How the virtue of compassion requires us to be vegan

Abstract

In my thesis, I applied virtue ethics to animal ethics. In order to show how virtue ethics can be applied to a specific topic in animal ethics – animal agriculture and its countermeasure: veganism - I focused on the virtue of compassion. Having obtained the virtue of compassion and realized that the animal agriculture industry hinders animal flourishing and that we should care about it, we cannot support it by buying its products, i.e. we should be vegans. Although there are other means to gain excess to animal products and animal by-products, they are not relevant, as most adults have to buy most their own food and my argument applies to them.