Is Destiny a psychopath? Or just delusional? (thoughts on the Vegan Gains debate)
https://youtu.be/AR-63cAVCPM
Published on Jul 5, 2017
Destiny made a lot of Objectivist/Libertarian/Rawlsian claims in his talk with Vegan Gains on veganism and morality. Basically, he doesn't think animals deserve any moral consideration (you can even torture your own dog, if ya like!) because of some strange reverence for the "social contract". As a former Objectivist, I know all about this irrational belief system and just how unsavory it is if followed consistently.
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Hey guys, so obviously this is a response to the Destiny - Vegan Gains debate from like a week or two ago and I figured I would respond to this because I know a lot about this kind of stuff, so for those who didn't watch it, a lot of clips will be included in this, so you don't have to watch it before hand, but I would recommend that you do, just in case I'm you know misunderstanding something or misconstruing something.
But, Destiny makes a lot of Objectivist / Libertarian(?) claims and since I used to be one of those, I’m very familiar with these claims, with these arguments, so yeah, I think I'm kind of the perfect person I guess to talk about this debate and to show Destiny if he is watching, and just anyone else watching why he is very, very wrong. That's a great way to start a video right? I'm going to show you how you’re wrong, enjoy!
So Destiny claims that children have rights because they can or they will one day grow to respect the social contract, but can they all? This obviously depends on the environment that they grow up in and just what will happen to them, it requires knowledge of the future applied retroactively, which children will and which children won't grow to develop that respect.Destiny wrote:So, basically the way that I kind of set up my argument, is I guess, it's a little bit axiomatic in that I just define the fact that humans exist on a different level than animals and that gives us the right to do whatever to them, basically the way that I kind of draw this distinction is that animals aren't really capable of reciprocating social value the same way that people are. So for instance, we can have like a social standard of values amongst humans, I can say you know like, we shouldn't kill each other, we shouldn't steal from each other, etc. Etc. Other humans can respect that, if they're too young to, they can grow to respect that right, if they're capable of like intellectually recognizing that thing.
If you kill the child before this happens, yes I know this is very dark (it gets worse), but if you kill the child before this happens then you can be 100% certain that the child cannot, will not, grow to respect the social contract, so does that mean that the child retroactively loses his rights when you kill it?
To be consistent, if you are talking about the rights being founded on future ability, you have to say yes. An Objectivist* like Destiny must agree that children only have rights so long as they are not killed or mutilated or abused to the point where they won't join the social contract, that's pretty terrible.
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*Or whatever he identifies as.
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If instead of actual future, you assume it's based on the potential*, the child's potential to grow to respect the social contract, even still you run into a few immediate issues.
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*the “best case scenario (ignoring actual eventualities or probability)”
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1. Abortion = Murder
First this requires you to be anti-abortion because of the fetus’s potential for the same, so basically abortion is equal to murder,
2. Make all the babies
Second it also requires you to demand the fertilization of every egg to the extent possible, since it has the potential to turn into a fetus, which has the potential to turn into a child, which has the potential to grow to respect social contract and third:
3. Rape all the women (told ya it was gonna get worse)
Erm No FAP for you, sorry, but likewise every sperm has that potential and now things get really pretty nasty because if women won't consent willingly you have a moral dilemma on your hands as a deontologist to rape her or to murder your sperm which has the potential to be a human respecting the social contract. Usually murder beats rape, so Destiny you are morally obligated to rape women, based on your beliefs, I don't think I need to explain how terrible that is.
Even if you try to draw the action/ inaction distinction, you still have to be against the action of masturbating, of using birth control, of saying ‘no,’ of fighting off a rapist, or even of punishing rapists, you have to be against any action that sabotages the potential for a new member to the social contract.
Although clearly Destiny does not make this distinction here, this action/ inaction distinction, in other cases [he does], as he demonstrates here:
If you try to draw an arbitrary distinction somewhere between the independent egg and the sperm, the fetus, the child and the adult, you have to justify this. Clearly one becomes the other, that fetus becomes the child, becomes the adult. There are fundamental changes along the way that there is a continuity of genetics, of living material between them, there is clearly a biological purpose to their existence.Destiny wrote:I don't see there being a fundamental difference, let's say that I see a child fall in the pool okay? Or let's say that there's a guy walking and the child falls in and that guy could jump in to save that child and he doesn't right? I would think that that would be a morally reprehensible action, for him to not just, if it's very easy for him to hop in the pool and get the child out, now let's say that you're on a cruise ship and there's a massive storm that comes by and a child falls out of a boat, and there's another guy and he doesn't jump into the raging waters to save the child, like I'm not going to give him the same amount of shit, I'm not going to be like “well why didn't you risk your life to do it?” Right? I don't think that would be a very fair thing to do.
I would say the only real difference* between these states is sentience, but Destiny rejects this:
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*the only important difference in terms of morality
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Okay? But then you're going to have a serious problem drawing any sort of rational lines that makes sense between an egg, a sperm, a fetus, a child, even human cancer cells.*Destiny wrote:In terms of the animals are sentient beings, so sentience is a trait that, in and of itself, I just don't see much value in, I mean, I don't know how you can necessarily quantify that or what it's relevance really is.
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*if you try to make the argument about “unique complete human DNA,” and then what are twins?
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I talked about this briefly in my response to roaming millennial,[1] so hopefully I've made my point that this Randian or Raulsian idea of rights based on social contract that it just doesn't make sense, it doesn't stand up to any sort of scrutiny once you start asking questions about children and about where children's rights come from.
I'm very curious to know how Destiny would respond to this dilemma, if he even sees it as a dilemma, I mean he does say some things that suggest that he has no problem with grossly violating any sort of social convention, like this:
So maybe Destiny wouldn't have a problem with everything I've said thus far in this video? Maybe he would declare that children are property, that along with non-human animals and the severely intellectually disabled that children are just property. They have no rights and they should only have protection from their owners as an extension of property rights.Destiny wrote:. . .I would rather be a sociopath than a hypocrite, I really would.
In other words maybe he would respond that it's perfectly acceptable for parents, owners really, to treat their children however they want, to sell them, to torture them, whatever, as long as they are not infringing on someone else's rights as a result.
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*if we find it useful to let them in at all
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And this property status would last, until and if* the child grows up to the point where he or she can respect the social contract, so by this view point it seems that the only wrong would be like manufacturing psychopaths and then releasing them into society and that's only because they would be negatively affecting others, who are members of the social contract, as long as you only produce well-adjusted adults and corpses then you're in the clear.
Or maybe that would cross his arbitrary line, maybe he would declare abortion, birth control and interference with rape tantamount to murder as I explained earlier because it interferes with potential, if that's true though, this wouldn't justify him eating most meat either, if you are going for the best case scenario future options, then you clearly have to give most animals rights too.
Intelligent animals are capable of learning social rules to varying degrees depending on their intelligence and of practicing them to the extent of their impulse control.[2] Social and domesticated animals like dogs, cows, pigs and even chickens are particularly capable of learning civil behavior given the right environment. Just as humans are incapable given the wrong environment because notions of non-violence, of property rights, of just basic civility are learned, these are not things that are innate to human beings.
But that's not to say it's rocket science, particularly just respecting the right to life, if well-trained domestic animals can respect Destiny’s right to life and avoid harming him and even property, why can't he do the same?
As unprepared as he was for Destiny’s interesting views on morality, Vegan Gains did bring up the perhaps simpler social contract between human and dogs, a point Destiny dismissed in a dazzling display of intellectual dishonesty, appealing to some sort of perfect all-consuming respect/ reverence for the social contract, that is stronger than survival?
Vegan Gains wrote:Like the issue I have here, is it seems like you're sort of ignoring the fact that animals, like can to some extent have sort of a social contract with you, like even if you think, okay it's not real love, they're just like the only reason they like you is because you fed them and gave them a warm home and everything, don't you think just the fact that they'd sort of return the favor to you, like the affectionate towards you, not bite you, because you give affection to them, like you don't think that gives them any sort of right to any kind of respect?
Destiny wrote:Not particularly, no I don't think that, that the fact that something is grateful to you that you feed it, I don't think necessarily entitles you to the same rights that humans have or any level of rights that would be similar to a human.
Vegan Gains wrote:Okay so like, even if, like so, you just think anyone should be able to like torture their dog to death.
To any sensible person that is obviously a social contract of trust, but Destiny does not want to recognize it because of some perceived imperfections. In reality though, we're really all fair-weather friends, a typical human will steal from you or even murder you for food (if starving), particularly if their children are starving.Destiny wrote:Pretty much yeah, because it's a possession and you don't extend the same rights to the animal that you would to humans yeah.
You can easily say that everyone is only behaving nicely because of the rewards that behaving nicely brings.*
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*there’s a very strong case to be made for this in psychology, and how it affects human actions and trustworthiness.
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Or because they are grateful to society or to those they are bonded with. So I guess the only people who deserve rights are the people who would suffer and starve to death instead of steal to live? The people who would dogmatically follow the social contract for its own sake, instead of because it's useful?
So if someone would hold their own survival above your property rights that means that they don't deserve any rights at all ever? Even in fair weather? Just as Destiny would deny rights to a dog, based on the source of the behavior or the hypothetical breakdown of that behavior if the feeding ends?
This seems to be what he's saying, it's understandable that Destiny might defend himself or his property if attacked by a starving person, but by his reasoning, rights are all or nothing. If a person would resort to such behavior then they do not respect the social contract and so they do not deserve rights in any situation.
So it's fine to do whatever you want with that person, torture or murder that person because they're not a true Scots[man]… I mean social agent.
And just so we're clear here, not all dogs will do this, not all dogs will attack their owners when they're hungry, I mean there are dogs that will starve before biting their humans and some humans won't do this either*Your logical fallacy is: no true Scotsman; you made what could be called an appeal to purity as a way to dismiss relevant criticisms or flaws of your argument.
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*usually based on quasi-religious devotion to authority.
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But it's the rare exception, as a rule the vast majority of humans have only limited respect for the social contract, so if you are keen to invalidate the rights of another based on a hypothetical situation in which that respect is overcome by survival instinct then your framework crumbles pretty fast.
There is probably not a libertarian on earth who would starve for their ideology rather than steal a loaf of bread, no matter what they say. This all-or-nothing mentality is really a serious problem, it is an inherent problem of deontology, which I talk about here. [3]
People trying to cling to a rule or dogma regardless of consequence or the reasoning that got them there, Destiny’s Dogma is no exception and with regard to consequences and consequentialism, Destiny makes it clear that he rejects that too.
He also discusses later how he thinks his dogmatic adherence to social contract is derived, spoiler, [from] self-interest.Destiny wrote:I'm not very much an “ends justify the means” person, I think that morality should be considered through and through, so for instance, you get into weird territories when you're like, should you consider the outcome when you're talking about morality, things like the trolley problem, at that point right? If you could push somebody in front of a moving train to say four people, would you do it? Or would you kill one person to harvest organs to save ten people, like I feel like you get into weird areas there, I don't usually consider morality based on outcomes, but more based on the actions that you're committing.
Destiny wrote:So like my fundamental axioms would be that my life matters, I guess, which I think most people agree on that, I think therefore I am, right? I know I exist and I know that my life matters, right? And then from there I know that there are other humans that are similar to me and because I want to exist right, if that's like my fundamental axiom, is that I want to exist and I don't want other people to fuck with my existence, it's like my fundamental belief, right? Now from that point of view I want to maximize whatever I can, to maintain that belief, I want to exist and I don’t want other people to fuck with me.
And for me, I think that the most rational way of doing that, is to demand for others the same rights that you would demand for yourself, that's where the social contract comes from right? Now if I were faced with a bear or a deer or a or an well probably not a dear, but whatever I don't know, anything else, a lion, a tiger, that would want to eat me, right? It doesn't matter what part of the social contract or how I engage with him or whatever, that dude is gonna fuckin’ eat me if he's hungry. Or if I seem threatening or whatever, right? So I don't really give a fuck what he thinks, what an animal thinks about that, because they're not capable of engaging with me in a social contract in this way.
I'm not a tiger, I'm not concerned with the existence of tigers, I'm a human that's what I am, I'm concerned with the existence of other humans because I know they can be concerned with my existence, this is how my moral code kind of works.
Vegan Gains wrote:So you're basically saying you don't give a shit about anyone else other than yourself and the only reason you create a moral, like a social contract with people is just to save your own ass?
Destiny wrote:Correct.
Vegan Gains wrote:Okay.
So Destiny makes it pretty clear here that he only values the social contract because of what it can do for him, so does that mean that he's one of those people who would violate the social contract in order to survive and if that's true well does that mean that he has no rights? That we can now torture him, murder him, just for fun because his adherence to the social contract is imperfect?Destiny wrote:But I think I can extend that to every other person too, so that they can all be self-interested in much the same way, yeah.
Given that he's unwilling to give the benefit of a doubt to non-humans and wait for actual violations to justify harming them then he'd have to say yes*, he'd have to say yes, that he doesn't really have rights because he doesn't truly subscribe to the social contract when it comes down to it.
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*if he were being consistent with his deontological beliefs.
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Vegan Gains wrote:Well no, I don't have to respect that social contract, so I could just say it's fine to like kill humans.
So that's kind of creepy, he seriously sounds like some Fundamentalist right out of the Dark Ages, who regarded non-Christians as sub-human. Point is, if Destiny was really being consistent, really being consistent with his beliefs and with the reasoning he's employed to get to those beliefs, he would be nothing but a self-serving egoist, using arguments for the social contract when it suits him, when it benefits him and then going against it when it doesn't, so just always following his own whims.Destiny wrote:So you don't respect my social contract then that means that I no longer respect you as a human.
And maybe that's the only thing he's really being consistent with, maybe he doesn't really value honesty at all, it might explain his interesting views on burden of proof, so about 1 hour and 47 minutes into the debate, he says this:
Vegan Gains wrote:But why do you think you should have the liberty to torture and kill animals?
But then a minute later he says this:Destiny wrote:Well because the argument hasn't been made that animals are worthy of any kind of protection.
Vegan Gains wrote:Like you could do that exact same thing and justify the Holocaust really.
Destiny wrote:But you can't, right? We already went over this.
Vegan Gains wrote:But you can.
So in other words, if someone wants to torture animals the burden of proof is not on them, the burden is on the people against it, they have to prove why it's wrong but in the case of someone wanting to torture like a group of disenfranchised humans, then the burden is on the torturer. And their liberty to do so - you know torture those people is denied by default. How does that work?Destiny wrote:Well what is your argument? Like for example if you’re a Nazi, what's your argument for treating Jews as less than human, like what is your rationalization there for that or your rationale for that sorry.
So definitely thinks that this is the most rational, ethical system, the social contract:
But it's really interesting when you start questioning the basis for those contractual details he reverts into relativism.So like using social contract, I think that you can generate a system of ethics and morals that works even on people with no empathy whatsoever, even if I don't give a fuck, I could maybe watch my neighbor die in his front yard of a fucking heart attack and walk away from it and not care, but I still wouldn't go over and kill him myself because I want that same respect for me.
Vegan Gains wrote:Right, so there's no such, like you keep going back and forth, you said that it's wrong to break a social contract, well why is it wrong to break a social contract?
So what he's saying here, is that it's his personal morality, only his personal morality that tells him that the Holocaust was wrong, that there's nothing objectively wrong about the Holocaust and that other social contracts can be equally valid, including those exclusive to Nazi’s bent on eradicating Jews.Destiny wrote:Well I, you're asking me from like a meta position, a person has morality A and there's morality B, could an outside hypothetical observer, would he say that it's wrong to move from morality A to B, no I mean if you want to, from an ultimate frame of reference, that guy could say that okay well he moved from A to B that's fine, but now a person who believes in morality A, like I do, if I see you move from my morality to something different, then I would say that's wrong, but it but it depends on like I guess the observer that you're talking about.
Vegan Gains called it earlier in the debate when he said that Destiny’s views on morality, it just sounds like might makes right, rights can only be negotiated with power and no system based purely in social contract, cares at all about the disenfranchised, you can really see the unsavouriness of his views, just by making slight adjustments to his earlier rationalization.
“I'm not a tiger, I'm not concerned with the existence of tigers, I'm a human, that's what I am, I'm concerned with the existence of other humans because I know they can be concerned with my existence, this is how my moral code kind of works.”
“I'm not a [Jew], I'm not concerned with the existence of [Jews], I'm a[n Aryan], that's what I am, I'm concerned with the existence of other [Aryans] because I know they can be concerned with my existence, this is how my moral code kind of works.”
That felt disgusting to say, I'm sorry.
It's just as valid to draw an arbitrary line at race, if one liberty, in inflicting harm against another group doesn't have to be justified, then the other doesn't either, both mentalities draw on the same fallacies and this mind-set very easily leads from speciesism to racism, when you don't care about the suffering of others.
These people are only out for themselves and for what they perceive to be their in-group because they believe that getting their kind ahead is the best way for them to prosper personally, Destiny's argument is not the most rational for eating meat, it's the least consistent and the easiest to debunk because it's filled with contradictions, while pretending to be logical.
It just may seem that way because most people, including most vegans are just so unfamiliar with it because it's so uncommon because as I've hopefully demonstrated it’s really revolting and goes against most people's just innate understanding of what morality is.
It's the golden rule basically, you know most people know that morality; it's not about what you can get, it's about what you can give, even when it's unearned.
Just to be clear, I do not believe that Destiny is a disgusting person, I don't think he really is okay with kids being treated as property, honestly I don't think he's thought that far into it. I think he's doing his best to avoid the notion that his eating habits are harming others and as a result he has aligned himself with a really, really, unsavory ethical system, which is to say no ethical system.
I know he did say ‘correct,’ in answer to Vegan Gains question about only being out for himself, but really I think that's just a defense mechanism, the number of Psychopaths and sociopaths in the world is incredibly small, so it's pretty unlikely that he's one of those, it's far more likely that he's lying to himself, he may really think that he's being honest, but the mind’s a funny thing and we can convince ourselves of a lot of wrong… stuff.
So I'm gonna end it there, thank you so much for watching. . .
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References:
1. Roaming Millennial needs a safe space from vegans - https://youtu.be/T2Hcd63TKdQ
2. Moral behavior in animals | Frans de Waal - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GcJxRqTs5nk
3. Dogmatic Justice vs. Morality, Animal experimentation, etc. - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AUKFHMHhv5E