Dumb arguments Against Veganism

Drew Schorno is wrong and bad

Today at Inkhaven, Drew Schorno writes Against Veganism, subtitled: Picking fights for fun 𐫱

Ok.

Because Drew is a corruptible bootlicker who has accepted sponsorship funding from Big Wordpress.com, he was instructed to “not be mean”. I am under no such obligations.

Apologies if my thoughts are half baked and don’t make any sense, but they are at least my own.

Yeah Drew, it shows.

It’s clear what’s going on here. Drew likes eating meat. That’s a normal and fine thing, and we shouldn’t shame people for it. But what is shameful is trying to retrofit your philosophy instead of just saying that being a vegetarian is hard and you don’t want to do it.

Poor Drew tells the story of his mean highschool girlfriend who bullied him into being a vegetarian for a whole “few months.” He now has “philosophical objections”.

Philosophical Objection 1: Veganism is more preoccupied with projecting moral purity than with achieving its own stated goals.

Damn Drew, looks like a slam dunk for you. Some vegans definitely do this. I’m sure you’ll stick the landing.

He argues that in capitalism we have markets (a genius observation). If you don’t want chickens to be hurt, then you should buy eggs from people who treat their chickens well. So far, so good. But then he says it’s actually better to buy high-welfare eggs than to not buy them at all. If you buy high welfare, you’ll drag the whole industry with you and it’s way better (because that’s how Drew thinks commodity products work)! And if you don’t buy eggs at all, the market will make spooky weird chemical foods instead.

I was so confused reading this. Yes this is exactly what we want the market to do. We want to replace torture foods with torture-free alternatives and make them better over time, but because you’re scared by instagram influencers you’re worried about weird chemicals and that it’s somehow a dead end? You literally hand-fill pyruvite and gelatine into capsules, take desiccated bovine thyroid extract, and inject yourself with peptides from the dark web. But ok you’re scared of JUST Egg.

And yeah Drew, I’m sure you’re really only eating high welfare eggs that you personally validate come from chicken heaven. (lol but actually if you’re doing this, please keep doing this)

Philosophical Objection 2: Prioritizing animals over plants is arbitrary

Jesus Christ.

Look, even if you’ve done the acrobatics to get yourself to think this, you know vegans kill less plants than you, right?

Sorry let me dumb this down. Me and you, Drew, we’re animals 🐒. We need to eat things to grow💪big and strong. But we also poop 🙈 and use up energy. So actually there are waaay more calories that we need to consume than is in our flesh. When we farm animals 🐄 🐥 we need to feed them too so they can grow! So we feed them plants 🌱🌱. Lots and lots of plants where the energy mostly goes to waste. Oh no 🚨 The poor suffering plants 😭!!!! Luckily vegans eat the plants directly 😋 so they actually eat less of them.

Also no the Jains don’t agree with your insane take. I know some stuff about Jainism, and literally their whole thing is to not cause harm to life that suffers. They follow a heuristic to consider what is sentient based on the number of senses they have. So plants are way down the hierarchy. Jains are open to their moral worth, but it’s far from arbitrary, they care about animals and their suffering way more.

Philosophical Objection 3: The logic of Veganism is antinatalist, and if you follow it to the end of its conclusions it promotes the extinguishing of all life.

Time to dust off the old math degrees. Ok so less of something and 0 of something are actually different concepts. I know it’s confusing, because they’re in the same direction. But trust me on this.

But, like, do you really think this? Have you engaged with reality? Are you curious at all about what happens on factory farms? It’s the modern day, you can just get this information now. There’s so many videos out there, they’ve got it in VR goggles and stuff now. You can even ask your AI chatbot, they’re pretty clued in.

It’s not antinatalist to look at the situation and say “you know what, maybe that overgrown chicken with the beak and claws chopped off whose legs have broken under its own weight, maybe we wanna not bring those into the world anymore.” Like yeah, we want less of them. Way less of them. But that’s insane to say that vegans are advocating for the end of all life because any suffering exists. Actually, having pet chickens is pretty rad. There’s a whole subreddit for it.

Philosophical Objection 4: You are not exempt from the sins of society as a whole

Ugh.

Oh look at me, I’m Drew. Nobody is responsible for anything because society exists. It’s actually mean to expect people to have morals, especially poor people. Society and the market will figure it all out without individuals doing anything different. The technology will come. Everything will just sort of happen. And until then, because it’s so hard and tough for other people with less means to do things, I don’t gotta either.

Drew’s Conclusion

Sharing food is one of the oldest human bonding rituals and rigid dietary restrictions make that hard to do. Eating together with people is good, and I feel like we should be trying to do it more.

Waaah waah waaah my mean friends won’t want to eat lunch with me so I’m actually philosophically in the right. Grow up.