Re: Stages of "vegan" retreat

----- Original Message -----
From: One more stroke or seizure and I've had it <[email protected]>
To:
Sent: 14/05/2025 01:54:39
Subject: Stages of "vegan" retreat
________________________________________________________________________________

 > The Ever Weaker Stages of "vegan" Self-Aggrandizement
 >
 > Stage I - "I live a 'cruelty-free' 'lifestyle'"
 >
 > A lie.  Everything "vegans" consume causes some harm to animals, 
which "vegans"
 > say necessarily amounts to cruelty.
 >

Hello, Jonathan Ball. Here I am, Rupert McCallum, and I have set up an 
Eternal September account on Thunderbird on my laptop. A pleasure to be 
able to engage with your drivel once again.

Now then. Do ethical vegans live a cruelty-free lifestyle?

Yes, they do. You are correct to say that if you are living the 
lifestyle of a typical consumer living in an affluent Western country, 
then the production processes for the various products and services you 
consume are going to involve foreseeably inflicting harm on wild 
animals, yes. Or even in some cases, harm to animals being used as items 
of property, since it's difficult to avoid supporting that altogether.

But the vegan position is not that you must make literally every effort 
possible to avoid financially supporting a process that foreseeably 
causes harm to wild animals or foreseeably causes harm to animals being 
used as items of property, and it never has been. The vegan position is 
that you must make every possible and practicable effort, which can be 
taken to mean "every effort that can be made consistent with you 
remaining alive and in reasonably good health", to avoid deliberately 
financially supporting processes that involve harmful exploitation of 
animals as items of property. If you are concerned about the fact that 
you are still financially supporting processes that foreseeably cause 
some harm, then you can offset the harm caused by making charitable 
donations which aim to reduce suffering for wild animals or suffering 
caused to animals used as items of property. That is all that the vegan 
position requires you to do, on any reasonable interpretation of the 
ethical foundation, whether it be deontological, act-consequentialist, 
or rule-consequentialist, and if you do that, then you may reasonably 
say that you are living a "cruelty-free" lifestyle. Some degree of 
foreseeable harm is still caused in order to support your lifestyle, but 
if you take the steps I have described, then it is reasonable to say 
that your conduct does not amount to cruelty. So, no, you have not shown 
that this claim of living a "cruelty-free" lifestyle is a lie. This 
argument fails.

 > Stage II - "I 'minimize' the harm my 'lifestyle' causes to animals"
 >
 > A lie - a lie twice over.  It's a lie, first, because in order to 
minimize you
 > have to measure, and no "vegan" has ever measured. It's also a lie 
because there
 > is always some possible - not just possible, but reasonable - further 
effort
 > that could be undertaken, but isn't only out of a wish for ease and 
comfort.
 >

What I have described does not amount to literal minimization of harm 
caused out of every possible alternative, no. One of the alternatives 
available is to commit suicide. This is a possible further step. But it 
is not, all things considered, a reasonable thing to require. There are 
other things that could be done beyond what I have already described, 
but they are not on the whole reasonable things to require. Especially 
when you take into account that keeping yourself alive and reasonably 
comfortable may be the best available way of having an overall positive 
impact on the world. And also taking into consideration that you have 
not in fact shown that allowing yourself some non-minimal degree of 
support of exploitation of animals as items of property is the best 
overall path to minimizing harm. You have never provided the necessary 
data and argumentation that would be required to show that, and I have 
provided lots of good reasons to think that most likely you are wrong. 
So I am entirely reasonable and justified in saying that the 
interpretation of "veganism" I have sketched above is on the whole the 
best way, and it can reasonably be called a way of putting an animal 
rights worldview fully into practice, and it can reasonably be called 
"cruelty-free", and you haven't shown that there are further reasonable 
steps to be taken that would further reduce foreseeable harm, and if you 
think you do know some such steps, let me know what they are, and I'll 
give you feedback on your efforts to argue that they are (1) reasonable 
and (2) would involve a further reduction of expected contribution to 
harm. Otherwise, your claim that such steps exist remains unsupported.

 > Stage III - "I'm doing the best I can to reduce harm to animals" A 
lie, for the
 > second reason in Stage II.
 >

Not a lie. An entirely reasonable statement, for reasons clarified above.

 > Stage IV - "I'm doing better than you bastard meat eaters" And here 
we arrive at
 > what it always was all about.  And yet, everything is wrong with this 
false
 > claim.  First, it isn't true - there is some meat eater somewhere who 
is "doing
 > better" than most "vegans".  This is the subject matter of the 
excellent "Vegan
 > Shuffle" piece.  It is possible to reduce harm beyond that caused by 
the typical
 > "vegan" with a meat-including diet.

You haven't shown that, all things considered, this is particularly 
likely to be true. Even if it were true, there are reasonable grounds 
for saying that a commitment to not supporting the exploitation of 
animals as items of property is part of the overall best approach. Any 
additional harm caused by this can be offset with charitable donations 
if need be. It is best to take a principled stand against financially 
supporting the exploitation of animals as items of property, for all 
sorts of reasons. This can, again, be justified in deontological, 
rule-consequentialist, or act-consequentialist terms.

Furthermore you are mistaken in thinking I have any particularly great 
investment in thinking that meat-eaters are bastards. I admit that now 
and then I'm a bit saddened by the lack of compassion shown by people 
who continue to eat meat, but my parents and sister eat meat regularly 
and I love them even though I don't fully agree with all their choices, 
and obviously there must be some sense in which I don't think they are 
bastards. I think that you're a bastard, obviously, for obvious but 
unrelated reasons. But I don't bear you any particular ill-will; I just 
get a mild recreational benefit out of putting further effort into 
(according to my ideas about what I'm doing here) giving you detailed 
constructive feedback on the intellectual shortcomings of your 
arguments. Yes, vegans do do better than meat-eaters at reducing 
expected contribution to harm, and no, the main point is not about 
trying to make yourself feel morally superior, it's about trying to 
reduce expected contribution to harm. That's what it's about. Your 
efforts to argue that the honest motivation isn't there were of course 
always transparent bullshit, motivated by feeling threatened by the 
ethical vegan stance out of a sense of guilt, as any person of good 
sense would have been easily able to see. It's funny how you lack the 
self-awareness to be able to see this.

 > The greater vileness of this claim,
 > however, is that it attempts to make virtue a matter of comparison 
with others,
 > rather than doing what is right, and that is never a valid basis for 
virtue.
 > This illustrated by the famous sodomy example featuring Derek Nash 
and his
 > beloved twin brother David.
 >
 > If David sodomizes the wretched eight-year-old neighbor boy six times 
a week,
 > and Derek sodomizes the lad "only" four times a week, Derek cannot 
claim to be
 > virtuous because he's "doing better" than David at refraining from 
harming the
 > boy.  Note also:  if David increases his filthy acts of depravity 
against the
 > boy to a dozen times a week, Derek could also increase his filthy 
acts of
 > depravity to, say, 10 times a week, and he could still maintain his 
claim to be
 > "doing better" than David, even though Derek is now doing *worse* 
than he was
 > previously.
 >

The disanalogy between this rather disturbing thought-experiment and the 
actual situation of ethical vegans as I have outlined above is clear. No 
sensible person would take seriously for a single second the idea that 
this is a valid analogy. All that this shows about you is that you like 
to dwell on the thought of sodomizing eight-year-old boys. It's not the 
least bit clever, and it doesn't speak particularly well of the 
healthiness of your state of mind either. There is no need to engage any 
further than that with this drivel, and there never has been.

 > Virtue is never shown by means of a comparison with others.  Virtue 
consists
 > only in doing what is right, and not doing what is wrong.
 >

But you've shown no good reason to think that the ethical vegan concept 
of virtue, as I outlined it above, is flawed, or that it is in some way 
tantamount to being willing to deliberately countenance deliberate 
sodomy of eight-year-old children. Because that's very obviously an 
extremely stupid thing to say, and I expect you probably feel a bit 
embarrassed now that this incredibly obvious fact has been pointed out 
to you. You definitely should, anyway.

 > The entire "vegan" claim collapses.
 >

You haven't made a single dent in it, and you never have.

 > * not "cruelty-free"

Yes, cruelty-free.

 > * not "minimizing"

Minimizing within reasonable constraints, yes.

 > * not "doing the best I can"

Yes, doing the best I can under reasonable interpretations of what that 
means.

 > * not "doing better than you meat eaters"

Yes, doing better, in all likelihood, than every single meat-eater, or 
at least you certainly haven't shown otherwise, and in any event without 
the slightest doubt doing better in expectation than the person who just 
regularly walks into the supermarket buying animal flesh without any 
effort to be selective about what they buy. That, of course, being you 
(we may reasonably assume).

There are also issues here about the nature of the harms necessarily 
involved whenever you make any attempt to do animal slaughter at scale. 
But we can talk about that some other time.

 >
 > It's all a lie, and the goal of the lie was morally invalid even 
before they
 > started.
 >

It's all true, and the ultimate goal is a perfectly respectable one, 
which you should adopt too, and deep down you know it, but you lack the 
moral courage to do what is required.

 > Just shameful.?

Not at all. You, on the other hand, should certainly be a bit ashamed of 
your continued meat-eating habit, not to mention your conduct over the 
years on this newsgroup, and you really should change. The time has 
come. Become a better person. I know you've got it in you.