To accept P1 & P2, but reject P3...
...On the basis that if everyone went vegan tomorrow it would maximise wellbeing to a high degree, but because the world isn’t sufficiently educated to want the end of animal agriculture, we are relegated to only a small difference we can make, so not the high degree threshold. Therefore we might better maximise wellbeing by trying to reduce our animal product consumption, but still satisfying some of our addiction/nostalgia for animal products so that we can enjoy life more and we’re able to be more productive at advocating for eco-socialism (which would ban meat all together), meeting the threshold.P3) Avoiding meat produced through capitalism maximizes wellbeing to a high degree.
Even more wellbeing could be achieved overcoming the addiction, but the former calculus would still remain true while meeting the threshold, making the latter not obligatory. As well it follows if one was raised vegan from birth they ought stay vegan.
I think Vaush couches everything above an obligatory subjective threshold as ‘if it helps bring about the revolution’ to ensure a kind of longterm stable maximized wellbeing. Which is why he compares buying vegan under capitalism to more like giving money to homeless, likely a good action, but not an obligation.Ask Yourself wrote:What about you eating a vegan diet encourages people not to do anything top-down?
Vaush wrote:Well it would keep me from encouraging people to do top-down because I would be miserable with the vegan diet and I probably wouldn't have the spare emotional energy necessary to stream and tell people why veganism is probably correct like I personally don't want to understate how extensive a change a vegan diet is for a lot of people, how impossible it is for people rooted in social and cultural attitudes.
So Vaush would bite the bullet of the reductio of a future where you’re socially conditioned into causing almost infinite suffering through purchasing a burger and all the deaths that went into that not passing the threshold. But the threshold having to do with whether there’s utility in the act of condemning someone’s character.Vaush wrote:I'm going to make the rule utilitarian case that I believe that the total amount of well-being in this world increases if we rhetorically shift our focus as people who are critical of the meat industry to address on an institutional level the propagation of product, rather than arguing amongst one another as to the efficacy or the ethics of consuming meat on an individual level... So you could also argue as a rule utilitarian that if you're walking down the street and you're like upper or middle-class or whatever and you've got a $100 bill in your wallet and you see a homeless person that you're ethically obligated to give that $100 bill to them because even as a rule in the world the total amount of well-being would probably increase if everyone who had $100 to spare gave it to somebody who didn't, but there are obviously more nuanced arguments to be made there about how you could do that but a broader refocused sort of institutional approach towards homelessness would probably make them happier in the long run and it's possible that the marginal well-being losses that you would get by contributing small portions of your income would in the long run inhibit your ability to advocate on an institutional level.
If Ask Yourself wouldn’t accept an answer that defines the high degree threshold as “the utility in the act of condemning character”, then Vaush wouldn’t make the ought statement in his original P2 that it’s okay for individuals to buy products under capitalism, because in his view all consumption under capitalism is unethical.
