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I wrote this article with Angel Flinn, who is Director of Outreach for Gentle World — a vegan intentional community and non-profit organization whose core purpose is to help build a more peaceful society, by educating the public about the reasons for being vegan, the benefits of vegan living, and how to go about making such a transition.
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20 Apr 2012 at 8:44am
I wrote this article with Angel Flinn, who is Director of Outreach for Gentle World — a vegan intentional community and non-profit organization whose core purpose is to help build a more peaceful society, by educating the public about the reasons for being vegan, the benefits of vegan living, and how to go about making such a transition.This
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6 Apr 2012 at 5:51am
We say that “Nature is red in tooth and claw.” Well, sometimes that's true. But since the notorious “food chain” is shaped like a steep pyramid, with prey far outnumbering predators, and predators often going hungry, most animals in the wild live much longer and more enjoyable lives than popular documentaries would have us
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14 Mar 2012 at 10:19am
I wrote this article with Angel Flinn, who is Director of Outreach for Gentle World — a vegan intentional community and non-profit organization whose core purpose is to help build a more peaceful society, by educating the public about the reasons for being vegan, the benefits of vegan living, and how to go about making such a transition.This
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25 Feb 2012 at 3:13pm
I wrote this article with Angel Flinn, who is Director of Outreach for Gentle World — a vegan intentional community and non-profit organization whose core purpose is to help build a more peaceful society, by educating the public about the reasons for being vegan, the benefits of vegan living, and how to go about making such a transition.This
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4 Feb 2012 at 11:05am
(This essay was originally published in The Abolitionist.)In our modern society, what we call “facts” are usually held in much higher epistemic esteem than what we call “values.” And the most esteemed of all facts are what we call “scientific facts.” And of what we call “values,” the least esteemed as knowledge are what we call “moral values.” Indeed,
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12 Jan 2012 at 10:04pm
I wrote this article with Angel Flinn, who is Director of Outreach for Gentle World — a vegan intentional community and non-profit organization whose core purpose is to help build a more peaceful society, by educating the public about the reasons for being vegan, the benefits of vegan living, and how to go about making such a transition.This
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5 Jan 2012 at 11:15am
I posted the following comment (in italics below) on this linked article. The Atlantic Monthly deleted it and blocked me from posting on the site. Just more evidence that speciesist prejudice is just as strong today (at least at The Atlantic) as racial prejudice was in the 1700s and 1800s in the US. A reasonable acid test as to
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15 Dec 2011 at 4:17pm
I wrote this article with Angel Flinn, who is Director of Outreach for Gentle World — a vegan intentional community and non-profit organization whose core purpose is to help build a more peaceful society, by educating the public about the reasons for being vegan, the benefits of vegan living, and how to go about making such a transition.This
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27 Nov 2011 at 9:33am
I wrote this article with Angel Flinn, who is Director of Outreach for Gentle World — a vegan intentional community and non-profit organization whose core purpose is to help build a more peaceful society, by educating the public about the reasons for being vegan, the benefits of vegan living, and how to go about making such a transition.This
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13 Nov 2011 at 9:58am
I wrote this article with Angel Flinn, who is Director of Outreach for Gentle World — a vegan intentional community and non-profit organization whose core purpose is to help build a more peaceful society, by educating the public about the reasons for being vegan, the benefits of vegan living, and how to go about making such a transition.
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17 Oct 2011 at 8:38pm
I wrote this article with Angel Flinn, who is Director of Outreach for Gentle World — a vegan intentional community and non-profit organization whose core purpose is to help build a more peaceful society, by educating the public about the reasons for being vegan, the benefits of vegan living, and how to go about making such a transition. This
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22 Sep 2011 at 2:38pm
I wrote this article with Angel Flinn, who is Director of Outreach for Gentle World – a non-profit educational organization whose core purpose is to help build a more peaceful society, by educating the public about the reasons for being vegan, the benefits of vegan living, and how to go about making the transition. This article was originally
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16 Aug 2011 at 5:25pm
I wrote this article with Angel Flinn, who is Director of Outreach for Gentle World – a non-profit educational organization whose core purpose is to help build a more peaceful society, by educating the public about the reasons for being vegan, the benefits of vegan living, and how to go about making the transition. This article was originally
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4 Aug 2011 at 6:39am
The recent ban on live export of cows from Australia to Indonesia, due to some gory and disturbing video footage of “mistreatment” of cows in Indonesia, has been big news lately.The unstated assumption supporting this ban is that cows aren't “mistreated” (read: tortured) in Australia. But this assumption is absurd. Regardless of their
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20 Jun 2011 at 10:03pm
I'm tired of seeing good, honest vegans embrace the incessant parade of celebrities who claim to be “vegan” only to be sadly surprised and disappointed when the celebrities reveal (as they almost always eventually do) that either they're not vegan anymore, or never were vegan. Celebrities -- the fickle charlatans of the entertainment
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14 Jun 2011 at 1:59pm
I often hear animal advocates, in response to a point made by another animal advocate, say or write “The animals don't care about [what we think].” For example, “The animals don't care that they are property.” (They just don't want to be tortured and killed.) On one hand, this is obvious. Nonhuman animals aren't thinking about
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8 Apr 2011 at 5:39pm
"It's not looking good for animals, to say the least, when even vegans oppose putting more resources into abolitionist vegan education.” ~ Facts and Explanation 7 In discussions with new welfarists, I am repeatedly faced with variations on the same old myths about abolitionism. It will be the purpose of this essay to correct ten of these myths
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8 Mar 2011 at 9:50pm
The intentional, unnecessary deaths we inflict on sentient individuals of other species worldwide -- mainly for food choices, and excluding animals from the water -- is greater in five days than the deaths we've inflicted on humans in all wars and all genocides in recorded human history. Even if every non-vegan cut their current animal product
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20 Feb 2011 at 8:40pm
While the environmental benefits of being vegan are tremendous, and probably the single best thing one can do for the environment, the environmental benefits do not compare in importance to the moral reasons for going vegan. Sentient nonhuman beings are just like us in all of the morally relevant ways. They value their lives. They strive as hard
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10 Jan 2011 at 8:55pm
On Variety in Meaning As the word “vegan” has fully entered mainstream media during the past five years, it has come to have many different meanings for many different people. For some of us, “vegan” means a strong, lifelong, and morally internalized commitment to avoiding the use of animals and animal products as much as is reasonably
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29 Nov 2010 at 6:29am
Occasionally, vegan advocates are accused by non-vegans of “promoting an agenda” or “forcing our desires on others.” The implication (sometimes made explicit) is that we are promoting “our self-interest.” The poor reasoning is that since vegans want a vegan world, and therefore strongly advocate for a vegan world, we are promoting “our self-interest”
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15 Nov 2010 at 2:41pm
Absent any comprehensive studies on what media are most effective for persuading people to go and stay vegan, we are left with searching for reasons why one medium of advocacy might be more effective than another. Further, any reasons we do come up with for preferring one medium over another would likely be speculative (i.e. empirically untested) and
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8 Oct 2010 at 7:06am
Part 1 of this essay defined indoctrination, contrasted it with education, and briefly described the indoctrination process from early childhood through our teenaged years. Part 2 continues with the on-going indoctrination we receive as adults and concludes with vegan education as the antidote to indoctrination at any age. Indoctrination as Adults
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22 Sep 2010 at 4:42am
Introduction Indoctrination and education are similar processes except for two differences: one conditional difference, and one crucial difference. The conditional difference is that indoctrination is one-sided and uncritical, while education is multifaceted, allowing for free and critical evaluation of at least two perspectives, either intentionally
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21 Sep 2010 at 8:35pm
James LaVeck of Tribe of Heart and HumaneMyth.org has made quite a splash among animal advocates recently with his video entitled “Silencing the Lambs” and a response to criticism of the video by Farm Sanctuary and similar new welfarist organizations. In the video and his response to criticism, LaVeck rightly criticizes animal advocacy organizations
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6 Aug 2010 at 6:19am
As of this morning, June 28, 2010, I have discovered that my account at The Huffington Post (“The Post”) has been reactivated and I am commenting again under the same user name, “abolitionists today”. I sent an email to The Post on Saturday morning inquiring about the ban, but have not yet received a reply as of 1:00 pm EDT today, so I do not know whether
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28 Jun 2010 at 10:16am
Update: As of Monday, June 28, 2010, my account has been reactivated at The Huffington Post. See this blog post for more details. Interestingly, The Huffington Post banned me from commenting on their site this morning, June 26, 2010, after I signed up last night to post two comments in the article entitled, Meat or No Meat: Tell Us What
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26 Jun 2010 at 9:51am
At least a few times every year, an animal welfare organization sponsors an undercover investigation and generates a “cruelty video” showing the torture that various innocent nonhumans endure in slaughterhouses, feeding operations, laboratories, rodeos, zoos, circuses, or various other locations of animal use. I covered a classic case of an undercover
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14 Jun 2010 at 12:58pm
Abolitionist vegans vary in their religious beliefs from “atheist activist” to “spiritual” to sincere adherence to any one of the five major religions of the world. The philosophy of abolitionist animal rights and veganism seeks the end of unnecessary violence, killing, and harm inflicted on innocent sentient nonhuman beings. As such, there is nothing
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24 May 2010 at 8:03am
The slogan in the title of this blog post has been prominently displayed on this site for about five months now. I read criticism of it when it was initially posted, and yesterday, brand new criticism of it was written on a “veg'n” forum, so I thought I would finally reply to the criticism today by explaining my interpretation of the slogan. An
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6 May 2010 at 6:09am
Those who accept speciesism often do so because they believe humans “superior” on the basis of rationality and empathy, but in a terrible twist of irony, reject all rationality and empathy in refusing to acknowledge sentience as the morally relevant characteristic on which to base inclusion in the moral community. In refusing to apply such rationality
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23 Mar 2010 at 11:23am
I have been invited to ARZone's Live Guest Chat this weekend, Saturday, March 13, at 3pm Pacific Time to answer questions about welfare reform, abolition, animal rights, and veganism. Participants must pre-register to ask questions. You can find more details, including time zone information, here.
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9 Mar 2010 at 10:39am
Supply-side Versus Demand-side Advocacy We live in a market economy made up of two major factors – supply and demand. These two factors determine what is bought and sold and for how much. Qualitatively, demand represents the wants and needs of buyers in an economy. Supply represents the efforts of firms to profit from existing demand. The
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4 Mar 2010 at 7:27am
Note: For various reasons, I was not satisfied with my previous essay on this topic posted on February 17, 2010. I am therefore replacing it with this one. If you read the previous essay, I hope you find this one more useful. Why I Am a Vegan and an Advocate I am a vegan because it is the minimum standard of moral belief, behavior,
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18 Feb 2010 at 3:36pm
Speciesist Compartmentalization Compartmentalization is the separation of persons (including nonhuman persons), things, ideas, attitudes, or behavior into categories or compartments. Sometimes it is epistemically rational to compartmentalize (e.g. biology); other times it is epistemically irrational to compartmentalize (e.g. race or species
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5 Feb 2010 at 8:45am
We live in a world of cause and effect. [1] Every act we carry out in our lives – from deciding on our life's path to scratching an itch – is caused by prior events ranging in significance from our birth circumstances to the whirl and buzz of billions of neurons generating a decision. Within such a world, there are various genetic, social, and
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16 Jan 2010 at 5:15am
During the day or two after I published PETA: A Corporate Tangle of Contradictions, I had a friendly email exchange with a reader who wrote that she was reconsidering her support of PETA as a result of the blog entry, but that there was still a lot she liked about PETA. She mentioned specifically that she liked PETA's undercover investigations,
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26 Dec 2009 at 6:37am
In the media and the minds of most people, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (“PETA”) is the corporate embodiment of “animal rights”. In some respects, this common belief in the connection between “animal rights” and PETA is understandable. Browse PETA's website or literature and you'll frequently see the terms “animal rights” and
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15 Dec 2009 at 8:18am
On Saturday, The New York Times published an excellent opinion piece written by Professor Gary Steiner. The essay questions whether we are justified in exploiting and killing animals for food and other uses, and also explains some of the challenges of being a vegan in a speciesist society. It is worth every second of your time to read it. Yesterday,
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24 Nov 2009 at 10:58am
The latest book buzz on the Internet, particularly among both traditional and new welfarists, is Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer. Indeed, many vegans(?) who condone others' animal exploitation by condoning welfarism are either eager to read it as soon as possible or are raving about it. As for those of us who have read a couple
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6 Nov 2009 at 9:43am
“There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root, and it may be that he who bestows the largest amount of time and money on the needy is doing the most by his mode of life to produce that misery which he strives in vain to relieve.” ~ Henry David Thoreau, Walden, Economy (Chapter 1-E)
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17 Sep 2009 at 8:44am
Although I'm all too familiar with the worn-out cliché that “opinions are like assholes: everyone has one and they all stink”, the phrase severely lacks profundity. Unlike anuses, some opinions are far better supported with facts and consistent, cogent reasoning than other opinions, and are therefore simply better than others; whereas
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27 Aug 2009 at 1:14pm
If Billy-Bob signs petitions for laws discouraging domestic abuse and donates a lot of money to and volunteers a lot of time at a women's shelter, but beats his wife and pays teenaged female prostitutes to have sex with him [1], does it matter that ‘he cares'? Can Billy-Bob really make up for his behavior by signing petitions and giving his
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7 Aug 2009 at 12:43pm
The (vast?) majority of donors to PETA, HSUS, and similar groups are not vegans. They are the same people who literally create the problems that these big welfarist groups feebly attempt to ameliorate. So, the donors create the problem through the extreme speciesism of consuming animal products, which leads to the breeding, confining, torturing,
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21 Jul 2009 at 2:12pm
The animal exploitation industry's front groups often call vegans who want to abolish animal exploitation “extremists”. But let's take a glance at the so-called ‘extremism' of abolitionist vegans in contrast to the real and violent extremism of industry and a ‘civilized' society that permits such violent extremism. In the United
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13 Jul 2009 at 3:30pm
A Contrast in Theory The abolitionist approach is a rights-based approach that identifies the core issue of violence inflicted on innocent sentient beings as rooted in the fact that these beings are considered property, commodities, and “things” under the law. This property, commodity, and thing status is at the root of our “moral schizophrenia”
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24 Jun 2009 at 7:54am
Occasionally, vegans encounter the claim that plants are sentient as a kind of objection to going vegan. The uninformed reasoning suggests that since ‘all life' is sentient, it doesn't matter what we eat. Vegans have three replies to this: 1) accept the premise that plants are sentient (no matter how offensive to common sense it is) and argue
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3 Jun 2009 at 4:05pm
During the past month, there have been a series of excellent and informative articles on the environmental disaster of animal agriculture written by Angel Flinn on Care2. I strongly urge everyone to read these articles and use them as educational tools in the fight to abolish the most deplorable industry in the world. The most recent of Angel's
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4 May 2009 at 12:59pm
Introduction Why is it that so many otherwise informed, intelligent, rational people are uninformed and epistemically irrational when it comes to their knowledge and beliefs about human-nonhuman relations, veganism, and animal rights? Why aren't otherwise informed people knowledgeable about the atrocities in animal agriculture and other
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24 Mar 2009 at 8:03pm
In discussions with non-vegans – particularly non-vegans on the Internet who are familiar with the assertions of both the vegan animal rights movement and the assertions of the countermovement – the issue of “drawing the line” is often raised as a sort of objection to veganism. While it's true that vegans avoid a lot of harm, so the argument goes,
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20 Feb 2009 at 9:26am
A few months ago, I had a discussion with a guy – I'll call him “Steve” – who argued that there was nothing wrong with intentionally slaughtering animals for food. He characterized himself as a very gentle person, a “writer and a healer”. He also characterized his non-vegan friends and associates as very kind, gentle, and empathetic people. His
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19 Jan 2009 at 3:41pm
Animals As Persons: Essays on the Abolition of Animal Exploitation Gary Francione Columbia University Press, 2008 If the right of animals to not be exploited, intentionally killed, and used as property is ever taken seriously by future generations, Professor Gary Francione will very likely be seen as the most important thinker
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23 Dec 2008 at 3:59pm
Introduction A common complaint made by some progressive thinkers is that justice activists are far too splintered and/or obsessed with a single progressive issue, such as ecology, human rights, or animal rights. The complaint is that “single issue activists” fail to see the common ground of opposing unjust or unsustainable exploitation among
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21 Nov 2008 at 2:58pm
Gary Francione has published some important facts and reasoning on his blog about why animal advocates should not vote for California's Proposition 2. Gary also demonstrates how astoundingly confused Wayne Pacelle, President of HSUS, is when it comes to protecting animals from abuse and cruelty. I highly recommend reading
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31 Oct 2008 at 10:15am
Introduction A single issue campaign (herein referred to as “SIC” or “campaign”) can be of two different types: welfare-oriented campaigns and elimination-oriented campaigns. SICs can also be short-term or take up an organization's entire mission and lifetime. The primary difference between the two types is that welfare-oriented SICs
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27 Oct 2008 at 9:48am
In the essay Sentience: The Morally Relevant Characteristic Justifying Basic Rights, I explained the moral relevance of sentience in justifying a basic right to physical security; that is, a basic right not to be tortured, killed, or caused serious physical or psychological harm. While I believe I was sufficiently clear in articulating the relevance
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1 Oct 2008 at 7:43am
The word “vegetarian” was introduced in the middle of the 19th century. Since then, it has come to mean a person who excludes flesh from mammals, birds, and fish from their diet, but includes other products from mammals and birds; specifically, breast milk from cows and eggs from chickens. In this essay, when I use the word “vegetarian(ism)”, I mean
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9 Sep 2008 at 1:13pm
Opposing Views is currently hosting debates on the questions “Should We Eat Meat?” and “Should We Keep Pets?”, which both feature Professor Gary Francione defending the “No” side of both questions by providing brilliant and compelling arguments and reasons why we are not morally justified in consuming animal products or breeding animals as “pets” or
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27 Aug 2008 at 4:00pm
After I published the essay entitled “In Defense of the Term ‘Moral Schizophrenia'” on August 4, 2008, a colleague suggested that I write a similar essay regarding “Simon the Sadist”, an analogy that Professor Gary Francione included in his book Introduction to Animal Rights: Your Child or the Dog? which has also received some criticism, mostly
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27 Aug 2008 at 12:30pm
Many people who are not vegans acknowledge that exploiting animals in the manner we do is seriously wrong, but because of their misconception of vegan living as sacrificing almost half of the foods they eat, they protest that going vegan is just too difficult. This notion that vegan living is primarily about sacrifice or giving up many of our favorite
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15 Aug 2008 at 1:25pm
Introduction Professor Gary Francione has coined the term “moral schizophrenia” to refer to the difference between what we as a society say we believe about animals and how we actually behave toward animals. We say that we recognize that animals are sentient and therefore deserve moral consideration and freedom from “unnecessary” suffering,
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4 Aug 2008 at 4:19pm
Three of the last several essays on this blog have been about vegan education. Based on what I've written in those essays, one might get the impression that I believe that everyone who goes vegan ought, as a moral imperative, to engage in a significant personal effort to educate others about why and how to go vegan; but that is not the case, and
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15 Jul 2008 at 1:48pm
In addition to Professor Gary Francione's new book announced in my last blog entry, there have been some positive developments in the abolitionist movement during the past few weeks as follows: Humane Myth A new website, HumaneMyth.org, was launched by Jenny Stein and James LaVeck of Tribe of Heart. It features various knowledgeable
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7 Jul 2008 at 11:58am
Columbia University Press has added a new Animal Studies category to their blog, edited by Wendy Lochner. The most recent blog entry is an interview with Gary Francione about his new book, Animals as Persons: Essays on the Abolition of Animal Exploitation (see link in side bar). Also, Columbia University Press is offering a 50% discount on
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19 Jun 2008 at 12:14pm
Where We Are versus How We Arrived There Vegans who support new welfarism [1] and the growing profitable market for happy meat sometimes claim that they arrived at veganism through choosing more “humane” animal products (i.e. “happy meat”), and therefore, based on personal experience, they see welfare reform and happy meat as a way of getting
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12 Jun 2008 at 8:44am
Recently, there has been a stream of authors writing about how wonderful it is to be a “compassionate carnivore” and be “shameless” (in the non-pejorative sense) about consuming animal products. First, let's look at the term “compassionate carnivore.” The first error that jumps out from that expression when applied to humans is that
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2 Jun 2008 at 8:55am
In the last essay, I provided some background on the difference between welfarist and abolition advocacy and very briefly explained why welfarist advocacy hasn't been and cannot be effective to bring about any significant changes for nonhuman beings. If there is any hope at all for significant improvement in the treatment of nonhumans, it will
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16 May 2008 at 11:44am
This is the first essay in a two-part series on vegan education. This essay will provide some background on vegan education and specifically explain some of the differences between welfarist and abolitionist education, with some good examples of abolitionist vegan education at the end. The second essay will discuss the incremental abolitionist approach
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3 Apr 2008 at 11:23am
For several years now, Chris Alley-Grubb of Peaceful Prairie Sanctuary has been putting in very long hours and doing the heavy lifting that running a rescued farmed animal sanctuary with a couple of hundred nonhuman residents requires, and amazingly, until recently in 2007, has been doing all of this work without a tractor. In addition to all of this
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13 Mar 2008 at 1:11pm
I've seen a new word floating around cyberspace. The word is "vegangelical." I believe it is meant to be a derogatory term for us so-called “holier-than-thou” or “extreme” vegans who “impose our beliefs” on supposedly innocuous and “moderate and reasonable” consumers of animal products. This essay is dedicated to looking a little closer at some
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10 Mar 2008 at 8:49am
I've read and heard that many people (generally non-vegans) are surprised at the horrific treatment of the so-called “downer” cows at slaughter (cows too sick to walk (i.e. “downer”) who the industry uses bulldozers to force into a brutal slaughter). We should not be surprised about this at all. This treatment is standard industry practice. It
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22 Feb 2008 at 1:57pm
Part One I am beginning this essay assuming the truth of determinism in human behavior, with a defense of determinism presented afterward in Part Two. My intention in this order of presentation is to immediately get to the primary point of the essay (in Part One) and leave the supporting argument for determinism at the end (in Part Two) for
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18 Feb 2008 at 8:18am
February through July is a busy time of year for me at work. As much as I enjoy writing unpopular vegan essays, I will have to slow down the frequency of blog postings from what has been a posting every week or two to about one posting or so per month during this period of long work hours. In August, I plan to pick up the blog pace again as work slows
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24 Jan 2008 at 11:08am
Introduction If animals have rights, it is sometimes asked, do we have obligations to police nature? To what extent should we intervene, if at all, in predator-prey relationships so ubiquitous in the wild? Is animal rights philosophy necessarily hostile to ecological concerns? What are the boundaries of our moral responsibility for others
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24 Jan 2008 at 10:05am
Last week's essay, ”Contrasting Harms", was dedicated to the issue of contrasting the harms between vegan and animal agriculture populations, and found that 1) in feeding equal populations, any system of animal agriculture would be significantly more harmful than a vegan system of agriculture, and 2) the current animal agriculture system is unimaginably
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9 Jan 2008 at 1:00pm
In last week's essay about veganism as the moral baseline, I promised to address the anti-animal rights claim that since 1) vegans consume grains, soybeans, corn, and other crops, and 2) crop production causes field animals to die, that 3) vegans cause animal deaths, and 4) are therefore violating the rights of animals. Before I address
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1 Jan 2008 at 1:47pm
The last two essays discussed 1) sentience as the morally relevant characteristic justifying the basic right to physical security and 2) the economic commodity and property status of nonhuman beings as an impenetrable barrier to recognizing the basic right to physical security. This essay will discuss veganism as 1) the only way to destroy
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24 Dec 2007 at 12:16pm
Before we start on this essay, we should be aware that both last week's essay, and as we will see, this one, are dealing with moral philosophy (i.e. reasoning from basic moral principles), the law (property rights, individual rights, and welfare laws), and empirical and rational fact (e.g. the full sentience of nonhumans and its relevance to a
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12 Dec 2007 at 1:33pm
In this essay, we will look at the moral relevance of sentience as the characteristic justifying a basic right to physical security (as defined in the next section), but first we should cover some preliminary notions which will set the stage for understanding how and why sentience matters when we are thinking about animal rights. A Brief
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3 Dec 2007 at 9:28am
Peaceful Prairie Sanctuary has posted this video on their blog of “spent” hens rescued straight from a cage-free egg facility. As the video makes very clear, these hens have suffered more intensely than we can imagine. Some of them seem quite literally psychotic; driven insane from the extreme deprivation and conditions they endured over several months
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26 Nov 2007 at 8:47am
Somewhere in the neighborhood of 300 million turkeys are intentionally bred to have their lives taken from them every year in the United States and many millions of these turkeys are killed and eaten for Thanksgiving dinners. Turkeys are intelligent, social beings, but most of us wouldn't know that unless we saw them in their natural
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16 Nov 2007 at 3:42pm
It has been brought to my attention that in the most recent blog essay, “Understanding the Anti-Animal Rights Viewpoint” (on Monday , November 12, 2007), I misrepresented William James' pragmatism when I said “'The Will to Believe' is derived from James' radical pragmatism whereby the epistemological standard of truth of a belief
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14 Nov 2007 at 2:33pm
Preface added January 25, 2010: This essay is exclusively about the viewpoint of people who actively advocate for animal exploitation. For an essay that explores, among other things, why people exploit animals without necessarily advocating for exploitation, see the more comprehensive (and more interesting) essay entitled Rational Ignorance and Rational
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12 Nov 2007 at 9:34am
On October 25, 2007, the New York Times published an opinion piece by Verlyn Klinkenborg entitled "Two Pigs" about, as Klinkenborg puts it, “taming” two pigs and then having a farmer and his son come over to kill the pigs while Klinkenborg and his wife watch (kill them because, as Klinkenborg says, “That's part of the job”). Whenever
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29 Oct 2007 at 2:22pm
A few weeks ago, there was much hubbub on Grist.org when Bruce Friedrich of PETA wrote as a guest on the benefits of vegetarianism for the environment. Indeed, there are very significant benefits which a vegan diet bestows on the environment which I will not go into here. However, there was much unwarranted hostility [1] toward vegans who were posting
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22 Oct 2007 at 1:11pm
Over the past three essays, we have touched on two major schools of thought regarding morality: theories of “the right” and theories of “the good”; and we have explored the basic and most relevant elements of two theories of moral development corresponding to the two schools of moral thought: Kohlberg's stage theory and Hoffman's empathy theory,
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17 Oct 2007 at 11:11am
This essay is the third in a series of four essays on moral psychology and development. Martin Hoffman's theory of moral psychology and development is primarily focused on empathy and empathic distress, but also includes classic conditioning, cognitive reasoning, and principles of caring and justice. Cognitive reasoning and justice are
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12 Oct 2007 at 1:45pm
This essay is the second in a series of four essays on moral psychology and development. Lawrence Kohlberg's Stages of Moral Development has its roots primarily in Jean Piaget's two-phase theory of moral judgment in children and secondarily in John Dewey's three-stage theory of moral development. Piaget's first phase is
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1 Oct 2007 at 8:15am
This essay is the first in a series of four essays concerning moral psychology and development. Moral psychology is an important area of knowledge for understanding various attitudes and beliefs regarding morality and, more importantly, for effecting moral progress. A society's collective attitudes and beliefs toward social justice issues like
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24 Sep 2007 at 11:25am
I was going to discuss moral psychology and development this week, but certain discussions last week have led me to postpone psychology and discuss the “imposing” word instead. When discussions of animal rights come up, and especially when those discussions lead to an assertion by an animal rights advocate that veganism is a moral imperative,
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17 Sep 2007 at 12:46pm
Blind Tradition: The Historical Moral Status of So-Called “Brutes” From pre-history until the 20th century, it was believed by almost everyone that humans needed to use and eat animals to thrive and even to survive. This was especially true prior to the 19th century; and philosophers in the 17th and 18th centuries, such as Rene Descartes,
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11 Sep 2007 at 8:20am
The five major religions (Buddhism, Christianity, Hindu/Brahmanism, Islam, and Judaism) all have a heavy influence on the thought, especially the moral thought, of people throughout the world, even in highly educated countries, and even at a time when science has knocked humankind off our imagined pedestal of being at the center of the universe with
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4 Sep 2007 at 12:27pm
Occasionally, abolitionists are asked by skeptics to “prove” that welfare reform itself does not and cannot lead to veganism, and therefore ultimately to abolition. The skeptics generally accept that the reasoning used by abolitionists to support our view is cogent and even compelling, but that we haven't been able to produce properly controlled
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28 Aug 2007 at 3:56pm
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