the point of gay rights. Driving a car and flying an airplane harms more animals. But it also harms more humans (and many of them will be gay)! It's harmful compared to the alternatives whether you're pro animal rights or LGBTQ rights. They're all about reducing suffering to the groups in question, but not all harms are the same. Some harms follow directly from a lack of rights in our society, and that's what really differentiates farming animals for our preferences and accidentally harming animals in our shitty consumer habits.

What this means for vegans

However, you can prevent all of these harms as far as practically possible to you, if you want. If you're a vegan, you probably have an ethical stance against the commoditization of animals. But there's nothing preventing you from having other ethics alongside your veganism to inform your consumer decisions. In fact, you should. Veganism as I see it is not a complete ethical framework for all matters. If you ask me, it's to do with animal rights, nothing more and nothing less. Not everything that harms animals is a matter of animal rights. This makes veganism compatible with a wide variety of metaethical frameworks.

However, it's likely that your reasons for being vegan also implies that you ought to care about other harms or violations, in order to be consistent. But let's not hold the animal rights movement to such a standard that no other rights movement has.

Minimizing unnecessary suffering across the board, within sanity, is great, and perhaps also something we should consider a moral obligation. But including it within the vegan philosophy is, the way I see it, not what veganism has been so far, nor a good way to express it going forward. Expressing it this way leaves too much room for annoying reductio ad absurdums, and in my opinion makes people miss the point.

Rebuttals

Rebuttal 1: The article seems to attempt to put cruelty in the context of exploitation simply because it's followed by "for food, clothing or any other purpose", and thus essentially reduce veganism to purely anti-exploitation. By ignoring vegans who come from an effective altruism background, attempting to determine what veganism is by appealing to the ways in which vegans behave, it's missing out on a motivation held by many vegans who clearly think reducing animal harm across the board, indiscriminately, is or should be a tenet of veganism - for instance that vegans should fight for wild animals. So perhaps the definition is bad or misinterpreted, and the second argument is unsound.

Response: While I support the idea that people who are vegans (and non-vegans for that matter) should care about these things as much, I don't think it should be logically entailed by veganism, as it then would become too extensive and not something that would be suitable and inclusive enough for a rights movement.

I don't think veganism should have to inherently set the axioms in a way that excludes either consequentialists or non-consequentialists. I view it more as a set of arguments that are coherent with other beliefs commonly held, regardless of metaethical framework. Targeting vegans (not veganism) may be a good idea when rallying support for wild animal suffering too though.

Rebuttal 2: The analogy fails because rights movements like gay rights, feminism and so on aren't about reducing suffering, nor do they express themselves this way - they're about equality. So even if humans lacked rights across the board, these movements only seek to make them equal, not to implement certain things on behalf of reducing suffering.

Reponse: I'd just hold veganism to the same standard then. I don't think it makes sense to demand that veganism is a suffering reduction movement and not an equality movement, while demanding that other rights movements are only about equality. But even if that's true of gay rights and feminism and not true of veganism, at the very least human rights faces the same reductios. So the analogy can be modified and still work, if that's the case.

It may be true that vegans often express themselves in a way that opens the way for the reductios seen in this article, which is why I'm writing it to address that.