2024/11/22 by Christopher Bobier, Josh Milburn · 1 voice · 1 citation
Social Sciences · #European and International Law Studies
paper · doi:10.1163/25889567-bja10055
openalex publication_date 2024/11/22 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/02
Abstract Imagine you come across a leftover turkey sandwich that will expire soon, no one is around to eat it, and you cannot donate it to someone else before it goes bad. A new omnivore says that you should eat the sandwich. A common rebuttal to new omnivorism says that by eating the turkey sandwich you become complicit in industrialized animal agriculture: consuming the leftover sandwich amounts to a retroactive endorsement of the institution that produced it. This is the complicity objection to new omnivorism. In this paper, we argue that the complicity objection fails to ethically distinguish new omnivores and vegans. We suggest that we accept that there is no harmless-to-animals diet available, and so, rather than trying to find the impossible, we should confront this morally tragic reality head on. Doing so may support new omnivorism over veganism.