Preface
Briefing description and more.
In answering this objection to veganism, we show how personal choice cannot be used to justify actions that are unethical.
Companion Videos
How to use companion videos
Videos may be posted on multiple social media platforms, and you can share them on each platform according each platform’s conventions.
Share this Briefing
Social Media Sharing Image
This image will be used when sharing the briefing on a social media platform. You can see all social sharing images in the grid view.
How to share this briefing
Click on the icon for the platform on which you wish to share. What happens next depends on the platform, but generally a popup will appear, letting you add your own text as you share.
Briefing Meta
Metrics
Additional media and advocacy resources are on the way, though not every briefing will feature every type of media.
| Text: | |
| Key Points | 5 |
| Counterclaims | 1 |
| Advocacy Notes | 4 |
| Footnotes | 3 |
| Media: | |
| Companion Videos | 0 |
| Memes and Infographics | 0 |
| Presentation Slides | 0 |
| Flash Cards | 0 |
Other Meta
Date Posted:
Last Edited:
Contributors
Help Us Improve
Please send your suggestions for improvements, or report any issues with this briefing to team@vbriefings.org
We appreciate that you are taking the time to help up improve. All suggestions and reports will be carefully considered.
Summary
A concise summary of the briefing (see below for citations).
Personal choices are not inherently ethical simply because they are personal. The notion of personal choice has been used to defend unethical actions, such as enslaving others or paying others less because of their gender.
It is possible to respect a person but not respect certain of their choices, which may be unethical and cause suffering.
Increased awareness of the suffering caused by consuming animal products can change one’s perspective, highlighting that these decisions are far from being merely personal.
Context
Places this topic in its larger context.
This objection to animal rights and veganism is made by those who are not aware of the implications of eating animals or by those who are aware but are unwilling to change.
The objection is often accompanied by a statement such as, “I respect your right to be vegan; you should respect my right to not be vegan.”
Key Points
This section provides talking points.
Personal choices are not necessarily ethical.
Just because it is a choice you personally make does not make it an ethical choice.
- Example: you may choose to be rude to someone because of their gender or skin color.
The fact that you are not legally restricted from such an action does not imply the action is ethical.
Declaring one’s personal choice can be and has been used to defend all manner of indefensible positions:
- “It’s my personal choice to own slaves.”
- “It’s my personal choice to pay women less money than men for the same work.”
It’s not just a personal choice.
It is a personal choice in the sense that it’s a choice you can personally make, but for any choice to be only a personal one, all those affected must give consent.
- Example: I may personally choose to cut in front of you in line in the grocery-store, but unless I get your permission, it negatively affects you.
If it involves harming others, then it is as much a social choice as it is a personal choice. As the saying goes “Your right to swing your fist ends where my nose begins.”
Some choices have victims.
It is inescapable that eating meat and animal secretions (such as milk, cheese, and eggs) harms animals. See our briefings on injustices and suffering for details.
When we choose to buy animal products we are not just ignoring the victim—we are complicit in the violence and suffering the victim has endured.
We are complicit because even though we are not inflicting harm directly, we are paying someone else to do so.
Respect for a choice is not the same as respect for a person.
Although it is difficult if not impossible to respect choices you consider to be unethical, just because you do not respect all the choices of someone does not mean you don’t respect the person making those choices.
Awareness changes your perspective.
When you become fully aware of the harms resulting from eating animals or their products, it is impossible to view it as merely a personal choice.
When you take a little time to educate yourself on the atrocities inflicted on animals before they become the food on your plate, you will less likely choose to harm other sentient beings whose lives are as important to them as yours is to you.
Counterclaims
Responses to some yes but retorts.
Claim: We don’t have free will (an idea known as determinism), so we only think we have a choice anyway.
Deterministic claims, if used in this context, could be employed to justify absolutely anything.
The employment of determinism to justify immoral actions undermines the basis for ethical decision-making by suggesting all actions are equally justifiable, ignoring the moral distinctions between them.
Supplementary Info
Additional information that may prove useful.
Pertinent Quotes:
- Humans are experts at rationalizing their choices, as Ben Franklin expressed when he said, “So convenient a thing is it to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find or make a reason for everything one has a mind to do.”1
Further Study
Sources providing a deeper understanding of the topic or related topics.
From Other Resources
This Stanford paper discusses the role of choice in the context of free will: Free Will.2
For a more rigorous treatment of moral perspectives on personal choices see The Structure of Moral Revolutions.3
Advocacy Resources
Information to help with outreach and advocacy.
Additional media and advocacy resources are on the way, though not every briefing will feature every type of media.
Share This Briefing
Cloned from the Preface Section on page load.
Companion Videos
Cloned from the Preface Section on page load.
Memes and Infographics
No images found.
How to use Memes and Infographics
To sequence through all memes and infographics on this page, click on any image than use the arrow keys or the arrow buttons to show next and previous images.
To share a meme or infographic, right click on the image and choose download or save as. Then upload the image to the platform of choice.
Presentation Slides
Slides not available.
How to Use the Presentation Slides
You can view the slideshow full screen by clicking on the first link above.
To use Canva presenter mode, view the speaker notes, or download the slides as PowerPoint, login to Canva (the free account works) and follow the Full Canva Link provided above.
To copy this presentation to your own Canva project, use the Full Canva Link provided above, then select File->Make a Copy from the upper left. You can build your own unique presentation from multiple briefings by copying the presentation from each briefing and then building another presentation from the copied presentations.
Flash Cards
We partner with Brainscape because of their excellent features for learning. You will need to create a free Brainscape account to study the cards.
About Flash Cards and Brainscape
Flash cards are here to help you commit important facts and concepts in this briefing to memory.
In Brainscape, there is one deck for each briefing. You can study more than one deck at a time. Brainscape uses spaced repetition to promote memory retention. It is “the secret to learning more while studying less.”
You can study using your browser, but Brainscape also has a free mobile app that makes learning anywhere easy.
Advocacy Notes
Tips for Advocacy and Outreach
This is one of the easiest objections to counter. It requires only simple logic.
This objection is often an implicit admonition to back off, motivated by a desire to avoid discomfort or scrutiny, rather than an invitation to engage in meaningful dialogue.
The author’s experience is Socratic questioning usually results in your interlocutor admitting this objection is invalid.
Socratic questions you can use:
- Can you think of any instances in history where personal choice was used to justify actions we now think of as unethical?
- Do you think the ability to make a choice somehow automatically makes it an ethical choice?
Footnotes
Our sources, with links back to where they’re used.
- Franklin, Benjamin. The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin. Amazon Classics, 2017. 48-49. ↩︎
- O’Connor, Timothy, and Christopher Franklin. “Free Will (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy).” Stanford.edu, 3 Nov 2022, plato.stanford.edu/entries/freewill/. Accessed 7 Mar. 2024. ↩︎
- Baker, Robert. The Structure of Moral Revolutions. The MIT Press EBooks, The MIT Press, 1 Jan. 2019, direct.mit.edu/books/monograph/4568/The-Structure-of-Moral-RevolutionsStudies-of. Accessed 7 Mar. 2024. ↩︎
