Vegan

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 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 🤷🏻‍♀️

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.

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.

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.

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: