Philosophical Vegan Forum

Aha this is funny, UV just tweeted:

People accusing me of irrationality by misrepresenting my views w/ deceptive editing is always fun.

Accusations of purposeful misrepresentation through framing (deceptive editing/ misquoting) is part and parcel of the course of most debates, naturally I’m perfectly happy to chalk it up to the flare with which you got carried away.

Your failure to give anybody the benefit of the doubt, and instead assume bad faith, is very concerning.

It was more of a dry British idiom like ‘elementary my dear Watson’. If you want the longer version it goes... I’m so sorry to bother you kind sir; but it would seem you just endeavoured to make it appear like I don’t naturally assume the laws of logic, which you know very well every person has to do so in order to go about their day, so sorry again, carry on as you were.

How do you justfy radical egalitarianism though?

Simply evolutionary meta-ethics [1], I’m a soft determinist like Dennet, so I’m partial to the limited free autonomy we have; expanding to the most amount of people born on the planet, it’s certainly a value commodity that you can put in normative consequentialist terms, but normative ethics fails to answer the question of what are good ends? We could be going down a route of effective altruism towards making everyone comfortable and content with their situation that ends up in everyone abandoning their intellectual clarity [2] and cultural diversity [3]. This is why the wild animal suffering debate is interesting to me also. [4]

This is not to say that the current state of affairs is not exceedingly unfair and therefore not conducive to the maximization of wellbeing. Both the social justice movement and the consequentialists strive to massively reduce inequality. It's just that, once this is hypothetically achieved, consequentialism proceeds to be critical of the legitimacy of radical egalitarianism as well and looks further towards even better systems, rather than making equality an end in itself.

Agreed, though I think this is a good critique of pseudo-scientific totalitarianism [5] rather than intersectionality as critical theory. Making objectives ends in themselves is consequentialists gig. People who fight for social justice do so because the means by which we make change, bolster autonomy and forge solidarity across broad identities are all important. Just look to the references I've included all along for a more expansive ethical framework that includes intersectionality [6][7][8][9]

But as I said I’m disappointed with the reductions and lack of scope in UV’s video series promised so I’m no longer interested in discussing each video individually under the format chosen, I’d rather wait for UV to finish saying what they want to say, and deduce from that her comprehensive argument.

_____________

References:

1. Robert Wright on the evolution of compassion - youtube.com/watch?v=N4wFyRGilp4

2. Robert Wright on Modern Psychology and the self - youtube.com/watch?v=gRCxX8JnTM4&list=PLXRGPjh6kmaNs-PqEIcX0xafTirZl-0-d&index=13

3. Saba Mahmood: Religious Liberty, the Minority Problem and Geopolitics - youtube.com/watch?v=5QYjo3VBmoc

4. http://www.thelandmagazine.org.uk/articles/slow-evolution-co-evolution

5. The Politics of Post Anarchism by Saul Newman - "However, can we assume that the possibilities of human freedom lie rooted in the natural order, as a secret waiting to be discovered, as a flower waiting to blossom, to use Bookchin’s metaphor? Can we assume that there is a rational unfolding of possibilities, driven by a certain historical and social logic? This would seem to fall into the trap of essentialism, whereby there is a rational essence or being at the foundation of society whose truth we must perceive. There is an implicit positivism here, in which political and social phenomena are seen as conditioned by natural principles and scientifically observable conditions. Here I think one should reject this view of a social order founded on deep rational principles. In the words of Stirner, ‘The essence of the world, so attractive and splendid, is for him who looks to the bottom of it – emptiness.’ In other words, rather than there being a rational objectivity at the foundation of society, an immanent wholeness embodying the potential for human freedom, there is a certain void or emptiness, one that produces radical contingency and indeterminacy rather than scientific objectivity. This idea has been elaborated by Laclau and Mouffe, who eschew the idea of society as a rationally intelligible totality, and instead see it as a field of antagonisms which function as its discursive limit. In other words, what gives society its definitional limit at the same time subverts it as a coherent, whole identity. Therefore, they argue, ‘Society never manages fully to be society, because everything in it is penetrated by its limits, which prevent it from constituting itself as an objective reality.’ Antagonism should not be thought of here in the sense of the Hobbesian state of nature, as a war of everyman against everyman, but rather as a kind of rupturing or displacement of social identities that prevents the closure of society as a coherent identity."

6. Beyond free and equal; the limits of liberal democracy - tspace.library.utoronto.ca/bitstream/1807/65490/1/Singh_Jakeet_201211_PhD_thesis.pdf

7. Anarchism and Animal liberation; Essays on Complementary Elements of Total Liberation.

8. SpeculativeNonBuddhism.com/2012/03/27/samsara-as-the-realm-of-ideology/

9. Theory and practice in Hellenistic Ethics.

NonZeroSum wrote: ↑Sat Feb 18, 2017 6:12 am I’m so sorry to bother you kind sir; but it would seem you just endeavoured to make it appear like I don’t naturally assume the laws of logic, which you know very well every person has to do so in order to go about their day, so sorry again, carry on as you were.

I can not assume that, unfortunately:
http://philosophicalvegan.com/viewtopic.php?f=17&t=2919

We have had no shortage of people criticizing the laws of thought as mere human constructs.

I'll let inator, who is probably better suited to answering these with references, address the other replies.
You might want to read this thread, or some others that deal with normative ethics and the root of what "good" is.
http://philosophicalvegan.com/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=2710

NonZeroSum wrote: ↑Sat Feb 18, 2017 6:12 amSimply evolutionary meta-ethics [1], I’m a soft determinist like Dennet, so I’m partial to the limited free autonomy we have; expanding to the most amount of people born on the planet, it’s certainly a value commodity that you can put in normative consequentialist terms,

I don't think that we can put the consideration of all interests into normative terms only now that we're at an arguably higher level of ethical development than, say, two millennia ago. It seems you're taking an anthropological-descriptive view of morality rather than an philosophical-normative one.

Yes, our understanding of ethics has evolved, just like our understanding of science. But claiming that only our evolutionary meta-ethics justifies equal consideration is similar to saying that a long time ago gravity wasn't true because we didn't think it was true and we had different explanations for reality.
Morality is not that different. Since there is no rational justification for disregarding the interests of specific sentient entities based on arbitrary biases we may have, morality would require that we take them all into consideration. This was always valid, then and now. It's just that nowadays reason and science usually inform our moral judgements better than they did before.

NonZeroSum wrote: ↑Sat Feb 18, 2017 6:12 am [...] but normative ethics fails to answer the question of what are good ends?

Preference consequentialism doesn't need to decide what are "good" ends a priori. It only strives to take all expressed interests into consideration and bring them into a sort of Pareto optimal state. The better-worse scale only informs us as to how far a state of affairs is positioned away from that equilibrium - and as I said before, different versions of cultural expressions can do just as well (or badly), no one's arguing for complete cultural homogenity.

Radical egalitarianism is different. It decides that the only "good end" is radical equality.
It would only allow for those improvements to a system that necessarily translate into less standard deviation OR that necessarily improve every single unit of the system (like some intersectional activism).
Actually, reducing the standard deviation would be the only change that counts as an improvement, irrespective of the effect on the level of overall wellbeing (like some badly thought-out forms of reparative justice). Is this your position?

By the way, in terms of economic equality, Afghanistan seems to have the best GINI coefficient in the world. To radical egalitarianism, that should be the best economy.

NonZeroSum wrote: ↑Sat Feb 18, 2017 6:12 amWe could be going down a route of effective altruism towards making everyone comfortable and content with their situation that ends up in everyone abandoning their intellectual clarity [2] and cultural diversity [3]. This is why the wild animal suffering debate is interesting to me also. [4]

I think you may be confusing classical (hedonistic) utilitarianism and preference utilitarianism/interest consequentialism. Interest consequentialism doesn't just want to make everyone "comfortable" in a hedonistic sense, and it also doesn't take the Buddhist route of trying to make everyone let go of desires and be content with their situation.
It strives to fullfill as many personal desires as efficiently as possible. It strives to change the world according to how different people want the world to be. When there are conflicting desires, they are weighed against each other fairly.

NonZeroSum wrote: ↑Sat Feb 18, 2017 6:12 amAgreed, though I think this is a good critique of pseudo-scientific totalitarianism [5] rather than intersectionality as critical theory. Making objectives ends in themselves is consequentialists gig. People who fight for social justice do so because the means by which we make change, bolster autonomy and forge solidarity across broad identities are all important. Just look to the references I've included all along for a more expansive ethical framework that includes intersectionality [6][7][8][9]

It's a critique of your stated radical egalitarianism, which happens to be, as you say, totalitarian. And which makes an end out of equality. I didn't bring up intersectionality at all in my last post.
I went into my objections to parts of intersectionality in the thread on justice (http://philosophicalvegan.com/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=2957). We can continue talking about it there if you like.

If you think you're not actually a radical egalitarian in that sense, do describe the premises and logical implications of your position in more detail in your own words. You want to make changes towards which better state of affairs?
Do you think that judging various cultural systems based on objective metrics like better-worse or more-less regarding the promotion of liberal values/human rights is justified? The passage you quoted would suggest not.

It seems to me that the type of egalitarianism that the social justice movement promotes either doesn't recognize that many interests are conflicting and can't all be fulfilled at the same time without compromise, or it doesn't care. For example, in intersectionalist terms, the struggle against oppressive neo-colonialism and the struggle for democracy or women's and LGBT rights can be incompatible (check out Mugabe's views on this). Same for veganism and the protection of cultural autonomy. How do you reconcile these things?

I've read parts of some of your referenced books some time ago. You might also enjoy the literature on welfare economics, especially the approach of Pareto and Kaldor-Hicks on social welfare maximization. It's similar to how we deal with interests.

NonZeroSum wrote: ↑Sat Feb 18, 2017 6:12 amBut as I said I’m disappointed with the reductions and lack of scope in UV’s video series promised so I’m no longer interested in discussing each video individually under the format chosen, I’d rather wait for UV to finish saying what they want to say, and deduce from that her comprehensive argument.

That's fair. But we're not exactly discussing the first video here. We're talking about the broader concepts.

inator wrote: ↑Mon Feb 20, 2017 8:58 am

NonZeroSum wrote: ↑Sat Feb 18, 2017 6:12 amSimply evolutionary meta-ethics [1], I’m a soft determinist like Dennet, so I’m partial to the limited free autonomy we have; expanding to the most amount of people born on the planet, it’s certainly a value commodity that you can put in normative consequentialist terms,

I don't think that we can put the consideration of all interests into normative terms only now that we're at an arguably higher level of ethical development than, say, two millennia ago.

Yes that’s precisely the point of evolutionary meta-ethics, the more complex non-zero sum relationships we enter into on a global scale, the more we learn to feel compassion for others outside our own tribe.

It seems you're taking an anthropological-descriptive view of morality rather than an philosophical-normative one.

No there are normative applications to evolutionary ethics; it just necessarily needs to be tentative and speculative, not to mention highly contested. Conservatives would have social Darwinism, while libertines would have cultural autonomy and environmental rewilding.

Yes, our understanding of ethics has evolved, just like our understanding of science. But claiming that only our evolutionary meta-ethics justifies equal consideration is similar to saying that a long time ago gravity wasn't true because we didn't think it was true and we had different explanations for reality.

Nope, again not a 'hard' evolutionary ethicist. We have to get out of the use of these absolutes, either way that is a fundamental misreading of evolutionary meta-ethics. You asked me how I personally justify radical egalitarianism. I said it’s because I value autonomy, productivity increases when you take power out of the hands of a small elite class. We should extend the free agency we have to the most amount of people on the planet.

Radical not as in singular goal, but because normative conceptions of equality under the law often don’t allow for people born into lower socio-economic classes to legitimately have the same opportunities. In my country we won representative democracy with the emergence of a working class party coming to power after WW2 and giving us the NHS, now we want economic democracy. [1]

Morality is not that different. Since there is no rational justification for disregarding the interests of specific sentient entities based on arbitrary biases we may have, morality would require that we take them all into consideration. This was always valid, then and now. It's just that nowadays reason and science usually inform our moral judgements better than they did before.

Sure thing, and I think the studying of capitalist systems and intersectionality (an epistemology of ignorance) will play an important part in understanding the proliferation of these biases.

[...] but normative ethics fails to answer the question of what are good ends?

Preference consequentialism doesn't need to decide what are "good" ends a priori. It only strives to take all expressed interests into consideration and bring them into a sort of Pareto optimal state. The better-worse scale only informs us as to how far a state of affairs is positioned away from that equilibrium - and as I said before, different versions of cultural expressions can do just as well (or badly), no one's arguing for complete cultural homogenity.

I disagree. I think a bias toward secular liberal models of democracy that are objective rather than subjective (piety movement) have been weaponised as good reasons to go into foreign interventions, because ‘good intentions’ are all that matter. The Colonel from Full Metal Jacket comes to mind:

"Son, all I've ever asked of my Marines is for them to obey my orders as they would the word of God. We are here to help the Vietnamese, because inside every gook there is an American trying to get out. It's a hard-ball world, son. We've gotta try to keep our heads until this peace craze blows over!"

Radical egalitarianism is different. It decides that the only "good end" is radical equality.
It would only allow for those improvements to a system that necessarily translate into less standard deviation OR that necessarily improve every single unit of the system (like some intersectional activism).
Actually, reducing the standard deviation would be the only change that counts as an improvement, irrespective of the effect on the level of overall wellbeing (like some badly thought-out forms of reparative justice). Is this your position?

Nope, you’re simply arguing against a consequentialist single issue form of radical egalitarianism. Radical equality as the prescription of intersectionality theory would have to reject all universal systematic decrees because, as you and UV said, it would be unjust.

“They [revolutionary authorities] must not do it themselves, by revolutionary decrees, by imposing this task on the masses; rather their aim should be that of provoking the masses to action. They must not try to impose upon the masses any organization whatever, but rather they should induce the people to set up autonomous organizations.” - Bakunin

NonZeroSum wrote: ↑Sat Feb 18, 2017 6:12 amAgreed, though I think this is a good critique of pseudo-scientific totalitarianism [5] rather than intersectionality as critical theory. Making objectives ends in themselves is consequentialists gig. People who fight for social justice do so because the means by which we make change, bolster autonomy and forge solidarity across broad identities are all important. Just look to the references I've included all along for a more expansive ethical framework that includes intersectionality [6][7][8][9]

It's a critique of your stated radical egalitarianism, which happens to be, as you say, totalitarian. And which makes an end out of equality. I didn't bring up intersectionality at all in my last post.
I went into my objections to parts of intersectionality in the thread on justice (http://philosophicalvegan.com/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=2957). We can continue talking about it there if you like.

NonZeroSum wrote: ↑Sat Feb 18, 2017 6:12 amBut as I said I’m disappointed with the reductions and lack of scope in UV’s video series promised so I’m no longer interested in discussing each video individually under the format chosen, I’d rather wait for UV to finish saying what they want to say, and deduce from that her comprehensive argument.

That's fair. But we're not exactly discussing the first video here. We're talking about the broader concepts.

I’m concerned that if we don’t have a clear frame for the discussion we will go off tangent. I think we should restrict this thread to the ideas brought up in the first video and whether UV’s argument expanded into 3 videos is valid. I’ve made my comments on the first video. I can only comment on the more detailed comprehensive argument promised, when it’s been released.

If you think you're not actually a radical egalitarian in that sense, do describe the premises and logical implications of your position in more detail in your own words. You want to make changes towards which better state of affairs?
Do you think that judging various cultural systems based on objective metrics like better-worse or more-less regarding the promotion of liberal values/human rights is justified? The passage you quoted would suggest not.

Correct, I subscribe to a libertarian socialist economy that rejects assimilation of cultural autonomy, to be negotiated by the community itself, and only receives outside pressure to change through good journalism and free market relationships, the use of force only to be used as a last resort. [2]

“[The modern state] attempts to assure absolute fidelity of the citizens-subjects whose social and political relationships cease to have their own center, to subordinate themselves to public or private capital of the centralist state, founded on the individualization of the possessive, envious and covetous individual, the Homo economicus, created in the West. The state attempts to homogenize all natural communities in its territory; to impose upon them the same way of thinking and behaving, the same habits, to establish what is called el imperio de la ley ('the Empire of the Law').” (Esteva and Prakash p132 - 1998)

It seems to me that the type of egalitarianism that the social justice movement promotes either doesn't recognize that many interests are conflicting and can't all be fulfilled at the same time without compromise, or it doesn't care.

I guess that is going to be the subject of the next video. I can’t fathom anything terribly wrong about encouraging people to engage with numerous social movements as a form of civil engagement, towards realising political goals. Libertines obviously represent an existential threat to those on the right in the culture war. This is why intersectionality has provoked so many debates about whether it’s a teleology or more of a situationist pursuit as I see it being used, i.e. simply a means to expand dialogue. [3] [4]

For example, in intersectionalist terms, the struggle against oppressive neo-colonialism and the struggle for democracy or women's and LGBT rights can be incompatible (check out Mugabe's views on this). Same for veganism and the protection of cultural autonomy. How do you reconcile these things?

Aha, I’m finding it difficult to discern the sarcastic point you're making by mentioning Mugabe. Intersectionality takes struggles for autonomy out of the narrow scope of Radical Feminism or Black Nationalism. White colonialism led to ‘the proliferation of a lot of objectively bad ideas’ to use UV’s terminology. Without representation through recourse to the ballot box to change racist policies, militant resentment was the 'natural' state of affairs in Africa and America, and persisted in the era of 'civil rights'.

“Having theorized this ontological self-assertion in Black Skin, White Masks as devoid of critical self-reflection or analysis, Fanon in The Wretched of the Earth, translated Sorel’s myth of the general strike and class conflict into the colonial context as a violent confrontation between natives activated by the myth of Négritude and their colonial oppressors. Fanon described the natives’ desire 'to wreck the colonial world' as 'a mental picture of action which is very clear, very easy to understand'; moreover such images are not formulated through 'a rational confrontation of points of views' but instead constitute 'an untidy affirmation of an original idea propounded as an absolute.' As George Ciccariello-Maher points out in his cogent analysis of Fanon’s debt to Sorel, such myth-making had unfortunate consequences, for by the time Fanon wrote The Wretched of the Earth Négritude 'had largely become a reactionary tool in the hands of neo-colonial puppets in Africa.' Thus the myth of Négritude, like that of class, could be marshaled to serve progressive or reactionary ends, and an anti-colonial movement founded on the myth of racial absolutes could unwittingly generate the very racial prejudice that its progressive adherents sought to overcome." (Mark Antliff p183 - 2011)[5]

I've read parts of some of your referenced books some time ago. You might also enjoy the literature on welfare economics, especially the approach of Pareto and Kaldor-Hicks on social welfare maximization.

Sounds good, any introductory essays or lectures you recommend? I was really inspired by 'Reclaiming Work Beyond the Wage Based Society' by André Gorz.

____________

References:

1. A history of the labour movement (in the UK) - youtube.com/watch?list=PLqRNOagVZDVfatNT_uZY2g5PN4YzZFNuE&v=ZCmBGxFkvdU
2. c4ss.org/whats-with-the-socially-conservative-strain-of-anarcho-capitalism-coming-out-of-the-mises-institute-and-hans-herman-hoppe
3. Hate Kills - A social justice response to 'suicide' - vikkireynolds.ca/documents/Hate_Kills_SocialJusticeSuicide_Reynolds_White2012.pdf
4. Principles of Transformative Justice - collectiveliberation.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/Generation5_Principles_of_Transformative_Justice.pdf
5. Bad Anarchism: Aestheticized Mythmaking and the Legacy of Georges Sorel - toleratedindividuality.files.wordpress.com/2015/10/bad-anarchism-aestheticized-mythmaking-and-the-legacy-of-georges-sorel.pdf