When we aim to justify veganism, a crucial question is how to frame the arguments. A widespread and intuitively compelling strategy is to adjust the message so that it fits with the preexisting values of the interlocutor: Suppose you are speaking with someone who cares deeply about climate change. In that case, it seems reasonable to address the environmental costs of animal agriculture, such as greenhouse gas emissions, land use, or deforestation. Or take an interlocutor who is particularly concerned with their personal health. Here, one might focus on how diets high in animal products are linked to health problems such as cardiovascular disease, high blood pressure, or type 2 diabetes.
So, it seems plausible that vegan advocacy should pay attention to what people already value or hope for. I call this approach tailored advocacy, meaning that vegan advocacy focuses on climate arguments for climate-conscious audiences, health arguments for health-conscious audiences, arguments about the impact of animal agriculture on world hunger for people concerned with global poverty, and so on.
To start, it is important to realize that tailored advocacy will often exclude animal suffering. This is so because animal suffering is notoriously difficult to talk about and is less likely to resonate with the audience’s preexisting values. This is not to say that people do not value animal well-being. On the contrary, many, if not most, people care about animals and reject cruelty to animals. Yet many of these same people also consume animal products, thereby contributing great harm to animals. This behavior creates an unpleasant internal conflict between eating habits (say, enjoying a steak), and moral self-understanding (being opposed to animal suffering). Psychologists have described this phenomenon as meat-related cognitive dissonance. Because dissonance is very unpleasant to bear, we rely on several strategies for reducing the discomfort, for example by rationalizing meat consumption as normal, natural, necessary, and nice. These rationalizations are often strongly embedded in cultural practices and come to us almost automatically, often without conscious effort. While this allows people to continue their eating habits without the psychologically taxing experience of dissonance, it also means that they tend to shut out arguments about animal suffering.
This leaves us with a rather narrow audience that is receptive for arguments about animal suffering, namely, those who are already abstaining from animal products. Such people do not have to cope with meat-related cognitive dissonance and therefore have less of a reason to shut out arguments about animal suffering. But in these cases, vegan advocacy is also redundant, since there is little point in aiming to persuade those who are already vegan.
Given these considerations, it might be wiser to use arguments other than animal suffering. If someone is more open to climate-related arguments for veganism, why not focus on those? If a health message makes someone more willing to avoid animal products, why insist on the problem of animal suffering?
While intuitively plausible, this approach overlooks some significant moral problems. Advocacy shapes how animals are perceived, even when the focus is not on animals but on climate, health, or other benefits of veganism. In fact, it is precisely by omitting animals as relevant stakeholders that we come to perceive them as irrelevant. Put differently, if animal suffering is not central to the argument, it is likely not perceived to be an issue, either.
Consider environmental arguments for veganism. Animal agriculture contributes to climate change and other forms of environmental harm such as deforestation. Yet when veganism is presented primarily as a climate-friendly lifestyle, animal agriculture will appear to the audience mostly as an environmental problem. In that case, the reason to stop using animal products is primarily that doing so is better for the planet. Similarly for health-based arguments: Plant-based diets can have significant health benefits, from improved blood-sugar control to lower body weight. But if veganism is presented mainly in those terms, the reason to reduce meat or dairy consumption is largely that doing so is better for our health or fitness.
Of course, one might ask why this is problematic in the first place. If people stop eating meat, avoid dairy products, or otherwise reduce their consumption of animal products, does it really matter why they do so? Does it matter if they do it for the animals, the environment, health, or for some other reason? In short, isn’t the main point that they do it, not why they do it?
The answer is more complicated than it might seem. To be sure, in a sense it is correct: The main goal of vegan advocacy is indeed that people stop using animal products; doing so will benefit animals independently of the concrete motivation. But in the long run, the reasons for going vegan matter more than we might think. To start with, if animal consumption is only ever presented in terms of how it affects other goals, such as environmental or health benefits, this will shape our perception of animals as means rather than ends in themselves. This, in turn, is also problematic as it can make it more difficult to argue for proper legal protections: If animals are not considered as beings with morally relevant interests, it becomes difficult to justify why they should receive legal protection or personhood status.
Another problem is that if animals become protection-worthy primarily because of how animal agriculture affects climate change, human health, world hunger, or other concerns, then animals are left vulnerable to future harm. For example, if people become vegan because animal agriculture is bad for the climate, what happens if future technologies reduce those environmental costs? Suppose, for example, new technologies were developed that could significantly reduce methane emissions from cows. If environmental harm is the primary reason to avoid meat, that reason would lose much of its force.
Or take health arguments. If people avoid animal products mainly for health reasons, what happens if new medication removes or reduces relevant health risks? Diseases associated with meat- and dairy-heavy diets, such as high blood pressure or type 2 diabetes, can already be treated to some degree. It is therefore not unreasonable to imagine future medication or even preventive treatments that would make these concerns obsolete. If health is the main reason to avoid animal products, it might no longer motivate veganism if the respective health concerns could be resolved medically.
Another reason why tailored advocacy can be morally costly is that it can create a moral hierarchy between different animal species. For example, someone motivated to live vegan for environmental reasons might still make exceptions when using animal products is more environmentally friendly than using alternatives. This could, for instance, be the case with leather products, which are considered more environmentally friendly than synthetic materials. In such cases, the cows whose skin is used to produce leather become less protection-worthy in the mind of the environmentally motivated “vegan.” And indeed, this would be compatible with their value system, since the cow herself is not the focus of concern; the environment is, and using leather would be compatible with their environmental goals.
So, if tailoring the vegan message to audience values can have such serious consequences, what is to be done? After all, the alternative strategy of focusing on animal suffering also has crucial drawbacks, as it can trigger meat-related cognitive dissonance and, consequently, intuitive defensiveness in the interlocutors.
Unfortunately, I do not have a good answer as to which strategy is best. In the end, there might simply not be a perfect solution. Still, knowing about the potential moral costs of tailoring can help vegan advocates make better-informed decisions. Tailoring the message to the audience can be useful, and I am not suggesting that it should be avoided under all circumstances. But if vegan advocacy aims to reduce animal suffering in the long run, it should be careful not to make animals morally invisible in the process.
This blog entry is adapted from the article “Tailoring to the Audience? On the Potential Harms of Message Framing in Vegan Activism.” A talk on this topic is also available on YouTube.
Friderike Spang
Friderike Spang is a postdoctoral researcher at the Center for Environmental and Technology Ethics – Prague (CETE-P), at the Institute of Philosophy of the Czech Academy of Sciences. Her research focuses on the intersections between animal, environmental, and AI ethics, as well as political philosophy.
