A question: why do left-leaning Australians (in particular modern progressives) overwhelmingly appear to reject veganism and animal rights?
You might retort, how do you know that leftists reject veganism? I think it’s obvious. The voting landscape is typically somewhat stable. About 30% of voters always vote for left-wing parties such as Labor and the Greens, 30% for the right (the LNP) and the rest seem to swing around a bit but seem mostly moved by what’s best for them personally (but often exhibit a wish to benefit from fairer conditions). As well, we might note that in line with overseas trends, Australians (particularly young Australians) are shifting left in their political outlooks. In 2022, for example, just 25% of voting age Millennials voted for the conservative LNP coalition.
From that, I think we can say that at least 30% and perhaps as much as 50% of the voting public are directly interested in, and concerned about, matters of fairness and justice as seen through a “progressive” lens. Perhaps we could say that social justice is a significant motivation for between one-third and half of the Australian voting public.
While left-wing political ideology tends to focus on fairness and justice in human-centric terms (and thus is primarily engaged in bettering the human condition within dominant political and economic systems), the underlying concepts and ideological motivations seem admirably suited to engaging with veganism.
Yet, just 2% of the population self-identifies as ethically vegan.
If the core essence of veganism is exactly about fairness and justice for other sentient species and people with leftist, progressive attitudes are engaged in striving for those qualities in human society, why then are they not engaged in the struggle for animal justice? Why is the wish to deliver to animals freedom from violence, oppression, marginalisation, powerlessness and violence whenever we can achieve that not striking a chord with those whose avowed aims in human society are exactly those?
I don’t have an answer. Possible explanations are:
- like most people, they aren’t really aware of veganism as a justice issue, believing it to be about diet/environment/health.
- most are likely raised in left-leaning households, so from the beginning they identify with that kind of politics. This doesn’t require them to change their core beliefs/behaviours over time, whereas to transcend typical societal attitudes to other animals requires challenging oneself and doing things differently.
- leftists (and conservatives!) care about people much more than they care about animals – their goal is a fair, just and equitable human society.
- they fear that by assigning comparable moral worth to other animals we undermine our human exceptionalism (and thereby deflate the project for human rights that emerges from our shared humanity).
What do you think – can you offer a reason why the significant proportion of the Australian voting public who believe in fairness and justice are not engaging with a perfectly rational ethical framework that strives to achieve those conditions for sentient animals?
Postscript: Interested readers may like to check out this article pondering similar themes from Will Kymlicka, though his is a far more erudite analysis than I can manage!.
Will is the Canada Research Chair in Political Philosophy in the Philosophy Department at Queen’s University in Kingston, Canada, and is married to the author Sue Donaldson, with whom he has co-authored Zoopolis: A Political Theory of Animal Rights (Oxford UP, 2011)
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