Should vegans compromise?

ABSTRACT

In two recent articles, Marcus William Hunt has posed questions about raising children as vegans. In ‘Parental Compromise’, he argues that pro-vegan-children parents should compromise with anti–vegan-children co-parents, and, in ‘Veganism and Children’, he challenges arguments in favour of vegan parenting. I argue that his pro-compromise position overlooks the idea that respect for animal rights is a duty of justice, and thus not something to be compromised on lightly. To demonstrate the plausibility of this position, I challenge his arguments that Tom Regan’s case for animal rights does not endorse vegan parenting. Nonetheless, I argue that there may be space for pro-vegan-children parents to compromise with anti–vegan-children parents over ‘unusual eating’. This seeks out unusual sources of animal protein that do not involve violations of animals’ rights.

KEYWORDS:

• Veganism
• compromise
• parents
• children
• animal rights
• animal ethics
• food ethics

Acknowledgments

I thank Marcus William Hunt for graciously engaging with my comments on his work and an anonymous reviewer for the Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy for some very useful recommendations. Some of the work for this article took place while I was a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Sheffield (grant number: PF19\100101). I thank the British Academy – and my supervisor, Alasdair Cochrane – for their support.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the British Academy [PF19\100101].

Notes on contributors

Josh Milburn

Josh Milburn is a philosopher who is presently a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Sheffield, where he is conducting a research project called Food Justice and Animals: Feeding the World Respectfully. His research addresses applied moral and political philosophy, especially animal ethics, food ethics, and liberal/libertarian political philosophy. Recent publications include papers in the Journal of Applied Philosophy and the Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics.