Veganism

Recently, I've been thinking about veganism and deep ecology.

My justification for veganism is that humans are capable of transcending the state of nature in order to establish an ethical society. We have no responsibility for animals in the state of nature, but once we bring a creature into the society of ethics we have to take responsibility for it.

Humans have to defend their society from nature, so it is necessary to innoculate against germs, kill pests, pull weeds, punish criminals, etc. But once an animal of any form is brought into ethical society, it becomes subject to moral judgements. Hence, capital punishment, meat eating, etc is wrong because it uses other beings merely as means to an end, and because we would not wish to be farmed or murdered ourselves. The problem is that this distinction between the ethical and natural worlds implies that there is a qualitative difference between animals and humans, and I'm not sure what this could be.

If humans are different from animals, there must be an "anthropogenic moment" - a point where humans become qualitatively different from animals. This means that there needs to be some kind of experience which we are capable of that animals aren't.

Hegel places the development of self-consciousness at the moment of frustrated desire, when a human first realises that there is a distinction between the world and the self. But this moment is experienced by animals. Bataille says that tool use separates us from animals because the tool is a "nasceant non-I" through the mediation of which we build knowledge of the world. But tool use again is found in animals.

It seems that language, compassion, a knowledge of the future, an awareness of self, the ability to abstract, subtract, etc, etc are all found in many different animal species. The difference between animals and humans is never more than quantitative.

This worries me. The only solution I can think of is that the ethical society is based on ethical principles which all conscious beings living in a society must necessarilly be able to conceive. For instance, the golden rule and the categorical imperatives. The ethical world is therefore qualitatively different from the animals which establish it.

Ethical society can only establish ethical responsibility between beings which are quantitatively, rather than qualitatively distinguished - for instance between rich and poor, or the strong and the weak. here, the principle established is based, as far as I can see, on the categorical imperative to act on maxims which we might wish to be universal laws. One such maxim is that the strong have some ethical responsibility to the weak.

Therefore Humans, as quantitatively more intelligent and adaptable beings have a responsibility to all living things.

This is fortunate, and answers another long-term question of mine; which is how we can morally justify an alliance to the underlying instincts of life when living things are just one class of thing in the universe and of have no inherent value.