This mornings email: >>Professor Francione, I have a question. I was a vegetarian for 11 years before I went vegan, and that happened after I found your Facebook page and then your website. No one had ever explained things the way you did and after thinking about what you said, it made sense that I had to go vegan so I did. But how can I tell others that they ought to go vegan right away if I didnt?>Its no surprise that you were vegetarian for 11 years. *None* of the large groups promote veganism as a moral baseline and they *all* promote various forms of non-veganism as a coherent moral position. Thats part of the problem. We are taught to defer to experts on matters of morality. And animal charities are not experts in anything beyond techniques for fundraising. But to answer your question, lets think about it in a human context. Lets imagine that you were a racist in Mississippi in 1955 and that it took you 10 years to see that everything you had been told about people of color being inferior was wrong and based on the insidious form of violence we call racism. So you stop behaving as a racist and thinking in racist ways. Would you say that you should not encourage people to stop being racist because it took you 10 years to come to that realization? Would you say that you should be supportive of more gentle forms of racism? Would you support something like Racist-Free Joke Monday? Of course not! The fact that youve been confused or wrong about an issue in the past does not mean that you encourage others to be similarly confused and wrong going forward. The same holds for the animal context. Weve been all been taught--by our society and, unfortunately, by the experts in animal charities--that animal exploitation can be justified. Thats just wrong. And once we see that, we have an obligation to try to reason with others in a creative, nonviolent way to demonstrate to them that if they agree that animals matter morally, going vegan is the *only* rational thing to do, and that anything less than going vegan is direct participation in animal exploitation. People who discuss this with us may decide to do something less than go vegan, but that should always be *their* choice and not what *we* recommend or support or praise. We should always be clear: no animal exploitation is morally justifiable means exactly what it says. *Anything* less is encouraging continued exploitation. This is not to say that we judge them as individuals; it is, however, to say that we are clear that the conduct of animal exploitation can never be justified morally. I hope this helps. Gary Francione
Posted on: Fri, 25 Jul 2014 11:22:15 +0000
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