Different Rules For Different People

I got into an argument with a vegan on Flickr. I had complimented the (beautiful) photo of a friend’s wife, saying that I wanted to be like her when I grew up, except for the veganism. I would love to be like her photographically; she takes beautiful photographs. The vegan in question stopped by to say that I wouldn’t be totally grown up until I was a vegan.

We went back and forth for a few posts until the friend’s wife took down our comments. Good for her. No reason her pictures should be our battleground. I went to look at the vegan’s photography and he had pictures of camels in a circus captioned, “animals aren’t property.” But what should he have a few photos later? A picture of his cat.

So I asked him the following question: if animals aren’t property, why does he own a cat (that, incidentally, he feeds a vegan diet)? Reasonable enough, right. His response was that it’s the other way around, that his cat owns him. I observed how remarkably convenient that fact was. He said I was being belligerent - I reminded him that he was still be a condescending vegan. That was the end of the debate.

Was I being belligerent? Perhaps…in fact, yes, I was. I was being belligerent. But at least I wasn’t insisting that my opponent play by a different set of rules than I was maintaining for myself. I suppose that there are more annoying argumentative tactics but I certainly can’t think of any.

In this case, the vegan in question clearly believed that he was free to say whatever he wanted because of his moral position of veganism. Because he is a vegan, his immature criticisms are thus acceptable. People who perceive themselves to be overwhelmingly right tend to afford themselves an awful lot of freedom that they won’t afford to those that they perceive to be wrong.

Peter Singer, a lightning rod for criticism, has made a career of advancing arguments that involve guilting and shaming his opposition into agreeing with him. “Oh, well, you wouldn’t kill a child would you? Then why are you spending your extra money on yourself instead of on children in Africa who need medicine to live? You’re the same as a child murderer.” (Singer, in case you’re wondering, is one of the ethicists who decided that humans and animals have equivalent value, and so killing animals is bad, bad, bad. Feeding them a vegan diet, making them miserable? Good, good, good! There I go again, being belligerent.)

But revisit this vegan with his pet cat. He hates the circus owners dragging their camels around the country for their own profit; meanwhile, he forces his cat to eat a vegan diet to satisfy his own beliefs about what is and is not appropriate in our world. In the circus example, the camels are taken out of their natural environment to benefit an owner. In the cat example, although the vegan maintains otherwise, exactly the same thing is happening. Exactly the same thing. The only difference is that the vegan is comfortable locking his cat up, forcing it to eat a vegan diet, and probably “fixing” it so that it wouldn’t reproduce, whereas he greatly objects to the camel owners locking up a camel, forcing it to eat a whatever diet, and probably “fixing” it so that it wouldn’t reproduce.

If the allegedly moral people of this Earth get to make arguments like this, so to does everybody else. If owning animals is wrong when a circus does it, then it probably is when everybody else does it too. Or, maybe it isn’t. Maybe there is a huge difference. I don’t know.

But declaring it off limits to discuss whether or not there are differences? Declaring that the only people allowed to ask questions are the moral, and the only people not allowed to ask questions are everybody else? That’s crazy. Absolutely positively crazy. Beyond being crazy, it’s damned offensive.

Here is the final part. I don’t care that the vegan is a raging hypocrite. I care that he won’t admit it, that the allegedly moral people who fill this world regularly refuse to admit the fact that they’ve decided that the rules governing their lives and actions should be totally different than those that exist for literally everybody else.