Are vegans hypocrites if no one can be 100% vegan?

The objection

“There’s animal product in your tyres, your phone, the bone-char that refines some sugar, the roads you drive on. You’re not actually consistent, so why should I take your moral lectures seriously?”

The answer

This argument is aimed at the vegan, and it leaves the case against eating animals where it was. Philosophers call the move tu quoque, “you too”: concluding that someone’s argument must be faulty because they don’t practise what they preach. The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy allows that catching a speaker in hypocrisy is a reason to be suspicious of their reasoning, but not a sufficient reason to discount it [1]. Even if every charge landed, the bacon on your plate would be no more justified than before.

Can anyone be 100% vegan?

Nobody can, and veganism doesn’t ask them to. The Vegan Society defines it as a way of living that seeks to exclude exploitation of and cruelty to animals “as far as is possible and practicable”, and its definition page notes that animal products turn up in more places than you might expect [2]. Charges of this kind can be true. Bone char, made from animal bone, is used to decolourise some cane sugar (Hart et al., 2022) [3]. Animals killed when crops are harvested are covered under crop deaths.

In the UK, the Bank of England said in February 2017 that an extremely small amount of tallow is used early in making the polymer pellets for its plastic £5 notes [4]. That August it decided to keep these animal-derived additives, typically under 0.05%, in future notes, although 88% of those who stated a preference in its public consultation were against them [5]. The only workable alternative was chemicals derived from palm oil, which 48% of the same consultees also opposed; the Bank said palm oil raised questions of environmental sustainability, and switching would have cost the taxpayer about £16.5 million over ten years [5]. It also pointed out that its notes were in line with other issuers of polymer notes, and that animal-derived additives are widespread in everyday products, including other ways to pay [5].

Are vegans hypocrites for using products with animal traces?

Not by veganism’s own standard: hypocrisy means preaching a rule you don’t keep, and the rule veganism sets is to avoid exploiting animals as far as is possible and practicable [2]. A shopper has no say over what goes into a banknote, but chooses what to eat several times a day. Peter Singer, whose Animal Liberation (1975) was revised in 2023 as Animal Liberation Now, singles out raising animals for food and experimenting on them as the practices that cause more suffering to more animals than anything else humans do [6]. His advice is to stop buying meat and other animal products “as far as is reasonable and practical in our individual circumstances” [6], much the same test the Vegan Society sets.

If nobody can be perfect, why bother?

Cutting most animal products still does most of the good: Singer accepts that eating 90% fewer animal products is 90% as good as going fully vegan in its direct effects, as a 2025 study guide to his book notes [6]. A standard of flawlessness demanded of vegans alone, with the inevitable shortfall then used to dismiss the whole idea, would excuse anyone from changing anything. The guide’s authors go further: getting more people to make partial changes, they argue, is often better than persuading a smaller number to act with greater moral purity [6].