Well, except for the significant carbon costs of all the forests we cut down to make way for farming many of them. And to grow the food required to feed them. And the methane they emit if they’re ruminants.
These are consequentialist arguments for eating less meat, similar to arguments for flying less, switching to solar energy etc. They don't add up to a case for strict veganism.
I don’t think I implied that animal products were costless.
‘Cutting down forests’ seems a weak argument - most crops require tree clearing, and animals often graze on country that is unsuitable for crops.
I will confess a bias towards protein production rather than calories. A lot of crops look good from a calorie perspective, but less efficient as a source or protein.
On that basis, I’m much more confused by vegans as opposed to vegetarians. Eggs seem like an excellent source of protein if you’re disinclined to kill animals or worried about methane in, say, beef cattle.
Apologies if I misinterpreted your claim; I was trying to take it at face value.
Globally, the amount of forest clearing for meat production, either directly or indirectly (i.e. clearing for crops used to feed animals) is a significant contributor to global warming (apologies, I don’t have figures to hand). And a largely unnecessary one from a nutritional perspective. I’m not really sure what part of the argument you think is weak, but the fact that crops require clearing is part of the argument, and doesn’t do much to undercut it. You’d need to cut down much less forest if people are much less meat.
Agree re eggs. Indeed, I believe chicken is also relatively energy efficient as a nutrition source.
As noted in my response to JQ above, I’m not arguing for veganism, just that a lot of meat consumptions is (indirectly) ethically problematic if you care about climate change. As JQ notes, there are a bunch of other things that are similarly problematic, and each of us has to make our own choices about what lines we draw.
> I don’t accept that there is anything inherently wrong with killing animals for food.
> Animals raised for food live longer and, with humane farming practices, happier, lives than they would in the wild.
There's a logical step in between these two statements. Vegans have issue with the raising of animals, and, separately, with killing animals.
I think you're sidestepping the question though, you're saying 'its fine to eat meat', but not 'I should eat this cow even though I have access to enough nutrition from other sources, because I think it tastes better'. The moral calculus is different in the latter.
Basing an argument on how the animals we have bred specifically as a food source would fare in the wild doesn't make any sense. If we had some other source of high-quality appealing protein, cows, pigs, chickens etc. would go the way of draft horses 100 years ago. They would not be turned out of the fields and farms to make their way in the world.
I'm not entirely sure most avid meat eaters would be willing to do the work necessary to put that meat on their table. A recent story pointed out that 12% of the people in the USA eat 50% of the meat consumed[1]: are they necessarily better nourished or stronger than the remaining 88%?
There are plenty of sources of high-quality protein that don't require animals to be killed and eaten: people should just admit they prefer meat and accept that hiring someone to kill animals for them is part of their moral calculus.
To clarify, I should have said that humanely treated farm animals have better lives than their wild counterparts: well fed, protected from predators and so on.
I'm getting a strong "you know, the Africans who were brought to the Americas lived better lives, learned skills, etc, than the ones who remained" vibe here. I find the idea that we can compare the lives of what ancient ancestor of today's livestock with that of an animal bred for industrial food production hard to take seriously. We are tiptoeing past the idea of killing for pleasure as if there is no alternative, especially as very few people would be willing take part in the process that delivers cellophane-wrapped cow slices to their local supermarket.
Obviously, I disagree with this part of your argument though the presentism piece I find agreeable. I wonder how people of the future will view our industrial food system and our defenses of it, in light of other ways of feeding ourselves that might also have been more equitable to humans, not just to the animals under discussion.
I've made this point to vegans many times. I live on a bush block with a sheep farm literally across the road from me. The sheep across the road suffer far less than the kangaroos, echidnas, sugar gliders and so on that are abundant on my property. As an example, the echidnas are nearly all covered in big fat ticks, which isn't the case with my neighbour's sheep.
The framing here is that we should approach the past like the present with Dumbledore’s moral sorting hat that divides actions and actors into good, bad, or indifferent. That’s not right, as we cannot affect the past whatever we do or think. Practical morality is about the future, which we can change. In a sense the present is an infinitely thin dividing line, and all perception lies in the past, but we reasonably expect that most of our contemporaries will still be around tomorrow, so that practical action has to be based on judgements about a loose present.
I suggest that the moral challenge of the past is less about judgement and more about empathy and reflective equilibrium. JQ puts 1600 AD as a limit to retrospective judgement. But think about the founding tragedy of Western theatre, Aeschylus’ Oresteia, set in the Bronze Age Greece of Homer. One of the key McGuffins of the action is the warlord Agamemnon's past sacrifice of his daughter Iphigenia to secure safe passage of the Greek fleet to Troy. In revenge, his wife Clytemnaestra ceremonially murders him when he returns in triumph from the war. This creates an appalling dilemma for their son Orestes: he must avenge his father, but this means killing his mother.
The dilemma assumes an honour code that is entirely plausible historically in its setting of Bronze Age warlords, but is very remote from us. More to the point, it was remote to Aeschylus’ audience and actors in urban Athens half a millennium later. Nevertheless, he makes it all work. The trilogy won the festival prize, so we know it worked then: and it still does. Playgoers are moved by Orestes’ dilemma, or Hamlet’s, without sharing its premises. We can even join the old Athenians in the great catharsis of the final trial and procession, in which the warlord honour code is replaced by the rule of law – not a Pollyanna one, the Furies are tamed and given their own shrine, not banished.
Curiously, in one respect we are closer to Homeric warlords than classical Athenians: on the status of women. In 5th-century Athens, they lived practically in purdah, or as lower-class menials, and were excluded from the public sphere, even acting. But in the Bronze Age Greece presented to us by its literature, very plausibly from what we know of more recent societies of the same general type like the feudal France of the troubadours, upper-class women are protagonists. As in our own society, they are not equal to men but far from absent. Clytemnaestra first appears as the conscientious and competent regent of Argos, carrying out a required sacrifice before dawn. Cassandra arrives as a pitiable captive of Agamemnon's, a piece of war booty and sex object. At the same time she is a princess of Troy and prophet – fated not to be heard at the time, but immortalised i memory.
The deepest problem of ethics is that we share the world not only with bad people who break a shared code, but with people who have a different one. Art and history are the two main ways we can develop empathy and learn to coxeist with difference (headscarves), or maybe fight it (slavery).
I have livestock, and they live far closer to their potential, and seem to be far happier, than anyone working seventy hours a week in a Foxconn factory.
Making meat available only in live form would reduce overall demand but I doubt that would reduce cruel practices. I think that, a lot like with renewables vs fossil fuels, the "solution" will be meat alternatives. They have to be convenient and low(er) cost and possibly include some pigovian incentives but people will have the option to choose.
Like with fossil fuels our LaborLiberalNational party governments don't really want to DO anything about cruel farm practices and unlike the science on climate the arguments for veganism are not as compelling or as widely supported; they feel no real public pressure on this.
Having Vegans making exaggerated claims, eg animal agriculture is the primary cause of global warming and veganism the solution, may not be helping - but, like with climate - having the focus on extremists who exaggerate or lie or inconvenience people, even if they are not representative (or because those who are are more reasonable and less objectionable) is about making the issue about opposing extremists and not about addressing the actual issue.
Using what activists get or do wrong to justify rejecting everything the science based advice gets right makes mobilising opposition easier.
Of course with the climate issue large parts of MSM are active partisan politickers and it is not just easy to oppose veganism, it is politically advantageous.
Since we can't time travel, our judgment of people in the past doesn't affect them. There's no justice to be had, nor can we change the past. So when someone criticizes Jefferson for enslaving people, they are mainly just upholding their current moral stance against slavery. When they hold back or limit that criticism, it's a form of empathy for someone with less moral luck than we have (we don't have to choose to free our slaves because we are not born aristocrats in a slaveowning society). Doesn't make TJ's choice moral by the standards of people alive today to make the judgment, but it does recognize that society has a very thick and complex impact on individual choices, and people are never fully free and independent of their social environments.
I think the idea of venerating people is usually useless and often harmful, but it is a very natural human thing to do, and if people want to admire the Declaration of Independence but find it difficult because it's author made morally repugnant decisions, it is understandable that they would want to analyze TJ on the basis of how he changed history more than how he followed the conventions of his time and class.
You ignore the inherent ethical concerns of killing sentient beings. The analogy to historical contexts is flawed; societal consensus doesn't negate moral responsibility.
I am vegan, more or less. The reasons are partly about animal cruelty, although I take your point and being a food source is an excellent way to avoid extinction and pass on genes.
Strict veganism also has inherent hypocrisy. Don't eat honey because it abuses bees, but fine to abuse them much worse in pollinating crops.
My main reason for becoming vegan(ish) was the impact and inefficiency of animal farming on the environment.
Since the vast majority of humans aren’t immortal, and quite a few are only interested in pleasure and suffering, it’s not clear that you are saying enough to differentiate humanity from the rest of the animal kingdom.
You know, I was going to do a seminar on bioethics, but it turns out, all I had to do was read a paragraph on a blog to be 100% correct. However, I spent my teenage years living on a farm tending goats and sheep. I gained the impression that, on the whole, they preferred that I not eat them. So I thought I’d go with that.
Unless they are immortal goats and sheep, they died anyway and quite likely after ten times more suffering than if they had been quickly killed for human consumption at a youngish age.
This version of presentism seems to have the role of enabling a division of people into "the good ones" and "the bad ones" (the "sorting hat" as James Wimberley says), something that is not generally useful to apply to anyone, alive or dead. Such a judgement's main use is to determine if a person deserves to be commemorated with some sort of solid object, or via lending their name to some solid object. But really, we can observe the good and bad things people have done, and leave it at that.
Another common kind of presentism is to reject advances of the past, because they were only partial advances by today's standards: the U.S. constitution was worthless, because only white men with property could vote. Removing the property restriction was worthless, because only white men could vote. Removing the race restriction was worthless, because only men could vote. Etc. This form of presentism is also without much merit.
This is true of all moral judgements, whether of people or actions, and whether they are past, present or future. So why not just say that moral judgements are useless and without merit?
What is true of all moral judgements? That they enable sorting people into "the good ones" and "the bad ones"? Most people have done both good and bad things, and generally there isn't any reason to put them on a scale to decide if, on the whole, they are good or bad people. About the only reason that such an overall judgement might be needed for, e.g., Jefferson or Chief Seattle, is to decide whether it's appropriate to name something after them. Otherwise, we can just see that they did some good things (the Declaration of Independence, advocating for land rights), and some bad things (slave ownership). I don't see any other reason for such an overall judgement. Nor should we decide that the good things someone has done are tainted by the unrelated bad things they've done.
Such summary acceptance or rejection of historical figures is similar to the common practice, these days, of deciding that some commentator is "a bad one", and therefore, that everything they say should be disagreed with. But that can lead to rejecting things due to tribalism that we should support on the merits.
As you say, most people have done both good and bad things, and that is true both now and in the past. But critics who deploy the term "presentism" want to deny this in relation to, for example, slavery and war. They want to say that participating in slavery or starting wars wasn't bad in the past, because it was widely accepted (even though, as I pointed out in the OP, there were plenty of opponents).
Presentism is an interesting concept. Certainly, slavers, misogynists, etc. should not be judged favourably for being those things. However if they achieved great things in the context of their times, when these were accepted practices, can we not carve out the acceptable parts of their legacy?
Churchill was a white supremacist and an imperialist. Yet he stood up to Hitler.
Some possibly are so bad that we cannot (Hitler was vegetarian and kind to animals – but that hardly cancels out the other seriously bad stuff he did): but should we be absolutist? There must bar edge cases that can be argued either way.
The claim is that it is permissible to eat another species because it has no sense of purpose (amongst other things). But justifying exploiting another species (or race?) in terms of a dimension of experience that is meaningless to it (or we assume is meaningless) is a dubious argument. Supposing an alien race landed on Earth and commenced farming humans. Their philosophers could justify it by saying that humans have better lives being farmed for food, and in any case they have no sense of kadishtu, so clearly their lives aren’t important. We wouldn’t accept that as a justification, because we have no idea what kadishtu refers to or why it is important. Aside from that, it isn’t even clear why a sense of purpose in itself makes an existence more justifiable. Some individuals’ purposes are deemed by some to make their existence less justifiable.
There is of course an obverse to this - those who oppose the concept of animal rights often do so in terms of the argument stated above - rights are a human concept, so it is wrong to apply the concept to animals. Our treatment of animals should be therefore only governed be utilitarian considerations. Leaving aside the fact that animals have also never heard of Utilitarianism, we do apply the concept of rights to entities with no conception of them. Some think the unborn have rights. Regardless of whether you agree, it isn’t obviously nonsensical to make that claim. Individuals who are severely mentally retarded are generally assumed to have rights.
Veganism is explicitly a moral stance. Vegans do not wear animal products, for example. Some people may eat a plant-based diet, but that is not the same as veganism.
Thanks for the clarification, although the Wiki might disagree (see for example 'environmental veganism' and'ethical veganism' as counterexamples in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veganism)
I think your argument for presentism is spot on, and your argument against ethical veganism is solid. But a lot of vegans today aren’t devoted ethical vegans in that way (I lean vegan and I’m not opposed to hunting in most circumstances, for example), and I don’t think the claim that future people will judge us for our meat consumption relies on it. It’s more that actual existing animal agriculture is unbelievably horrible, and people know about it, and eat meat anyway. Judging people for that might be unfair in the way that any moral judgement of a distant person can be, but the ideal question of ethical veganism doesn’t really factor.
Separately from that, I suspect that future people will end up mostly being ethical vegans if we get sufficiently good meat alternatives that they become the standard for 80+ years, but that will be a cheap belief at that point and not really relevant here either.
In my opinion, your view on eating meat is 100% correct.
Animals should be treated well, and killed humanely. But there’s nothing wrong with eating them.
Well, except for the significant carbon costs of all the forests we cut down to make way for farming many of them. And to grow the food required to feed them. And the methane they emit if they’re ruminants.
These are consequentialist arguments for eating less meat, similar to arguments for flying less, switching to solar energy etc. They don't add up to a case for strict veganism.
Agree. I was just responding to Greg’s ‘there’s nothing wrong with eating them’ claim, which struck me as overly strong.
I don’t think I implied that animal products were costless.
‘Cutting down forests’ seems a weak argument - most crops require tree clearing, and animals often graze on country that is unsuitable for crops.
I will confess a bias towards protein production rather than calories. A lot of crops look good from a calorie perspective, but less efficient as a source or protein.
On that basis, I’m much more confused by vegans as opposed to vegetarians. Eggs seem like an excellent source of protein if you’re disinclined to kill animals or worried about methane in, say, beef cattle.
Apologies if I misinterpreted your claim; I was trying to take it at face value.
Globally, the amount of forest clearing for meat production, either directly or indirectly (i.e. clearing for crops used to feed animals) is a significant contributor to global warming (apologies, I don’t have figures to hand). And a largely unnecessary one from a nutritional perspective. I’m not really sure what part of the argument you think is weak, but the fact that crops require clearing is part of the argument, and doesn’t do much to undercut it. You’d need to cut down much less forest if people are much less meat.
Agree re eggs. Indeed, I believe chicken is also relatively energy efficient as a nutrition source.
As noted in my response to JQ above, I’m not arguing for veganism, just that a lot of meat consumptions is (indirectly) ethically problematic if you care about climate change. As JQ notes, there are a bunch of other things that are similarly problematic, and each of us has to make our own choices about what lines we draw.
No worries - fair points. And I was latching on to the narrowest possible interpretation of John’s post 🙂.
> I don’t accept that there is anything inherently wrong with killing animals for food.
> Animals raised for food live longer and, with humane farming practices, happier, lives than they would in the wild.
There's a logical step in between these two statements. Vegans have issue with the raising of animals, and, separately, with killing animals.
I think you're sidestepping the question though, you're saying 'its fine to eat meat', but not 'I should eat this cow even though I have access to enough nutrition from other sources, because I think it tastes better'. The moral calculus is different in the latter.
Basing an argument on how the animals we have bred specifically as a food source would fare in the wild doesn't make any sense. If we had some other source of high-quality appealing protein, cows, pigs, chickens etc. would go the way of draft horses 100 years ago. They would not be turned out of the fields and farms to make their way in the world.
I'm not entirely sure most avid meat eaters would be willing to do the work necessary to put that meat on their table. A recent story pointed out that 12% of the people in the USA eat 50% of the meat consumed[1]: are they necessarily better nourished or stronger than the remaining 88%?
There are plenty of sources of high-quality protein that don't require animals to be killed and eaten: people should just admit they prefer meat and accept that hiring someone to kill animals for them is part of their moral calculus.
1. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/oct/20/beef-usda-climate-crisis-meat-consumption
To clarify, I should have said that humanely treated farm animals have better lives than their wild counterparts: well fed, protected from predators and so on.
I'm getting a strong "you know, the Africans who were brought to the Americas lived better lives, learned skills, etc, than the ones who remained" vibe here. I find the idea that we can compare the lives of what ancient ancestor of today's livestock with that of an animal bred for industrial food production hard to take seriously. We are tiptoeing past the idea of killing for pleasure as if there is no alternative, especially as very few people would be willing take part in the process that delivers cellophane-wrapped cow slices to their local supermarket.
Obviously, I disagree with this part of your argument though the presentism piece I find agreeable. I wonder how people of the future will view our industrial food system and our defenses of it, in light of other ways of feeding ourselves that might also have been more equitable to humans, not just to the animals under discussion.
I've made this point to vegans many times. I live on a bush block with a sheep farm literally across the road from me. The sheep across the road suffer far less than the kangaroos, echidnas, sugar gliders and so on that are abundant on my property. As an example, the echidnas are nearly all covered in big fat ticks, which isn't the case with my neighbour's sheep.
The framing here is that we should approach the past like the present with Dumbledore’s moral sorting hat that divides actions and actors into good, bad, or indifferent. That’s not right, as we cannot affect the past whatever we do or think. Practical morality is about the future, which we can change. In a sense the present is an infinitely thin dividing line, and all perception lies in the past, but we reasonably expect that most of our contemporaries will still be around tomorrow, so that practical action has to be based on judgements about a loose present.
I suggest that the moral challenge of the past is less about judgement and more about empathy and reflective equilibrium. JQ puts 1600 AD as a limit to retrospective judgement. But think about the founding tragedy of Western theatre, Aeschylus’ Oresteia, set in the Bronze Age Greece of Homer. One of the key McGuffins of the action is the warlord Agamemnon's past sacrifice of his daughter Iphigenia to secure safe passage of the Greek fleet to Troy. In revenge, his wife Clytemnaestra ceremonially murders him when he returns in triumph from the war. This creates an appalling dilemma for their son Orestes: he must avenge his father, but this means killing his mother.
The dilemma assumes an honour code that is entirely plausible historically in its setting of Bronze Age warlords, but is very remote from us. More to the point, it was remote to Aeschylus’ audience and actors in urban Athens half a millennium later. Nevertheless, he makes it all work. The trilogy won the festival prize, so we know it worked then: and it still does. Playgoers are moved by Orestes’ dilemma, or Hamlet’s, without sharing its premises. We can even join the old Athenians in the great catharsis of the final trial and procession, in which the warlord honour code is replaced by the rule of law – not a Pollyanna one, the Furies are tamed and given their own shrine, not banished.
Curiously, in one respect we are closer to Homeric warlords than classical Athenians: on the status of women. In 5th-century Athens, they lived practically in purdah, or as lower-class menials, and were excluded from the public sphere, even acting. But in the Bronze Age Greece presented to us by its literature, very plausibly from what we know of more recent societies of the same general type like the feudal France of the troubadours, upper-class women are protagonists. As in our own society, they are not equal to men but far from absent. Clytemnaestra first appears as the conscientious and competent regent of Argos, carrying out a required sacrifice before dawn. Cassandra arrives as a pitiable captive of Agamemnon's, a piece of war booty and sex object. At the same time she is a princess of Troy and prophet – fated not to be heard at the time, but immortalised i memory.
The deepest problem of ethics is that we share the world not only with bad people who break a shared code, but with people who have a different one. Art and history are the two main ways we can develop empathy and learn to coxeist with difference (headscarves), or maybe fight it (slavery).
Cross-posted at jq.com.
I have livestock, and they live far closer to their potential, and seem to be far happier, than anyone working seventy hours a week in a Foxconn factory.
Making meat available only in live form would reduce overall demand but I doubt that would reduce cruel practices. I think that, a lot like with renewables vs fossil fuels, the "solution" will be meat alternatives. They have to be convenient and low(er) cost and possibly include some pigovian incentives but people will have the option to choose.
Like with fossil fuels our LaborLiberalNational party governments don't really want to DO anything about cruel farm practices and unlike the science on climate the arguments for veganism are not as compelling or as widely supported; they feel no real public pressure on this.
Having Vegans making exaggerated claims, eg animal agriculture is the primary cause of global warming and veganism the solution, may not be helping - but, like with climate - having the focus on extremists who exaggerate or lie or inconvenience people, even if they are not representative (or because those who are are more reasonable and less objectionable) is about making the issue about opposing extremists and not about addressing the actual issue.
Using what activists get or do wrong to justify rejecting everything the science based advice gets right makes mobilising opposition easier.
Of course with the climate issue large parts of MSM are active partisan politickers and it is not just easy to oppose veganism, it is politically advantageous.
Since we can't time travel, our judgment of people in the past doesn't affect them. There's no justice to be had, nor can we change the past. So when someone criticizes Jefferson for enslaving people, they are mainly just upholding their current moral stance against slavery. When they hold back or limit that criticism, it's a form of empathy for someone with less moral luck than we have (we don't have to choose to free our slaves because we are not born aristocrats in a slaveowning society). Doesn't make TJ's choice moral by the standards of people alive today to make the judgment, but it does recognize that society has a very thick and complex impact on individual choices, and people are never fully free and independent of their social environments.
I think the idea of venerating people is usually useless and often harmful, but it is a very natural human thing to do, and if people want to admire the Declaration of Independence but find it difficult because it's author made morally repugnant decisions, it is understandable that they would want to analyze TJ on the basis of how he changed history more than how he followed the conventions of his time and class.
You ignore the inherent ethical concerns of killing sentient beings. The analogy to historical contexts is flawed; societal consensus doesn't negate moral responsibility.
I am vegan, more or less. The reasons are partly about animal cruelty, although I take your point and being a food source is an excellent way to avoid extinction and pass on genes.
Strict veganism also has inherent hypocrisy. Don't eat honey because it abuses bees, but fine to abuse them much worse in pollinating crops.
My main reason for becoming vegan(ish) was the impact and inefficiency of animal farming on the environment.
I don't believe that non-human animals have an ethical interest in longevity- there only interest in pleasure and suffering.
Since the vast majority of humans aren’t immortal, and quite a few are only interested in pleasure and suffering, it’s not clear that you are saying enough to differentiate humanity from the rest of the animal kingdom.
I think it is very clear. A human can contemplate his/her impending death and suffer existential fear in a way that a beetle cannot.
*their
You know, I was going to do a seminar on bioethics, but it turns out, all I had to do was read a paragraph on a blog to be 100% correct. However, I spent my teenage years living on a farm tending goats and sheep. I gained the impression that, on the whole, they preferred that I not eat them. So I thought I’d go with that.
Unless they are immortal goats and sheep, they died anyway and quite likely after ten times more suffering than if they had been quickly killed for human consumption at a youngish age.
This version of presentism seems to have the role of enabling a division of people into "the good ones" and "the bad ones" (the "sorting hat" as James Wimberley says), something that is not generally useful to apply to anyone, alive or dead. Such a judgement's main use is to determine if a person deserves to be commemorated with some sort of solid object, or via lending their name to some solid object. But really, we can observe the good and bad things people have done, and leave it at that.
Another common kind of presentism is to reject advances of the past, because they were only partial advances by today's standards: the U.S. constitution was worthless, because only white men with property could vote. Removing the property restriction was worthless, because only white men could vote. Removing the race restriction was worthless, because only men could vote. Etc. This form of presentism is also without much merit.
This is true of all moral judgements, whether of people or actions, and whether they are past, present or future. So why not just say that moral judgements are useless and without merit?
What is true of all moral judgements? That they enable sorting people into "the good ones" and "the bad ones"? Most people have done both good and bad things, and generally there isn't any reason to put them on a scale to decide if, on the whole, they are good or bad people. About the only reason that such an overall judgement might be needed for, e.g., Jefferson or Chief Seattle, is to decide whether it's appropriate to name something after them. Otherwise, we can just see that they did some good things (the Declaration of Independence, advocating for land rights), and some bad things (slave ownership). I don't see any other reason for such an overall judgement. Nor should we decide that the good things someone has done are tainted by the unrelated bad things they've done.
Such summary acceptance or rejection of historical figures is similar to the common practice, these days, of deciding that some commentator is "a bad one", and therefore, that everything they say should be disagreed with. But that can lead to rejecting things due to tribalism that we should support on the merits.
As you say, most people have done both good and bad things, and that is true both now and in the past. But critics who deploy the term "presentism" want to deny this in relation to, for example, slavery and war. They want to say that participating in slavery or starting wars wasn't bad in the past, because it was widely accepted (even though, as I pointed out in the OP, there were plenty of opponents).
Presentism is an interesting concept. Certainly, slavers, misogynists, etc. should not be judged favourably for being those things. However if they achieved great things in the context of their times, when these were accepted practices, can we not carve out the acceptable parts of their legacy?
Churchill was a white supremacist and an imperialist. Yet he stood up to Hitler.
Some possibly are so bad that we cannot (Hitler was vegetarian and kind to animals – but that hardly cancels out the other seriously bad stuff he did): but should we be absolutist? There must bar edge cases that can be argued either way.
Seriously spicy footnote 2 LOL
The claim is that it is permissible to eat another species because it has no sense of purpose (amongst other things). But justifying exploiting another species (or race?) in terms of a dimension of experience that is meaningless to it (or we assume is meaningless) is a dubious argument. Supposing an alien race landed on Earth and commenced farming humans. Their philosophers could justify it by saying that humans have better lives being farmed for food, and in any case they have no sense of kadishtu, so clearly their lives aren’t important. We wouldn’t accept that as a justification, because we have no idea what kadishtu refers to or why it is important. Aside from that, it isn’t even clear why a sense of purpose in itself makes an existence more justifiable. Some individuals’ purposes are deemed by some to make their existence less justifiable.
There is of course an obverse to this - those who oppose the concept of animal rights often do so in terms of the argument stated above - rights are a human concept, so it is wrong to apply the concept to animals. Our treatment of animals should be therefore only governed be utilitarian considerations. Leaving aside the fact that animals have also never heard of Utilitarianism, we do apply the concept of rights to entities with no conception of them. Some think the unborn have rights. Regardless of whether you agree, it isn’t obviously nonsensical to make that claim. Individuals who are severely mentally retarded are generally assumed to have rights.
Not all vegans, of course. Some people are vegans for health reasons, which may have nothing to do with how humans treat, kill and eat animals.
Veganism is explicitly a moral stance. Vegans do not wear animal products, for example. Some people may eat a plant-based diet, but that is not the same as veganism.
Thanks for the clarification, although the Wiki might disagree (see for example 'environmental veganism' and'ethical veganism' as counterexamples in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veganism)
I think your argument for presentism is spot on, and your argument against ethical veganism is solid. But a lot of vegans today aren’t devoted ethical vegans in that way (I lean vegan and I’m not opposed to hunting in most circumstances, for example), and I don’t think the claim that future people will judge us for our meat consumption relies on it. It’s more that actual existing animal agriculture is unbelievably horrible, and people know about it, and eat meat anyway. Judging people for that might be unfair in the way that any moral judgement of a distant person can be, but the ideal question of ethical veganism doesn’t really factor.
Separately from that, I suspect that future people will end up mostly being ethical vegans if we get sufficiently good meat alternatives that they become the standard for 80+ years, but that will be a cheap belief at that point and not really relevant here either.