What Is Ethical Veganism?

I think for a lot of people, the typical vegan is a bit of a mystery. They seem to operate on a different frequency, powered by kale and a level of willpower that feels frankly superhuman. We understand a "plant-based diet"—that’s about health, and health is a straightforward concept. But what about the person who sends back a soup because it was made with chicken stock? Or meticulously reads the label on a packet of sweets to check for gelatin? What is the philosophical operating system running in the background that leads a person to give up not just meat, but cheese, honey, and woolly jumpers?

It's a calm Wednesday afternoon here in Helsinki, a city that values quiet consideration and order. It feels like a stark contrast to the loud, passionate, and often messy world of ethical debates. So today, I want to respectfully wade into one of the messiest and most misunderstood of them all. I want to move past the stereotypes and investigate the core ideas. So, what is ethical veganism? It's not just a diet; it's a profound and challenging moral philosophy.

Beyond the Plate: It's Not Just About What You Eat

The first and most important thing I discovered in my investigation is that for an ethical vegan, the diet is just one piece of a much larger puzzle. It is the most visible expression of the philosophy, but it is not the philosophy itself.

This is the key difference between a "plant-based diet" and "ethical veganism":

• A plant-based diet is a description of what you eat. The motivation is often personal health. Someone on a plant-based diet might still wear a leather jacket or go to a zoo.

• Ethical veganism is a description of why you do what you do. The motivation is a moral stance against animal exploitation. This stance logically extends beyond the plate to all other areas of life.

The formal definition, coined by The Vegan Society way back in 1944, puts it perfectly. Veganism is "a philosophy and way of living which seeks to exclude—as far as is possible and practicable—all forms of exploitation of, and cruelty to, animals for food, clothing or any other purpose."

That is a huge and all-encompassing idea. It means an ethical vegan will also avoid:

• Clothing: Leather, wool, silk, fur, and down.

• Entertainment: Zoos, aquariums, horse racing, and circuses that use animals.

• Products: Cosmetics and household items that have been tested on animals or contain animal-derived ingredients like carmine (from crushed insects) or lanolin (from sheep's wool).

It’s an attempt to remove oneself from the systems of animal use as much as one possibly can. To understand why someone would commit to this, I realized I had to understand the big, challenging ideas that form its foundation.

The Philosophical Deep Dive: Meet the Big Ideas

When I started my research, I expected to find a lot of emotional arguments. Instead, I found a rich history of rigorous academic philosophy. It turns out, there are some very big brains behind this movement. The entire ethical framework seems to rest on a few powerful, and admittedly challenging, concepts.

Speciesism: The Elephant in the Room 🐘

This is the central pillar of the ethical vegan argument. The term was coined in the 1970s by psychologist Richard Ryder and later popularized by the philosopher Peter Singer. Speciesism is defined as a prejudice or bias in favor of the interests of members of one's own species and against those of members of other species.

In simpler terms, it’s the argument that we humans give special, preferential treatment to our own kind, for no other reason than the fact that they are human. An ethical vegan would argue that this is as arbitrary and morally indefensible as racism (giving preference based on race) or sexism (giving preference based on sex). It's a challenging idea, and it's one that I, Manu, had to sit with for a long time to really unpack. The argument forces you to ask: what is the morally relevant difference between a human and, say, a pig that justifies us using one for food but not the other? Is it intelligence? Language? The ability to do complex math?

Ethical vegans argue that none of these are good answers. They point out that we don't base a human's right to be free from harm on their intelligence level, so why should we do so for other animals? This leads them to the one trait they believe truly matters.

Sentience: The Moral Bottom Line

The one characteristic that ethical vegans argue is morally relevant is sentience. Sentience is the capacity to feel, to perceive, to experience subjective states like pleasure, pain, joy, and fear. If a being is sentient, it has interests. It has a preference for feeling good and an aversion to feeling bad. It wants to live and avoid suffering.

The philosophical argument, most famously put forward by utilitarian philosopher Peter Singer, is that if a being can suffer, its suffering must be given equal consideration. It doesn't mean we have to treat a chicken and a human child exactly the same in all respects, but it does mean that the chicken's interest in not being in excruciating pain is just as morally important as a human's interest in not being in excruciating pain. And since our methods of raising and killing animals for food, clothing, and experiments cause immense suffering, a utilitarian would argue that we are morally obligated to choose a different path when one is available.

The Rights-Based Approach: Beyond Suffering

Another major branch of the philosophy, championed by Tom Regan, takes a slightly different path. Regan’s is a rights-based, or deontological, argument. He argued that any creature that is the "subject-of-a-life"—that is, has a life that can go better or worse for it—has inherent value. This value is independent of their usefulness to others.

From this perspective, the problem with using animals isn't just that it causes them to suffer; it's that we are treating them as a resource, as a means to our own ends. We are violating their fundamental right to exist for their own purposes. For a rights-based vegan, even a hypothetical "happy," painless farm would be unethical, because it still involves treating a sentient being as property to be used and disposed of.

The Awkward Questions: A Closer Look at Dairy and Eggs 🤔

This is where the philosophy gets really challenging for many people. It’s easy to understand the ethical argument against killing an animal for a steak. But what’s so unethical about drinking milk or eating eggs? From the outside, it seems harmless. In my investigation, I found that ethical vegans argue it is anything but.

The Dairy Dilemma

The ethical vegan argument against dairy is not about the act of milking a cow itself. It’s about everything that is required for a modern dairy farm to exist. The argument goes like this: For a cow to produce milk, she must first give birth to a calf.

1. Forced Impregnation: This happens on a yearly cycle, usually via artificial insemination.

2. Calf Separation: In order for humans to have the milk, the newborn calf is typically separated from its mother within hours or days of birth. This is a source of profound, documented distress for both the mother and the calf.

3. The Fate of the Calves: The female calves are often raised to become the next generation of dairy cows. The male calves, because they are useless to the dairy industry, are either killed shortly after birth or raised for a short time and slaughtered for veal.

4. The Fate of the Mother: After a few cycles of impregnation and lactation (usually around 5-7 years), the cow’s milk production declines. At this point, she is considered "spent" and is sent to the slaughterhouse, decades short of her natural lifespan.

From an ethical vegan perspective, a glass of milk is therefore inextricably linked to a cycle of forced impregnation, maternal grief, and the slaughter of both infant and adult animals.

The Egg Conundrum

The argument against eggs follows a similar logic. Even on so-called "free-range" or "humane" farms, the ethical issues are profound.

1. Male Chick Culling: The most significant issue is the fate of male chicks. Since roosters don't lay eggs, they are considered useless byproducts of the egg industry. Within hours of hatching, they are killed, usually by being ground up alive (maceration) or gassed. Billions of male chicks are killed this way every year.

2. Conditions: While "cage-free" sounds nice, it can often mean thousands of birds crammed into a massive, windowless shed. The beaks of the chickens are often seared off without painkillers to prevent them from pecking each other in the stressful, crowded conditions.

3. The Fate of the Hens: Like dairy cows, egg-laying hens are slaughtered when their productivity declines, usually at just 18-24 months old, a fraction of their natural lifespan.

For an ethical vegan, buying a carton of eggs, no matter the label, is seen as directly funding these practices.

The Counter-Arguments: Investigating the Other Side

My investigation wouldn't be complete without looking at the common arguments against ethical veganism and how the philosophy responds to them.

• The "Lions Eat Meat" Argument: The counterargument here is that lions are obligate carnivores; they must eat meat to survive. Humans are omnivores with no biological need to eat animal products. Furthermore, we don't look to the violent behavior of wild animals as a model for our own morality in any other aspect of life.

• The "Plants Feel Pain" Argument: This is a common one. The vegan response is twofold. First, plants lack brains, central nervous systems, and any of the biological structures required to experience pain as we understand it. Second, even if plants did feel pain, raising livestock requires feeding them vastly more plants than if we just ate the plants ourselves. Therefore, an animal-based diet would still be responsible for more "plant suffering" than a vegan one.

• The "Humane Slaughter" Argument: The rights-based vegan argument, from philosophers like Tom Regan, is that there is no such thing as a "humane" way to take the life of a being who does not want to die, for a reason you don't need. They argue that the term itself is an oxymoron designed to make us feel better about an inherently violent act.

Understanding the deep ethical arguments is one thing, but many people are drawn to veganism for its environmental case, which is a whole other beast. If you're wondering if your food choices can actually make a dent in a global crisis, I've investigated that too: [Can Veganism Save the Planet?] 🌎

The Conclusion: A Widening Circle of Compassion

So, after this deep and frankly exhausting dive, what is ethical veganism?

I've come to see it as a moral philosophy based on a single, powerful idea: the circle of compassion should not be limited to our own species. It’s an attempt to answer the question, "If we can live a happy and healthy life without causing harm to other sentient beings, why wouldn't we?"

It’s not just a diet. It’s a stance. It’s a conscious effort to disconnect from systems that treat living, feeling creatures as mere commodities. It’s a challenging, demanding, and often inconvenient philosophy, but one that is built on a rigorous foundation of logical consistency and empathy. You don’t have to agree with it, but after my investigation, I can tell you it is certainly more than just a passing trend. It’s a serious answer to a very old question about our place in the world.

And if this whole deep dive into philosophy has you feeling a bit stressed, maybe it's time to investigate a different kind of anxiety. Check out my report: [Can Veganism Cause Anxiety?]

Sources

• The Vegan Society. Definition of Veganism. https://www.vegansociety.com/go-vegan/definition-veganism

• Singer, P. (1975). Animal Liberation. HarperCollins. (The foundational text of the modern animal rights movement, outlining the utilitarian argument).

• Regan, T. (1983). The Case for Animal Rights. University of California Press. (The foundational text for the rights-based approach to animal ethics).

• The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Animals and Ethics. https://iep.utm.edu/animals-and-ethics/ (Provides a good overview of speciesism and the different philosophical arguments).

• Ryder, R. D. (2010). Speciesism: The Original Essay. Critical Society.

• Francione, G. L. (2000). Introduction to Animal Rights: Your Child or the Dog?. Temple University Press.

• PETA. The Chicken Industry. (Provides information on standard practices like male chick culling). https://www.peta.org/issues/animals-used-for-food/factory-farming/chickens/chicken-industry/