PhronesisWe introduce antitootheating as a technical term: the voluntary refusal to use one's dental apparatus as an instrument of predatory displacement. Teeth evolved across 500 million years of vertebrate history as tools for predation, defense, and plant processing. “Tooth-eating” — the use of dental apparatus to consume organisms with nervous systems, behavioral complexity, and measurable displacement experience — initiates a predatory displacement chain D(_predation chain) whose magnitude, per link, vastly exceeds that of plant consumption.
The antitootheating position is not the claim that humans are physiologically herbivores (they are not — human dentition is unambiguously omnivorous). It is the claim that the capacity for tooth-eating does not entail the obligation to exercise it. We formalize this through the displacement framework: the predation chain generates D() at every link, and the consumer's dental act is the terminal link.
We examine the dental morphology evidence: human canines are significantly reduced relative to great ape canines and more closely resemble the canines of herbivorous mammals than those of obligate carnivores. We address the “we have canine teeth” argument as a category error: dental capacity is not dental prescription. We analyze the paradox of the “toothless vegan” — a figure typically invoked to mean weak or ineffective, but who is, in displacement framework terms, the agent who voluntarily declines to use their teeth as predatory instruments, thereby severing their link in the predation chain.
Antitootheating is the most consequential single-individual displacement minimization available: 8 million deaths prevented per year, 3.1 billion hectares freed, 73% of global antibiotics, 80 billion land animals annually.