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Approaches towards ethics which are influenced by Wittgenstein raise a concern about a loss of concepts which occurs as religious ontologies become secularized, psychologised and demythologized. Variants of this idea, of literal or figurative loss, occur in Cora Diamond, Iris Murdoch and (perhaps more strongly) Alasdair MacIntyre. Their shared commitment is to the maintaining of a rich conceptual repertoire for ethics, with many concepts performing many different tasks. Their shared background idea is one of rejecting tendencies within the deontological and consequentialist traditions, which all three regard as reductionist. Whatever we might want to say about the potential of such traditions for picturing ethical predicaments in fuller, and non-reductionist ways, vegan advocacy has in the past been influenced by versions of them which do seem to fall foul of the Diamond-Murdoch- MacIntyre problem. Particularly, through the embracing of what we might call ‘a reductionist story about value.’ That is, a flawed conception of what it is that we are doing when we talk about non-human animals as having value. As a possible corrective, the paper will consider the converse process of gaining concepts, and its potentially destabilising role when it occurs in the form of bringing in concepts from outside of the broadly liberal repertoire of rights, duties, equality, liberty, and community. The focus will be upon appropriation of the distinctively non-liberal concept of ‘ahimsa,’ a popular concept among vegan advocates who otherwise adhere to some version of the reductionist story about value. The paper will argue that gaining concepts in this particular way poses several significant problems: difficulties of harmonizing across liberal and non-liberal concepts; fidelity to the appropriated concept; and concerns about cultural appropriation and the way that it can feed back into cultures of origin. The easiest way to appropriate is, after all, to misappropriate. We can see this in the case of ahimsa, which has multiple associations, when it is reduced down to something far thinner, such as a mere repetition of our concept of non-harm. The reductionist tendency in the way that broadly liberal concepts are themselves used, is then reproduced when the new concepts are brought in from the outside, without allowing them a sufficiently distinctive role. The paper will argue that there is nonetheless a gain to be had from pluralising discourses of vegan advocacy, through such appropriation, and that it can also serve as a corrective to reductionist tendencies rather than merely reproducing them. Tony Milligan(Cosmological Visionaries project, King’s College London) Comments are closed.
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