Today I won (post made on my FB page)

I'm not able to refrain from pointing out on my own Facebook page that today I clearly won. Quotation of post made to veganism-debating FB group provided below, context being that someone asked how do vegans justify killing tapeworms, I replied by stating Joan Dunayer's view that causing death to protect one's own bodily integrity can be justified, in line with current US law which holds that homicide can be justifiable if it's the only way to prevent being raped, then I was challenged on how Joan Dunayer can justify supporting plant-based agriculture since it harms wild animals, my reply is given below.

"She has a view that we are justified in taking steps that are necessary to preserve our own lives even if this requires processes that foreseeably cause harm or death to wild animals. It may be that this is not fully coherent, since it may be that we could reasonably satisfy our nutritional needs even at current population levels by methods which do not cause any harm at all, and one could imagine that a transition to this type of food production may actually occur in the future. The current situation is that an individual living in an urban area who cannot realistically become self-sufficient in food production, and does not wish to forage for food in dumpster bins or keep themselves alive by drinking Soylint or allow themselves to starve to death, would probably have to occasionally buy food from local supermarkets whose production processes would involve some harm. Or at least I've pretty much covered all of the available courses of action that I can think of. It has been suggested to me that it would be feasible to join a vegan commune and become self-sufficient in harm-free food production that way. There may be some other options that I have not thought of (note that I did include "starve to death" as one of the options, so I think I'm being comprehensive about the courses of action which are actually available). So yes, it is indeed an interesting area of inquiry whether a coherent deontological non-speciesist view can be such that individuals living in modern Western societies would realistically actually put the view into practice.

One could also further observe that we can virtually guarantee that you too are avoidably contributing to various processes which foreseeably cause harm or death to humans who have not consented to bear the risk, and can reasonably know this. For example, coffee and chocolate production quite often involve human slave labour, that's literal enslavement, not just the situation of having to accept bad working conditions due to having limited choices because of poverty. That also includes child slave labour, involving beatings if the children are perceived as not working hard enough. In addition, the act of driving a car or otherwise contributing to air pollution, even putting aside concerns about possible anthropogenic climate change or risk of car crashes, is guaranteed to be foreseeably contributing to deaths of humans who haven't consented to bear the risk, and quantitative estimates of the expected contribution that you make towards the harm would be easily derivable from public information on Google, and it is likely that you have not taken the step of researching that matter. Furthermore, I am able to find public information on Google which would seem to indicate that cotton production contributes to environmental harm which foreseeably causes deaths to humans, that's humans who have clearly not consented to bear the risk. I can get you the link for that if you like. No doubt other examples could be given. Perhaps it might be said that your expected contribution to harm to humans from the purchases that you make is probably lower than the expected harm to non-human animals that comes from my lifestyle, but it is very unlikely that you or anyone else actually knows this. Furthermore, you surely could reasonably have had these insights I've just outlined for you if you'd only stopped to think, and done just a tiny bit of research, but you haven't bothered to look into that, because you see you don't actually genuinely care about not causing harm to beings whom you claim to believe have moral rights, you mostly just care about trying to make vegans look hypocritical because you think it's clever, and it reduces the sense of cognitive dissonance you feel when vegans publicly take a stand on the obvious fact that it's unconscionable to support modern systems of animal agriculture, but you find it a bit inconvenient to actually follow suit.

So there you go. Don't really have any strong points to make here, do you?"