Beyond Animal Rights by Milligan Tony;

Author:Milligan, Tony;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Published: 2010-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

5 The Impossible Scenario

UNIVERSAL VEGETARIANISM

The ready availability of a healthy vegetarian diet may lend plausibility to an ecological charge, one that turns availability into a threat rather than an opportunity. So long as vegetarianism is a minority activity, all well and good, but what would happen if all or many of us were to become converts? When Catherine Osborne writes that ‘a great deal of complicated commercial exchange would be necessary to support a purely vegetarian economy for more than a part of the population’ she articulates this reasonable concern.1 Such a situation would be radically different from our current predicament. As radically different, it is also easy to imagine that it could be damaging in ways that our existing set-up is not. The very language of vegetarianism requiring ‘support’ suggests that it would be burdensome, although the extent of the burden is not clear. An extreme scenario that may be imagined along these lines is one in which an entire society, or a nation, or a group of nations such as the UK or the EU, undergoes a transition to vegetarianism or to veganism. Pollan refers to just such a scenario as a ‘vegan utopia’ and (predictably) disapproves.2 He suspects that a universal abandonment of meat-eating would be a disaster and even vegetarians and vegans might suspect that he could be right.

But it is not obvious that this should matter in terms of how we act now, as individuals living in a predominantly carnivorous culture. There is, after all, no immediate prospect of a mass abandonment of meat. There is no threatened dictatorship of the herbivores. It may also be suspected that many vegetarians simply have no determinate view about whether or not everyone else ought to turn vegetarian. Organizations are a different matter and they do tend to hold positions on this issue. But when asked why are you a vegetarian? individuals may (and often do) reply without appeal to anything akin to a universal human obligation. And we may readily understand just why this is the case. What we might call ‘universal vegetarianism’ is not a basic requirement for human well-being or sustainability. If we ask the question what kind of people do we need to be if we are to have a tolerable and sustainable future? it is unlikely that our best answer will be vegetarians, although a significant level of vegetarianism could perhaps contribute to such a future. So, in the absence of any proselytizing zeal or evangelical fervour on the part of vegetarians (and vegans), it is not always obvious why some defenders of meat-eating think that there is a problem here.

One reason may be the influence of an idea of moral egalitarianism that stems from the eighteenth-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant. In one way or another, all contemporary philosophy is influenced by Kant and so too is a good deal of our intellectual culture. But the particular influence in the present case is the idea that defensible moral principles must provide universal and impartial guidance.

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