Is Vegism an Amputation?

Sometimes vegists stress that their dietary and other consumption patterns are not restrictive in a negative sense. Vegetarian food tastes good, is easy to make, and is nutritious; I don't think anyone committed to a veg lifestyle misses what they forego. Stressing that vegism is not restrictive is, I think, designed to persuade potential recruits that our lifestyle does not diminish the quality or variety of life (it doesn't!). However, I think that viewing vegism as an "amputation" (I'm borrowing the word from a friend) actually turns the tables on the "vegism is a restriction" debate more effectively than cataloging the specific pleasures of vegism.

An amputation requires that something be lost, yes. One could use the metaphor of disease, a disease that has metastasized throughout the Human but which has its nodes and nodules of highly dangerous tissue. Maybe we can save the Human (and a new kind of humanism), maybe not. The disease metaphor illustrates analogically a situation in which amputation increases life. Not that an analogy is an argument--there are always counter analogies--but it prepares the way for an argument.

After amputating flesh-eating and the like, we have room for a prosthesis. Again, a long tradition of the Human has made persons with prosthetics less than the "full" or "whole" body. Practically if not theoretically I think we are well past the uninterrupted body and into the age of the cyborg. Eyeglasses are a pretty primitive technology and I would be dead without them; don't get me started on my interface with coffee and the coffee machine. Fulfilling the function of a lost organ is only one facet of the prosthesis. By not being identical to the other organ prostheses have other facets of being that are thereby offered to the person, culture, machine, etc, to which they are attached. Marking the prosthesis as one center of being rather than as a marginal case makes other parts of the body-machine reveal themselves as multi-faceted, non-monological, interesting and dexterous.

It is in this light, as amputation and prosthesis, that I view vegism. Something is excluded to be sure, excised or exorcised, but so as to yield a "net gain" in vitality. This is not an ethical argument in the traditional sense and will probably not convince many "persons on the street." However, I can't in good (immoral) conscience promulgate a Christian version of ethics even if it does have more short term benefits.