The Vegan Definition and The 5 Main Ethical Foundations

[NonZeroSum]

-

I define veganism as simply "an animal products boycott." Why someone would arrive at that ethical conclusion could be a million ways, but I'll focus on trying to summarise the 5 main ethical schools of thought. Let me know what you think.

Hedonistic Utilitarianism: The principle of not breeding sentient life into the world where you know you will cause more suffering on a global calculus than happiness. Examples: climate change, stress and pain in slaughterhouse than longer happy life in wild with low rates of predation, stress to slaughterhouse workers who are more likely to abuse their family).

Preference Consequentialism: The principle of not breeding sentient life into the world to kill when you know they will have interests to go on living longer than would be profitable. Examples: They have habits for things they'd like to do each day and they show you by their desire not to be loaded onto scary trucks and to a slaughterhouse with screams and smells of death.

Virtue Ethics: The principle of not breeding a sentient life into captivity when you know you could leave room for other animals to enjoy happy flourishing being able to express all their capabilities in wild habitat. Not wanting to parasitically take away life with meaning for low-order pleasure in our hierarchy of needs which we can find elsewhere.

Deontology: The principle of everyone should only act in such a way that it would still be accetable to them if it were to become universal law. So not breeding sentient life into existence, only to keep them confined, tear families apart and kill them later, as you wouldn't want it to happen to you.

Nihlist Ethics: The principle that you should be wary of inauthentically acting in a way you don't believe due to outside social pressures, like that acting uncaringly is necessary to what it means to be a man. So testing out values you were brought up with against new ones as you go and and coming to the conclusion that you prefer a society where most have the value of seeing animals flourishing in nature and not in captivity/pain.

-