The style of the argument, then, is one instantly recognisable to scholars in this new literature, even if the precise content may be challenged. On the other hand, the practical goals of the present paper are quite ambitious. We aim to show that, in some but not all cases, there is a distinct and potentially action-guiding wrong involved in the consumption of animal products, even if said consumption does not have a causal relationship with any actual harm to animals.
For example, no animals were killed for that act of consumption, and no animals will be killed because of that act of consumption. And this could show why the strict vegan should be reluctant to embrace freeganism. We begin with several strategies for defending the wrongness of freeganism that are not particularly promising.
First, if that were true, then it would apply equally well to many standard vegan practices. Many vegans go to non-vegan restaurants and order vegan meals. However, those restaurants are made profitable, in part, by the sale of animal products. So, the availability of vegan products at those establishments depends, in part, on the availability of wrongfully acquired animal products, which means that vegans are benefiting from wrongdoing when they eat at those restaurants, and are thus according to this argument acting wrongfully.
On the plausible assumption that this is too demanding a standard, we should reject the moral premise. Second, note that, quite apart from any concerns about the ethics of diet, we are constantly in the position of benefiting from historic wrongs. And, of course, you could just eat scavenged animal products in secret. Or, at least, so it seems at first blush. On reflection, though, concerns about causal inefficacy arise. Someone knows that you are an animal advocate and sees you eating meat.
Given the low odds that any individual consumer makes a difference, and the low odds that you might influence any individual in such a way that she alters her purchasing behaviour, it seems highly unlikely that an expected utility calculation will come out in favour of abstaining from consuming scavenged animal products on signalling grounds.
Footnote 8 So, influencing others is not going to be the way to defend the wrongness of freegan practices. But Driver offers other strategies for criticizing freeganism. If vegans regularly visit non-vegan restaurants, they habitually benefit from the misdeeds of others, allowing them to reap the benefits without the dirty hands. Driver makes one additional move. This seems unfair. In principle, they might desire the end of animal exploitation while still being convinced that, in the interim, they should minimize waste and avoid contributing to animal exploitation by purchasing consumer goods, many of which are, more or less directly, causally connected to animal exploitation.
This seems like a commendable motivation and hardly evidence of a character flaw. So far, the freegan appears to have the upper hand in their debate with the strict vegan. Animals, with the possible exception of some companions, are not currently perceived as members of our society. This non-recognition, it might be thought, is an important cause of our disrespect for them. After all, if we choose to conceive of animals as co-society-members, then we are opting to have a relationship with them that precludes seeing their dead bodies as resources at our disposal.
Footnote 9 When it comes to the corpses of human society members, we have strong intuitions and strongly integrated social practices about respectful treatment.
Often, though not always, Footnote 10 the latter are backed up by the threat of legislative censure. After all, most of us would prefer for our corpse not to be eaten after we die. Others might have preferences that go strongly against the intuitions.
Our point is simply that people can and do give consent and express preferences for all kinds of grotesque things. One possibility is to point to reverence for corpses as an important societal norm. It is—and we do not take this to in any way diminish its significance—a convention about what counts as respectful. Footnote 11 The thought is that part of what it is to be a member of a particular society or shared endeavour is to adopt a certain set of conventions for expressing certain fundamental moral values and goals.
Obviously, these are culturally and contextually specific conventions; shaking hands need not mean in one context what it means in another. On the other hand, to fail to extend these forms of respect to certain other members of our community seems to deny the mattering, equality, value, or dignity of these others.
Or, at least, it does so if we fail to extend these norms without a very good reason. There is something undignified about sharing intimate photographs of a corpse with strangers.
But this is an indignity that we tolerate when, for example, photographs from an autopsy need to be shared with a jury. Crucially, no individual can simply decide on new rules of respect and reverence. Because they serve to coordinate the behaviour of a wide range of individuals, most of whom are strangers, they must be determined at the group level, not by each individual.
We can add that the living might become ill. And so on. The strict vegan can thus present the freegan as acting in a morally dubious way by failing to extend these norms of corpse respect to animals, even this failure does not actually harm any animals.
Again, there is flexibility when it comes to very good reasons speaking against the norm. As we have defined the term, for example, the strict vegan will still allow the eating of animal products in genuine emergencies. Equally, genuine emergencies will permit treatment of human corpses that would normally be beyond the pale. Is there any reason that the freegan is required to adopt the standards of the strict vegan? They offer a political account of animal rights in which animals are conceptualised as belonging to one of three categories, with their classification dependent upon the nature of their relationship to a mixed human-animal society.
While all sentient animals are afforded key basic negative rights, the positive entitlements owed to animals vary depending upon their group membership.
On this picture, as earlier, we ought to give the corpses of domesticated animals the same respect that owed to the corpses of humans. This is because domesticated animals are citizens of the same society as humans. Donaldson and Kymlicka do raise the issue of corpse respect, though only in passing, in the context of a discussion about the feeding of carnivorous animals.
Footnote 12 They say that some of the ideas people have about the treatment of corpses. This could mean that while there are some ways in which we should never treat a corpse — human or animal, citizen or foreigner — there are special obligations we owe to members of the community… Perhaps, then, we ought to treat the bodies of domesticated animals the same way as human bodies in any given society or community, but the same obligation does not apply for corpses of those from outside the community.
This seems to solve the most pressing problems facing the last view. Their reasons for this will be discussed shortly. Second, we may be able to block strange implications that could arise from the previous view. We can borrow from Donaldson and Kymlicka to place limits on freeganism, but not to condemn it altogether.
This is consistent with the desire to see co-relationships with animal citizens governed by the same kinds of rules that govern co-relationships with human citizens. Someone might hope otherwise.
In short, do we treat them respectfully when we treat them as members of our own community, or when we treat them as if they are members of sovereign animal communities?
The strict vegan might insist that some moral caution is appropriate, according to which we ought to offer liminal animals certain kinds of respect simply to mitigate the risk of misinterpreting our obligations to them. However, intuitions are going to pull in different directions, here. However, those would be the exception rather than the rule: there is no reason to think that crocodiles or crickets have such social practices.
The strict vegan might think that these considerations about community are all beside the point. This line is indeed available, but we think it ought to be resisted. This is implausible. The consumption of corpses as a part of a funerary rite is uncommon in the twenty-first century, though it was certainly practiced by some human communities into the twentieth century.
The Roman Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation holds that believers eat the literal body and blood of Christ when receiving the Eucharist. If there is nothing wrong with that practice, which is certainly one that occurs in Western culture, then we have no basis for denying that our eating parts of some dead humans is perfectly consistent with respecting said humans.
Perhaps a change in our attitudes to animals will itself prompt a change in norms about how corpses are treated. The animal ethicist Bernice Bovenkerk, for example, has said that she would prefer for her body to be fed to wild animals after her death van Dinther, This is something practiced in certain non-western contexts.
Whether we should persist with our current norms of corpse treatment or seek to change them is a separate question—though one surely worth asking. Second, there is something presumptuous about taking our norms of respect and treating them as sacrosanct for interactions with those outside our culture, even if we regard them as sacrosanct for those within. Mutatis mutandis , the same applies to bodies of those from communities including wild animal sovereign communities where corpse consumption is a considered a respectful or unobjectionable practice.
There is one more strategy that the strict vegan might try to employ here. To see this possibility, it will help to disentangle two lines of reasoning that Kymlicka and Donaldson offer for their view.
This, they say, is mistaken:. Animals are alongside us at every stage of these expanding circles. We might say the same of our wider community. The process of domestication itself is one of humans and animals coming to live together, which Donaldson and Kymlicka compare to the North-Atlantic slave trade.
Likewise, Donaldson and Kymlicka argue, domesticated animals should be recognized as full citizens. On the other hand, there is a more interest-oriented line of reasoning. Donaldson and Kymlicka claim that it is in the interests of some animals particularly domesticated animals to continue to have a close relationship with humans, though in a heavily modified form.
This is complicated, because the close relationships that human communities have had with certain animals have usually been extremely harmful. Footnote Now, in a standard situation of historical abuse, we might think that it would be the decision of the victim whether a relationship continues once the abuse has been eradicated. Donaldson and Kymlicka see these two lines of reasoning—historical and interest-based—as two sides of the same coin.
Together, they form the basis of their claim about the compulsory nature of our having a certain kind of relationship with domesticated animals. First, they might observe that we live in the Anthropocene, an age defined by ubiquitous human influence on the natural world. There is, after all, another way to interpret the impact of freegan behavior.
Sure, freegan dollars are not supporting Big Food, but freegans—in so far as they keep wasted food out of landfills—effectively buffer Big Food from the fallout of anti-environmental publicity. When freegan behavior reduces methane emissions linked to rotting food, it helps out food producers. Individualism and the acquisitive impulse? Capitalism approves. Big Food and the governing agencies that regulate it should not fear the freegans. Instead, they should give them free reign.
Because, in a way, their work is revolutionary. Answers to the most commonly asked questions here. To read the full version of this content please select one of the options below:. Other access options You may be able to access this content by logging in via your Emerald profile.
Rent this content from DeepDyve. Rent from DeepDyve. As such, the welfare of animals ranks highly for freegans, as do human rights, the environment, and living a simplistic life. Freegans aim to live outside of the capitalistic economic system, striving to buy and sell nothing. They prefer to live in less densely populated areas outside of capitalist hubs.
This helps them to fulfill goals of exclusion from modern consumer behaviors and cycles. To satisfy their needs, freegans choose to use alternative living strategies, often foraging instead of buying, volunteering rather than working, and squatting as opposed to renting. Freegans will typically scavenge for discarded items, barter, or create their own goods. Freeganism is practiced on a continuum, with a range of participants from the casual to the extreme.
Casual freegans may have no qualms salvaging discarded goods but refuse to eat food found in a dumpster. By contrast, a more extreme freegan may live in a remote desert cave, refusing to participate in the use of money for philosophical reasons.
Dumpster diving is legal in all 50 U. Generally speaking, freegans organize their lives around a few core concepts: waste minimization and reclamation, eco-friendly transportation, rent-free housing, and working less.
Freegans embrace concepts of community, generosity, social concern, freedom, cooperation, and sharing, as these things help to satisfy needs and also create a network for fighting against capitalistic extremes. The freegan lifestyle generally protests against capitalistic extremes in the areas of moral apathy, competition, conformity, greed, excess production, over-consumption, over-indulgence, and gluttony.
The philosophy of freeganism and the freegan label was first introduced by the founder of Food Not Bombs in the mids. Food Not Bombs has been known for recovering food that would otherwise go to waste and using it to prepare meals to share in public places, welcoming all to join. In the late s, the manifesto "Why Freegan? Today's freegans are considered a spinoff of a s anarchist group, the Diggers. The Diggers envisioned life in which all that was needed—food, supplies, and labor—were given.
This group organized events to house the homeless and give away food and supplies. Around , an organized group of freegans formed in New York City. This group established the Freegan. Info website explaining the freegan philosophy and developing resource listings for followers.
There are several practices freegans use to achieve basic needs while also protesting anti-capitalistic extremes. Common activities include dumpster diving, hitchhiking for transportation, squatting or camping for housing, and sharing housing to promote working less. Urban guerilla gardening is one example of freeganism in action. In this scenario, Freegans support and participate in the transformation of abandoned lots into community-garden plots.
Often, freegans see the development of community gardens in obscure environments and low-income neighborhoods as offering a resource of healthy produce for the community.
Freegans believe in focusing less on capitalistic profit-making and more on community-building.
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