"Love One, Love All": Empathy, Compassion, and the Ethics of Care in Vegan Discourse

Following on from Elizabeth Thomson’s recent IDEAS seminar on empathy, this presentation looks at empathy, compassion, and the ethics of care in vegan discourse and the Vegan Society’s Be AnimalKind campaign (Vegan Society 2022a). Using systemic functional work on appraisal (e.g. Martin and White 2005, Economou 2009, Feng and O’Halloran 2013, Ariztimuño et al. 2022), I consider the campaign’s multi- and intersemiotic construal of how we might feel, think, and act in relation to others, both within and across species. I’ll begin with a short introduction to veganism and the Vegan Society and give a brief summary of (eco)feminist animal ethics (Donovan 1990, 1996, Curtin 1991, inter alia) and how it contrasts with and/or supplements rights-based and welfarist approaches. The main focus here will be on Gruen’s (2007 [2004], 2009, 2012, 2013, 2014) entangled empathy and empathetic engagement and Curtin’s (2022 [2014]) distinctions between empathy and compassion. I’ll then use the appraisal framework, and especially the attitudinal categories of affect, judgment, and appreciation, to investigate how, in the Be AnimalKind campaign, affect might negotiate empathy and the sharing of emotions, judgment might negotiate character and the sharing of principles or ethics, and appreciation might negotiate taste and the sharing of preferences (Martin 2004, 329; Stenglin 2004, 403; Martin and White 2005, 42). I’ll also consider the importance of the distinction between judgment and appreciation in the way our relations with other animals are instantiated and negotiated—are we appraising someone or something?—as well as how the textual voice(s) engages with different voices in the discourse. This is especially important here since the Be AnimalKind campaign is aimed primarily at “non-vegan animal lovers” (Vegan Society 2022a, emphasis added), so the textual voice, presumably a “vegan animal lover”, needs to shape the dialogic space in such a way as to align the viewer around a particular set of values, some of which might not initially be shared with or acted upon by the viewer. This talk is based on a work in progress for a special issue of Language, Context and Text on the “Semiotics of Peace, Compassion, and Empathy”, edited by Etaywe, Thomson, Wijeyewardene, and Wheeler. My contribution will be part of the section on compassion. References available on request