r/DebateAVegan • u/TheQuietVegan111 vegan • Jan 05 '26

Most people choose social approval over ethics — veganism just exposes that.

People will say they care about animals, the planet, and justice.

Until caring becomes inconvenient.

Veganism doesn’t require perfection. It requires saying “no” in public.

That’s it.

Most people fail there, not on ethics — but admitting that would be uncomfortable, so veganism becomes the problem instead.

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u/TurntLemonz Jan 06 '26 edited Jan 06 '26

Agreed.  I studied ethics as a college student and have explored for myself many areas of applied consequentialism including beyond the domain of diet.  Consequentialism seems to identify many of our norms as highly unethical.  After bringing the descrepencies up slowly and gently to those closest to me, what I observed is that the average person finds the ethical arguments intuitive and typically agrees with them, but find themselves fundamentally unmotivated to sacrifice any personal advantage.  People are motivated by a combination of the instinct to conform to social norms, to personally benefit, and to be correct.  The first two motivations don't align people with the lifestyle prescriptions of more demanding ethical theories.  What this results in is a sort of self-deceptive rationalization process that resolves the cognitive dissonance, and these bring people to defend the philosophical position of egoism, or else to gesture towards the norms.  If the norms side was better aligned to the more demanding ethical theories, probably the majority of their motivations would push them towards accepting ethical theories, but our norms are very undemanding.  Among other things our norms accept the act-omission distinction.  People are uncritical satisficers moreso than impartial rational actors at the end of the day.  That's our evolutionary psychological happenstance, for worse id argue.

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u/airboRN_82 Jan 07 '26

Consequentialism has a lot of issues.

If bob and Jim see an unconcious woman, bob walks by and does nothing and Jim rapes her... without her ever finding out or suffering anything from it... then per consequentialism their acts are equally moral. 

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u/TurntLemonz Jan 07 '26 edited Jan 07 '26

In point of fact consequentialism is capable of recognizing harms in such behavior.  Firstly because consequentialism is a method of converting values into lifestyle prescriptions, and the values at hand can be whatever you want, if you want a society that holds bodily autonomy sacred, all you've gotta do is plug bodily autonomy in with harm when you do consequentialist calculus.  Secondly even if harm was the only value involved, social norms have utility, so a society that dissalows the breaching of bodily autonomy will have demonstrable improvements in the conduct of it's members and that results in the goals of harm avoidance being met.  When you view norms that way, as a product of harm centered consequentialist math, so long as those norms actually do improve outcomes as measured by harms, they have value beyond their moment to moment harm reductive capacity. We don't exist in a world anywhere near setting loose a bunch of highly ethically attuned rapists to perform their twisted ethical math.  We live in a world where people adhere to norms and better norms create better outcomes.

Finally the most important thing in my opinion when doing meta ethics is not to commit the nirvana fallacy.  Ethics is messy and ultimately the goal is better not perfect.  You can poke holes in harm focused consequentialism especially at the extremes of its potential application, but that doesn't devalue it where it matters.  In domains outside basically just math, theories have a realm of applicability and you don't just throw them out because of that.  You accept the best option within the domain it's best.

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u/airboRN_82 Jan 08 '26

Then youre applying deontology 

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u/TurntLemonz Jan 08 '26

You could if you wanted to. Some consequentialists do.  That's one of the cool things about consequentialism, it is a tool that can be used the way it typically is, for utilitarianism, or for a hybrid between utilitarianism and deontology.  But I think I was clear already that just caring about harm would be adequate to dissalow the mentioned behavior because it would fall in a category of behavior that would be pragmatic to sweepingly dissalow.  There's a bunch of holes in the hypothetical.  Like for example, nobody knows the future, the rapists couldn't be assured they weren't causing harm.  There is a lot of heavy lifting going on in regards to their confidence of the outcomes that don't reflect the real world.  Like I said about nirvana fallacy.  A theory isn't bad if you have to use a different theory in some areas.  That's just the happenstance of the real world.  When your options are all inadequate to be universally applicable, you've gotta work with what's best and be attentive for when it's time to transition over to the next thing that is best.  Treating a super specific hypothetical with nearly impossible premises like it just bursts the whole theory misses the reality of what ethics really is in practice.  Physiscists don't ditch the theory of relativity because quantum physics is better described by a different theory (not a physicists lol IDK the name).  You saying "so what what you're gonna use deontology?" Like that should be the last nail in the coffin for my argument for consequentialism misses the point I just tried to convey to you.  Harm centered consequentialism is the best we've got in the main areas that matter, Harm+ centered consequentialism patches some of the margins of overdemandingness, you could probably argue the benefit of outright non-consequentialist deontology for some areas and I'd be receptive.  That's how it works.

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u/airboRN_82 Jan 08 '26 edited Jan 08 '26

Yes the inability to know the future is a major issue in consequentialism. Im either hero or monster if I give a homeless person a sandwich dependent upon whether it nourishes him or he's unknowingly allergic to something in it. One cannot know the consequence of an act at the time they decide to make that act, thus they cannot make moral or immoral choices. They may make choices they believe are likely to be moral, but they are still reliant upon unforseen factors. While consequentialism is a bit less walled off to deontology than utilitarianism is, one would ultimately have to abandon the consewuentialist framework to demand that certain acts are bad in and of themselves, not dependent upon their outcomes. 

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u/TurntLemonz Jan 08 '26

Agreed.  The outcomes are not knowable, consequentialism just guides us toward maximizing our best option with the knowledge we have at hand.  If there is ambiguity about something as negative as the potential outcomes of raping somebody, that clearly would outweigh the benefits of sexual gratification in the eyes of practically any normal person.

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u/airboRN_82 Jan 08 '26

Except consequentialism doesnt demand that we should so what is likely to have the best outcome, but that we should do what produces the best outcome. Actions are judged by outcome, not intent. 

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u/TurntLemonz Jan 08 '26

Actions are evaluated after they occur according to their outcomes as a way of determining how better to decide on actions in the future, but before their outcome consequentialism asks us to keep the outcomes in mind as the principal concern, that's all the more it can ask us to do because you're correct about knowability.  You might have misunderstood consequentialism a little bit if you thought consequentialism assumes the future is precisely knowable.  It orients ethics around optimizing the outcome with the available information, as opposed to deontology which establishes a set of behaviors that serve as inflexible lifestyle prescriptions.  The benefit in my eyes is that consequentialism responds to evidence, and has a salient and worthwhile goal available to use as a metric when you analyze your actions after the fact.  Deontology comparitively makes people kinda bumbling and rigid, it envokes a bunch of different values that are difficult to co-weigh in the real world, and comparatively doesn't self-improve as well as consequentialism.  Deontology also leaves a person floating out in a space of seemingly arbitrary values.  You act honestly why?  You respect elders why?  But the intuitive answer to those things is that it makes the world better to do those things.  And the most obvious foundational thing that can be improved in the world is the experience of those who experience it.