are informed non-vegans bad people?
@AnonymousI think the answer to that is too complex to give a simple yes or no to. First off, just because someone is vegan, doesn’t make them a good person. There’s a lot of other factors to consider when attempting to gauge whether someone is a good or bad person. Too many factors, is it even possible? And really, who am I or anyone else to be a judge of that anyway?
Secondly, people are informed and continue to do terrible things all the time and the reasons for that can vary from (amongst other things) having shitty ethics, or a lack of willpower or simply not being as well informed as they think they are.
This is an important concept because in my experience, I’ve known a lot of people who have attempted to go vegan but have struggled and every single time I’ve noticed that they usually lack the knowledge that I am privileged enough to have. I know what happens in slaughterhouses and on dairy “farms”. I’ve watched the videos, I’ve read the statistics, I’ve read books and studies, I’ve witnessed this stuff in real life. To have seen and learned as much as most fully-fledged vegans have but to still not live vegan, then perhaps I’d be inclined to doubt one’s ethics, their morality, their “goodness”.
That being said, all it ever took for me as a child to not eat animals was to realise that the steak on my plate was once a cow. My mum never told me, but I figured it out. I liked cows, I knew the one of my plate was dead. I didn’t need to be taught that murder was bad to know it was bad. But I did need to be told that the meat on my plate was once a living creature. Once I learned that the liquid oozing out of my lamb chop wasn’t “juice”, but blood, I was horrified and just knew that it was wrong.
The fact that most people detach themselves from this is due to a combination of things; clever marketing, tradition, laziness. A lifetime of being told that something is wrong, is right - doesn’t make it right though. My mum had a plethora of excuses when I was growing up for why we ate what we did. And that’s still what I hear these days from omnivores, excuses. Or selfishness. Or uneducated “facts” like, “but we need dairy” or opinions like, “but animals are here for our use”.
There have been periods in my life where I ate and drank animal products- even though I knew what I was doing. Does this make me a bad person? Probably. I had no good reason for doing so and feel extreme guilt about it. I feel that I was being a bad person, just the same as I’d feel like a bad person if I intentionally contributed to another person or non-human animal’s suffering now. I did it because I wasn’t as educated as I am now but I still knew in my heart it was wrong.
In the end, I don’t feel like living a vegan life is a choice. It’s in tune with my ethics to do as little harm as possible in my time on earth. I don’t need to be taught and have extensive knowledge about the fact that murder or rape of humans is bad to know that it is bad, the same goes for the rape and murder of non-human animals. Sometimes it just takes people time to get their head around it. I mean, I still drive a car and I’d like not to for numerous ethical reasons but it’s taking me time to learn how to be self-sufficient without one. Does that make me a bad person even though I’m informed?
Or is being a “good person” in modern life like trying to blindly navigate a mine field? Fucked if I know. If I believed in god, I’d be happy to leave it in their hands to decide whether I’m good or bad but until a higher power makes themselves known I’m just trying to do the best I can.
And I expect that everyone else do the same.
