Famous Vegans - Michael C. Dorf

Michael C. Dorf

He is an American law professor and a noted U.S. constitutional law scholar. He is a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School. He spent the year between college and law school as a Rotary Scholar at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. He is currently a Professor of law at Cornell Law School. He has written dozens of law review articles on constitutional law and related subjects. You can find some of the books he has written at this link.

Quotes by Michael C. Dorf:

"For ethical vegans, veganism is no more a "lifestyle choice" than pacifism or opposition to slavery and torture of human beings are lifestyle choices."

"If I were accidentally to hit and kill a deer with my car, I suppose that I would have no first-order moral objection to eating its flesh and making slippers out of its hide (assuming I knew how to do that). Indeed, on utilitarian grounds, I might have good reason to call a butcher and tanner to do these things and sell the products to the omnivorous public, on the theory that doing so might make unnecessary the deliberate killing of one additional deer. Yet I have a revulsion against both courses of action, perhaps on aesthetic grounds only, although my aesthetic judgment here is clearly related to my ethical grounds for veganism."

"The very existence of the almost-word "pescetarian" shows what a hard sell empathy for fish is, notwithstanding the evidence that they are similar to mammals and birds in their capacity to suffer. People who formerly denied that fish feel pain now commonly say that a being cannot really feel pain unless it understands that it is experiencing pain. To my mind this gets things exactly backwards: the most searing pains render one incapable of understanding pain or anything else; they are raw sensory experiences, and much the worse to experience as a consequence of that fact."

Quotes are from his Dorf on Law Blog.