by Jerry Cayford
The Vegetarian Fallacy was so dubbed by philosophy grad students in a well-oiled pub debate back in the 1980s. There is a fundamental conflict—so the argument went—between vegetarians and ecologists. The first principle of ecology—everything is connected to everything else (Barry Commoner’s first law)—is incompatible with the hands-off, “live and let live” ideal implicit in ethical vegetarianism. The ecologists took the match by arguing that, pragmatically, animals either have a symbiotic role in human life or else they compete with us for habitat, and those competitions go badly for the animals. In the long run, a moral stricture against eating animals will not benefit animals.
Now, pub debates are notoriously broad, and this one obviously was. A swirl of issues made appearances, tangential ones like pragmatism versus ethics, and central ones like holism versus atomism. In the end—philosophers being relatively convivial drinkers—all came to agree that pragmatism and ethics must be symbiotic as well, and that the practice of vegetarianism (beyond its ethical stance) could be more holistically approached and defended. Details, though, are fuzzy.
A fancy capitalized title like “Vegetarian Fallacy” may seem a bit grandiose, given the humble origins I just recounted. What justifies a grand title is when the bad thinking in a losing argument is also at work far beyond that one dispute. And that is my main thesis. So, although I will elaborate the two sides, it will be only a little bit. I am more interested in the mischief the Vegetarian Fallacy is perpetrating not in the academy but in wider political and cultural realms.
A dispute between friends
Ecology and vegetarianism are generally considered highly compatible, even connected, and for good reasons. Though vegetarianism is thousands of years old, its current explosion in popularity coincides with the development of ecology—Barry Commoner’s The Closing Circle and Frances Moore Lappé’s Diet for a Small Planet both came out in 1971—and the two movements are attractive for overlapping reasons and among overlapping subcultures. The terrible environmental impact of factory farming is a particular common concern. So it is important to be clear that the only target here is a specific motivation for vegetarianism called “ethical” or “moral” vegetarianism: “Moral vegetarianism is the view that it is morally wrong—henceforth, ‘wrong’—to eat meat” (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Moral Vegetarianism”). Ecology has no quarrel with other motivations for vegetarianism.
One hears more these days about the environmental and health benefits of vegetarianism, which are very strong arguments. It might seem perverse, then, even belligerent, to dwell on the one area of disagreement between these two movements. And yet, the moral claim is inescapable as soon as you start reading vegetarians. From tee-shirts and bumper stickers—“Be kind to animals. Don’t eat them.”—to books and journal articles, the moral claim is central. Michael Allen Fox’s Deep Vegetarianism starts with an “historical-philosophical overview” in which the moral imperative is presented as self-evident; vegetarianism is cyclically rediscovered as we “remind ourselves” of “what it means to exist as a humane being.” In fact, the moral stance is so dominant as to make other arguments feel like a tactical approach adopted for outsiders who bristle at being judged immoral. Vegetarianism and ecology may have highly compatible goals, but their ethical approaches are very different, and are fiercely held by each of them.
Ecology grew naturally out of biology, but it is genuinely new. In contrast with the scientific norm throughout the modern era, ecology thinks systemically. It looks at the big picture, the whole, the ecosystem. “Holism” is the idea that you understand the parts by seeing their roles in the system. Traditional science (“reductionism”) studies the parts first, and builds the whole by seeing how its parts fit together.
The other parent of ecology is the environmental movement, from which ecology inherited an ethical and political agenda: to save the planet. The ethical philosophy natural to a field so pragmatic and holist down to its bones is utilitarianism. Of course, utilitarianism is ascendent in our world today (or at least appears to be), so its role in ecology is somewhat unremarkable. But in the same way that kids today are “digital natives,” speaking fluently what the rest of us laboriously translate, so ecology is a utilitarian native.
A utilitarian has to think through the consequences of an action. The moral value of that action is the sum total of all the changes it will effect. This is exactly what the ecologists in our pub debate convicted the vegetarians of failing to do. The vegetarian moral position, though, rejects that utilitarian framework. Animals have moral standing and therefore have rights that must not be violated by killing them. A rights theorist does what is right, here and now, consequences be damned. The two approaches clash quite hard.
The costs of moralizing
Parallel to this debate between vegetarians and ecologists is a similar argument that ethical vegetarianism conflicts with feminism, made by feminist philosopher and geneticist Kathryn Paxton George: “In this article, I will tell you why choosing a vegetarian diet for the sake of animals or as a feminist ideal is much more complicated than many ethical vegetarians might have expected” (“Should Feminists Be Vegetarians?”). Her argument is more formally developed and in greater detail than the aforementioned pub debate. The gist, though, is that some bodies can adapt to a vegetarian diet more easily than others can. Specifically, adult male bodies in wealthy countries with sophisticated, industrialized food systems have an easier time achieving healthful nutrition without meat. Therefore, a moral imperative not to eat animals disproportionately burdens women, children, the elderly, the poor, and members of less scientifically advanced societies: “feminists must object to any ethic that places greater moral and health burdens on women and children than it does on adult males” (reply to critics).
What George is challenging are “the reasons ordinarily given to accept vegetarianism as a moral requirement (as opposed to, say, a health recommendation or a personal preference).” She shows that those reasons fail by their own criteria, the traditional criteria of moral argument: “no ethics can admit of arbitrariness in its prescriptions and theories” and “Traditional morality claims to prescribe for everyone—not merely for some; its rules are supposed to be universal…[and] should also be impartial.” Morals—unlike policy (or personal) recommendations—impose compulsory obligations, and must meet these stringent criteria in order to earn that standing and power.
When the basic criteria for moral claims encounter the inconvenient physiological facts George details, the arguments for ethical vegetarianism are shown to “contain a contradiction because a male physiological norm is assumed; this norm builds in moral partiality for males; thus, these arguments are internally inconsistent and violate their own principles of impartiality and universality.” (She investigates and rejects the vegetarian assumption that the differences between groups are slight and the unequal burdens minor.) In this way, the rights-based moral imperative against eating meat fails.
Lacking the moral standing to impose obligations, vegetarians must do the hard work of convincing fellow citizens by argument—political, cultural, scientific—work that takes consequences seriously. Ecologists, as utilitarian natives, consider this situation not a fall from grace but the permanent human condition. They consider moral arguments roughly continuous with policy recommendations. George describes succinctly the attitude utilitarian natives take toward traditional moral rights theory: “either the ordering [of priority interests and rights] is based on maximization of the good (and is thus utilitarian) or is based on an intuitionism that is arbitrary and without foundation.” Peter Singer, perhaps the leading vegetarianism theorist (and, unusually, a utilitarian), acknowledges the danger of intuitionism present in the vegetarian movement: “there seems to be no way of resolving that [basing morality on rights] except by appeals to intuition. And people will have different intuitions on those matters.” The Vegetarian Fallacy is the miscategorization of policy prescriptions as moral imperatives, and the consequent reliance on intuition.
Now, to deserve a fancy label, the Vegetarian Fallacy needs at least a bit more specificity, and maybe some commentary on practical applications. A dark side to this way of thinking is starting to emerge: the moral imperatives of traditional rights theory assert the authority to declare a debate completed, pre-empting further investigation; when their basis is really no more than an intuition, those “moral imperatives” are usurping authority that belongs to a full and open utilitarian investigation of the policy and its consequences. To return to the original pub debate, the fallacy was claiming that the first law of ecology—everything is connected to everything else—can be ignored with impunity (or even that it represents a deplorable pedantry so rejecting it is morally laudable). The ideal asserted is “live and let live.” It promotes a moral focus on the integrity of individuals over the practical reality of their interconnectedness with others. We all know the examples of animals raised in captivity, then released into the wild, supposedly for their benefit when in fact they are unprepared to survive there. Once you start thinking about the Vegetarian Fallacy, other examples of well-intentioned respect for individuals at the expense of due respect for consequences appear everywhere.
Consider cultural appropriation. The Vegetarian Fallacy attracts people to a simple position of “Respect other people’s stuff. Don’t take it.” However, a minority subculture with little access to mainstream funding or markets might benefit greatly from having the wider society exposed to its stuff. The consequences of appropriation are complex and so is hashing out its fairness, but a morally simple “hands off” merely obstructs engagement with either consequences or fairness. Appropriation’s complexities are shown in the history of one possibly-slave-era folk song, as told in “Samson and Delilah / If I Had My Way,” with links to many performances. (Here’s my favorite by the first mainstream appropriators, Peter, Paul and Mary.)
An especially egregious example of the morally simplistic “live and let live” position (probably not “well-intentioned”) is the argument against liberal alarm over wealth inequality. (After Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century came out, rebuttals from defenders of inequality were common.) The reasoning is that only absolute levels of wealth matter, not relative levels, because people are independent individuals: your poverty has nothing to do with my wealth. Of course, it’s not true: the effects of other people’s wealth are everywhere in our lives, especially the impacts of money in politics, and those are worse the greater the inequality.
Naming a problem
I have tried to show the Vegetarian Fallacy operating in its namesake topic, vegetarianism. It seems obvious that similar thinking occurs elsewhere. Should immigrant communities assimilate? It’s a complicated question, with consequences difficult to assess. But whether a community protects its separateness or actively assimilates will affect many people outside that community. People worried about a refusal to assimilate are not necessarily bigots, and a dogmatic moral imperative that communities are entitled to decide for themselves may inflame fears without addressing legitimate concerns. We have seen particularly bitter disputes in America over English-only laws and in France over headscarves.
Multiple situations reveal the Fallacy. If corporations are people, are we morally obligated to extend to them all the rights people have? It seems silly, but some are thinking that way. Two news stories I heard today may not quite show the Vegetarian Fallacy in action, but they sort of rhyme with it. One about the group Moms for Liberty and their campaign to ban books (and remake public education) quoted a 1920s precursor declaring, “We want no teachers who say every question has two sides.” This rejection of two sides before even knowing the question feels to me like the Fallacy, looking for a moral principle to end discussion. The other story all over the news today is TikTok. Some people apparently argue that all companies have the same rights, so it is immoral to treat Chinese-owned TikTok differently, propaganda and national security concerns notwithstanding (that is, consequences be damned).
I have proposed, instead of such rights-based moral positions, the utilitarianism of ecologists. Estimating the consequences of an action or a policy requires systemic, holistic thinking and an open-ended investigation. Ethical vegetarianism is in tension with Barry Commoner’s first law of ecology that everything is connected to everything else, but his fourth law may be just as relevant: there is no such thing as a free lunch. The rights theory approach to many questions seems to look for a free shortcut to decisive moral authority.
There are strong arguments for vegetarianism. The environment would indisputably benefit from a lot more people eating a lot less meat, and so would many people’s health. But the claim that eating meat is morally wrong is unsound, and it derives from a faulty approach to complex issues. I know I have not pinned down the Vegetarian Fallacy. I probably can’t really pin it down. But that may not be important. It’s just a label for a bit of bad thinking I encountered back in grad school days. What is important is that bad thinking. Maybe giving it a label and a paradigm case will make it more visible as it crawls through our world causing trouble.