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Vegetable RightsVegetable Rights is a philosophical movement and ideology which campaigns for the rights of vegetables, and against their use as food. Vegetable rights activists see themselves as inheritors of the philosophies of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Jainism, and see Vegetable Liberation as the logical outcome. Activists are generally non-violent. Historical precedents include the prohibition of bean-eating by Pythagoras. In the modern world, Jainists prohibit eating root vegetables. Vegetable Rights proponents also claim that future long-distance space travel and colonisation of other planets will mean that humans will have to rely on stimulated food rather than organic matter, and therefore humanity should switch to non-vegetable foods as soon as possible. In ecology Many environmental lawsuits turn on the question of who has standing; are the legal issues limited to property owners, or does the general public have a right to intervene? Christopher D. Stone's seminal 1972 essay, "Do trees have standing?" seriously addressed the question of whether natural objects themselves should have legal rights, including the right to participate in lawsuits. Stone suggested that there was nothing absurd in this view, and noted that many entities now regarded as having legal rights were, in the past, regarded as "things" that were regarded as legally rightless; for example, aliens, children and women. His essay is sometimes regarded as an example of the fallacy of hypostatization. A year before Stone's essay, the children's author Dr. Seuss published The Lorax, in which the title character, a defender of the ecosystem, punctuates the book with the refrain "I am the Lorax: I speak for the trees." In satire The notion of vegetable rights has sometimes been presented satirically, as a reductio ad absurdam to the concepts of animal rights and vegetarianism. One notable example of this occupies most of Chapter XXVI of Samuel Butler's novel Erewhon, which describes a fictional civilization in an isolated and remote area. Various aspects of Erewhonian customs mock those of Victorian England. A Erewhonian "prophet" who argues for animal rights states that "As regards vegetables you may eat all those that will let you eat them with impunity." However, a professor of botany notes (correctly) "both animals and plants, have had a common ancestry, and that hence the second should be deemed as much alive as the first." He goes on at considerable length to demonstrate that plants possess intelligence. - The conclusion he drew, or pretended to draw, was that if it was sinful to kill and eat animals, it was not less sinful to do the like by vegetables, or their seeds. None such, he said, should be eaten, save what had died a natural death, such as fruit that was lying on the ground and about to rot, or cabbage-leaves that had turned yellow in late autumn.
Having thus "driven his fellow countrymen into a corner at the point of a logical bayonet... though the Puritan party made a furious outcry, the acts forbidding the use of meat were repealed by a considerable majority.... Even the Puritans after a vain attempt to subsist on a kind of jam made of apples and yellow cabbage leaves, succumbed to the inevitable, and resigned themselves to a diet of roast beef and mutton, with all the usual adjuncts of a modern dinner-table." External links * Stone, Christopher D. (1988), Should Trees Have Standing? And Other Essays on Law, Morals and the Environment. (Reprint) Oceana Publishing, ISBN: 0379213818
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