The Appeal to Nature Fallacy (vegan / vegans / veganism)

hey the appeal to nature fallacy is a
concept that gets kicked around a lot on the internet perhaps especially amongst people interested in veganism ecology and animal rights as with many other phrases that end with the word fallacy it gets repeated so often that people forget that the concept itself is not always fallacious and ad hominem fallacy at Latin term meaning fallacy of speaking against the person instead of against their ideas not all ad hominem information is fallacious you may have an argument against a person about their character about their conduct with the dunna life which is completely valid and salient and important to the conversation you're having if you're having an election and you're debating who should who should people vote for ad hominem material may be really useful and salient and important and not a fallacy at all may not be raised in a in a fallacious way likewise this question of nature invoking the idea of nature or the observation of the natural world as a standard as a referent is not always fallacious by any means if you have a captive breeding program for endangered bird species so you have birds where there were so few of them left that if you just leave them in the forest you're afraid they're gonna disappear or it may be that there's so little forest left that the type of habitat they're from has disappeared that you're taking them in and you're gonna try to build an enclosure for them how would you design that enclosure to be humane strange word to be appropriate for those birds well a study of their natural habitat is the way to do it to say these birds will be more comfortable in an enclosure that resembles their natural origins is not an appeal to nature fallacy it's completely procedurally correct you're interested in the temperature the climate how much water they'd be exposed to are they the type of bird that likes to be next to a pond what type of vegetation what type of trees yes you would gather assiduously information about the natural world and put together a model for what type of environment they should live in if you're going to keep these birds in captivity temporarily or permanently for this type of reason since not every use of the concept of nature is a fallacy and I mean I don't know it's funny to me I've Egan's have gotten into this habit of anytime someone says to you that eating meat is natural just throwing back this idea well that's that's an appeal to nature fallacy you can reflect in your own lives whether or not that has ever really been effective for you if you're talking to someone maybe your boss at work maybe your boyfriend maybe your girlfriend maybe your brother I I really doubt that this will get a positive reaction or move the conversation forward in an effective way to simply snub someone by saying oh no that's an appeal to nature fallacy even if it really is an appeal of taste repel see it may be that they're engaging in fallacious reasoning and appealing you know to nature as a standard when it's not appropriate but I have now had all of the same excuses from vegans that meat eaters make for eating need when vegans want to make excuses for buying a dog and cutting off its testicles and then raising it as a house pet where they think the way the dog lives in nature is irrelevant and therefore I'm supposedly guilty of committing an appeal to nature fallacy by just talking about how dogs actually live in nature you know for example the African wild dog my pointing out that pigs in the wild do not behave like these pigs people are now raising as house pets and there were similar issues you know are you gonna spay and neuter the pig are you gonna remove the pigs fangs you know is this pig is presumably not going to be allowed to grow tusks and it's not going to be allowed to go hunting let's say wild boars actually kill and eat other large mammals you're not gonna let the pig kill and eat your dog as an example which they're quite capable of doing there are so many absurd contradictions in this and people talk about a real fallacy people also send in the excuse to me of symbiosis of claiming that their relationship with their host pet is one of symbiosis I'm not going to get into the scientific definition about it okay you think taking an animal and castrating it so that it can entertain you so it can be your your companion and have an emotional you think that's symbiosis you look at look at symbiosis in nature you think it's reasonable to extend the concept of symbiosis to a human being spaying or neutering a house pet depriving it of its natural environment depriving it of its autonomy in every way and turning it into a toy into what you you regard that as symbiosis well which which one is a worse fallacy when I am appealing to nature in that discussion I'm appealing to the concept of nature in exactly the same way that we would in designing habitat for birds in a bird enclosure or for penguins say in a penguin enclosure you may indeed have a situation where a specific breed of penguin it's gonna die or it's been displaced you need to provide shelter to keep them alive either before they can be returned to their habitat or for some other reason obviously you're gonna want to really carefully study what is the diet of the Penguins in nature what temperature would they be at how can you provide them with enough time on land enough time of the water etc etc I mean there's no not every use of the idea is fallacious parallel to this also I mean there is the the appeal to culture fallacy more often called the appeal to tradition which comes up a lot life where people make excuses for things because something is cultural or traditional well sometimes that may be fallacious and again when you're talking to people face-to-face whether it's your brother your boss or what have you it's probably not useful to say to them oh well that's an appeal to culture fallacy you know where is that gonna take the conversation and why would they respect your opinion and why would that be convincing I think this is probably more counterproductive people want to think it is but the appeal to culture also it's not always a fallacy if we're discussing the best way to organize an art museum culture is significant culture is relevant culture is a meaningful standard Akrotiri tradition is relevant there are all sorts of hype I know organizing a performance of Shakespeare whatever culture and tradition and all those ideas you want to talk about religion or religion and politics there are all sorts of contexts where it's not fallacious to appeal to these ideas as a standard and finally I mean probably the most overused fallacy of them all on the Internet is this idea that causation causation is not proved by correlation sorry we normally sit the other way around that correlation doesn't show causation and there it's like well this is true and some people seem to feel very intelligent powerful by leaping out to declare that this is true that correlation is not the same thing as causation but this tends to be a sort of meaningless distraction from the fact that correlation itself is very meaningful and very important long ago before I left Toronto we had a scandal covered in the newspapers about the correlation between ethnicity and different types of police arrests and right away looking at the statistics you could see there was a very unequal treatment of black people and this was actually not at downtown Toronto this is really the suburbs of Toronto and especially the highways that connected the suburb so was the police were stopping it's like one especially disproportionate example was the police stopping cars with black drivers and checking to see if the car was stolen where there was no no other reason to do so now correlation does not prove causation but it's still incredibly important it's true you don't have a cause-and-effect relationship there between ethnicity and police behavior but it doesn't matter the correlation already is really important it's something you really need to address the inequality between the races shown by this correlation is already something really meaningful important and we don't even actually need to get into other causal factors so though there may be some you know maybe that when you really look at it well ten percent of these cases were for this reason and five percent were for that reason it's never gonna be a hundred percent racism but obviously I say the correlation already is so significant so likewise we're talking about appeal to nature well sometimes nature really is significant can I keep a pet penguin no can I keep a pet flamingo a pink flamingo no I think if you really search your heart of hearts as a vegan and you look at how dogs live in the wild how pigs live in the wild what the life of a wild boar is like in the forest then you may be surprised to find that the answer the question can you keep a pig as a pet actually is no even though the life of a pig in your living room as a pet is much more pleasant than the life of a pig in a slaughterhouse or on a farm I understand that same for dogs raising dogs as pets is obviously nicer to the dogs and raising them for meat but that is ultimately a meaningless comparison the comparison I want you to make that we all should make is the comparison to how animals live in the wild finally one more one more example I want to mention on this issue of correlation versus causation um every so often I see social stitches of this kind of really misunderstood where there's a correlation between art education students who are schooled in painting and then how much money there and after they graduate or how successful they are in university or other factors that's the case we repeat many people really do miss understand they think oh if you teach students how to draw in paint it will make them smarter and then they'll be better at math for that reason for cause-and-effect reasons now of course in reality if you understand social science statistics the type of students who have access to art education have all kinds of other social advantages and the students who are deprived of art education have other disadvantages and so on there are all these other conflating factors now nevertheless the correlation may still be meaningful it may still be worth really thinking about what ways learning or studying art makes you know students may be more motivated to do better at math maybe it's just a nice distraction maybe students do better at math because their their education as a whole is less boring or you know more rewarding or they're happier overall or something but you know when you have a correlation like that students getting art education to better at math then no we we definitely do not want to talk about correlation equating causation but we still can recognize the correlation itself as something meaningful so guys we've all been kicking around this concept of the appeal to nature fallacy a little bit too much some voices on YouTube in particular have really popularized this as a kind of fast kick in the pants reputation for meat eaters which is really kind of shallow and stupid and self-defeating as opposed to having a more meaningful engagement with the people you're debating these issues about and being open to really understanding what their misconceptions are and trying to educate them I mean you know it works both ways too right because if vegans people say to us that eating meat is natural we say no that's an appeal to nature fallacy well we say a human being drinking a cow's milk is unnatural well then the meat-eaters can say to us that's an appeal to nature fallacy is it a fallacy I think it's really meaningful and worthwhile to say look in nature mammals feed milk to their own babies only you know like a cow feeds a baby calf and humans feed milk to baby humans and that's it and it's not part of adult nutrition for really any mammal species you know dolphins do breast feeding too you know but human beings do not try to drink dolphin milk do not Google that do not Google that you know so yeah talking about what's natural and what's unnatural is not always a fallacy is not always a logical dead end it doesn't mean you're stupid it doesn't mean you're you're asking the wrong questions all of these questions are worth exploring with a detached down-to-earth ultimately open-minded attitude that's informed by the facts and that's also you know honest about the extent to which our own emotions are involved in this because these decisions are not purely factual ultimately the sense of revulsion I have for the dairy industry it's partly emotional it's partly irrational it's partly ecological it's partly economic but we all know it really comes down to a question of principle at the end of the day it begins with ethics it ends with ethics and most of us go cut the middle is about ethics so whether or not you think that the role of nature is is a fallacy it comes down to questions of good and evil and questions of good and evil will never be strictly logical they'll be about me and you what kind of man I want to be what kind of society I want to live in what kind of world I want this to be for myself and for my children in the future