It’s often stated with little argument that it’s “colonialist” or just wrong to say that indigenous people and communities, if they have the means to go vegan, have a moral obligation to be vegan. However, we should push back against this sort of woke relativist promotion of animal abuse for a few reasons.
First, the charge of “colonialism” against the vegan advocate is thinly veiled, garbled relativism and anti-animal rights sentiment. It’s relativism in the sense that they want cultures to be able to pick and choose which morality they want. Moral demands, for them, are relative to which culture you belong to. It becomes quickly garbled when we realize that fewer of these advocates would say the same thing for the violation of women’s rights or a culture that practiced human slavery. Try to imagine these people saying “imposing women’s rights/human rights on indigenous communities is colonialism.” It’s less likely to happen. Yet, to be consistent, they should say imposing these moral demands on indigenous communities is colonialism (that said, in being consistent with their warped sense of morality, some “progressives” will say female genital mutilation is okay for some cultures).
Now, what’s the animal rights advocates’ position? It’s that many non-human animals, just like human animals, have a right to life. People (whether they be white or not) violate that right when they kill them and use them for food. If this moral demand is wrong to “impose” on others, then the same goes for women’s rights or human rights in general. To deny that one must do the same for human rights is to beg the question against the animal rights advocate. For the anti-vegan, it’s taken for granted that non-human animals have no right to life, and so no real moral demand exists like it does against human slavery. The animal rights position is that both humans and non-human animals have a right to life, so the same goes for both—regardless of culture. Their question begging aside, we shouldn’t expect the anti-animal rights “progressive” to be able to actually argue against animal rights or even in favor of human rights.
Second, this sort of attempt at morally insulating indigenous people approaches being racist itself—if not already being there. For vague reasons, indigenous people are exempt from following an ethical demand, as if they are not autonomous. Yet the reasons for being vegan are universally applying. It’s wrong to harm, kill, and exploit the innocent. That applies to every moral agent. Of course, non-agents are exempt from moral demands. Examples of those who are exempt from moral reasons being binding are boulders, lions, and severely mentally enfeebled people. By this, I don’t mean we don’t have duties to, say, a lion or a mentally enfeebled child. Rather, these individuals have no moral duties to perform. They are just moral patients who are owed certain treatment, not moral agents who owe others certain treatment. My view is that indigenous people (aside from the mentally enfeebled) are moral agents who have responsibilities, like the moral duty not to harm and exploit the innocent. But for the woke white college kid on Twitter, indigenous people have the sort of moral capacity as a boulder.
Third, it’s claimed to be “white supremacist” to argue for a moral obligation to be vegan. Again, this charge itself admits of racism and is indicative of the supremacist views of the person making it. There are black vegans and indigenous people who are vegans for ethical reasons. They’re not “white supremacist” in any sense of the term if they deny the absurd moral relativism from Woke Twitter. Additionally, the woke clowns promoting this idea are often not vegan, and there’s evidence showing that holding speciesist attitudes (like eating animals) positively correlates with holding racist and other prejudicial views. So, there’s reason to believe that the Woke Twitter crowd who pushes this argument while tucking into their chicken tendies are likely to be more racist and prejudiced than some of their vegan counterparts.
Fourth and lastly, relativists will state that indigenous communities claim to have a contract with animals or some other mythos that justifies exploitation; therefore, they have no relevant moral obligation. This is a mess of an argument because a mythos makes no difference to the morality of the action. Plenty of cultures have conjured up and believed in false views of the world and its inhabitants to justify slavery and all sorts of acts. That doesn’t make slavery or anything else justified, though. If someone accepted Aristotle’s theory of a natural hierarchy among humans, and, therefore, slavery was okay, we wouldn’t throw our hands up and say there’s no universal obligation not to enslave humans.
Indy 