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Veganism: ethics in everyday life

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Abstract

This article examines the disjunction between ethical vegans’ private morals regarding animals and their public presentation of them as an instance of American individualism. Using in-depth interviews and observations of vegan gatherings, I find that most vegans, those who employ what I call “strategic individualism,” think of veganism as a general moral imperative—that humans ought to be vegan as a matter of social justice for animals—yet they frequently individualized their positions when interacting with nonvegans to avoid interpersonal conflict and thereby engage nonvegans. Rather than discuss morals as collective obligations, which they privately believe, vegans who use strategic individualism present morals as individual choices and experiences. The differences in their private morals and their public presentation demonstrate that individualism may be better understood less as a fundamental orientation, which is the dominant approach in cultural sociology, so much as an interactional strategy to achieve particular goals.

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Notes

  1. I use “vegan” throughout the paper as a shorthand for “ethical vegan.”

  2. While Booker and Moby publicly individualize veganism, it is unclear if they employ strategic individualism or strict individualism because their private beliefs about veganism are uncertain. For example, they may think of veganism as a public good but present it as an individual choice. To know if this is the case, I submit that the best way to understand their perspectives is through in-depth face-to-face interviewing.

  3. Americans also value other forms of individualism, particularly economic individualism, which refers to the self-reliant individual who attains society’s scarce material resources through individual merit, such as hard work ethic. Economic individualism is central to the American Dream narrative that anyone can get ahead if he or she tries hard enough (Hochschild 1995). Sociologists have also used both forms of individualism to explain sociological evidence, such as decline in social obligations to community (Bellah et al. 1985), how Americans talk about morals (Jensen 1995), lack of political participation (Bellah et al. 1985; Putnam 2001), how Americans think about adulthood and teenage sexuality (Schalet 2011), how Americans think about inequality and their self-worth (Bobo 1993; Lewis 1993; Lamont 2000; Silva 2015), and how Americans evaluate poverty and social spending programs (Gilens 1999; Rank 2003), among other explanations.

  4. O’Brien (2015) is an exception, as he argues that individualism is not a deep American cultural value that directs Americans toward voluntarist conduct, but rather a strategy of action that Americans use to resolve the cultural dilemma of fulfilling external obligations within an individualistic context.

  5. This is one of the main reasons individuals adopt veganism (Cooney 2013), though my argument does not rest on representativeness.

  6. The exception may be “abolitionist” vegans who view veganism as a general moral imperative, and that vegan activism must include this message (Francione 2000). None of the vegans I interviewed identified with this approach, but I do plan on interviewing abolitionists for a future project.

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Acknowledgements

I thank Robert Zussman for his guidance and mentorship. I also thank Amy Schalet and Jonathan Wynn for their thoughtful comments and suggestions.

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  1. Department of Sociology, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, 200 Hicks Way, Thompson Hall, Amherst, MA, 01003, USA

    Ryan Turner

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Correspondence to Ryan Turner.

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Turner, R. Veganism: ethics in everyday life. Am J Cult Sociol 7, 54–78 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41290-017-0052-8

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