II. The Question(s) of Ethics
When people ask, or, more often, demand, to know why I became vegan, an
immediate (but ultimately inadequate) response would be “for ethical reasons.” I
can generally make myself understood to other people when I evoke ethics, but
because it is not the whole truth, it is not the response I like to give.
It is not the whole truth because
it dangerously grants vegans and vegetarians a kind of “purity” or moral
superiority over other people. In fact, this is a common theme amongst many
vegans and vegetarians, and it is difficult to think of anything more agitating
to me personally than when “fellow” vegans think that they know what is “right”
or “good” and that, therefore, everyone who doesn’t follow their practice is
“wrong” or “evil.” In this formulation, veganism/vegetarianism ceases to be an
ethical practice and becomes an ideology. This is a form of veganism that
deserves to be criticized. By saying this, I do not mean that the ethical
question should be dismissed, or that it is dismissible. But it is imperative
that vegans and vegetarians stop producing such dogmatic claims to absolute moral
truth.
For this reason, I want to begin
to unwork some of the more problematic assumptions embedded in ideological
veganism/vegetarianism. I would argue instead that ethical justifications for
veganism are often either misunderstood or, quite frankly, insipid—that they
can, and indeed do, work against the
political relevance of being vegan. Saying this may put me at odds with many
vegans, and it may seem patently absurd to meat-eaters. This is understandable.
However, I hope I offer a gift that “ethical vegans” may come to appreciate,
and, furthermore, something of a response to the perennial question of the
meat-eating reader—a response that will serve to generate critical thought rather than end it.
First, we must ask, What is “ethics”? In the previous
section, I noted that becoming vegan greatly increased my happiness. For this
reason, the decision could be considered “ethical,” if when we say “ethics” we use
Spinoza’s well-known definition of ethics as an induction into what constitutes
“happy life,” that is to say an intellectually flourishing life.
For Spinoza, to ask, What is an ethical life? is the same as
asking, What is a happy life? or, What does it mean for me to be happy? Thus,
Spinoza wrestled the practice of ethics from the starchy domains of morality
and philosophy and returned it to its proper place, praxis. Ethics is not dependent on the expectations placed upon the
subject by the various political or religious institutions or organizations to
which she belongs, or to which she is said to belong, or to which she is told
she must belong, or to which she is made to belong (though, realistically
speaking, this is not to say that the two are unrelated for most people). Ethics
pertains, simply enough, to happiness. Of course, this is not actually a
definition qua definition (that is,
in the final, conclusive sense of the word “definition”). Spinoza’s definition
simply adds a new density to the way we think ethics and, more importantly, the
way we do ethics, by focusing on the
question of happiness, which we are now invited to consider along with the
question of ethics.
But here we are also confronted
by the unique limitations of ethics as they are currently theorized in
modernity, especially in the analytic tradition of the English-speaking West. Any
given ethical problem, when broached in a university classroom or by armchair
ethicists, is practically required to present itself to us fundamentally as a
calculable, controllable choice between two (or more) actions. This is a way of
practicing ethics that I reject, because, to put it frankly, this brand of
ethics rejects me—it rejects my specificity as a spatiotemporally singular
being whose daily circumstances and interactions cannot be reduced to a formula;
it rejects me and you and, indeed, everyone as historical agents who live in a
dis-ordered world but are nevertheless called upon to make decisions (sometimes
invisible decisions) every day.
Jacques Derrida’s notion of undecidability is crucial, then, as it
relates, especially in his later writings, to the ethical question. An ethical
life cannot be reduced to a single, one-time choice between clear opposites,
but is in the form of a continuous choice, or, better yet, a continuous affirmation
or negation in the context of constantly shifting pressures and determinants. It
is therefore wrong to say that veganism is the termination or conclusion of
dietary ethics; it rather denotes a position
or, to put it less concretely (and therefore more truthfully), an embodied sensibility or ethical sensitivity
to the problematic of human-animal relation. Because happiness, like ethics,
cannot be a quantifiable operation, the ethical imperative is not to make the
correct decision based on pre-existing categories of “the good”; rather, the
ethical imperative is produced by the choices and circumstances that present
themselves to us.
