blaineallenbrown submitted:
Lately, I’ve seen a lot of people reblogging this post. It bothers me how it seems to be intentionally missing the point the original poster is making that it’s not natural for humans to drink cow’s milk. I guess there’s a lot of unnatural things humans do and maybe that shouldn’t be the crux of an argument, but people aren’t even saying that. They’re just ignoring the argument.
Sometimes I will meet really liberal people who are very vocal about equal rights and they tell me, “I hope you’re not one of those vegans.” Even if you’re not ready to make the jump personally, isn’t it obvious that veganity is a natural logical progression from humanism and human rights?
Feel free to disagree, soycrates, and you don’t have to respond to any of this, but if you have thoughts on it I’d love to hear it.
The appeal to nature fallacy (or rhetorical tool, if you’d prefer) is one of the biggest problems in the area of argumentation and reasoning concerning veganism. Even if we accepted a standardized definition of what it means for something to “be natural”, there would still be a lot of natural things that can kill us. Poisonous plants. Hurricanes. Child birth.
But it’s doubly unreasonable to use an appeal to nature in a world where there is no authoritative and singular definition of what is “natural”. Is something natural when we’ve been doing it for a long time? Does that make abuse or slavery natural? Is something natural only when it is not made of chemicals? Doesn’t that mean nothing is natural (since everything is chemicals)?
The reason why I’m not upset with non-vegans addressing the “milk is not natural” argument with derision or mockery is because I tend to react the same way. I don’t care if you think milk is natural or unnatural - the better way to express why we shouldn’t consume dairy is to stick to less ambiguous facts, like “cow’s milk is not needed for the growth and development of the human body”, “cow’s milk is not the only, or best, source of dietary calcium”, and “the dairy industry is the leading support of the veal industry as well as supporting the slaughter and exploitation of dairy cows themselves”.
I don’t think animal rights is necessarily a “natural progression” from humanist beliefs, because many people can formulate the foundations for their humanism to be strictly anthropocentric. In essence, if your reason for supporting human rights is your belief that only the human species deserves moral consideration, there is nothing pushing you to consider the rights of other animals. But I also think if we question, examine, and expand upon our explanations for why we care about human rights, in the process we’ll commonly run into explanations which support the moral consideration of non-human animals as well, such as the capacity to experience pain or pleasure, and the ability to lead a self-motivated life.