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.
If you’re anti-utilitarianism, how would you ground a coherent ethical framework?
As bad as utilitarianism is, deontology seems far worse. And virtue ethics requires a metric for choosing virtues… which will bring you either to deontology or utilitarianism depending on your answer.
As I said in my comment I have leanings towards utilitarianism but the notion that utilitarian values/analysis is more grounded than other systems is a bit funny. Like one of the primary good criticisms against utilitarianism is that you cannot actually practice it and instead end up implementing some other ethics system on a day to day basis.
How do you calculate the utilons of any decision? Like seriously how?
Well I don’t think you’re the OP. He’s made some pretty sweeping claims that I’d like to address with him.
But as for your comment, I’ll happily oblige 😊
As an individual? Probably not, no. But countries and organizations ought to determine their laws and/or policies based on utilitarianism, yes.
Individuals will probably follow the moral codes of their communities, and only actually use utilitarian principles when it’s time to evaluate whether the rules are working as intended.
Badly, I assume. But it’s closer to “good” than any other system will get you.
I’m not seeing the reasoning behind your assertions.
You say:
Which is a statement of your beliefs near as I can tell, but not the reasons for them. I assume you hold the opinion:
In relations to the idea that this is more grounded and or coherent. Which you believe to be true despite it being essentially impossible to actually do the nuts and bolts thing of utilitarianism because of the enormous complexity of the world and the difficulty in predicting the future; the criticism I gestured at.
But, why? You say later that it’s closer to good than deontological or virtue ethics based approaches (the other 2 major ones). Well actually you say all but lets focus on the big 3 to avoid getting lost in the weeds.
Again, I’m quite sympathetic personally to consequentialist ethics and utiliarianism but you haven’t really given any reasons why it’s better or more reliable or closer to actual moral facts or whatever your reason for believing in it is. I’ll note, referencing my comment again, that philosphers are really evenly split between the big 3 frameworks.
Why is it that you believe it is more reliable, and should be used on a societal level, despite the difficulties in actually using it?