9 Comments

One of the main advantages of utilitarianism is that beyond good and evil, it allows for all the intermediate shades of grey.

In my view there is a lot of room between “veganism” and welfare indifferent omnivorism.

Keeping a given amount of animal protein consumption you can displace meat by diary (or free range eggs), and you can also displace meat from species raised in CAFO (pigs and chickens) by that raised by ruminants feed on pasture (cows and sheep).

There is more that accepting “imperfection”. Utilitarianism provides directions for continuous improvement.

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You can also support opposition to the villainous efforts to stymie the RD&D of meat alternatives.

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Jul 6Edited

Loved this article!! I strongly agree that anti-hypocrisy norms get in the way of a lot of positive moral change.

It’d be helpful if this phenomenon had a name (“anti-hypocrisy bias”? “cognitive-behavioral dissonance”?). I think the fact that we all know what “confirmation bias” is and can refer to it quickly helps us (even if only marginally) to resist it. Something similar would be helpful here.

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As a child I grew up in a Lutheran church and studied the life of Martin Luther extensively. Luther probably had some form of OCD, he was stricken by anxiety over the idea that he might be condemned to Purgatory for centuries because he committed a sin and forgot about it by the time he had confession, or committed a sin without noticing (for example, he once freaked out because he stepped on some straw on the ground and noticed that two pieces of straw had fallen in such a way that they made a cross). Luther eventually significantly reduced his anxiety by studying the Bible and developing a theology where it is impossible for humans to achieve any sort of personal moral perfection and it wad purely through God's grace that they were saved.

Now that I am older, there is obviously much to criticize about this worldview. Many of the sins Luther was freaked out about were stupid stuff like having "impure thoughts," rather than stuff of consequence like not doing more for your fellow humans. It was also as motivated by a fear of supernatural punishment as it was by a desire to do good.

However, I think overall my upbringing inculcated a lot of positive habits of thought in me. I have always seen it as essentially unreasonable to expect moral perfection of humans or to punish people for failing to love up to perfection. I also tend to suspect akrasia rather than hypocrisy when people fail to live up to their standards.

My study of history in general probably also influenced this view. It was pretty obvious to me that lots of earlier societies had committed all sorts of grave moral errors, so probably mine was too. No sweat, I'm sure eventually someone will figure out what it is and then I can do something about it. There was no reason to get upset at average people in our society, for the same reason there is no reason to get upset at average people in the past.

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I taught ethics and philosophy at the community college level for a long time. I wish I could have taught with the insight Chappell has.

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Aw, thanks!

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I think it's Diana Fleischmann from whom I've heard the metaphor of flossing your teeth: when you start after not doing it, you bleed, maybe hurt, so you're getting feedback similar to actions that would be harming your body; similarly, when you reflect upon a new area where you could be morally better, you get feedback (shame, fear, etc) similar to what you'd get if you were doing something currently on your radar as wrong. Natural selection has optimized us for avoiding the feeling of guilt and shame as a proxy for avoiding doing things that warrant guilt and shame.

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Imo the so-called demandingness objection is a prime example of philosophers engaging in "apologia for bourgeois manners", as Justin Smith-Ruiu has called it. Though I don't count myself among them, I give props to the utilitarians for their revisionist ambition (and likewise to the Mohists as well - whom I adore).

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Great stuff.

I agree that it's a cope, or at least it feels like it is. Part of it is probably rooted in the way people process information about mortality of others (as opposed to competence): one of the key differences between those categories can be summarised as "doing something smart makes you a smart person even if you also do dumb things, but stealing once makes you a thief". This asymmetric attribution of traits arguably makes sense from the point of view of protecting small groups from bad/immoral behaviour while allowing more trial and error with competence, but it stops making sense in the world of abstract, graduated, large scale ethical decisions precisely because it leads to defensive copes.

Personally I'm always surprised by how many people seem unable to accept that they do stuff that's not morally optimal, and even more surprised that they seem thrown or offended by my stating that I accept that I do immoral things (for example, while I think it's ok to eat "hunted" meat eg non farmed fish and wild or very lightly framed game, I also eat farmed poultry, tho I do aim for free range if I have a bit more money; I do use up scarce state resources via getting it to finance my completely useless and self indulgent extra degree I'm pursuing in my dotage which will benefit absolutely no-one else but provides me with some entertainment and structure and interest, and again people act almost offended when I acknowledge it's ethically sketchy).

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