Skip Navigation
Vegan @vegantheoryclub.org
🏴 hamid the villain [he/him] 🏴 @vegantheoryclub.org

Statement on "Negative Utilitarianism," "Efilism," and "Antinatalism,"

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.

31 comments

  • Anti-natalism fails to pass a very simple vibe check because it targets predominantly the global south. When people are talking about "exponential population growth" they rarely talk or mean

    . I will not be able to put it better than it already had been at https://hexbear.net/post/99029, which is how !chapotraphouse@hexbear.net's "anti-nautilism" rule came about.

    Also I keep hearing bad things about Singer but haven't actually looked into it.

  • I think laying out the consensus you wish to arrive at sort of undermines the idea of reaching a consensus.

    I have strong leanings towards utilitarianism but recognise that it is, at least at this point, incalulable and therefore extremely open to bias. That said I am unconvinced that virtue ethics is not open to exactly the same problems. Many people who do awful shit follow that too. My conclusion thusfar is that making grand statements of ethics is an insane thing to do and if you're ever faced with a bunch of screaming people while you're "doing the right thing" maybe you're not and you should chill.

    I think an ethics that ignores that an enormous amount of suffering is experienced by living beings is naive. There is a lot of agony in the world. If you conclude from that the idea that we currently are ready to play god well then you're a bit stupid. While it's nice to imagine a form of life where motivations are determined by gradients of pleasure (the usual goal of serious negative ethics systems) humans will more than likely never be capable of doing this.

    I don't think you can really claim leftism is pro life so much as pro people. If people exist we should take care of them. I don't thing this has any particular valence towards or against making more humans. Many humans desire to make more humans, but this isn't really a good argument for making more humans. It's essentially the same argument for breeding animals for pets.

    I have no way of assessing whether the average human life has negative or positive moral valence and I am deeply sceptical of anyone who claims they can determine that.

    Edit: I want to add a source which is a survey of philosphers, it has this interesting table of results.

    Normative ethics: deontology, consequentialism, or virtue ethics?

    • Other 558 / 1803 (30.9%)
    • Accept or lean toward: consequentialism 435 / 1803 (24.1%)
    • Accept or lean toward: virtue ethics 406 / 1803 (22.5%)
    • Accept or lean toward: deontology 404 / 1803 (22.4%)

    from: https://philpapers.org/surveys/results.pl?affil=Philosophy+faculty+or+PhD&areas0=0&areas_max=1&grain=coarse

    As we can see professional bigly thinkies are quite split. I would caution against wholesale adoption of rejection of any particular system of ethics.

  • I'm a leftist and a vegan because I lean utilitarian, not in spite of it, so I disagree. I want as many sentient beings to have the best lives possible and I act in accordance with that because I want that outcome. To me, those are much more solid axioms to have than any other ethical framework.

    However, if you arrived at veganism and leftism through some other ethical system, I have zero interest in denouncing how you got there, and think there should be space for that.

    That said, you can also use virtue ethics to justify heinous actions and beliefs too, but I think it's better to be targeted in criticizing the specifics of their actions and beliefs over denouncing utilitarianism or virtue ethics as a whole. If you want to levy specific criticisms about how someone acts, and you think it's rooted in utilitarianism, that can be useful, but denouncing an entire ethical framework when its application can have widely varying outcomes isn't good because that would throw out every ethical framework.

    • I want as many sentient beings to have the best lives possible

      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...

      • For me, this is where utilitarianism falls apart. It makes the observer the person who gets to decide what "the best lives possible" means.

        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.

        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.

        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).

        Now consider non-human animals and how we are even less effective at communicating with them...

        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.

    • The ethical framework of the panopitcon and Nazi eugenics is not one that I would openly claim I follow. If it brought you to veganism it was an accident, a utilitarian would be against abolitionist veganism for being too extreme and for promoting humane animal testing. Utilitarianism undermines the fundamental concept of justice which is core to a social justice movement like veganism. Sorry but there is no room for that. You should really evaluate the effect of utilitarianism on the world and what people utilitarian mindsets have actually done. If it helps you that is fine but I can never support it and have to denounce what I see are dangerous ideologies.

      https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/ethics-everyone/201506/whats-wrong-utilitarianism

  • I realize I didn't share my stance on antinatalism, which is probably super telling. It's so far removed from my life and experiences I simply don't think about it that much lol.

    In my perfect world there would be no unwanted pregnancy or forced birth. The quiver full movement is wack as fuck. Both forcing people to give birth and giving birth to people to have them be your little soldiers are abhorrent behaviors to me.

    I have never wanted to have children so I don't understand that part of the human experience. I don't think it's inherently moral or immortal to want to and succeed in procreating. I don't know enough about the topic (and don't think internet antinatalists do either) to try and tell people what they should be doing like that. I don't think there is a net good to me or anyone else that I was born but I also don't think it's that deep 🤷🏻‍♀️

  • This is the first I have heard about the incident in Palm Springs. Everything I read about it seems to presume I would know who is against fertility clinics but I can't figure it out. Would be grateful if someone could clue me in. (I thought that the current flavor of US fascism supported fertility clinics. I know some religions are against it but seems unclear who would do it, especially without a statement.)

    My take differs from what Hamid posted slightly - but it could also be me reading too much into it, lol! I read this statement as presenting life as inherently good an joyful, something to be enjoyed.

    I personally view it as neutral. It just is. It is not inherently good or bad, there is no meaning. But paired with that is a fiery opposition to treating some life as worthless or as a source of commodities. To me, life has no meaning but fuck anyone who tries to impose meaning on any being through their authority. Examples include capitalism (workers lives are to produce value for the capitalist), patriarchy (people who can give birth's lives are to produce workers), carnism (animal lives are here to extract commodities from). Also fuck everyone who withholds the requirements for life (access to food, water, clean air, community).

    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.

    This is probably just semantics and me being way too literal in my thinking but the above is where my veganism and leftism is centered and it is so without the idea of "promoting" life. We're here, we're alive, and we all deserve to live in peace, comfort and community.

    Utilitarianism assigns value in an arbitrary manner based on the observers values and that's super wack to me.

  • I 100% agree with your stance on antinatalism, but I'm confused about condemning utilitarianism. I don't know if I'd call myself one, but certainly I fall into the broader category of consequentialism rather than deontology, that is, the morality of an action is determined by the consequences you can reasonably expect that action to have, as opposed to morality being about abiding by a set of rules and fulfilling moral obligations. To me, as a vegan, this is fully compatible with a vegan perspective, consuming animals or animal products leads to the consequence that animals will suffer, and I don't want that to happen, so I don't do it.

    I don't see how utilitarianism in general would imply antinatalism. You could make a utilitarian argument for it, I suppose, but it's possible to "make an argument" in favor of just about any position from just about any moral framework. That doesn't mean that the framework actually implies that position. It's fair to critique utilitarianism, but I don't think it's appropriate to draw a hard moral line against it, because individual utilitarians can still be good people who agree on specific issues like veganism, like being against antinatalism, etc. There are good and bad people who subscribe to just about every broad philosophical framework like that.

    Moreover, I'm not sure what moral framework you're proscribing here.

  • I've not seen antinatalists say that there's anything specific to be done about the people already on this planet. It may be an adjacent idea, but not one that's included in the definition or concept of antinatalism. That said, there are more impactful ways of bringing good into the world even compared to adopting, like giving lectures, releasing videos, or even talking to people online. The reach, the effort/result, or the risk/reward ratio are just significantly higher than raising one or more kids, who may or may not listen, like everybody else. You could call that utilitarian, but regardless of whether it really is, someone who's not yet born has no value from either philosophical perspective.

    PS. A woman giving birth is always riskier for her than the opposite, so that's something to consider in evaluating which, if any, position is against women.

  • 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.

  • These, or their cousin "we could lose a few billion people," pop up on my instance from time to time. I'm not amenable to either, but I do understand the feelings of grief behind them. Myself, I adopted a secular practice in order to stay grounded, because it's easy to fall into the pit... comment sections with debate lords proclaiming why whatever is futile, people raging and posturing or possessed by long dead philosophers, all while the machine gobbles up the world. Soul crushing.

    Grief and its companions fear, anger, despair, are blinding and consume the larger liberatory project. The sense of powerlessness these states foster breeds the need to control, and it's easier than people want to admit to slip. I feel similarly about the tendency to dehumanize. I always try to be empathetic, reminding myself that those thoughts once crossed my mind, the visceral frustration I once felt, but it's disheartening.

  • Antinatalism is also often, when I've seen it, incredibly racist and has a poor understanding of sociology and demographics. They're the sort of people that think the population is going to keep increasing exponentially, forever. In part because capitalism has taught them that, because infinite economic growth requires infinite growth of the proletariat. But sociological study has definitively shown that's not the case. Countries/regions go through a demographic transition and end up with a shrinking population. Wealthier, developed countries have already gone through this transition, and you see these armchair philosophers from those countries talk about antinatalism when the reality is they often believe it's a problem only in developing countries. That it's due to religion, or culture or some other inherent "problem". The reality is that access to modern medicine, birth control, condoms, abortion, decreased infant and child mortality are all contributing factors to the transition, and that developing countries got access to all these things much later due to factors like colonialism. Current estimates have the population peaking at around 10.5 billion, with a very small chance of reaching 13 billion. Meanwhile, have some random reddit comments I found that prove my point with some inherently racist paternalism:

31 comments