Stop it.
When I helped run the the “Vegan Circlejerk” Reddit community we were always firmly anti-utilitarian. Utilitarianism is a nonsensical, murderous, carceral, western philosophy that espouses using impossible math to come to conclusions. The wrong way to approach the world is to attempt to do equations and decide on your approach based on nonsense regardless of your intent for the “greater good.” We and the communities I’ve helped moderate have always believed in doing the right thing. Acting in accordance with your belief will bring you the result you want.
After my crew and I stepped down from Reddit, that community was steered towards antinatalism. I am personally against this and want to have this community come to consensus against it as well. I have no right to tell other people what to do with their bodies. For some I believe this philosophy is a way to control women’s bodies and set impossible standards. For others I believe it to be an expression of frustration and depression. Neither of these are in the spirit of abolitionist veganism and it will never become a prerequisite for it. Additionally the antinatalist philosophy is exclusionary to people who already have had kids which, when you get to my age, is most people. The admin of lemmy.vg is the same person who brought this philosophy to the subreddit, I would hope that recent events would encourage them to remove this link. To be clear if you decide having children is not for you that is great. I also came to this conclusion. I also don’t believe everyone who promotes people coming to their own decision is a bad person or doing the wrong thing if that includes not having children. It is when we demand people do not that it becomes problematic.
By extension these other utilitarian adjacent philosophies can be found within our movement and it is time to formally denounce it. The point of veganism and leftism is to promote life, not rally against it. The point of veganism is to elevate all life to the consideration that is supposed to be enjoyed by humans. The point of leftism is to ensure that all humans are elevated to that status too and protect each other. When we adopt philosophies that are anti-life, anti-birth, anti-woman, anti-human we lose touch with this and it is the seed from which ur-fascist thought grows.
What happened in Palm Springs is a tragedy. They were not bringing the fight to capital which oppresses us all, it brought the fight to people we are in solidarity with against capital. It was not bringing the fight to the soldiers of the settler regime, it attacked the entrapped. It was essentially a murder suicide from a depressed person who needed solidarity and community. Our vegan communities are doing a disservice promoting misanthropy to our comrades.
Please if you agree or disagree leave your statement in the comments. Thanks.
For me, this is where utilitarianism falls apart. It makes the observer the person who gets to decide what “the best lives possible” means. How can the outside observer have the authority to make this decision?
When talking about humans, consider when people defend colonialism by saying they brought “civilization” and modern medicine, comforts, etc. to people who did not live the way the colonizers did. I’m not saying that non-colonized people live in some utopia, but the people who thought they were doing good didn’t give a single fuck about what the colonized people wanted, disregarded all their knowledge and experience and forced their ways on them. Even if we take lessons learned from that and try and be more open minded about listening to people before making decisions about them (my skin is crawling as I type this omg) we don’t know what we don’t know and it makes no sense to apply this framework to decision making impacting others.
Now consider non-human animals and how we are even less effective at communicating with them…
Every ethical framework requires making some affirmative presumption to begin with. The is-ought gap cannot be closed. Many ethical frameworks begin with less tangible things, like a belief in a deity, which can also lead to either heinous or benevolent outcomes.
I don’t disagree with any of this. And this is why I also strive to do whatever I can to accomplish the goal that I care about – everyone having the best lives possible – to do whatever I think results in other having the greatest degree of autonomy. It’s because I believe that no one knows what would result in a better life for themselves than themselves. I will always defer toward what empowers them to have as much autonomy as possible, provided they aren’t harming others (like carnism, colonialism, capitalism, ethno-supremacy, etc. do).
Yeah. I think there’s an interesting conversation to be had about how one can cause the least harm and be most helpful to someone that we can’t effectively communicate with. I don’t have a good answer for this, so I just want to make sure their basic needs are met (or in the case of non-human animals, not actively sabotaging them) so that they can try to do whatever is best for them.