Vegans and compassion
Above average compassion is neither necessary not sufficient to be vegan
One of the common ways to promote a vegan lifestyle is to urge people to make compassionate choices in their everyday lives that spare animal cruelty. The messaging centered on kindness is ubiquitous in the animal rights space from holding placards urging people to keep animals off the plate to large campaigns promoting cruelty-free lifestyle.
The core assumption that underlies this messaging is that people consume animals because they lack sufficient compassion. At least compassion towards non-human animals. Conversely, the implicit presupposition that those who made the switch to wean off animal products are kinder people.
How accurate is this view? And more importantly, is it the deficit in compassion that is keeping people from changing their behaviors to minimize suffering?
To the extent that we want to explore such questions seriously, we need to sharpen the definitions before meaningful comparisons can be made. How does one evaluate compassion? Is it compassion that one experiences for all non-human animals or is it more selective – maybe towards aesthetically pleasing species or those that evolved through generations of domestication to be friendly with humans? Is it compassion towards animals that are encountered in person – observing them in their natural environment and seeing them being playful and happy? Or is it somewhat more abstract and extends to all sentient life-forms? Does it arise from the positive experiences of animals - playfulness, freedom and full of life - or does it stem from not wanting them to suffer?
These are not academic questions by any stretch. For starters, we have the all too common examples of people demonstrating remarkable compassion towards dogs or birds (going so far as to nurse injured wild animals back to life) but utterly indifferent to the ethical questions raised by eating animals. The vast majority of people volunteering for organizations that work towards rescuing dogs or cats aren’t vegan. Neither are veterinarians whose professional commitments are towards enhancing health and well-being of (certain?) animals. Anecdotally, the vast majority of individuals who proclaim love for animals aren’t vegan and they also aren’t trying to be one.
We can of course castigate them as hypocrites for the contradiction between their professed concern for animals and the disregard for the lives that are abused in animal agriculture. This however is not very helpful; for one, most people are hypocrites to one degree or another. Even committed vegans may have to eliminate pests in the house in less than ideal ways. More significantly, such dismissals fail to recognize how the human mind works. The claim of compassion here is not false except it comes with an implicit assumption that it applies to a narrow category of animals.
At the same time, there are plenty of examples where compassion and some reflection has led people on the vegan path. But it is equally true that there are people for whom it wasn’t extra compassion but rather ethical principles and moral consistency that guided them towards consideration of all animals and go vegan.
It is difficult to believe that one needs greater compassion than what is typically found in the average person to find cruelty of animal agriculture to be abhorrent.
In other words, although compassion may play a role in getting people to go vegan, an above average level is neither necessary nor sufficient in the general case.
Is there a problem in emphasis on compassion?
Besides the uncertainty in effectiveness of appealing to compassion as the primary approach to advocate on behalf of animal welfare, there are other issues to consider here as well. Compassion is an emotional trigger that is effective when the victim is clearly front and center. And this is why people are appalled by wanton cruelty towards animals, evidence for which can be seen by reactions online to such recordings (I want to emphasize that even here, it is not universal; there is a sizable number of people who remain indifferent to it altogether).
However, in the complex interdependent world where animal exploitation towards human use is so deeply embedded in the systems that we are a part of, the victim may not be so clearly visible. While there is a direct relation to the animal when eating a piece of chicken for example, there is a layer of separation when using dairy products, and even more when it comes to products that are tested on animals or plant produce where animals are used in one form or another. Here compassion may not be evoked as easily and we need reason to guide us towards the ethical choice. Furthermore, given the entrenched nature of animal exploitation in society, we need to think strategically about ways to reduce suffering and that requires going beyond having a compassionate outlook.
In fact, the vegan community has often ended up getting fixated on personal purity and first-order veganism (avoid products where animals are involved directly but be far more lenient when it comes to the second-order impacts). This happens at the cost of pursuing strategies that reduce overall animal suffering because encouraging reduction, as opposed to elimination, in consumption or working with the industry towards improving welfare of animals is deemed antithetical to the principle of veganism. Most abolitionists believe that any compromise that does not guarantee complete liberation of animals is betrayal of veganism. This is wrong-headed and ignores how change happens in society. Undoubtedly a certain fixation on understanding the world through the lens of compassion has a role to play here.
Role of compassion in other social problems
We should also recognize that we don’t urge compassion when we wish to eliminate social ills such as patriarchy or racism. We don’t ask would-be perpetrators of sexual assault or hate crime to be compassionate to their victims. That would be perverse. More pointedly, campaigns to raise awareness around these issues don’t emphasize compassion to get the public to be more engaged with the issue. It is framed as a matter of rights or rule of law and it is assumed that people have sufficient compassion to regard sexual violation as unethical.
In fact, compassion may lead to less than ideal preferences when it comes to how we respond to catastrophic events or warfare. There is the all-too-familiar pattern where an individual tragedy, preferably one getting considerable media coverage focused on the human element, draws disproportionate attention from viewers as opposed to humanitarian disasters that affect thousands or hundreds of thousands. Clearly compassion operates not in proportion to the scale of human suffering but rather based on specific emotional triggers that seem stronger when confronted with narratives involving individual victims than faceless multitudes. Our brains are wired towards compassionate responses where there is a greater immediacy: the individuals are present in our lives or in our environment, we can relate to them, and our responses have a positive impact that is tangible to us. The mechanism gets completely overwhelmed and possibly even shut down when there is widespread misery around where we seem powerless and our actions seem to make little difference. Paradoxically, we do less in those cases even though rationally speaking, the need for assistance is much greater.
This is undoubtedly a problem when we rely upon compassion to help us make the right choice. The response it induces does not track the magnitude of suffering or the number of lives that are at risk. It is driven by several factors that have evolved over the years that does not equip it to make the ethical choice during a tragedy.
Compassion as an obsolete relic of our evolution?
It may be tempting therefore to argue the exact opposite: ignore compassion altogether and use a cold calculus of objective benefits from various options to determine the right course of action. Indeed much of the effective altruism movement is an effort to do that. And it may be argued that given the almost incomprehensible level of non-human animal suffering in the world (70 billion land animals slaughtered each year, the number in trillions for fish/marine life), maybe we should entirely ignore the decidedly unreliable compassionate drive and just determine the amount of lives/suffering saved per dollar/unit of resource.
I don’t think that is correct either. And the reason for that lies in the fact that compassion plays an important role in our original interest in making a change for the better. At the heart of every ethical choice lies the desire to limit suffering in some way. While compassion may skew where we devote our energies to in less than defensible ways, a complete absence of it would lead us to be utterly indifferent to the plight of any and all suffering.
If compassion is removed entirely from consideration, then the ethical pursuit may feel empty and pointless. Compassion is the original driver for thinking about welfare of animals and eliminating it would be akin to ignoring the importance of education once we get busy building schools.
At the same time, we need to remember that compassion cannot be the only criterion for determining the best path to pursue.
And this contradiction lies at the heart of issues where one is tempted to help out people or animals in our vicinity even though we know that it is not the most cost/resource effective. A sensible advice in such situations is to split resources/donation so that there is the contribution to something that is likely very effective but removed from our surroundings while also providing relief to a cause closer to home where one can draw satisfaction from.
In the more broader sense, what we need then is not really greater compassion but rather thinking through what our compassion entails on a larger scale and some measure of consistency of our behavior.
We are imperfect beings, and each of us has a different take on the world, but it is unlikely that just asking people to become more compassionate as opposed to rethink their relationship with animals they consume is going to lead to the desired change.