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I go over whether veganism is compatible with libertarianism.
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Transcript
Is Veganism Compatible with Libertarianism?
Is meat murder?
Do cats and dogs have the same moral agency protections as humans do?
Can veganism even be consistently held in a libertarian framework?
Before we get to these questions, we must first understand what veganism and libertarianism are.
Veganism is the rejection of physical harm against animals through a lifestyle that avoids all animal-derived products, including meat, dairy, eggs, honey, and gelatin, as well as non-food items like leather, wool, and silk.
It’s rooted in concerns for animal welfare, environmental sustainability, and often personal health.
Libertarianism is an ethical philosophy revolving around consent and property rights, beginning with the concept of self-ownership.
It’s the general idea that each person has the right to be free of physical intrusion into his or her body or property unless they consent to it.
Essentially, the goal of libertarianism is to minimize the initiation of force by maximizing the respect of consent.
Given that each person has the right to choose what they will take or not take into their body, a person could choose a vegan lifestyle as a libertarian and avoid animal products so long as that personal action does not initiate force against the body or property of others.
However, veganism cannot be held as a forcible ethical standard against others without creating some serious conflicts.
If libertarian ethics, coined as the “non-aggression principle,” are held to non-human animals, then the act of killing an animal for food would be considered a violation of property rights in the same way that a person murdering another human being would be a violation of property rights, even if they cannibalistically ate that person.
A violation of this magnitude would normally allow deadly defense and capital punishment-level retribution as murderers and those attempting murder can be killed in self-defense.
Which would mean that all meat eaters would merit deadly force to stop their meat eating under a militant form of veganism.
This mentality would greatly escalate violence against human beings, creating more conflicts where the predicate issue does not involve one human’s violation of property rights against another human.
A militant vegan framework would also validate ending the lives of all carnivorous animals as their actions would be grave property rights violations as well.
Arguing that carnivores “need” to kill other animals would be a contradiction of ethical principles because the “need to live” can be equally applied to those animals who do not wish to be eaten by the carnivores.
“Need” here brings in a communist utilitarianism that undermines the vegan argument that killing animals is fundamentally unethical.
Vegans struggle with this performative contradiction in excusing carnivores because they know a strong ethical framework would demand an end to all carnivorous creatures in defense of herbivores.
Vegans downplay this and side-step the issue by redirecting their focus to human actors, claiming that humans can at least help lessen animal suffering.
But this misses the point for libertarian ethical principles: if the goal is to have a consistent ethical stance, then exempting or minimizing other animals killing each other doesn’t bring consistency, but permits a selectively accepted violence.
Which brings us back to our framework within libertarianism: Why should libertarian ethics only apply to humans?
The primary reason why human beings are the subject class for libertarian ethics is that human beings are generally viewed as having the capacity to understand and reciprocate property rights.
This is a crucial feature because any system of ethics where the subject class of actors cannot meaningfully hold the tenets will soon fall into violent chaos.
Take an extreme case to see what this means.
If I were to come up with an ethical rule that said, “It is unethical for human beings to breathe air,” this would be rather problematic.
If held consistently, all human beings would immediately begin to suffocate and, within minutes, die off, as they could no longer breathe.
As can be seen, coming up with an ethical rule that causes all or most all members within a group to immediately perish would be problematic as those members cannot reasonably be expected to uphold the rule or they will die.
Likewise, creating and applying ethical rules that would be inherently broken to an extreme degree is poor philosophy as people will then either suffer or be subject to punishment for breaking rules they inherently are going to break.
If people cannot be expected to uphold certain ethical rules, then they cannot be held liable for their actions, no more than a fish could be found at fault for swimming or a baby be blamed for burping.
When it comes to the non-aggression principle, libertarians have the expectation that people at large are at least capable of respecting the physical bodies and the physical properties of others.
This expectation and ability to reciprocate is what underpins the psychological drive of “justice” and “responsibility” for human action.
Within the whole of human diversity, there are those who are unable to understand and reciprocate due to developmental stage, as with young children, and those who cannot understand due to biological dysfunction such as those suffering Alzheimer’s or those with Down Syndrome.
To accommodate diversity in capacity, species-wide reciprocity should be applied when the average member of a species is capable of understanding and reciprocating respect for other people’s bodies and properties.
Human beings have the brain size and raw intelligence for this kind of understanding that most animals simply do not have.
To further see why the “average member” metric is important, consider what the world would look like if most people could NOT understand and reciprocate property rights.
In that world, people would be taking things from others, destroying other people’s property, and causing mass physical harm to others through rape, battery, and murder.
Such a world would be littered with violence beyond imagination, and philosophical discussion would be ignored as most would have to focus on fighting for survival against a brutal horde of human predators, like a dystopian zombie movie.
In such a world, there would be so many violations that people would be completely focused on protecting themselves and exacting retribution.
Thankfully, we live in a world where most people can maintain routine respect of body and property.
Largely, people only make exceptions to this expectation when it comes to rationalizations for state violence.
Animals, on the other hand, do not have the ability to internalize and act on property rights to this meaningful level.
Carnivores, categorically, are engaged in the business of committing violations against other living creatures.
Herbivores, by nature of their capacity, violate physical property norms and even some standards of recklessness and negligence in accidentally killing other creatures they step on.
Anyone trying to suggest that animals could be treated with respect on a different scale is then devolving away from the original premise of applying libertarian ethics broadly and consistently.
By holding two different standards between non-person animals and humans, militant vegans would be trying to create an apartheid system of ethics where human beings are treated more harshly for the same actions taken by other animals in the wild.
Why should force be permitted to stop a human from eating deer, but not a lion?
This cannot be answered without abandoning a consistent application of the non-aggression principle.
While personally chosen veganism is compatible with libertarianism, militant veganism by way of applying the libertarian ethical framework to animals through the N.A.P., is not.
This only escalates violence among humans with selective application and selective outrage.
Sources
Veganism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veganism
Voluntaryism and Animals – Does the N.A.P. Apply?
https://vassociation.com/2019/04/18/voluntaryism-and-animals-does-the-n-a-p-apply/
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