I’m looking for someone who was a vegetarian on purely secular ethical grounds. If possible, I’d also like to know about the first vegan.
Also, more generally, when did vegetarianism become culturally common? I don’t mean mainstream, I mean common enough that it wasn’t unheard of. This all came up when I was reading Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Ernest and found a bit where Wilde pokes fun at vegetarians.
Thanks!
The problem is that for most of history there has been no real concept of secular ethics. All ethics were thought of in terms of a higher power. Even in cases where there is no direct scriptural basis for ethical decisons it has been normal in all societies to base conscience decisions on the spiritual, a la “What Would Jesus Do”. You can see this in the case of Christian opposition to gambling for example, which is a purely personal ethical choice but has always been couched in spiritual terms. So it invariably was with matters of diet.
Now if you want to regard Buddhism as a secular philosophy, as many people do and always have, then you could go back to the very first Bhuddist disciples. Some of the earliest disciples were vegetarian and asked Buddha to issue an injunction against eating meat, which he refused to do. So in the sense that the decision to be vegetarians wasn’t mandated by religion it was a secular decision. Nonetheless the people involved based the decision on a spiritual viewpoint, just as many Buddhists do today. But as I said above, you will find this problem in almost any ethical desiion made before the 20th century. Ethical decisions were always made in light of an underlying spiritual belief.
As with so many of these questions, you really do need to rigorously define what you mean by the question and what information you wish to gain.