Animal Rights & Ethics

Although it occupies an entire section of her book, Keith's argument against 'ethical vegans' relies on just one core argument (and a couple of straw men and ad hominems): everything, from trees to cows to humans, is alive and seeks to perpetuate life; everything is also part of a natural cycle of life and death; therefore, we should not make arbitrary distinctions between living things based on whether they are animal, vegetable or possibly even mineral. To do so, she claims, would be childish and hypocritical, or even unethical.

We will examine this in detail in the sections below.