Some vegans make the point that a lot of other injustices that exist, such as racism and sexism are often motivated by speciesism, and if we taught children how to respect animals, it would be much harder for them to be racist and sexist later on, discriminate and objectify other humans.
This is all fine, but I think it’s not the root cause, I’m going to argue it goes even deeper. The real problem is pro-life, pro-natalist, viviocentrist (life-centered) ideology, the idea that life can be a net positive is used to justify speciesism.
Species survival is assumed to be a noble goal overriding suffering:
- ”But if we didn’t eat the cow, then the cow wouldn’t even be alive right now, they’d all go extinct! You want to murder the cows???”.
It’s true that if we didn’t want to eat pigs, cows, chicken anymore – pigs, cows, chicken as they are would go extinct, we wouldn’t deliberately breed them into existence anymore and it’s unlikely that such animals could survive in the wild.
However, it would be completely irrelevant, because before cows existed, cows were not trapped in an unborn cow purgatory from which they desperately waited to be released. All their pain would have been prevented, and no pleasure, relief of pain they could have experienced in their lives, like eating grass, could have been missed by them either.
You only get hungry from not eating if you exist. If you don’t exist, you don’t eat, but you also don’t get hungry as a result of that, because you don’t exist.
Pleasure is not intrinsically valuable, it only becomes valuable when you make someone dependent on it by reproducing them. If you’re never reproduced, you don’t miss pleasure from the unborn purgatory, by being reproduced on the other hand, you’re being put into the position of having to chase comfort to avoid being in discomfort.
So really, the cow is not benefitted by being made dependent on comfort that farmers give the cow in return for the milk they give, because the cow did not feel a need to exist before it existed, so arguing you’re doing it a favor by giving it comfort in return for milk would be like arguing I’m doing you a favor by injecting you with heroin in your sleep, making you addicted to it, and then making you suck my dick for more heroin. See, it’s a symbiotic relationship, if I didn’t make you addicted to heroin, you would have never enjoyed satisfying your heroin addiction.
Circle of life, the cow gets comfort and shelter from wild predators that it didn’t need before you forced the genetically modified, retarded cow to exist in the first place, and you get to fondle the cow’s tits. You get new heroin that you didn’t need before I forced you to become addicted to it, and I get my dick sucked.
- ”Are you going to stop all the carnivores from eating meat, silly vegans? No? Then veganism is wrong! Just admit it vegans, you want to murder lions, just admit it!”.
A great amount of speciesists spend their time pestering vegans with questions about how we ought to deal with cats that need meat to survive, and then all the wild animals that need meat to survive if we want a vegan world.
In all of this, they don’t even question whether life itself is an absolute necessity. Fine, let’s say the animal needs meat to live – does the animal need to live in the first place?
Let’s say some mad scientist bred a new alien species in his laboratory. They will be carnivorous, and they will thrive primarily eating the intestines of human children.
Meat eaters think that it’s justified for cats and other carnivores to hunt for flesh based on the justification that they are carnivorous, and frequently they want to pretend that they themselves are also carnivorous.
So if ”I’m carnivorous” is a justification for harming someone else, then these meat eaters would have to offer their children to the carnivorous alien species in order to not be total hypocrites.
Would they do that? Why or why not? I thought that ”I need meat to live” is an adequate justification for eating someone? Are you saying that the suffering experienced by your child being gutted by my alien breed justifies sterilizing and/or straight up euthanizing my alien breed?
So you SUPPORT GENOCIDE? You don’t think these aliens need to exist?
Suddenly, I think most of these meat eaters would be able to give a clear answer. No, these aliens did not really need to exist to be honest. Before they existed, no one ever needed them to exist. But guess what, that’s the same for all life – before conscious life existed in the universe, the universe never said ”but I really need conscious life to exist! :(”.
If humans, cats, lions and my hypothetical alien breed didn’t exist anymore, they would never miss out and lament not existing, so why is the harm caused by their existence justifiable? It is not.
- ”What about animal experimentation, you want humans to get sick and die? Ha! Veganism disproven, harming animals is necessary to preserve human life!”
Same, just use alien hypotheticals. We do it for factory farming, we can do it for the animal experimentation problem too. Let’s say there are aliens that will have to perform medical experiments on human children in order to save themselves from a few illnesses that their existence presents them with.
It’s true that these aliens might have to experiment on us once they exist and are prone to suffering, but it still does not explain why they need to exist and be prone to suffering in the first place.
If I know that if I create an alien species, I will have to perform a thousand horrific vivisections on human children in order to figure out what the right medication is for my alien breed when they get a migraine headache, you’d look at me the same way we look at someone like Josef Mengele, what gives me the right to do all that, just because I have a giant boner for aliens existing on planet earth?
Nothing. And similarly there is no justification for the harm caused by human existence or non-human animal existence, speciesists just have a hard-on for humans existing ad infinitum, we can torture as many organisms as possible to preserve human life, life itself is more important than suffering.
- Nepotism, another form of ingroup bias: why is it wrong to value the dog over the pig? I also value my child over any other child!
Nepotism is the favoring of your family over others, many vegans while they try to reject speciesism don’t fully reject nepotism. Nepotism is making the value of an organism dependent of what a third party feels about them, i.e it is bad if my child is raped and killed, because that then makes me feel bad because it’s my child.
But obviously, you know that if the parent that valued the child did not exist, you still wouldn’t want to be in the position of the child getting tortured, you recognize the suffering itself as a problem as soon as it happens to you, and don’t want your right to be free from torture based on how your family would be affected by you being tortured.
What about orphan children whose parents don’t feel bad about them being abducted, raped and killed? So nepotism is a bigoted non-sense philosophy, just like speciesism, just like racism, caring about a child only because it popped out of your vagina is bigotry.
An equal consideration of interests as true anti-speciesist philosophers like Peter Singer promote also goes against nepotism, you want exception from torture based on the fact that you are able to be tortured, so can other animals be tortured, so they have to consistently go into the category of organisms that have a right to be free from torture. The same principle rejects nepotism, your child is torturable, but it is not torturable just because it is your child.
Some vegans argue that humans learn racist behavior from being speciesists who ignore the suffering of other animals first, and then they internalize that behavior and have a higher chance of becoming nazis.
- ”Jews are just subhuman animals” – the nazis said.
But I think the truth is that nazi ingroup favoritist behavior is learned much earlier when the child internalizes that their parents and siblings are somehow more important than everyone else’s parents and siblings.
Right there, they learn to ignore the capacity to suffer in organisms of equal suffering capacity to their own, because other parents and siblings are able to suffer just as much as their own parents and siblings, but somehow the child is more attached to their family than anyone else’s.
So it’s more likely that nepotism comes first, then comes speciesism, then comes racism, that is where the first ”somehow my ingroup is more important” feelings are created, and the creation of families is again promoted by pro-lifers, pro-natalists, viviocentrists who think that life is an absolute necessity, because if there’s no life, there’s no happy happy joy moments, and the reason why we chase happy happy joy moments is to avoid miserable miserable pain moment, and they’re just too dumb to figure out that if life didn’t exist, miserable miserable pain moment would no longer exist, so it wouldn’t need to be escaped.
The assumption that life must exist can be found in a lot of anti-vegan arguments, showing confusion about the implications of what would happen if we were to reject speciesism:
- ”But then these farm animals would go extinct!”
- ”But then what about wildlife suffering, euthanize carnivores???”
- ”But that’s the circle of life, big fish eat small fish!”
There is no need for life to exist, it is not an absolute necessity to avoiding suffering, it only becomes one when you create the life, so why create it?
Counterintuitive conclusions 