The pitfalls of qualified moral veganism. A critique of Jan Deckers' holistic health approach to animal ethics

Abstract

I critically examine Jan Deckers' position in Animal (De)liberation, where he defends two main views. The first is "qualified moral veganism": Most humans have a duty to abstain from consuming animal products, even if there are circumstances in which doing so is justified. The author argues, on the one hand, from a pan-sentientist view that attributes sentience to all elementary entities and their compounds. Thus, all living things (such as animals and plants) have a capacity for positive and negative experiences. On the other hand, he develops a consequentialist view that assigns moral agents the unconditional duty to promote their own "holistic health." This is partly constituted by the agent's "moral health," that is, her acting in a morally justified way. On Deckers' view, moral agents must care for the health of all living entities, give greater weight to the interests of organisms to which they are more closely biologically related, and respect the integrity of nature. Diets containing animal products have a very high negative health impact, because of how they affect the environment, human food security, and the well-being of nonhuman animals. In addition, even though plants are sentient, they are likely less so than animals, and their interests must be given less weight. Therefore, most humans should shift to a vegan diet. Deckers' second proposal is that a qualified ban on the consumption of animal products should be enacted. After discarding other alternative strategies, Deckers defends its feasibility relying on data obtained via a series of surveys. Though the argument partly succeeds in developing a coherent account accommodating the author's intuitions, I conclude that his ontological and normative frameworks remain too underdeveloped, his appeal to biological relatedness has implausible implications, and the methodology he uses in defence of his political position is problematic.