Against utilitarianism & consequentialism (within the vegan movement)

I don't want to be the kind of person
who says they're vegan but who delights at the chance to eat cheese pizza pepperoni and cheese pizza for free because someone else paid for it I refuse to use cocaine not for the sake of the cocaine not for the sake of indirect consequences for the economy of Belize or Colombia I refuse to use cocaine because of Who I am there's a judgment here on the perpetrator I don't want to be a crackhead on the contrary I actively want to be the kind of person who uniformly and consistently refuses to use cocaine if you have the opportunity to rape someone hold unquote without consequences like these rapists I've described or it won't have these numbers would you jump at the chance to take that opportunity if so there's a judgement on you that stands or Falls independent of the consequences there's a question of who you are and who you aspire to be if you don't want to be a rapist it doesn't mean you only rate people sometimes or when you can get away with it or when the consequences eliminate it means you're committed to never committing rape if you do not support slavery it means you don't participate in slavery if it's a little bit and you take that opportunity to stand up and say no I'm going to stand up again I'm not gonna be a part of this if you are vegan it means you refuse to use animal products even when there is no you when you're not paying for it even when someone else pays for it [Music] let me see in this video opens with an historical analogy and then we get straight to the point I read the autobiography of a Christian preacher a Protestant a white man who went from Europe to North America and then from North America to what is today Myanmar then the British colony of Burma he was a brilliant linguist he learned many of the local languages he actually wrote hymns he wrote songs for local people to sing that converted them to Christianity hard-working man with a brilliant mind shame that he used it to such a bad purpose but of course in his way he was a man very much committed to his own morality a moral code I disagree with but a moral code nevertheless when he was living there in Myanmar you know of course in very very hard conditions over 100 years ago much tougher than anything we endured today he received gifts from supporters all around the world who learned about the work he was doing through Christian missionary bulletins newspapers and this sort of thing and every so often he'd received handmade gifts from the southern United States woven baskets or what have you and every single time despite the poverty and difficulty he lived in despite his remote location he made the effort to pack them up in boxes and ship them all the way back the United States wherever it was they come from with a note explaining that he does not accept gifts from slave owners that he does not accept gifts that are made by slaves in many ways from my perspective he was a man whose whole life was devoted to taking free people and making them into slaves destroying their culture destroying their language destroying their independence and converting them to a to a foreign ideology that you know in a sense in a sense in a very abstract sense of slavery but he was standing up on point of moral principle now the people have been debating with lately I can't believe this is a controversial issue they might question well what harm is actually done by the basket itself if you use this basket you're not enslaving anyone you're not torturing anyone you're not directly approving of or endorsing slavery are you it is from my perspective completely surreal than in the 2008 in the year 2018 I've had this passionate response from vegans who stood up one after another and tried to defend the idea that vegans can and should wear leather the vegans can and should wear the dismembered corpses of dead animals so long as it is secondhand so long as for example it's a hand-me-down that your older brother bought it tried it on decide it didn't look good on him and then he hands it to you to wear as long as someone else gets the unique bad karma that they imagine is attached to the act of buying the item they think there is no magical bad karma attached to owning and using the item in perpetuity and that from my perspective is really laughable and surreal now I've already made a video that I think covers most of my point and the level controversy the level ups the number of people have wanted to dispute this with me at some length and some depth this is the most controversial subject of my channel in that sense it's called most controversial measuring the controversy by the number of vegans who really want to dispute me the most controversial since my first comments on vivisection when I'm in my first comments on vivisection there were many people who were furious and really wanted to talk to me it made a lot of videos Department so um the difference is vivisection is really a deep worthwhile issue to discuss with the department and many many people say that including outright abolitionists like Gary France I own a Gary France I own a does acknowledge that abolition of vivisection and animal experimentation for science for scientific research is ethically different and more complex than the use of animals for circuses food leather etc he seen him say that in interviews with journalists giving almost verbatim the same answer again and again there's something that that's really worth talking about and this topic secondhand leather and second immorality there is no depth to it there is no complexity to it there's nothing here worth debating that's why it stuns me that people have been getting in touch with me to talk to me at length basically demanding that I repeat the same points again again the same simple definitions again again because all that my argument relies on is the understanding that if you are a vegan therefore you regard the use of animal products as bad as something to be avoided so therefore using leather is something bad it's nine to be avoided assuming you're not abandoned on a desert island assuming you're not in a situation where you will freeze to death unless you wear this leather coat that's not what were debating today was within veganism this is the status of second-hand leather than veganism and the counter arguments that are presented to me are really surreal they're they're they're bad and misguided in and of themselves and they lead to necessary absurdities so I've been asking these people hypothetical questions that are not terribly hypothetical like well if you have two men let's say you have two identical brothers and they both show up at a vegan protest wearing fur coats but one of them says oh don't worry I got the coat for free I got it secondhand or it was a hand-me-down for my grandmother and the other one says oh I bought it I paid cash I ordered it sure you really think this is different there they are men wearing leather coats sort of win this case for coats what have you the only thing my argument rests on is the very basic concept that wearing a leather coat is still wearing a leather coat using fur using animal products or using animals is still using animals whether or not you have this excuse for it whether or not you were removed from the moral Act the moral decision of choosing to buy that product by one or two stages whether it's cuz you got it secondhand because you got it as a hand-me-down for your brother or what have you so the the counter-argument must be and this is what I've challenged people says what is the difference you see between these two identical twin brothers and had to ask people would you yourself go to a vegan protest wearing a fur coat and then when other vegans are alarmed explain oh no don't worry at secondhand what possible sense could your moral paradigms make if they lead to these kinds of excuses these kinds of absurd situations and that you see a deep ethical difference between two men again identical in all other respects who are both wearing fur coats or wearing leather coats but one of them peed himself and in the other case he got it for free from his brother I mean if someone else made this immoral decision what's the decision you're making in participating in it what's the decision you're making in benefiting from it that's it brings us back to this simple example of the Christian missionary in Myanmar he's making a decision he's not going to participate in slavery he's not going to benefit from slavery even though admittedly he as many stages were moved from directly exploiting the slaves or you know killing someone putting someone in Chains kidnapping someone or raising someone's children as indentured servants or what-have-you he's not involved in any of that but he's putting his foot down and saying no he supports the abolition of slavery therefore he's not going to participate in or benefit from slavery we support the abolition of factory farming and of the factory leather industry and so on as different stages of that same industry therefore we're not going to participate in this now another illustration of this that again none to be able to be with it have had any terribly good answer to was why is it that we regard it as immoral for human being to wear a t-shirt that approves of Adolf Hitler or approves of the Holocaust that's not too terribly hypothetical we just had a whole bunch of people wearing t-shirts like that and holding up flags like that and an infamous protest that took place in Charlottesville Virginia so there's been quite a lot of political discussion about that what is the meeting once there's an evidence of that well wearing a t-shirt of that kind I mean where as just wearing a t-shirt with a political slogan on it doesn't in any way causally involve you in the etre to the Holocaust nevertheless there's the the the fact of wearing this the fact of voicing your approval in this form has an ethical significance that everyone can recognize so why would it be difficult for vegans within the vegan movement to see the problem with a t-shirt stating a slogan of this kind and yet to refuse to see the significance of actually wearing the the dismembered pieces of animals bodies now there is an answer to this question and the answer is that these people believe in a doctrine which is sometimes called utilitarianism and sometimes called consequentialism in the context of this conversation they boil down to the same thing I've realized those words do not have the same meaning but they pertain to this question in the same way um now I'm gonna put a trigger warning here if this hasn't been disturbing enough for you we're gonna get into some really disturbing examples psychologically disturbing if you believe in consequentialism you believe in judging the ethics an action by its consequences by its outcomes and in many instances that is very plainly evil in my opinion and within the vegan movement it leads to absurd contradictions conclusions and excuse making excuse making that is so strictly paralleled the excuses that meteors make for eating meat that frankly it blows my mind any of these vegans can take themselves seriously when offering these excuses for wearing second a leather or indeed I should add when they make these same excuses for eating secondhand meat every single one of these people who supports wearing secondhand leather would also stand by eating meat or eating cheese in circumstances where you didn't pay for it so again this is freeloading this is free riding on someone else's bad decision so a very real-world scenario one of the people I talked to is a university student so he's often in situations at a university meeting or someone else has bought a pizza for everyone to share let's say there's both meat and cheese on the pizza as a pepperoni pizza and everyone can have a slice for free and he thinks there's no moral significance to him as a vegan eating meat and cheese he thinks that's morally neutral she's because he didn't purchase it again the instance of the basket made by slaves so you think that is simply because this basket was given you you didn't enslave the people you're not participating in you're not benefiting from slavery by using the basket again baskets a very very remote example compared to eating you know eating the bodies of dead animals because it's anyway it's it's uh it's it's mind-blowing to me um this perspective consequentialism entails certain absurdities precisely because it shifts the locus of our judgment to the consequences to the outcomes which may be quite irrelevant to the moral character the person making the decision or doing the act i have heard two cases in depth of men who committed rape against women again every possible trigger warning you might want to close the video now that's gonna strip you men who committed rape against women and the women were completely unaware and they had no psychological consequences or distress to they didn't even know what had happened until the police contacted them and presenteth evidence in one of the cases the man had filmed himself committing the crime and then indeed this was used to convict him and the woman who was the victim she had absolutely no memory of it drugs were involved in another case the man was a surgeon so again he had the drugs used to put someone put someone to sleep to to injure surgery so they had no physical experience they had no side effect no harm no psychological is worth so you can compare two different rapists or three different rapists we can come up with different scenarios where the consequences are orderly utterly different we in one case there was trauma and the woman's life is destroyed why we had pregnancy in one case that the rape results in pregnancy and changes the whole woman's life forever in in all kinds of ways psychologically physically economically and then you have another case where absolutely nothing changes there are no consequences this rape was committed and if the if the videotape had been lost let's say hypothetically she would have never known there would have been no negative side effects for her whatsoever a true consequence of me a true consequentialist someone who really believes in this form of utilitarian thinking of judging actions by their their consequences would judge these two rapists differently in fact strictly speaking if you believe in the well being centered model of utilitarianism you might even have to regard one of them as neutral or good but at a minimum one would be much less evil than the other to me that is irrelevant because when I'm judging a case of rape I'm not judging the victim I'm judging the perpetrator I'm judging the decision that person made and in many Western countries on many schools of law the rapist who in this way completely got away with the crime who were they left no awareness on the part of the victim the victim was drugged in such a way whether by a surgeon or or otherwise that it had none of these negative consequences they may be more guilty they may face a much sterner sentence precisely because the method used here reflects very clear premeditation this person took responsibility they made this decision it wasn't spontaneous they weren't drunk or distracted there were no other possible excuses here to mitigate it they will probably get a worse sentence they will probably get a fuller Senate they'll get more punishment than someone in some other circumstances that didn't show for example for meditation many Western cultures not all premeditation leads to the crime being judged more harshly right a judge or sentenced I should say and indeed in me it may be a slightly different charge than other circumstances that are dealt with okay so consequentialism and utilitarianism lead to absurdities within veganism right now one of the main proponents of this who have criticized in many videos on my channel is unnatural vegan and her version of utilitarianism and consequentialism she uses both terms to describe herself leads her to make excuses for or drinking milk as long as it's produced by a cow that's happy eating meat she will literally eat meat if she orders food and the waiter brings her the wrong order so again this is like second hand leather second hand meat second hand cheese she accepts that as vegan so we now have a rationale for vegans eating and again put this into context there's the emotional psychological reality so if you order a vegan soup I know let's say you order a vegan minestrone soup and you don't even say you're vegan it's just you know it's on the menu it's vegan and and the waiter happens to bring you a pork dumpling soup what's the mentality of this so-called vegan who subscribes to utilitarianism and consequentially or they say oh great oh goody Oh wonderful here's my opportunity to pork because in their mind they've justified this they've indicated this this action by saying that if they don't eat it it'll go into the garbage they consider that a waste I do not I differ from this whole line of thinking branch as I've already said in in an earlier video so they might as well just use this animal products they might as well just benefit from the immoral act someone else did same way again you want to benefit from the fact that your brother bought a leather coat your grandmother bought a fur coat and they gave it to you for whatever you got it secondhand you didn't pay but you still want to benefit I mean if you again the basket made by slaves and the significance the moral significance of refusing to use the basket in refusing to use the basket you're putting your foot down saying I will not be a part of slavery no I understand from a consequentialist respect you say well you know if you're just using the basket or you are you really a part of slavery um if you're wearing a leather jacket I don't have to reach for this concept of indirect consequences whether through the free market or psychology or what-have-you I'm not really concerned about you know the perception of others and I don't know your self perception how you feel but those like if you're wearing a leather jacket my argument is simple that you are wearing a leather jacket and the fact that in your mind you have this excuse that you didn't pay for your brother paid for it is immaterial it's irrelevant that is in plain English simply not good enough now I say this you know with all due humility there are circumstances you're freezing to death on a desert island there is literally no other clothing you post wait there are some excuses that are good enough ok that's not one of them somebody else paid is not one of them right now why do I use these examples that from some perspectives just been targeting people who really don't get how these examples are related ultimately the judgment about rape doesn't have to do with the consequences for the victim as I say because I'm not judging the victim I'm judging the perpetrator we're judging is this man a rapist is he guilty of rape ok if you wear a leather jacket you're wearing a leather jacket you're engaged in animal use as like I said before if it's a horse I don't care that you didn't buy the horse the fact that you keep it in captivity and write it that's it this is use veganism is opposed to all use of animals but so if you identify as a vegan you are therefore a hypocrite in wearing a leather jacket or a fur jacket or eating the pizza that someone else purchased for you right ultimately this isn't a judgement about indirect consequences it's not a judgment indirect consequences for the victim of a rape it's not a judgment indirect consequences like by accepting this basket made by a slave or you somehow perpetuating the cycle of slavery on that slave plantation no no it doesn't rely on any of these things the question is about you as a person making the decision of who you are and that for me is what links this the question of whether or not you refused to wear secondhand leather whether not you refuse a basket made by slaves whether or not you refuse all lampshade made it of human skin some that really happened during World War two the concentration camps that did make lamps at a few minutes ago whether or not you refused to wear leather whether or not you refuse to be an accessory to rape well not you refused to use cocaine ultimately I refuse to use cocaine not for the sake of the cocaine now for the sake of indirect consequences for the economy of Belize or Colombia I refuse to use cocaine because of Who I am there's a judgment here on the perpetrator I don't want to be a crackhead on the contrary I actively want to be the kind of person who uniformly and consistently refuses to use cocaine I don't want to be the kind of person who says they're vegan but who delights at the chance to eat cheese pizza pepperoni and cheese pizza for free because someone else paid for it if I did that in a very meaningful sense I would be a different person that would be a different moral and ethical identity for Who I am if you have the opportunity to rape someone hold on quote without consequences like these rapists have described or it won't have these numbers would you jump at the chance to take that opportunity if so there's a judgment on you that stands or Falls independent of the consequences there's a question of who you are and who you aspire to be if you don't want to be a rapist it doesn't mean you only rate people sometimes or when you can get away with it or when the consequences eliminate it means you're committed to never committing rape if you do not support slavery it means you don't participate in slavery if it's a little bit and you take that opportunity to stand up and say no I'm going to stand up again I'm not going to be a part of this if you are vegan it means you refuse to use animal products even when there's no when you're not paying for it even when someone else pays for it it means you take that stand which is not that hard to take you say to your brother look if you give me this second hand leather garbage you pardon me you say to your brother I understand you're trying to give me this leather jacket it's secondhand you think I can use it and you can't anymore if you give me this jacket I'm gonna throw it in the garbage because my moral position is that that's where this belongs I don't think that the body parts of animals are clothing for me to wear if you invite me to a party or someone else paid for cheese pizza if you insist on giving me a piece of pepperoni pizza I'm gonna put it in the garbage because from my perspective ethically that's where it belongs I'm not gonna participate in the exploitation of death and animals ecologically ethically in terms of health I have all these reasons and the fact that someone else paid for it may matter it may be a significant moral consideration in many ways but as I said before the lesser of two evils is still evil the fact that it might be less evil for me to eat a pizza when someone else paid for it or for me to wear a leather jacket when someone else bought it doesn't mean that it's not wrong a virus yen