Vegan Ethics: An Overview of Moral Arguments for Veganism

Why be vegan? And specifically, what are the ethical reasons to be vegan? As someone who has been vegan for over 14 years, been a vegan activist, and talked to many people about vegan ethics, I can help lay out the common arguments for you.

Here are the 13 common ethical arguments for veganism I’ll be covering:

1. Animal welfare.
2. Animal rights.
3. Consent.
4. Exploitation.
5. Intersectional anti-oppression.
6. The environment.
7. World hunger.
8. Treatment of workers.
9. The sanctity of life.
10. Speciesism and anti-speciesism.
11. Sentience (and why it’s okay to kill plants).
12. Expanding the circle of moral concern.
13. Nonviolence.

Many of these are related, and you could expand them out into a much longer list. But covering these should give you a good introduction.

As a disclaimer, let me say: This is not an academic paper. This is a practical overview from someone who has been around the vegan movement for a long time. I’ll mention some philosophers, but I’ll try to put their arguments into clear, simple language.

1. Animal Welfare Arguments for Veganism

This may be the most common type of ethical argument made about going vegan.

The argument is that factory farms are extremely cruel to animals, fur farms treat animals abusively, animal research labs treat animals cruelly, and so forth—and going vegan is the best way to protest this cruelty.

If you’re not familiar with the details of modern industrial animal agriculture, I’ll cover some basics here:

• The animals are often kept in extremely small cages. Some of them can’t even physically turn around in the crates that hold them.

• Animals raised for meat are fed growth hormones and a caloric surplus, so they grow as fast as possible. This can cause all kinds of suffering because their bodies were not evolutionarily prepared for that kind of growth. Some chickens on factory farms can’t walk because they grow too fast for their legs to support them.

• The animals may be kicked, beaten, and abused by workers who are also exploited and abused (more about workers’ rights below). Here is an undercover video of dairy farm workers punching, kicking, and abusing cows.

• The animals undergo painful operations like tail docking, dehorning, debeaking, castrating, and branding without any anesthetic.

Due to the capitalist drive to maximize profits, farmers are incentivized to pack more animals into less space. To remain competitive in the marketplace, they need to cut as many costs as possible.

This situation ends in factory farms that cut as many corners as possible when it comes to what is comfortable, healthy, or safe for the animals. And the result is mass suffering for farmed animals.

Veganism as a Solution to Animal Cruelty

This is the most common line of argument pursued by animal welfare organizations such as PETA, Vegan Outreach, and Mercy for Animals. These organizations promote veganism as one of the best ways to reduce suffering for other animals

(Some organizations and activists also focus on cruel practices in animal testing/vivisection, fur farming, leather production, animal abuse in circuses, and elsewhere. But agriculture tends to be the biggest focus because the number of numbers killed for food is much higher.)

The Philosophy Behind Animal Welfare Arguments for Veganism

You don’t really need a philosophical reference to say that hurting animals is bad. But if you want one, the go-to source would be Peter Singer’s classic book Animal Liberation.

Peter Singer’s arguments for animal liberation are based on a type of ethics called utilitarianism. If you’re taking a serious look into animal welfare arguments for veganism, you should start by taking a look at utilitarianism as a theory of ethics.

Understanding Utilitarianism

Utilitarianism is the philosophy that says that actions are ethically “good” or “bad” due to the amount of happiness or suffering that they cause.

So, according to utilitarianism, you can sort of calculate whether an action is good or bad by asking if it causes more happiness than suffering.

In practice, these ethical calculations can get pretty sloppy because how can you even quantify happiness or suffering? But the philosophy at least gives you a formula of what to aim toward—more happiness, less suffering.

It’s kind of like the Golden Rule: Assuming what we all want is happiness and what we all don’t want is suffering, something is “good” if it helps individuals experience more of what they want and less of what they don’t.

So at the core, utilitarianism is based on the fact that we all have preferences. We all care what happens. And an event is good if more people prefer that it would happen.

Applying Utilitarianism to Veganism

Peter Singer applied this utilitarian philosophy to our treatment of nonhuman animals. And the reasoning is quite simple: Nonhuman animals seem to have similar preferences as we have. Specifically, animals prefer to avoid pain.

Basically, Singer says, “If it’s wrong to needlessly hurt other people, then why wouldn’t it be wrong to needlessly hurt animals?”

In this way, you can look at animal welfare (and really, most of vegan ethics) as being about “expanding the circle” of our moral concern to other species. We’re taking the kind of moral considerations we already make for other humans, and we apply it to animals.

To only care about human pain would be speciesist, according to many vegans. Shouldn’t we care about the pain experienced by nonhuman animals, too? It’s still pain.

And if we do consider nonhuman animal pain as ethically relevant, then things like the confinement and killing of animals becomes at least questionable.

What’s most definitely wrong from a utilitarian vegan perspective is the cruel treatment of animals on modern-day factory farms. The horrific abuses on factory farms are intolerable from a utilitarian perspective because they cause so much suffering.

But do utilitarian ethics take you all the way to veganism?

Does Utilitarianism Lead to Veganism?

An interesting point is that you can hypothetically kill animals without causing them any pain. And if you achieved that, it would be okay according to a utilitarian ethic.

Utilitarianism doesn’t actually say there’s anything wrong with killing. It just says we shouldn’t cause suffering.

Now, most forms of killing will cause suffering. The animal will be scared and confused before they’re killed. Maybe their family will suffer due to seeing them be killed and not having their family member around anymore, and so on.

But if you somehow killed animals without causing pain, it would be okay according to Peter Singer’s utilitarianism. So not all vegans agree with this position.

Many vegans feel there is a more fundamental ethical reason not to kill animals—and I’ll cover that below. But let’s really get the implications of this point here first.

The Gap Between “Reducing Suffering” and Going Vegan

When you hear arguments about how you need to go vegan to reduce animal suffering… that’s not actually an air-tight argument.

Of course, going vegan is one way to help fight the cruel meat industry. Arguably, it is the best way. But you could also plausibly reduce suffering by raising backyard chickens and killing them “humanely” instead. (Just to give one example.)

So if you really want to make an air-tight argument for veganism, animal welfare arguments are probably not the path to take. They can potentially be resolved by reforms that just create more “humane” treatment in the process of confining and killing animals.

That said, if reducing suffering is genuinely the main reason you’re vegan, then by all means, speak your truth.

2. Vegan Arguments for Animal Rights

Many vegans believe nonhuman animals have a fundamental right to life, autonomy, and freedom. That is, they believe in animal rights.

Some vegans specifically want to abolish the legal property status of nonhuman animals, and to acknowledge them as “nonhuman persons.”

You’ll notice that these views are at least subtly different from Singer’s view (above), which simply argues that animals shouldn’t be made to suffer. These views argue something more fundamental: Animals have rights.

“Animal rights” can mean a lot of things, and I’m not well-read on every philosopher in this field. That said, I’ll outline a few of the main threads and the most influential authors.

Gary Francione and the Abolitionist Approach

Gary Francione is a thought leader among a group of vegans called abolitionists. Francione is a lawyer, and he argues for abolishing the property status of animals.

Gary Francione is actually opposed to any activist campaigns toward more humane treatment of animals being exploited. He argues only for the abolition of these industries.

Why would a vegan activist be opposed to “humane treatment” reforms?

Abolitionists argue that bigger cages would not at all make it okay for those animals to be caged in the first place. Furthermore, some consumers will be comforted to know that their meat and eggs are “humane” now.

So in that way, reforms can lead people to be more okay with the exploitation and confinement that’s still occurring.

Last I checked, Francione seems to spend a lot of time trying to convince animal welfarists to become abolitionist vegans. He posts many critiques of animal welfarists on his website.

Taking Anti-Speciesism Seriously

To Francione’s credit, he seems to take the idea of speciesism (explained more below) very seriously. Take the following example:

Would we be okay with campaigns today asking for bigger cages for human slaves? No. Such a campaign would be offensive because it would simply not be asking enough. Asking for bigger cages for slaves would seem to be condoning the fact that slavery is happening in the first place.

So we shouldn’t be okay with campaigns for bigger cages for animals, according to Francione. The only acceptable change is to abolish the system of animal use by humans.

In alignment with this view, Francione promotes the idea of veganism as a “moral imperative.” It is a moral baseline. It’s not too much to ask of people—it’s the only reasonable thing to ask.

For more on this perspective, check out Francione’s book Animal Rights: The Abolitionist Approach or check out his website at abolitionistapproach.com.

The Movement to Recognize Nonhuman Persons

There has slowly been growing recognition for the idea that certain species qualify as “nonhuman persons.” Usually, the species is dolphins or other cetaceans.

SeaWorld has struggled in recent years as a business in large part due to this growing recognition that orcas and dolphins deserve more rights and should not be confined.

In late 2015, India actually declared dolphins to be nonhuman persons, outlawing the captivity of dolphins in India for entertainment purposes.

But these steps are not fully vegan wins—because the reasons cited for dolphin personhood are typically based on intelligence, self-awareness, and specific rational capabilities.

Those reasons won’t necessarily apply to all farmed animals equally.

A truly vegan step would be saying that dolphins should be protected because they are sentient or because they have preferences. That would be a characteristic that applies more broadly to more animal species.

But still. The expanding rights for cetaceans may be the first step toward a much broader acknowledgment of nonhuman persons and animal rights for many different species.

Tom Regan on The Case for Animal Rights

Tom Regan is another famous animal rights philosopher who may fall into this broad category of “animal rights” rather than “animal welfare.”

Regan argues that nonhuman animals have moral rights because they, like us, are “subjects-of-a-life.” Their lives therefore have inherent value, they deserve respect, and they should not be used as a means to someone else’s ends.

Regan’s view of moral rights resembles that of famous philosopher Immanuel Kant—but Regan simply applies these rights beyond our own species. (See “Expanding the Circle” below.)

Learn more about this perspective in Regan’s classic book The Case for Animal Rights.

3. Vegan Arguments About Consent

Many vegan arguments are focused on the idea that it’s wrong to use animals without their consent. And due to communication barriers, the quality of consent we can receive from nonhuman animals is never very good. So, vegans argue, we just shouldn’t use them.

Humans can enter into agreements with each other about an exchange they want to make: “If you do this job, I’ll pay you $50.” But we can never get this kind of explicit consent from other animals.

Even in situations where an animal seems grateful and willing to enter into an exchange with us (like pets), there can never be full, informed consent because the higher levels of communication are not possible.

This line of argument has an obvious parallel to sexual consent between humans. So it’s a line of argument that’s often pursued by intersectional vegans (who I’ll cover below).

But this line of argument is also made by libertarian and anarchist vegans.

Libertarians and anarchists oppose how the government uses the threat of physical force to make citizens follow laws and pay taxes. Libertarians value the freedom to choose what relationships and contracts you enter into. They believe in voluntary exchange with consent.

Why would the principle of voluntary exchange and the importance of consent not be carried over to nonhuman animals?

Notice that, even when you take good care of an animal—you’re giving them food and shelter—you’re making decisions on their behalf. The animal is not expressly consenting to anything. You have the control as the owner.

So this line of argument takes us very naturally to veganism: We shouldn’t use animals because it’s impossible to get clear consent from them to use them, and it’s wrong to use any sentient individual without their consent. So just let them be free.

See also: Would “consensual cannibalism” be vegan?

Pet Ownership and Vegan Arguments About Consent

Vegans who focus on the issue of consent will often feel discomfort about pet ownership. You can never actually have clear consent from your dog to be the steward over their life.

It’d be ideal if your pet was able to come and go by their own choice. But if you’re locking them inside your home or in your yard, it’s less clear that they’re really consenting to that situation.

Pretty much all vegans just accept that this is a compromise and that it’s worth rescuing pets from other, worse situations. Many vegans are pet lovers and have multiple cats and dogs.

But there are definitely some vegans out there who say that a true vegan world would not include pet ownership.

I’ve heard it argued that there should be a movement toward more animal sanctuaries, where the animals are guaranteed greater freedom of movement than in most pet situations.

4. Vegan Arguments About Exploitation

Exploitation is a term often used in labor relations. It refers to treating workers unfairly in order to benefit from their labor, and it is made possible by the power imbalance between workers and their bosses.

But many uses of animals can also be viewed as labor.

The term “exploitation” is used by vegans frequently when talking about dairy and eggs. To say that dairy cows are “exploited for their milk” is to say that the cows are treated like machines or resources—things—in order to ex