I think that's because non-vegans think vegans draw arbitrary lines to separate themselves from vegetarians. For example, vegans refuse to eat honey (insect labour) but seem to have no issues with eating figs (which contain the remains of wasps), fruit which has been pollinated by bees (insect labour), or cashews (human suffering).

In general, the ethical question of how to assign moral weight to different beings is an open one. Some people would argue that a human being has greater moral worth than an insect. Others argue that all animal lives carry equal weight with human lives (I don't know who these people are, but they worry me).

Moreover, when people (unprompted) claim to be vegans in the presence of non-vegans, they are morally distinguishing themselves. It is the unstated claim "you are in my out-group" that non-vegans find so offensive. But then, a lot of people are offended when anyone they might call a friend goes out of their way to make a moral distinction, and this is not specific to diet preference at all.

> Others argue that all animal lives carry equal weight with human lives (I don't know who these people are, but they worry me).

I'd consider myself one of these. All living things are equally fair game to be eaten. Obviously some carry social and legal consequences that make it not worthwhile, but ethically, we're all organic matter. Life consumes other life to keep itself going. That's how it works. I don't know why I should be concerned about a cow but not a stalk of celery. They're equally alive.

> They're equally alive

I guess if you only care about the most primitive, baseline definition of "alive". I would think we had evolved beyond believing killing is killing no matter the circumstance. Do we not wish to distinguish ourselves from primal, purely survival-driven animals?

It seems short-sighted to deem yourself more important than celery. We're both a tiny blip, an eddy in the outflow of energy from a star where we momentarily reverse the flow of entropy in the universe.

If you're not survival-driven, you will eventually be out-competed by something that is. If we don't survive, everything else is pointless.

The activity of caring can be either actuality-based or feeling-based.

A lot of caring from the vegan community is feeling-based. What this means is that one _feels_ that one cares about living species while not _actually_ caring about them. Furthermore, when one strongly feels in this manner they tend to hold strong beliefs as well. Much like religion, this results in people fighting over their cherished feelings and beliefs.

In the end, nobody seems to _actually_ care about the animals.

Think about it.

It would all be hilarious were it not for the suffering people instigate in order to defend their beliefs.

Please don't take HN threads further into flamewar. We're trying to avoid that here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Reposted with different words (same message).

I'm curious why you openly hold what seems to me a totally sociopathic viewpoint - do you assign any moral weight to anything at all? If so, why do you not assign moral weight to the suffering of conscious beings?

Even from a completely amoral perspective where nothing is preferable to anything else, do you not see the social benefits of a community which has the socially-enforced value of "suffering is bad"?

Yes, I even explicitly mentioned social reasons in the previous comment. A society in which humans are all actively trying to eat each other obviously would not function as well as the one we have, where we generally all agree that it's not all right to eat other humans. The reason for it is not for some nebulous, indefinable moral reason about preventing suffering, but simply because one works and the other does not.

To be clear, what irritates me about your comments is not that you don't care about suffering - it's that you're taking it on yourself to tell other people not to care about things they do value. What does it matter to you?

An amoral framework has no basis whatsoever to argue that any value system is wrong. Why would a moral person care about the material reasons why society is altruistic? There's nothing you can argue at the object level that will change someone's moral values.

Where did I tell someone else what to care about?

Does it also irritate you knowing that vocal vegans take it upon themselves to tell other people to care about things they do not particularly value? If not, why not?

You seem to be confusing how something might come to exist (Darwinian explanation of altruism) with why someone might choose to adhere to a philosophy. Personally, as far as I can tell, most people I know are both intrinsically good and also extrinsically good in that they have considered nihilism and rejected it in favor of, like, having any value system and preferences about how the world should be at all.

I never said I didn't have preferences about how the world should be. They are just a little more nuanced than "this class of living things should be kept alive and feeling happy and that class of living things should not"

In general I prefer life should go on living and creating more life in a sustainable fashion, but generally that does involve some amount of suffering for some life somewhere.

This is the nihilist/materialist rhetorical trap.

If you take scientific materialism to it's extreme 'we are all just particles' ergo, none of intelligence/life/love/wisdom/creation even really exist, it's all just how we perceive randomness.

'Sociopaths' and 'Psychopaths' cannot exist in materialism after all: we're just mounds of atoms.

But once you accept the life principle, which is not so well defined but nevertheless evident to us all at least due to the fact we are conscious ... well then you can start to arrive at why we might think we are 'more important' than rocks.

Then things like 'community' etc. make sense.

But one's metaphysical view needs to have something more transcendent that e=mc2 at the root of it in order for it to work.

The OP's comments are actually reasonable in the context of materialism, and that they are a little 'shocking' to someone normally engaged in life is only evidence of the hollowness of our current rational regimes at explaining the most basic question, which is 'who/what are we'. Knowing how 'dark matter' works will be nice, but it's still secondary to understanding the nature of life itself, I think.

> Others argue that all animal lives carry equal weight with human lives (I don't know who these people are, but they worry me).

I thought as well that human lives are more important than animal lives, but the question is that when AI gets smarter than us and concious, do you want AI to have the moral value of human life having lesser importance than AI life?

IME most non vegans (including me) understand why it is a useful delineation, even if we cannot precisely quantify miral weights.

unfortunately, it doesn't just come from non-vegans. There is so much infighting within the community because so many demand "perfection" or else you are a "fake vegan".

This seems to crop up all the time when it comes to idealistic movements. It certainly has happened to different forms of communism, arguably sunni vs shia, vegans being fed up with vegetarians etc

I'd love to know if there is a handy word/term for this phenomenon where an odd amount of energy is spent opposing those people/views which are more similar than less similar.

The term is the "narcissism of small differences," coined by Freud.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcissism_of_small_difference...

it is definitely a common manifestation of human psychology and black and white thinking. Not many people are comfortable with the grey area and the morally ambiguous.

People want strict rules that they can follow that gives them a measuring stick by which they can gauge their own (and others) "worthiness", "purity" or "success". If we set specific boundaries, then we can more easily judge ourselves if we succeeded/failed or others if they are in/out. This type of thinking is most commonly found in diets. We decide which foods are "bad" and which are "good" so we know whether or not we have achieved our goals. It's easier to know when you "fell off the horse" when you ate a food previously deemed "bad". It's not so easy to make judgements on ourselves and others when the rules are not so clear-cut.

I think many are afraid of looking to ourselves as the deciders of our own realities/moralities. We prefer to look outside to leaders/gurus/experts to tell us what the truth is.

The first thing I thought of was "bikeshedding", which absorbs so many people in the tech industry.

“Holier-than-thou”, perhaps, though it can be used even with people with views that aren’t similar.

I suspect most of the hate vegans get are from other "more pure" vegans. Purity is how vegan cult members judge each other. Not how normal minded people judge vegans.

As for "some good", you might really want to get off your high horse and objectively look into the catastrophic environmental damage that a vegan diet causes. Not to mention the long term harm it does to the human body.

You literally cannot survive in nature on a vegan diet. You'd starve to death. You literally cannot have a vegan diet without fossil fuel ( good luck growing avocados in alaska or NY ). You literally cannot have a vegan diet without killing nearly infinite number of bugs, worms, vermin, etc. I know truth can be triggering to a cult member, but this is agricultural and economic reality of a vegan diet.

Personally, I'd love to society move to a "hunter gatherer diet" as that's the most natural, healthy and environmentally friendly diet possible. Rather the elites want to put us on a diet akin to the "vegan diet" livestock on industrial farms are fed. It's funny how industrialization is turning humans more and more into livestock. Maybe the UN will recommend troughs filled with vegetables for human beings.

Maybe it's changed but I was heavily involved in the vegan and vegetarian community online about 15-20 years ago and there was absolutely no purity wars. Honestly, it was quite supportive and very much "everyone does their best and everyone has different morals" kinda place. I was still a young adult back then trying to learn to navigate life in general and vegetarianism was an entirely a new concept to me, so it was helpful.

But "har har, vegans are all crazy toxic assholes, amiright?" is a popular trope, no matter the factuality.

As somebody who isn't a vegan or even vegetarian, but eating a mostly-vegetarian and sometimes-vegan diet, living with a vegetarian and generally being in lots of vegan-friendly places offline, I don't think anything changed - your description still seems correct to me today.

Seriously, you view veganism as some kind of elite-pushed new world order way of cheapening human experience into livestock? I would think that if the establishment were interested in veganism, it would be more popular.

How many billions of people can earth supported wih a hunter gatherer diet? Veganism is one of the least CO2-intensive diets possible in a modern society (https://i1.wp.com/shrinkthatfootprint.com/wp-content/uploads...), and if you knew any vegans personally I think they'd agree with measures to reduce the CO2 intensiveness of agriculture. I'm not exactly sure who or what you're arguing against.

With regards to insects, plenty of people are interested in insect and wildlife suffering, including vegans - https://reducing-suffering.org/why-vegans-should-care-about-.... Under some assumptions, by reducing land & water use, veganism does reduce insect suffering somewhat. Clearly, it also reduces livestock suffering.

The problem is that veganism is inherently a no-compromise position, the explicit goal is no harm to animals, which makes issues like this a glaring inconsistency.

Other diets such as vegetarianism are much more clearly harm minimization based, which makes it easier to deal with issues like this.

It takes two to tango. If vegans stopped pestering non-vegans, then the non-vegans probably wouldn't care to prove the vegan's stance to be silly.

Vegans own smug and 'ethical checkmate' inanity - the 'eco' ethos of food goes hand in hand with this, they are the same thing; don't blame outsiders.

I have never in real life heard of anyone contemplating nuts and avocados as 'vegan' or not, but I hear all the time from my vegan-leaning friends about GMO's, palm oil, and everything else.

Most of us just want a croissant made with butter and would like for it to work out in some reasonable way for everyone including the cow.

> Vegans own smug and 'ethical checkmate' inanity

...the loud, obnoxious ones you know about, perhaps. Most vegans and vegetarians in my experience (hopefully including myself) don't try to preach, lecture, or abuse...but you likely don't even know their eating habits as a result.

Likewise - are you even hearing from actual vegans/vegetarians? Or are you hearing repeated stories that curdle outrage?

When I was in high school I wrote an essay about how ridiculous it was that I could be insulted for daring to hold a door for a woman when I hold doors for everyone! It was a couple of years before I realized I never HAD been insulted, I had simply been told I could be. This has happened with any number of items in my life: the outrage far exceeds the actual experiences.

I won't deny there are _some_ smug and self-righteous vegans out there - there are annoying people everywhere. But have you actually encountered the "community" (to use the word from above poster)?

I don't dislike vegans, nor dispute motivations, and I'm fully aware that 90% of them are as normal as can be.

I'm de-facto a vegan every second day, without thinking about it.

I do dispute however the OP's point 'non-vegans' splitting hairs on vegans 'a thing' or 'the thing'.

The 'finger wagging and moral high ground posturing' is almost entirely a function of the vegan side of the equation.

For example: GMO's, as someone noted below, it's 'not a vegan issue' - of course not strictly, but it's the same crowd of 'food concerned people'.

'Organic, GMO, Vegan' overlap quite a bit - this is where the discussion and marketing (as a result of demand no doubt) is happening.

>Vegans own smug and 'ethical checkmate' inanity

I maintain that the Vegan Police from Scott Pilgrim are one of the finest satirical concepts I've ever seen in fiction.

You do realize they exist online, right? ;) People are usually way nicer in person.

definitely got a good laugh from that. Nobody is safe from being made fun of!

I understand that you want the butter to be fine, but the dairy industry is pretty seriously abusive to animals. Just because you want that to work out doesn’t mean it’s actually ethically sound.

> Most of us just want a croissant made with butter and would like for it to work out in some reasonable way for everyone including the cow.

Vegans (I don't know what vegan-leaning means, but I'm referring to most actual vegans here) want this as well. The difference is that they recognize that this is largely untenable.

I disagree with the adjective “largely.” Vegans would not want anything to “work out for the cow” if butter from cow’s milk is the product that someone wants. It’s completely and absolutely untenable as long as the butter is a product of/from an animal.

If it’s vegetable fat based butter or genetically modified yeast making milk from which butter can be made, that’s not an issue.

GMO's have nothing to do with veganism.

unfortunately, anti-GMO, anti-vax, anti-science etc. is becoming more and more synonymous with the vegan community. The "what other beliefs does this vegan hold" bingo is becoming more and more disillusioning.

And yet one of the most successful vegan companies recently genetically engineered soy beans to produce heme.

With the introduction of ethical meat riding on the back of GMO & science I bet we'll see an emergence of very different forms of veganism.

I've slowly reduced my meat & dairy consumption, but haven't eliminated it. This year I have almost entirely eliminated cow meat from my diet (probably ate ~100-200 grams this year for cultural reasons), but am highly anticipating the impossible burger 2 coming to local restaurants.

> I've slowly reduced my meat & dairy consumption, but haven't eliminated it.

Good for you! More people need to realize this is an option. Too many in the vegan community and elsewhere push a "all or nothing" approach which is harmful to the movement overall. People don't do well with totally changing their lifestyle overnight. Slow and steady is the key to long term adoption.

Except (in cases) when GMOs are tested on animals.

the checkmate game is played against vegetarians too, and often there is no check, or check mate, its just claptrap as they are ill informed.