Hail Seitan!
There Are Seven Fundamental Tenets:
I - One should strive to act with compassion and empathy toward all creatures in accordance with reason.
II - The struggle for justice is an ongoing and necessary pursuit that should prevail over laws and institutions.
III - One’s body is inviolable, subject to one’s own will alone.
IV - The freedoms of others should be respected, including the freedom to offend. To willfully and unjustly encroach upon the freedoms of another is to forgo one’s own.
V - Beliefs should conform to one’s best scientific understanding of the world. One should take care never to distort scientific facts to fit one’s beliefs.
VI - People are fallible. If one makes a mistake, one should do one’s best to rectify it and resolve any
harm that might have been caused.
VII - Every tenet is a guiding principle designed to inspire nobility in action and thought. The spirit of compassion, wisdom, and justice should always prevail over the written or spoken word.
Since in the modern age we can obtain all of the nutrition we need from a well-planned plant-based diet, by buying & consuming animal products, we participate in unnecessary cruelty to sentient beings
I can make an argument that being non-vegan in the modern age is violating all seven of these tenets
Tenet I : It’s neither reasonable, nor compassionate or empathetic, to needlessly exploit & take the life of a creature when we have moral agency & alternatives, unlike other animals.
Tenet II : It’s true that it’s legal to exploit & unalive animals today, but it was also legal to own slaves in the past. Just because we’re legally allowed to do something doesn’t mean we should.
Tenet III : One’s body being inviolable and subject to their own will alone should extend to all sentient beings. If it doesn’t, Name The Trait in a way that doesn’t lead to contradiction or absurdity
That is - Name The Trait different between humans and other animals that makes it okay to do things to other animals that we wouldn’t be okay with being done to humans.
I.e. justify the speciesist discrimination and double standard and differential treatment.
Tenet IV : We should be free to tell people they’re hypocrites for loving dogs & eating cows, or even for participating in the exploitative pet industry instead of adopting/rescuing companion animals.
Even if this is offensive to people. It’s freedom of speech and necessary for the activism and the struggle for justice that should prevail above laws and institutions (Tenet II).
To willfully and unjustly encroach upon the freedoms of other sentient beings, is to forgo your own right to be respected like you would be if you first gave respect to other individuals (animals).
Tenet V : Insisting we need to eat meat or animal products to be healthy despite that disagreeing with scientific consensus, is distorting scientific facts to fit your beliefs,
& not conforming beliefs to your best scientific understanding of the world.
It’s denying reality,
burying your head in the sand to avoid confronting the truth,
& living in ignorance & delusion & the willfull, unnecessary destruction & oppression of others, self, & planet.
Tenet VI : Assuming that we are already perfect & couldn’t possibly be doing anything wrong or unjust, despite every historical society participating in normalized injustice, is not recognizing humans
are fallible.
And, when confronted with your mistake, in the form of what your kind have raised you to traditionally participate in regarding unnecessary systemic exploitation & violence to sentient beings,
if your response is to deflect, close your ears, & refuse to take personal responsibility or change any behavior, is to not do one’s best to rectify it & resolve any harm that might have been caused.
then that is to not right the wrong and fundamentally unjust relationship between humans and other animals and resolve it into one of harmonious and respectful coexistence.
Rather than one of needless exploitation, domination, violence, cruelty, and oppression.
Finally, Tenet VII : To claim that because these tenets do not specifically mention an obligation to not exploit & harm non-human animals unnecessarily & to be vegan, that means it isn’t entailed by
the values underlying them, is to not let every tenet serve as guiding principles designed to inspire nobility in action & thought & not allow the spirit of compassion, wisdom, and justice to prevail
over the written or spoken word.
It depends on what was implied by your statement.
You seemed to be using it to say “we accept we need to kill animals and plants, and therefore we have no desire to make any effort to reduce the amount that happens, or to avoid doing it on purpose and unnecessarily & opportunistically exploiting & harming animals & causing them suffering, or to reduce the harm caused by that or change the way we do it and attempt to eliminate it where possible, even if it can’t be stopped entirely”. It was being used as a thought-terminating cliche which was implying a nirvana fallacy, as usual. So no, vegans don’t think like that generally. Because obviously we do think there is a better way to do things, which is to avoid exploiting animals, and as a result cause much less harm to both animals and plants and the environment - as a starting point for further transformations to the systems that sustain us that can improve them further and hew closer to that ideal standard of perfection, which you seem to want to use to oppose any reforms or progress on the grounds that they aren’t perfect instead of actually striving toward it and making the changes that are possible now.
Also, if it implies “accept it as an immutable reality and be closed off to the possibility of better ways of living that could avoid unintentionally killing any animals or plants, as well as to the idea of currently not deliberately exploiting or killing sentient animals and reducing the harm to all lifeforms as much as we can in the meantime”, then that is very different from simply accepting or acknowledging the fact that it is a current reality (but not necessarily an immutable, permanent reality) that some lifeforms, including sentient animals, must be harmed unavoidably by us as a cost of living, but that we can reduce that to all lifeforms both now and in the future and not cause it intentionally (or deliberate exploitation/killing etc) to sentient animals, and it’s a reality we should work toward changing and improving as much as we can for all lifeforms sentient or otherwise.
it’s neither a thought terminating cliche nor a Nirvana fallacy. it’s pointing out that everyone accepts this reality, to one extent or another, and so most people are just unlikely to take vegan arguments seriously, since they appear to be hypocrites
Well I don’t know what your point of saying this is, but I largely agree that most people are attached to the status quo and don’t want to change or even believe the reality as long as they get to keep doing what they want and bury their heads in the sand. But it’s also true that most of us are conditioned to make fallacies especially when we start to use the less rational parts of our minds that come up when we’re experiencing cognitive dissonance and feeling the need to defend things that we feel guilty about and know are wrong, but which we feel incapable of changing, causing us to lash out at the messengers who are trying to shed light on the truth and encourage positive evolution. Accusing us of hypocrisy, imperfection, somehow being worse than you in some way (wanting to deny that you’re doing anything wrong by painting the other “choice” to respect animals and reduce your harm to the environment (incl. plants) as being impractical, counterproductive, invalid, etc). For example thinking that we’re hypocrites even though we’re doing the best we can, to reduce harm to animals, plants and the environment and human society, and if the best solution isn’t perfect, there’s not really anything you can reasonably blame anyone for there - and even if we’re not doing the best we can on whatever you think we’re hypocritical for, and there’s something else we can do (let us know what), that fact that we’re hypocritical or imperfect on its own wouldn’t mean we’re wrong about the message that we should move away from animal exploitation and reduce harm to the environment etc as much as we can. And especially opposing that solution just because it isn’t perfect, which ignores that every life matters, every sentient being has a unique perception and experience of the world and they aren’t replacable, so reducing harm to them and not harming them unnecessarily means the world to them, as well as is critical for protecting natural plants and the environment.