{"id":774084,"date":"2023-11-07T07:37:53","date_gmt":"2023-11-07T12:37:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/animalrightswatch.us\/?p=774084"},"modified":"2023-11-07T08:48:04","modified_gmt":"2023-11-07T13:48:04","slug":"the-moral-bankruptcy-of-using-social-justice-rhetoric-to-justify-the-torture-of-animals","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/animalrightswatch.us\/?p=774084","title":{"rendered":"THE VEGAN ‘PRIVILEGE’: The moral bankruptcy of using social justice rhetoric to justify the torture of animals"},"content":{"rendered":"\t
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The claim that veganism is a privilege and somehow antithetical to the interests of the marginalized is particularly demented. The global meat industry is especially bad for many marginalized humans; a vegan world would have much less hunger, environmental destruction that particularly harms people in poor countries, and disease. But the biggest mistake that this argument makes is that it fails to treat animals as a genuinely marginalized group. Animals are, without a doubt, the most marginalized group on the planet. We torture and kill 92.2 billion animals every year. People have the gall to claim that when they defend this psychopathic torture they are speaking up for the oppressed. Anyone who thinks this is morally blind and doesn\u2019t know what oppression is.<\/p>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t<\/blockquote>\n\n

BENTHAM’S BULLDOG:<\/strong> Those who defend ethical veganism are often claimed by those who defend left-wing positions to be \u201cspeaking from a position of privilege,\u201d or \u201cfailing to speak up for the marginalized.\u201d Many on the far left seem to believe there to be a fundamental tension between the injunction not to eat meat when one can and advocacy for the oppressed. Such people often point to the existence of food deserts, claiming that huge numbers of people are unable to go vegan because of lack of access to vegan foods.<\/em><\/p>\n

This talking point is totally wrong. For one, it is people in wealthier countries who eat most meat. The cheapest foods\u2014rice, lentils, beans\u2014are generally not meat; as such, many of the poorest people are mostly vegetarian because they cannot afford expensive meats. As for the claim about food deserts, it\u2019s totally wrong\u2014as Nobis notes, most people in food deserts just travel a bit to get their groceries…<\/em><\/p>\n

The attempt to claim that veganism is somehow antithetical to the interests of the marginalized is particularly demented. The global meat industry is especially bad for many marginalized humans; a vegan world would have much less hunger, environmental destruction that particularly harms people in poor countries, and disease. Somehow, these people who convince themselves that they\u2019re speaking up for the marginalized endorse rich westerners stuffing their faces with hamburgers, when that same farmland could have been used to feed many more people if it had grown plants.<\/em><\/p>\n

Very often the things said when people try to argue that veganism is in conflict with the rights of the marginalized don\u2019t even rise to the level of arguments. The food desert \u201cargument,\u201d for example, isn\u2019t much of an argument; it\u2019s not clear how you get from it to the nonexistence of a general duty to go vegan. Instead, it just arises because some people feel that veganism is in some way elitist, even if they don\u2019t have a way to articulate why.<\/em><\/p>\n

But the biggest mistake that this class of arguments makes is that it fails to treat animals as a genuinely marginalized group. Animals are, without a doubt, the most marginalized group on the planet. If we treated any humans the way we treat the 92.2 billion animals we torture and kill every year, it would be undeniable that we had recreated Auschwitz. If one replaced the animals with people, it would undeniably be the greatest holocaust in human history.<\/em><\/p>\n

Animals are so thoroughly neglected that it\u2019s seen as offensive to compare any other group to them. Dehumanizing any group is seen as a grave offense because being like a nonhuman animal is seen as sufficient to make one totally morally insignificant. Animals are so thoroughly marginalized that it\u2019s regarded as totally morally fine to eat their corpses after they\u2019ve spent their entire life being tortured. If you make any fuss about this, if you so much as encourage people not to pay for these ghastly industries to torture animals, you\u2019re seen as some type of pushy moralist.<\/em><\/p>\n

And yes, the conditions animals endure are torture. Read through the conditions described here and ask yourself, if these were inflicted on any person would we hesitate to call them torture? If we found out that the U.S. government was confining prisoners in tiny cages, covered in the feces of the prisoners above them, before having their nose sliced off with a hot knife, would anyone hesitate to call this torture? If you found out that the U.S. government castrated prisoners with a sharp knife and no anesthetic, would you regard it as controversial to regard this as torture? If prisoners were shoved into tiny crates in ways that broke their bones, that killed about a quarter of them, would calling this torture be seen as anything beyond the most trivial of utterances? Of course not. We only take are hesitant to call factory farms torture chambers because we give so little of a damn about animals that we don\u2019t consider their torture to be real torture…<\/em><\/p>\n

So we have a situation in which three times the population of Earth is being tortured before being killed, often quite brutally. And some people still somehow think that social justice is opposed to doing anything to stop that. These people think that the really marginalized people are slightly below-average income people in the world\u2019s wealthiest countries. That the people who want to take these helpless victims out of these ghastly Guantanamos are somehow privileged. This would be a bit like claiming that abolitionists are privileged because poor people can\u2019t afford to sell their slaves. It\u2019s moral blindness of the highest order. It fails to recognize that the ones being viciously tortured in the cruelest ways imaginable are the victims, and we must do everything in our power to end their plight.<\/em><\/p>\n

Every second of every day, over 24 billion land animals are left languishing in these torture chambers. More than three times the population of Earth is being tortured every single instant and most people don\u2019t care in the slightest…<\/em><\/p>\n

People have the gall to claim that when they defend this psychopathic torture they are speaking up for the oppressed. Anyone who thinks this is morally blind and doesn\u2019t know what oppression is. If you\u2019re incapable of recognizing that the beings who we torture and kill on a scale unforeseen in human history are the real victims, and that in an oppression Olympics, they would win handily against any other group, you have a quite significant moral blind spot. If you feel more sympathy for the people doing the torturing primarily out of convenience and pleasure than those being tortured, your moral priorities are seriously screwed up. There is virtually nothing more despicable than using the real plight of the downtrodden to justify furthering the mistreatment of history\u2019s most thoroughly immiserated victims, who rot in torture chambers because of people\u2019s lust for their flesh. <\/em>SOURCE…<\/em><\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

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