Reference
Glossary
The words carry the frame. Each term links to the essay that develops it and the flaws it protects you from.
- Abolitionism
- The position that the goal of animal advocacy is the abolition of animal exploitation, not its regulation or improvement.
- Why it matters: The identity of this platform. Every step of the flowchart assumes abolition is the goal and welfare debates are a detour.
- Essay: principle
- Accountability
- Being answerable for what you choose to do and for the consequences of those choices.
- Why it matters: The principle asks humans to justify the human practice of exploitation instead of claiming authority to decide what is acceptable for its victims.
- Essay: principle
- Emancipation
- The end of the relationship of use itself: animals released from the status of resources, not treated more kindly within it.
- Why it matters: Cross framed veganism as liberation, not welfare. Emancipation names the destination; welfare names a detour.
- Essay: visionFlaw: welfareTrap
- Exploitation
- The act of using someone for your purposes or as a means to an end.
- Why it matters: The wrong is in the use, not the method. A painlessly killed animal has still been exploited. This one word keeps the conversation off the welfare exit ramp.
- Essay: principleFlaw: exploitationWrongDefinitionFlaw: sufferingNotExploitation
- Instrumentalisation
- Treating someone as a tool or resource for achieving your own purpose.
- Why it matters: Affection and kind treatment do not end exploitation while the animal is still being used as a means to an end.
- Essay: languageFlaw: welfareTrap
- Live vegan
- The platform's standard phrasing for adopting the principle, in preference to "go vegan."
- Why it matters: "Go" suggests a trip you can return from; "live" names an ongoing moral stance. Small words carry the frame.
- Essay: languageFlaw: liveNotGoVeganLanguage
- Moral arbiter
- Someone who claims the authority to decide what is right or acceptable for others.
- Why it matters: Veganism questions the assumed human authority to decide when and how other animals may be used.
- Essay: principle
- Paternalism
- Centring the animal's inferred preferences rather than human accountability for the practice of exploitation.
- Why it matters: Keeps the human as moral arbiter, still deciding for the animal. Veganism is about human accountability; accountability, not sentiment, produces abolition.
- Essay: effective-activist
- Plant-based
- A description of a diet's contents. Says nothing about the principle held by the person eating it.
- Why it matters: Using it as a synonym for vegan reduces a moral doctrine to a menu, which is exactly the reduction outreach exists to undo.
- Essay: languageFlaw: plantBasedNotVegan
- Property status
- The legal and cultural classification of animals as ownable objects that can be bought, used, and killed at human discretion.
- Why it matters: The root of the problem. Welfare reform regulates how the property is used; it cannot resolve treating sentient beings as property at all.
- Essay: principleFlaw: welfareTrap
- Sentience
- The capacity for subjective experience: to feel, to suffer, to have preferences about one's own existence.
- Why it matters: The morally relevant characteristic. It is the factual premise you confirm early in a conversation, and the answer to plants-feel-pain deflections.
- Essay: animals
- Single-issue campaign (SIC)
- Advocacy targeting one species, product, or practice: fur, whales, dog meat, foie gras.
- Why it matters: By condemning one use in isolation, SICs implicitly endorse the unmentioned rest. The principle admits no category exceptions.
- Essay: languageFlaw: attachOtherCauses
- Speciesism
- Assigning different moral weight to beings based on species membership rather than morally relevant characteristics.
- Why it matters: Names the bias behind every carve-out. The test question: what is the morally relevant difference that justifies the treatment?
- Essay: animals
- The victims' position
- Asking the person to apply their own justification with the roles reversed: if you were the one bred, confined, and used, would tradition or taste convince you?
- Why it matters: Tests whether a justification survives the removal of self-interest. The single most clarifying move in the middle of a conversation.
- Essay: effective-activist
- Three-strike disengage
- After three deflections of a direct question, plant the seed with a closing statement and walk away. No debating, no chasing.
- Why it matters: Your time is the movement's scarcest resource. Unreachable-today people are left with a seed, not a spectacle.
- Essay: effective-activistFlaw: failedToDisengageFlaw: lostControl
- Universal moral claim
- A principle said to apply to everyone, not only to people who personally prefer it.
- Why it matters: Veganism says humans should live without exploiting animals; it is not a private shopping preference.
- Essay: principleFlaw: plantBasedNotVegan
- Utilitarian framing
- Evaluating animal use by weighing suffering against benefit. Produces welfare improvements but cannot produce abolition, because it accepts that the right circumstances could justify exploitation.
- Why it matters: The subtle leak inside seemingly abolitionist arguments: suffering counts, intelligence rankings, victim mathematics. Justice is not a calculation about the terms of use.
- Essay: languageFlaw: sufferingNotExploitationFlaw: statistics
- Veganism
- The principle of the emancipation of animals from exploitation by man (Leslie Cross, 1949); formally, the doctrine that man should live without exploiting animals (1951). A universal moral claim, not a diet, lifestyle, or identity.
- Why it matters: Every welfarist misreading starts by getting the definition wrong. If you cannot state the principle, you will end up defending a diet.
- Essay: principleFlaw: plantBasedNotVeganFlaw: negativeDefinition
- Welfare trap
- The conversational drift from whether animals should be used into how they are treated: conditions, methods, labels.
- Why it matters: The single most common way activists lose the thread mid-conversation. If you are debating treatment, you have already conceded use.
- Essay: languageFlaw: welfareTrapFlaw: industryFocus
- Welfarism
- The position that advocacy should reduce animal suffering through better conditions and incremental reform within existing systems of use.
- Why it matters: Welfare messaging validates the framework of exploitation, misdirects attention to cage sizes, and hands people a humane-label exit ramp. Naming it is the first step to not leaking it.
- Essay: languageFlaw: welfareTrapFlaw: sufferingNotExploitation