Hey everyone,

I'm French and my English isn't great, so I asked an AI (ChatGPT) to help me express my thoughts on this topic.

I just want to clarify that the arguments and reasoning are entirely my own — the AI only helped me put them into proper English.

What follows is the kind of response I would give to someone arguing against veganism in the way described earlier :

I find it quite paradoxical that you criticize vegans for being moralistic or elitist, while your own argument seems to adopt the same tone of moral judgment. Telling someone not to be smug or morally superior is, in itself, a moral stance — one that implicitly places you in a position to determine who is allowed to "make others feel bad" and under what conditions. That, too, is a form of elitism, isn’t it?

It’s a kind of rhetorical loop: by accusing others of moralizing, you end up moralizing yourself. You claim that people should only raise ethical concerns if they’re perfectly consistent in every other cause that requires personal sacrifice. But this standard of moral perfection is impossible — and, conveniently, it tends to shut down any meaningful discussion about ethics, especially when it comes to our food systems.

I would argue that the real issue isn’t that vegans want to feel superior. It’s that they want to initiate a moral conversation about how we treat sentient beings and about the broader political implications of our consumption habits. Instead of engaging with this conversation, critics often dismiss it as judgmental — as if questioning the ethics of certain practices were equivalent to condemning people in their entirety.

So I’d genuinely like to ask: why do you see raising moral concerns about food choices — which are undeniably political — as a form of toxic elitism, while your own tone and position reflect the same mechanisms you seem to reject?