The Vegan Police – Do We Need These People
The issue of who is vegan enough and who isn’t comes up on our blog and Facebook time a lot. Sometimes it’s justified and sometimes it isn’t. I think it’s important for vegans to know the difference.
It really annoys me when people bash vegans for eating ‘unhealthy’ vegan food. I see this all of the time. Well, guess what? Veganism means not harming animals, it’s not a health food movement. We should only be concerned that humans are not killing or harming animals for food. If a vegan wants to eat a pack of Oreos every day I don’t care.
I came across the article below and thought it summed up a lot of my thoughts on this subject very well. You see there really is a time for the vegan police to step in and call someone out on their antics. Other times, not so much.
Guest Post by Alan O’Reilly
Since the use of animal products in all manner of both common and obscure items is endemic, it is impossible to be a “perfect” vegan. In fact, even in a completely vegan world we could not avoid causing some indirect or inadvertent harm, despite our best efforts.
Enter the “nirvana fallacy”, which is the fallacy of comparing actual things with unrealistic, idealized alternatives, and it is a favourite justification for not being vegan; since veganism cannot be perfect, there is no point in being vegan at all, they trumpet. Now we may expect this kind of nonsense from nonvegans, but recently there seems to be an increasing number of people identifying as vegan using this particular fallacy to mitigate their occasional consumption of animal products.
This is usually included in a “confession”, presumably made to obtain moral absolution from their peers. These incidents are often referred to as “slip ups” but, regardless of the reason given for such a lapse, deliberate and knowing animal use is not “slipping up” in anything like the same sense as, say, missing the declaration of whey powder in the ingredients list of a packet of biscuits. It is certainly not vindicated by our inability to be “100% vegan”.
Continued on another site. You can read the rest of this guest article on ecorazzi by clicking here.
