Footsoldier's Video Arguing Vegans Must Be Deontologists

[Margaret Hayek]

Hi all,

Is this forum still active? I noticed Vegan Footsoldier posted a new video arguing that all vegans have to be deontologists:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OAM7VtyIB9I&t=1s

I thought I'd mention that here since as I recall this was a vegan forum pretty hostile to deontology. I'm actually sympathetic to both approaches and wish folks would not try to shrink the vegan tent by insisting that one must be one or the other (or have some other overarching ethical worldview) in order to be vegan. Here is what I commented on the Footsoldier video:

Thanks for showing respect for those with whom you disagree, but to be frank I don't think that your arguments here are very convincing at all: (1) Most deontologists will agree with Singer that we have positive duties that morally require us to help others at relatively trivial cost to us, (2) Deontologists also have to deal with vagueness, including in determining how we should act in light of negative rights; a philosopher like Regan will say that we are allowed to override the rights of some if we are in lifeboat situations - that is what the miniride principle is about, and there is vagueness in terms of how to apply those principles, and any sane deontologist will say it is permissible to make minor infringements on the rights of some to protect the greater rights of others, e.g. push someone down or prick someone's finger to save someone else from death, but when exactly the infringements are sufficiently minor and the benefits are sufficiently great as to justify overriding or infringing is a vague matter ((3) Actually for consequentialists it is clearer at what point we are required to help the child than for most deontologists; for consequentialists it is the point of marginal benefit; all else held equal you are required to save the child up to the point where the expected harm to you is as great as the expected harm to the child, so that would include past a certain harm of quadraplegia; that is counterintuitive but it is the price for recognizing the philosophical indefensibility of the view that there is a principled moral difference between inflicting harm and failing to prevent harm or inflicting harm as means or as a side effect. E.g. suppose a nuclear armed trolley is headed to blow up a city of 9 million people, and you could do 3 things: do nothing, in which case the 9 million die, divert it into a smaller city of 2 million, in which case 2 million die, or push a single big man into its path, in which case only the big man dies. Obviously you push the big man; when you can be certain of the consequences it's just as important to prevent harm by harming as a means as as a side-effect), (4) Not all consequentialists weigh the pleasure of the oppressor, there is a venerable consequentialist tradition according to which morally reprobate sadistic pleasure is not good, (5) in real life there is no reasonable expectation that eating a beef burger yourself will do more long run good than refusing to do so; in real life you have the option of trying to convince the person alllegedly offering to not eat 2 beef burgers if you eat 1 to not eat them without your eating 1, in real life they would probably go ahead and eat at least as many beef burgers as otherwise if they convinced you to eat 1, in real life you could offer to suck the person's dick if they don't eat 3 beef burgers and that would be at least as likely to work as your eating the beef burger to get them to not eat 2, (6) your core argument against celebrating welfare reforms was actually consequentialist and one with which smart consequentialists would agree: that by going for tiny welfare reforms we do vastly less good than putting our energies into taking a stronger stand against the practice of animal use and killing, not letting people be placated by largely meaningless reforms that do little if anything to actually reduce harm to the farmed animals, and more strongly demanding the vastly greater good of ending animal exploitation and killing (and yes, most consequentilaists can accept the individual-affecting view that it is a much better thing for individuals including non-human animals to not be killed and deprived of all future goods - in addition to being a consequentialist and specifically utilitarian Singer himself also accepted an impersonal view and a view about death only being harmful to those with desires for their futures both of which are implausible for reasons that don't have to do with the consequentialism vs. deontology issue), (7) for similar reasons smart consequentialists can oppose trying to police nature on a large scale especially by trying to kill some wild animals to benefit others becasue we are very likely to do more harm than good; also deontologists who believe in positive duties which includes most of them also have the worry about why we should not intervene in nature by non-lethal or non-obviously-harmful means, (8) consequentialists including utilitarians can be vegans if they believe that we should not live by exploiting animals because they believe, quite correctly, that exploiting animals has worse expected consequences than not exploiting animals.

[brimstoneSalad]

Footsoldier showed respect to somebody?
Unsure if engaging with him is productive, but maybe you've found otherwise. I know he has some kind of beef going on with Isaac, and Footsoldier is saying formal logic is gibberish to him so he won't engage with those arguments. There's some kind of cosmic symmetry going on here, as you may be able to appreciate.

As to your point about these "sane" deontologists, I think it's much to the point of a "sane" Christian who doesn't think the Earth is 6,000 years old and basically ignores 90% of scripture. It's begging a very sticky question: are these people even deontologists/Christians at that point?
As you increase the "sanity" of a deontologist by introducing all of these extra unsubstantiated rules and exceptions the effect approaches the exact outcome of consequentialist reasoning... just with a far more complicated and contorted engine under the hood, a Rube Goldberg machine rather than the elegant single piston sterling engine of consequentialism.

On the points of consequentialism, regarding number 3: Obligation is tricky, and probably doesn't mean much if there's a spectrum of good and nobody is going to do the far extreme. It's not necessarily even relative to self sacrifice (consider an altruistic system as you mentioned in point # 4) The lowest arguable point of condemnation-worthy failing would be based on a calculus of acceptability of the moral heuristic and it's broader effects. If people would reject morality entirely if it required them to sacrifice a limb to save a life, but would accept it if it required a bruise or really bad papercut to save a life and thus DO, then the latter may be the superior heuristic. For a good-doer there's also a substantial question of opportunity cost.

I would also add that consequentialism is very nearly baked into the definition of vegan.

[Lay Vegan]

@Margaret Hayek You can also link him here: https://www.vegansociety.com/go-vegan/d ... n-veganism The definition of veganism is already consequentialist in nature.

Veganism is a way of living which seeks to exclude, as far as is possible and practicable, all forms of exploitation of, and cruelty to, animals for food, clothing or any other purpose.

There’s nothing in that definition that dictates the absolute deontological form of animal rights that Footsoldier and others are arguing for. There’s nothing here that indicates vegans should believe all animals should be granted personhood or inalienable rights. There's no indication that personhood or inalienable rights are necessary to reduce animal suffering, or that use itself is necessarily exploitative.

The people who first shaped the vegan movement in the west choose to do so because they recognized that eating animals causes suffering, and since suffering is bad, choose to abstain from paying corporations to farm and slaughter them. There's nothing about this abstention that requires the belief in this archaic all-or-nothing kind of philosophy that doesn’t respond well to nuance or valid justifications for “non-vegan” behavior (like eating fucking bivalves or killing ants when driving on the road).