Unlike other animals, humans have moral agency – we care about what’s right and wrong. We’ve been developing this quality for thousands of years with the goal of making life go well not just for ourselves, but other people too.

We can also extend this moral concern to other animals. To some degree or another, that’s been a hallmark of human attitudes to other animals for much of our existence, but in recent times moral thinkers have refined just how we might go about this (and how far our concern should extend).

One notable step forward in this regard was the formation of the UK Vegan Society in 1945 from which came both the concept of veganism and one’s personal identity as vegan. Cutting a long story short, the founders of veganism were hoping to free animals from their harmful and unfair use by people and by so doing help advance the human condition. This sense of veganism was somewhat driven by emotional and moral reactions to World War II.

Veganism is a secular ideology – it doesn’t depend on a faith-based outlook – so anyone at all can be guided by its principles. Those principles have been refined and expanded in meaning since 1945 by later ideas such as animal rights and animal protection. But at the heart of all of this remains the core belief that human beings can care about how life goes for other animals.

In this short post, I propose that we regard veganism as the general, standard term for the idea that we should include other sentient animals within our moral concern for fairness and justice.

I would sum this up as:

“Veganism recognises the inherent value and dignity of other species and aims to treat them fairly by our choices whenever we can.”

Boiled down into everyday terms, I am proposing that veganism is the moral baseline for human treatment of other animals. At its simplest, veganism gives rise to just two core principles – that whenever we can, we should keep animals free and and protected from our cruel treatment so that life goes well for them.

This is not to redefine veganism as it was originally thought of by the founders of the UK Vegan Society. Rather, it makes much more explicit just what they intended in their own ethical and moral attitudes to animals, and by extension, the improvement of the human condition.

I offer one caveat to this. Veganism, so regarded, remains for now a personal and voluntary ethical program (no-one has to be a vegan). Everyone is free to adopt vegan ethics as they see fit, according to their own motivations and circumstances. This means that there is no action someone can take that seeks to make the lives of sentient animals go well for them, just by virtue of their own existence, that is not at least in part consistent with veganism.

For example, animal welfare regulation (particularly when it reflects current thinking such as the Five Freedoms or A life Worth Living) seeks to ensure that we are not cruel to animals when we can do that, so it is partially enacting at law one of the core principles of veganism. Likewise, philosophies such as Ethical Omnivorism are deeply anchored to those very same core principles. In that way, the Ethical Omnivore Movement remains a practical application of veganism (though to be clear, the Ethical Omnivore philosophy denies the core aim of veganism for animals to be completely free, thus Ethical Omnivores are NOT vegans).