I want to address a recurring theme I have seen in some of the vegan discussion on social media regarding Alex O’Connor (aka Cosmic Skeptic). I already critiqued his post I wrote yesterday, so I won’t be rehashing that again, at least not directly. In that post Alex said that he would continue to oppose factory farming as a non-vegan, and in my critique I addressed the problem with that statement: it is incongruous with the implication that animal products are essential for human health. I explained why in that piece for those who are interested.
The discussion unfolding includes Alex’s utilitarian approach to veganism. I will confess that I did not watch every minute of Alex’s vegan content. I know that he discussed utilitarianism a lot with respect not only to veganism but other ethical issues on his channel. Did he ever actually identify as a utilitarian? Did he ever say explicitly that utilitarianism is what led him to veganism, as opposed to say, his conscience, which he later then sought to rationalize and formulate in utilitarian terms?
I’m not sure. But the widespread assumption is that utilitarianism was his motivation for going vegan, and, so the logic goes, because utilitarianism is a terrible philosophy that can never truly justify veganism, Alex’s defection was inevitable. It ties into the idea that he could have never been a vegan to begin with - if utilitarianism is really that bad, could a utilitarian ever really be a vegan at all? You can become vegan if you are motivated by compassion, by conscience, by deontological or virtue ethics perhaps, maybe even religion if you can twist it into a vegan shape, but not utilitarianism. As evidence, behold one Peter Singer, who rationalizes eating oysters and backyard eggs. Birds of a feather!
There’s a lot to critique here. I’ll start with the idea that Peter Singer himself is some sort of monster. You may not agree with his views, you may not consider him a vegan (does he even consider himself a vegan?) but what I don’t think you can dispute is this: Animal Liberation is responsible for bringing animal suffering into the public consciousness and discourse in a way few other works could ever claim to, at least until the era of the big documentaries such as Dominion. Singer’s work is an expansion of a question pondered by the founder of utilitarianism itself, Jeremey Bentham. It was Bentham who stated: “the question is not ‘can they reason’ nor ‘can they talk’ but rather ‘can they suffer’?” I am not making the claim that Bentham was the first or only philosopher in history to ponder animal suffering, but he certainly appears to me to be one of the most influential thinkers to first raise these questions and take them seriously before the public in the modern era. Utilitarianism, neither then nor now, provided the solutions that many of us would prefer, but in light of its history of bringing suffering in general and animal suffering in particular to the public conscience, knee-jerk categorical denunciations of the entire philosophy are entirely uncalled for.
It however is fair to say that utilitarianism takes us only so far. That the utility of utilitarianism itself is limited, providing diminishing and even negative returns beyond a certain point. I do happen to think that if you find yourself not simply using utilitarianism as a lens through which to view problems - one lens among many, I should say - but have come to identify yourself as “a utilitarian”, you are headed down a path that can easily lead to rationalizing atrocities. But if you think other metaethical approaches are exempt from rationalizing atrocities, you’re wrong.
I had someone insist to me not too long ago that vegans can only be vegans if they subscribe to the Kantian categorical imperative. This is the same imperative that many have interpreted as insisting that we may never lie - not even if it’s 1930s Nazi Germany and the Gestapo is at your door looking for the Jewish family you happen to know the whereabouts of. You’re duty-bound to inform the Gestapo, and absolutely prohibited from lying to them.
If the police showed up at your house suspecting your friend of harboring an animal rescued from a nightmare farm, would you just give them up for similar reasons? Or might the potential consequences of such an act stay your hand? If you said, “well, I’m no utilitarian, suffering really doesn’t matter in the face of categorical right and wrong, like George Washington ‘I cannot tell a lie’, I’ll sleep well tonight even though that chicken or that pig is headed straight back to its filthy tiny crate, I did my moral duty,” could you live with yourself as a vegan?
Fuck no you couldn’t. Your conscience would eat you alive.
Oh, but I’ve misinterpreted the Kantian categorical imperative, you might say. It was never meant to apply to situations like that, you say. We have “threshold deontology” now, you say. Fine. And maybe you’ve overstated the case against utilitarianism just a little bit. Maybe I’m a “threshold utilitarian”! Maybe none of these ways of thinking are meant to be adopted into totalizing life philosophies and dogmatic pseudo-religions, but are simply different perspectives through which we could consider a single dilemma.
But what about rights!? For some reason, rights are always juxtaposed to suffering/well-being as mutually exclusive categories. One example:
What’s wrong here?
First, depending upon what exactly we mean by “welfarist”, it does not necessarily follow at all from a negative utilitarian approach to veganism. One can easily conclude, as I have, that the degree to which these animals suffer warrants immediate abolition. That it is warranted in principle does not mean that it has any chance of happening in reality, though. You can shout that it is “your goal” from the rooftops, but let me see your plan after that. Chances are you don’t have one, or that if you do, it isn’t a good one.
Welfarism in principle is hot garbage. Welfarism as “the best we can do at a given time, in a given place” may well be a “moral imperative” compared to the alternatives. Welfarism as a transitional demand (in the Trotskyist sense of that phrase) is entirely justifiable. Perhaps I’ll write on that next.
Second, what exactly does it mean to reject “welfarism” and an “anti-factory farming approach?” Does rejecting welfarism mean abstaining from or even voting against something like Proposition 12 in California? Does it mean going one step further and denouncing all who did support Prop 12 as essentially no different than a Tyson or Smithfield corporate lobbyist? No better than carnivore grifters like Sean Baker and the “Liver King”? No less ignorant and absurd than Neil DeGrasse Tyson on Joe Rogan? Are there even degrees allowed here? Would rejecting an “anti-factory farm approach” mean saying “NO!” to the total abolition of the CAFO system if the price of that was say, promising to allow individual/local hunting and fishing to remain legal? Could you live with that compromise? Could you live with rejecting it?
Third, and more to the point I want to make: why are we opposed to “commodification and exploitation”? To simply say “individual rights” is a non-answer. It is not a “right” that screams in pain when its testicles are cut off without anesthesia; it is a living, breathing, sentient being. We oppose the commodification and exploitation of Homo Sapiens and animals alike because whatever goods or pleasures those things may bring are nowhere near as great as the suffering required to produce them. It is the suffering that moves us, that speaks to our conscience, that causes us to look at whatever cheap consumer goods are spit out the other end and say “not worth it.” It is not a divine command or a categorical imperative, it is the suffering in front of our faces, on our screens, in our news reports. When we feel the need to rationalize our moral outrage, we find the language of rights to be convenient because that is the tradition we have inherited. When we want to stop the suffering, we invoke the rights. I’m fine with that language, but it isn’t pointing to anything metaphysical or fundamental about reality. Deluding ourselves otherwise has the potential to allow planetwide atrocities to continue for the sake of our own righteousness and absolutely nothing more.
Fourth and final point: do we really want to tell people like this to go f themselves?
I critiqued a piece by Brian Kateman before. And that was over who gets to rightly say that they are a vegan. I do not think Kateman is a vegan, and I do not think his concept of a “95%” vegan is intellectually tenable. The person he is retweeting here is outright conceding that they are not a vegan. And yet both are willing to work against one of the most evil, corrupt and violent systems that has ever existed on this planet. And the political reality is this: vegans need non-vegan allies.
Is their logic incoherent? Of course.
But we are in a serious existential crisis, and I firmly believe that if we against all odds managed to abolish CAFOs and shut down the industrialized slaughterhouses, ending the remaining instances of animal exploitation and abuse would be a slam dunk. In terms of a battle, once you break the enemy’s center or turn their flank, the rest is a rout. Once the Nazis began retreating from Stalingrad, once the Allies landed in Normandy on D-Day, the outcome of WWII was inevitable. Smashing the CAFO system would mark an irreversible transformation in human consciousness and the beginning of the end of carnism.
It remains to be seen what kind of non-vegan ally Alex O’Connor will be. Given the sting of his betrayal, and believe me when I say I feel it too, we may well never want to accept any help from him. But from the likes of Kateman or Farhad Manjoo? Yes, I’m good with that. I’m not nominating any of them to be the pope of veganism, or even low-level initiates. They’re allies, not members. They’re not and never will be “one of us.” As long as we are clear about that, and refuse to delude ourselves, it shouldn’t be a problem. If you call yourself a vegan and you make certain claims, well then yes, I do care that those claims are coherent. If you’re just an ally, then let’s just say I hold you to a lower standard. Learn from the original activist:
I wrote to you in an epistle, not to keep company with fornicators. I mean not with the fornicators of this world, or with the covetous, or the extortioners, or the servers of idols; otherwise you must needs go out of this world. But now I have written to you, not to keep company, if any man that is named a brother, be a fornicator, or covetous, or a server of idols, or a railer, or a drunkard, or an extortioner: with such a one, not so much as to eat. For what have I to do to judge them that are without? Do not you judge them that are within? - 1 Cor. 5:9-12
The same distinction holds for us. Those who are without (potential allies) and those who are within (vegans). If we didn’t work with anyone who refused to become a vegan, we’d hardly be able to work with anyone. And if we don’t hold other vegans to some standard, we cease to have a vegan movement. It’s a delicate balance, but there’s a lot at stake for us to maintain it. As vegans we are the vanguard. The vanguard never has been or will be the whole army. And yet the success of the army depends upon us, and that is why if it is indeed successful, it is we, and not half-assed welfarists, who will decide what that victory will mean going forward.