The Vegan Trolley Problem
Suppose you’re a vegan and an omnivore friend offers you a deal: they’ll cut their meat consumption in half if you start eating meat once a week. They want you to prove you’re not totally inflexible and that you don’t look down on them for eating meat. You’ve known this person for a long time and you can trust they’ll follow through. Given that they usually eat meat a couple times a day, this represents at least five meals worth of animal products compared to the one you’ll be adding. What do you do?
This is not just a thought experiment. What if being less than 100% vegan makes you more effective at persuading people to reduce or eliminate their meat consumption? If you were 99% vegan, which translates to about one non-vegan meal a month, would people be more willing to listen?1 There’s evidence that the answer is yes, people are more receptive to non-vegans about reducing their meat consumption. More research is needed, but there is a real possibility that we could save more animals by not being fully vegan.
The fact that people who eat meat might be better at saving animals than us should give us pause. We’re in the habit of treating veganism as the primary criteria for someone’s morality and respectability. Yet when we focus on veganism, we obscure the many shades of gray within omnivorous diets and the ground we can gain from working within that space. Someone who eats meat once a month and successfully advocates for other people to reduce their meat consumption gets thrown in the same bucket as someone who eats bacon for breakfast, ham sandwiches for lunch, and steak for dinner. Call me crazy, but I don’t think those two people should be regarded as the same.
If we zoom out even more, it becomes clear how arbitrary veganism is. We act like veganism is permanent, a reflection of someone’s enlightenment and virtue. Yet when we look to the past, present, or future, this permanence doesn’t hold up: most of us grew up eating meat; self-identifying vegetarians and vegans often eat animal products; and most people who are vegan now will no longer be in ten years time. There are very few people who will be 100% vegan for their whole lives. The truth is that we are all fractional vegans.
The Virtue of Growth
If we leave behind veganism as our standard for people, we may want another way to evaluate whether someone is committed to the cause. I propose growth. Are they reducing their meat consumption? Are they exploring animal advocacy and contributing their talents to the cause? If someone continues to improve, they will become a more valuable ally as time goes on, regardless of where they are in the present.
Growth is much more forgiving than a specific cutoff. It allows for the fact that we live in an environment that opposes veganism and that becoming vegan is a journey. Growth supports set backs and slip ups and all the difficult parts of being human. It’s a standard that can apply equally well no matter what situation someone is in or what background they come from. As long as someone keeps growing, they will eventually surpass someone who finds an arbitrary standard and holds to it.
It took me six years to complete the journey from vegetarian to vegan. During that period, I never stopped pushing to reduce my animal product consumption. I volunteered for The Humane League and fought for better living conditions for animals. What would have happened to me if I had not given myself the grace to take the time I needed to complete the journey? I’m not convinced I would have remained in the movement, but I will never know.
The grace I gave myself is the grace I hope to see reflected in our movement. Everyone is in a different position, making difficult choices. We are all trying to do what we can with what we have. If we can focus more on helping people along the journey and less on always making the right choice, we can build a movement where anyone can find a home and that’s what we will need to set the animals free.
Informed By
The Growth Mindset by Carol Dweck
Thanks to Beta Readers: Kim Evans
You could always lie about eating meat, but that’s another can of worms and could blow up in our faces if the lying ever comes out.
I love that note! I'm sure it does put people at ease. It reminds me of a friend I have who says she's 80% vegan, 15% vegetarian, and 5% polite who has lots of productive conversations with people about diet.
You can correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't feel there is a call to action for vegans to become non-vegans; rather, this can be taken as a call to action that vegans are approachable, kind, friendly, willing to mingle with everyone, and willing to talk to all people in good faith -- encouraging progress over perfection.
From a utilitarian calculus, and in isolation, the laid-out example makes sense and I also believe purity is not the metric to be optimized for. But I don't believe this example extends very far in practice -- I hypothesize that a personable vegan will most likely have a flexitarian influence on the people around them (assuming they are not disliked or they choose not to self-separate, which are both real risks). A strict flexitarian will have a weak flexitarian influence on the people around them. A weak flexitarian will likely have zero influence to no influence on the people around them (unless perhaps they're extremely articulate and morally passionate about speaking up about the issue -- which, genuinely, I don't think is very common). While I do believe in relatability being a way to exert influence, I also believe in moral examples and virtue helping lead the way for people.
It is definitely an interesting body of research, and totally invaluable!