The Vegan Thread

Anyone here following Vegan Strategist? Just found his page last week. He seems a bit controversial in the vegan community, however I really resonate with his message.

I think I've looked at what he writes before but I haven't been too interested.

Being vegan is obviously great and the way to go, however for me it sometimes feels like a struggle for perfection. I have set very high standards for myself (and rightly so) and strive to be as consistent as possible. For example, I am still using the leather wallet that I bought before I went vegan and it bothers me a little bit every time I pull it up.

That's not something I would worry about too much--replace it when you feel like it. The 100% vegan restaurant and bar Karamel in Wood Green has lots of leather sofas left over from the previous use of the space, when they weren't involved yet. What happened there is in the past. I still have an old leather saddle somewhere (that I've been trying to find for years) and I don't lose any sleep over that.

Tobias (vegan strategist) reminds me how important it is to take a step back and gain some perspective, to remind myself of why I am vegan. Which is to stop animal suffering, not to be 100% consistent all the time or some sort of saint. I find this a very refreshing view because it shifts the focus from "me, myself and I" to the animals and how I can best make choices to reduce their suffering. To look at veganism from a bigger picture if you will.

He brings out a very interesting scenario in one of his videos. Suppose a non-vegan friend of you invited you over to dinner and he went out of his way to make a vegan lasagna. It turns out, however, that the lasagna sheets have eggs in them. What would you do at this point? Would you say "sorry, I can't eat this, I'm vegan" or would you make a compromise and eat the lasagna? What choice would best help the animals in the long run?

What he's advocating there is merely a consequentialist perspective--look up 'consequentialism' or 'utilitarianism'. The idea there is that if you're nice to your friend he might be more likely to go vegan, which would have as a consequence or utility that the sum total of the benefit to animals that he might cause during the rest of his life would be a lot more than the suffering of the animals who were abused in producing the eggs that went into the lasagna sheets. Many consequentialists actually invent scales on which such things are supposedly measurable, so that you can compare the two and conclude that there are much greater benefits from your friend going vegan. This is all casuistic bollocks, of course, based on nonsensical stipulations.

(Many people think that consequentialism/utilitarianism is an ethical theory; I don't, but it's a long discussion. Some people naturally tend towards finding consequentialism/utilitarianism intuitively compelling and others don't, and there are reasons for that which aren't usually understood very well in the debate, so that discussions about this tend to be interminable. :) )

Of course you should watch the consequences of what you're doing, but that doesn't mean that consequences are the substance of ethics. Anyway, it's old hat. Also, it's precisely because you don't always have to act in accordance with bringing about the most positive consequences or utility that what Samuel Scheffler calls the 'agent-centred prerogative' can apply to you here. That is, you don't always have to act in the way consequentialists argue you should. You can stick to your principles--the key is to be diplomatic about it.

So, no, I certainly wouldn't eat the lasagna, but I would, of course, thank him for his well-meaning efforts and make sure I don't piss him off (if I did with that he might not be ready to go towards veganism yet, anyway).

You tend to be caught out by contamination enough without it occurring in dinners cooked by friends to worry about it too much, e.g. accidentally missing an animal ingredient in a packet of crisps you buy or something like that. There are plenty of opportunities not to be perfect. Just decide in each case what you want to do.