Use and abuse revisited: Response to Pluhar and Varner

Abstract

In her recent “Counter-Reply” to my views, Evelyn Pluhar defends her use of literature on nutrition and restates her argument for moral vegetarianism. In his “Vegan Ideal” article, Gary Varner claims that the nutrition literature does not show sufficient differences among women, men, and children to warrant concern about discrimination. In this response I show how Professor Pluhar continues to draw fallacious inferences: she begs the question on equality, avoids the main issue in my ethical arguments, argues from irrelevancies, misquotes her sources, equivocates on context, confuses safety with morality, appeals to fear, confuses correlation with cause, fails to evaluate scientific studies, draws hasty conclusions from insufficient data, ignores a large amount of data which would call her views into question, does not follow good scientific or moral argumentation, objectionably exceeds the limits of her expertise, and resorts to scapegoating. I also argue that Professor Varner fails to make his case because he offers virtually no evidence from scientific studies on nutrition, relies on outdated and fallacious sources, makes unsupported claims, ignores evidence that would contravene his claims, draws hasty conclusions based on weakly supported hypotheses rather than facts, employs a double standard, appeals to ignorance, does not evaluate arguments from his sources, and makes anad hominem attack on a respected nutritionist when his focus should be on evaluating the evidence and arguments from the scientific studies themselves. Neither Varner nor Pluhar have responded sufficiently to the real issue in my arguments, that of discrimination and bias in the vegan ideal.