The Problem with Single Issue Campaigns

I've heard a lot recently from people who are defending "single issue" campaigns, obviously feeling the need to defend their actions. Unfortunately, a lot of the attempt becomes simple nit-picking, trying to find specific campaigns that abolitionists might support, or citing Gary Francione as saying, in his book Rain Without Thunder that sometimes single issue campaigns were justified, using this inaccurately despite blogs from Prof. Francione himself clarifying what he said, meant, and thinks.

The problem I have is that focus on whether "single issue" can ever be justified misses the central point abolitionists make. That point is that campaigns to change egg production from cage-laid to barn-laid, or to catch tuna without also killing dolphins, are not helpful to the goal of ending animal exploitation. Far from moving in the abolitionist direction, they often form a new basis for people to feel complacent about continuing animal exploitation, feeling they have adopted "kind" methods of exploitation. Most of the welfarist argument contributes to the current emphasis on "kind" exploitation ("happy" meat), and the promotion of "conscientious omnivores". This ultimately forms a justification for continued exploitation, rather than a move towards ending such exploitation.

There are single issues that are more in line with abolition rather than "welfare". Banning fur effectively seeks to stop a single form of exploitation entirely. Unfortunately, a campaign for banning fur focuses a lot of energy on a single area, and is inconsistent at its root. After all, why is the use of fur worse than the use of leather, which is much more prevalent? If the answer is that using leather, or eating meat, or using animals as test subjects, is equally objectionable, than why not an abolitionist campaign, instead of a single issue campaign? If the answer is that fur is a luxury item, and leather shoes and belts are not, (questionable, given the price of some leather shoes, and the availability of cheap non-leather shoes), than it becomes a justification for the argument that exploitation is fine if there is sufficient "use value". The result is a schizophrenia that sees dog-fighting as "bad", but sees as perfectly justified the training of guard dogs to be highly aggressive by taunting or hitting them.

Another approach I've seen used to justify single issue campaigns is that of poor analogies, such as asking if the fight for gay marriage, a single issue campaign, is unjustified in the general fight against homophobia. The problem with this analogy is that gay and lesbian people have already won their fundamental battle, which is recognition as individuals with rights like others, and now are fighting against inequalities inherent in the law. Abolitionist vegans are still fighting for the basic recognition of animals as individuals with rights. A proper analogy would be: when homosexuality was illegal, how would those struggling for gay rights see a single issue campaign demanding that men imprisoned for homosexuality be segregated from other prisoners for their own protection. I think most gay rights advocates at the time when homosexuality was illegal would see campaigns for more "humane" imprisonment to be retrograde efforts. A proper analogy to the "gay marriage" case would be: once animal exploitation is illegal, there may still be need for efforts to ensure animals have the ability to migrate, and a need to alter fencing and property laws accordingly.

Again, the central issue for me, as an abolitionist, is not whether or not a campaign is "single issue". The central issue is the abolition of animal exploitation, and any campaign has to be measured against whether it moves society in that direction or not. In my view, welfare campaigns are always counter-productive, since they indicate a "humane" form of exploitation. Campaigns to ban animal use in limited areas raise, for me, the question of whether that implies other uses are OK.

In fighting to end animal exploitation, I am aware that this requires a fundamental shift in people's view of animals. Ending animal exploitation goes far beyond dietary choice, it actually restricts choice and would make consumption of meat illegal. It is the equivalent of ending slavery, making it illegal, not just deciding to not personally own slaves. It is equivalent to legalising homosexuality, not just keeping the secret of a friend or relative. To push something like that through requires a change in the general social consciousness. Changes like that require substantial public support. It is therefore essential to work on changing the way ordinary people think about animals. Any welfarist campaign that seeks more "humane" ways to exploit animals simply reinforces the notion that animals are there to be exploited.

Campaigns like the one for the abolition of human slavery, or for the abolition of animal exploitation, are not won in a year or two. The change of the social mindset, called metanoia, takes time, though it can happen far more quickly than we would think. It does, however, require that whatever else we campaigners do, we continually assert our basic message, and don't engage in activities or campaigns that confuse or undermine that message.

The primary critique abolitionists have concerning new welfarists is not simply that their campaigns focus on single issues. It is that their campaigns almost never promote an end to animal exploitation, nor do they promote a vegan lifestyle, and frequently they do promote, explicitly or implicitly, the notion of acceptable exploitation. They do not promote the principle that non-human animals have a right to life, or a right to be considered as individuals rather than property. They therefore undermine the struggle to end animal exploitation.

Right/wrong, correct/incorrect, helpful/unhelpful, and what serves

All my blogs are intended to be contemplations of ethical issues that concern me. I don't intend them as attacks on individuals. I don't present them as perfect wisdom. They are only my own attempts at clarifying and communicating my own thoughts. I put them on the net, because I feel that it is nice to have something to refer to, if I'm communicating with someone on twitter, etc, where length limitations make it difficult to put out a more extensive comment, and where referring to a background argument may make going on at length unnecessary.

Please understand that I am only beginning to write about my views on our brother and sister animals. I may not know all the arguments others have had, and the positions they've taken, especially where words or phrases have developed specific contexts (like compassion). Have mercy on my ignorance.

*****

Right/wrong, correct/incorrect, helpful/unhelpful, and what serves

The subject of this blog is about words, and how they work to help conceptualise notions about ethical choices. I feel this is important because words frame and form the way we conceive. Choice of words reflect attitudes and understandings.

"Correct" and "incorrect" are basic terms that should be non-judgemental. Some statements can be checked for accuracy. It is in the interest of anyone wishing to communicate that their statements are accurate. I qualify by saying some statements can be checked for accuracy, because not all statements are about facts, and not all facts are easily checked. Value statements (Blue makes me feel hopeful) cannot be verified except by the speaker, although sometimes (I care deeply about animals) we can try to deduce something about the statement through factual indicators. Some facts (e.g. the level of awareness of coral) are under dispute, because of different definitions of "aware" and different ways of testing that. We need to understand that statements of fact may be correct, incorrect, undetermined, indeterminate, or possibly undeterminable. Subjective statements, like "I feel a connection with animals" depend on what a person means by words like "connection" and even then, their truth is mainly subject to self-examination.

It is helpful to separate moral statements about right and wrong from statements about accuracy, because to say someone is morally wrong is to speak negatively about their nature, their conscience, and their behaviour. With the confusion between wrong and inaccurate, it is probably better to stay away from wrong altogether, and stick with inaccurate or immoral, whichever is meant. Immoral is a more accurate word, and has more emotional force if we want to make that point about someone's action.

Of course, emotional force isn't always the thing that will help change hearts and minds, so aiming words like "immoral" at someone is not always the best idea. This understanding, that communication has a purpose, introduces another term, helpful. The Buddhists have a term, skillful, used about trying to get someone to understand something. While honesty is a foundation precept in Buddhism, there is a recognition that bluntness isn't always the quickest or best way to get someone to see something. "Brutal honesty" can often become more about emotional brutality than about communication or change.

Somewhere in the concept of helpful actions is the notion of motivation. Whether a remark is unhelpful only makes sense when we have some general or specific purpose we are moving towards. That could be as vague as "to help other people become more aware" or as specific as "to try and build an ethical consensus that will lead to the abolition of animal exploitation". Once I have a motivation, I can look at things like how I deal with someone who believes it is OK to kill animals. If my purpose is to change their mind about their actions, I can try to see if it is more helpful to say their actions are immoral, or to try and explain calmly how their attitude comes from a disconnection with other forms of life, and that this disconnection, this callous attitude, will affect them in all their interactions with the world. Calling their actions immoral may be more helpful, but it is a judgement call, and it may change with the person and situation. "Helpful" expresses those considerations about how my actions work toward my goals (or those of others with goals similar to mine).

In a bigger frame, what I try to do forms a more complex set of motivations and purpose. In that context, I look at my actions in terms of whether or not they serve me. This is where instead of deciding how best to talk to someone on the net, I decide whether or not to talk to them at all. Some considerations may be that I feel the person is only posting something to get a rise, or bother people on a list. I may conclude they have no real intention of listening to responses at all, except to try to find some word or phrase they can feed back to continue sniping. In such a situation, there may be no point whatever in responding to them. On the other hand, particularly where it is a public forum, I may choose to comment, with comments being mainly for the benefit of the other people listening/reading. The nature of the comments should reflect my purpose.

In a way, this happened with Katrina Fox's excellent article on "happy meat" in the Sydney Morning Herald. After the article was published, a forum was opened for comments for a time. I (and others) then had to decide what kind of a comment would best serve the interest of promoting the abolition of animal exploitation. Being an open forum, there were a number of people abusing vegans and animal rights advocates, making provocative comments, ignorant comments, or intentionally misleading comments. The question I faced was what I should say, particularly since comments had limited length, and it was sometimes difficult to get the SMH to accept them.

I had to consider what served me: to answer those making ignorant or malicious comments, or to try and add to, or reinforce, the information readers might get. What was clear to me was that, no matter how accurate or justified, there was little point is responding to the "happily adversarial". A lot of what they had to say made no pretence toward real discussion, or even toward logic. They were simply trying to make remarks they considered clever, and to reinforce the lowest, kneejerk reactions to vegans and the subject of animal rights found in the public. Responding to them directly would not serve changing public perception. Becoming angry or upset myself would not serve my purpose, no matter how justified my irritation might be. Others were correcting some of the inaccuracies, and I felt my efforts were best spent adding information about "barn-laid" and other "humane" options. If more people were commenting about that, I might have chosen to counter misinformation.

In any case, sometimes talking with others, it may seem more helpful to talk about what purpose their comments serve: whether what they are saying is helpful, or serves a purpose like "living a good life". This may be more effective than saying their approach is "wrong" or "immoral". Sometimes focussing on common motivations, such as being more aware, more alive, healthier, is more effective than confrontation. Not always, but sometimes.

Ehical Relativism

All my blogs are intended to be contemplations of ethical issues that concern me. I don't intend them as attacks on individuals. I don't present them as perfect wisdom. They are only my own attempts at clarifying and communicating my own thoughts. I put them on the net, because I feel that it is nice to have something to refer to, if I'm communicating with someone on twitter, etc, where length limitations make it difficult to put out a more extensive comment, and where referring to a background argument may make going on at length unnecessary.

Please understand that I am only beginning to write about my views on our brother and sister animals. I may not know all the arguments others have had, and the positions they've taken, especially where words or phrases have developed specific contexts (like compassion). Have mercy on my ignorance.

*****

Ethical Relativism

It bothers me when, during a debate, someone accuses another of being an ethical relativist as if that was a bad thing. It bothers me because I consider myself an ethical relativist. Some people, especially in the vegan movement, attack ethical relativism as being a sort of post-modernist "anything goes", especially where choice about eating meat is concerned.

On the simplest level, my understanding of ethical relativism is that there is no absolute code of ethics. That different people can have different ethical frameworks. What does this mean, for people making ethical choices? It means that a person trusts their own notion of right and wrong, instead of one that is external, one that is told to them.

Ethical absolutism allows us to argue that someone else is wrong, and use the absolute code we follow as proof. An absolutist needs no more evidence than that. They just assert their view as absolutely true, and their opponent as wrong.

The problem of ethical absolutism is that if there is only one true ethical code, who has that code? As a vegan, I believe that we have no right to kill and enslave animals. As a Buddhist, I believe in non-harming, ahimsa. The people who I hear say there is one truth, one moral code, sometimes say "Thou shalt not kill" (and then turn around and justify all sorts of killing, of people as well as animals). They also may say homosexuality is wrong. Their justification is that there is an absolute moral code from on high, part of the same code that says "thou shalt not kill", and it says homosexuality is wrong, no matter what you or I feel or think. If I disagree, I am wrong, because an absolute ethics is always right, by definition. All of that absolute code is right, not just the bits I like.

That's the catch in ethical absolutes. They say that there is a "true" moral code, and if my inner perception of morality differs, I am wrong. Absolutists have a fixed set of ethics. Absolutist ethics imposes a static view of truth, and of morality, from outside. It denies my/our individual understanding of the truth. It says that my own perception and understanding cannot be trusted. My own sense of right and wrong is incorrect whenever it varies from the absolute code.

Ethical absolutism is ultimately dis-empowering to anyone who believes in it, alienating them from their inner truth. If I am a believer, I can sometimes use the code to push my own agenda, but sometimes the code tells me to do things I don't feel to be right or necessary. If we cannot trust our own understanding of right, we are forced to rely some external source, a book or set of rules. Then we need someone to interpret the book, because each of us, left to ourselves, might interpret the book in our own way. So we get a hierarchy, with some pope with absolute authority to tell us the true path. Of course, there are competing hierarchies, each with a Pope, a Patriarch, an Archbishop, a Master, each claiming absolute truth.

Ethical relativism says to depend on our own sense of right and wrong. The Hindus, and paths derived from Hinduism, like Jaina and Buddhism, argue that each person needs to find the truth within, and therefore truth varies with each person's understanding, and each person's experience: that our understanding can change even within one person, over time. Our understanding evolves. There are Buddhist teachers who eat meat, and can justify eating meat, but my own sense of ethics tells me this is wrong. Ethical relativism lets me trust my own understanding of the truth, in spite of majority opinions.

The strength of ethical relativism is that it validates what we know in our hearts. The weakness is that we must acknowledge that other people have their own truths, their own understanding. Paths based on Hinduism, including Buddhism and Jain Dharma (Shraman Dharma) are ethically relativist. They believe that people evolve. Our understanding evolves from ignorance to wisdom.

Relativist understanding of ethics does not mean that anything goes. Implicit in the idea is that our own understanding of truth, of ethics, changes and improves. Implicit in the understanding of Dharma, a path, is that we actively seek to improve our understanding of truth, actively seek to improve our ethics, and our behaviour. Ethical relativism is a path (dharma) of increasing understanding. Dharma, any dharma, involves actually trying to understand what our ethical path is, and doing our best to live that path.

As a vegan, when people, particularly Buddhists, Jains, and Hindus, argue that they have a different interpretation of ahimsa or non-harming, my approach is to ask if they are really seeking to understand ahimsa. To be really ethical, in a relativist path, means actively questioning myself, my understanding. It means seeking out the wisdom of others. It does not mean blindly following. It does include the idea of self-perfecting.

We cannot do that by sticking to the notions we already have. Who knows where they come from: society, parents, reading, advertising? Ethical relativism certainly does not mean using our mind and reason to throw up obstacles to understanding, so we can continue to mindlessly pursue our desires. It cannot mean simply being "clever" with ideas from ethics and spiritual teachings, to try and argue a case that means we don't need to change. Really following an ethical relativist path is difficult, maybe more difficult than following an absolutist one.

Another major misperception about ethical relativism is that it means we cannot object to ideas different to our own. This is untrue, just like a belief in tolerance does not mean we need to accept the actions of neo-nazis or homophobes. My understanding of truth and ethics doesn't mean I adopt a laissez-faire attitude about things I see as wrong in the world. Quite the opposite: for me, my ethics say that I need to be socially engaged and actively oppose things I see as wrong, actively support things I see as right. There is nothing contradictory for me, in being an ethical relativist and being a vegan abolitionist.

I don't believe that everyone accepts or understands ahimsa. I don't believe ahimsa is some absolute doctrine. My understanding is that by following ahimsa, my connection to all life improves. My devotion to self-cherishing declines, and my openness to awareness improves. More importantly, my understanding leads me to the conclusion that acting-for-others helps me evolve more than acting-in-my-own-self-interest. Ahimsa, not acting in violence, not causing harm to others, is the most basic form of acting for others. If we cannot embrace non-harming, saying we are helping is nonsense.

I believe that vegans who claim non-harming sentient life is a moral absolute need to think about what having moral absolutes means. I do not see non-harming as a moral absolute. My understanding is that if I want to morally evolve, non-harming is a very basic step, so basic that to fail it is to betray my own sense of right and wrong. My understanding is also that non-harming is so basic to the notion of caring about others that nearly every teacher I respect advocates ahimsa. I do not adopt ahimsa because they say so, but it is encouraging to find so many people I respect in agreement on this.

I adopt ahimsa because I believe that to respect others is really impossible if we don't care when we do them harm. That seems completely logical to me. Accepting ahimsa as part of my path, I try to perfect my understanding, and my action, by understanding how my actions can harm others, and how I can correct my actions to cause less harm. Ahimsa becomes a foundation in my path, and to my understanding of what it would take for any sentient being to evolve. Those not following a path of ahimsa are not "wrong" in an absolutist sense. They are ignorant, and they may learn if we speak to their heart. I am an ethical relativist, and that does not interfere in any way with my total conviction that ahimsa towards all sentient beings is the right way to act and be.

About Vegan Ethos

To me, being vegan is far more than diet. It is an ethos, an ethical way of living. At its heart is a valuing of all living beings. Part of the ethos of being vegan means being dedicated to not harming other sentient beings. Not just "not using animal products", but not harming mosquitoes, lizards, moths, snails. They are all sentient beings. They all count.
This dedication to not harming doesn't come from a rule, or a commandment, it comes from a recognition that all living living beings have equal intrinsic value. They all are equally born, equally here, equally value their own existence, equally have their own purpose.
Non-harming requires a discipline. Minimally, it means never to intentionally cause harm. Beyond that, it means noticing: noticing what beings are around me; noticing what I am doing; noticing where I step; noticing the consequences of minor actions, like leaving a water bucket uncovered (insects drown). It means actually feeling the bond with other forms of life, paying attention to the birds, the lizard on the stone, the spider building a web in the corner of the bathroom. We don't pay enough attention to our surroundings. Unless we are really amazing beings, no matter how much attention we pay, we can always be more attentive, more present.
Being vegan for me, means being attentive, and valuing the life I see. It means making an effort to not cause harm, making an effort in my life, not just not eating meat or dairy. It means feeling the commonality with life. It means caring. It means not being afraid of other beings. It means not giving other beings a reason to be afraid of me.

For me, the root of my ethos is mystical. That's a personal view. I don't believe that one needs to be religious to be vegan, but I do feel that some sense of an underlying spirit within all life is behind many vegan motivations. For me, that doesn't equate as having anything to do with a "god", but does imply at least a sense of the spirit within nature and life. By training I'm a scientist (a biologist and health specialist), and I don't see anything contradictory in feeling there is a spiritual dimension to life, any more than I feel there is a problem with being a scientist and teaching philosophy of science and environmental ethics. I certainly don't feel that belief in a spiritual aspect of life means I should follow any particular religion, or deny my reason, or take anything on faith. I just feel there is more than reason. There is something within us that we can touch and which connects us to the world, to all other life. Pure materialism seems empty to me, and very alone, but perhaps viewing all things as transitory might create a value for beings that exist, and sense of a sharing based on ephemeral existence, a dancing on the face of the void.

In any case, valuing, caring about life, means wanting to help end all the oppression faced by animals. It is not enough to try not to create harm in my own life. It also means opposing the exploitation and killing of animals. We are social animals. We largely define ourselves in relation to our communities. We are socially engaged, and our social actions and inactions, are equally things we do. I cannot feel like I'm really practicing non-harming if I do not oppose harm. I cannot honestly say I am just if I allow injustice to happen in front of me without raising my voice.
In relation to animal rights, I don't believe "less cruel" exploitation is any sort of answer. We need to stop exploitation. Making exploitation more palatable makes it more acceptable. The only answer is to create a movement that will make animal exploitation as unthinkable as slavery. Like abolition of slavery, there needs to be social change. It was not enough for people to not own slaves. It needed a movement to end slavery. Likewise, ending animal exploitation is not going to happen by some of us not using animal products. Animal exploitation will be abolished by a movement to end this abuse of other sentient beings.
What I consider a vegan ethos has a personal aspect, as a set of practices and an inward journey. It equally has an outer aspect, of acting to promote the abolition of all animal exploitation. Both require a certain change, a development of inner attitudes towards life and living beings, and a social metanoia, a profound "change of mind" in enough people that the normative values of humanity are transformed.