When I was a vegetarian, I justified my lack of activism by using the ol' "everyone is entitled to their opinion/ethics/morality and you can't tell other people what their morals should be" excuse. I don't know if I ever really believed this, but I certainly said it. Maybe it was to justify the fact that I hated being yelled at, hated being in the confrontation that invariably ensues from trying to tell someone that their dietary habits are directly responsible for the death of sentient beings.
Also, I hate being told what to do myself. I could sympathize.
I still get nervous about confrontation, but like my fear of heights, it's under control. Although I no longer subscribe to the above argument, I still get it thrown at me on a semi-regular basis. Don't get me wrong, I think many things are simply a matter of opinion. Sexuality, for example. There's no rational explanation for why it is wrong to be homosexual. Thus, it's an opinion. A lot of the people I know from school have a tendency to extrapolate that same thing to animal rights: "Veganism is just your opinion." Which is to say given our reasoned argument supporting animal rights, "Morality is a matter of opinion." An argument that lets them off the hook.
That may be so, but I'm willing to bet there are some things encompassed by "morality" that don't fall under the sphere of mere opinion. For example, when we pose the question about whether or not it's okay to kill babies, we get a resounding no. Even if your culture said to? Even if you had a really good reason? What if it saved lives? Are you sure? No, no it's not! (Interestingly enough, the same holds true when we ask if it's morally okay to burn kittens with a blowtorch.)
That's why we fight for human rights, because we've identified a common morality that we believe should hold true across all cultures. I don't know anyone who would say that we should forgo talk about rights in the human context. When we talk about rights, we're not trying to say you should believe what we believe. This isn't religion. If I refuse to convert, I harm only myself. If I refuse to recognize rights, however, I will probably harm other sentient beings, which is about justice. What we're saying when we speak of animal/human rights is that they exist whether or not we choose to recognize them. Maybe that's not really a hard and fast truth (everything is subjective, right?) but if you argue that then you commit yourself to saying that no moral rights exist; for example, slavery, when condoned by the law, is beyond moral reproach. Likewise, just because the law says we have a right to skin an animal alive doesn't mean that it is okay anymore than when the law said it was okay to own human slaves.
If someone makes the assumption that veganism is simply an expression of opinion, they should have to defend that assumption. What they are saying, without actually saying anything at all, is that our efforts to collapse speciesism into the same moral tent as racism, sexism, bigotry, etc. is erroneous. Therefore, they must tell us why animal rights is an opinion while talk of other rights are a moral baseline. If your relegate speciesism to the status of an opinion, you must in turn make the claim that racism, sexism, sexual prejudice, agism, etc. are merely matters of opinion, and that we should simply remain quiet about these 'personal views' even when we see them being violated.
Crossposted @ Vegan Soapbox
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