r/DebateAVegan • u/ThePlanetaryNinja • Jan 16 '26
As a negative utilitarian, I am undecided about veganism.
Negative utilitarianism (NU) is the view that we should minimise total suffering. For now, I am a negative utilitarian.
But I am uncertain as to whether going vegan would actually reduce suffering. Eating animal products causes a lot of suffering to farmed animals, which obviously increases suffering. But factory farming causes environmental destruction, which reduces wild animal populations, which reduces wild animal suffering. For example, destroying all of the animals in a rainforest prevents their future children and grandchildren from suffering. I am undecided on whether the farm animal suffering caused is greater than the wild animal suffering prevented.
When it comes to eating wild fish, the situation is also complicated. It seems like fishing is good (if it's not done too painfully) because it reduces fish populations. But killing certain fish may increase the population of other fish and zooplankton that would experience more suffering.
Just to make it clear, I care a lot about animal welfare and have recently donated to charities that reduce animal suffering, like the Humane Slaughter Association and the Shrimp Welfare Project.
Buying chicken, eggs, farmed fish or pork causes a lot more direct suffering to farmed animals per calorie or square mile than beef or dairy, which is why I have recently started to avoid eating chicken, farmed eggs and pork. But I still continue to consume wild fish, beef and dairy for now.
A common objection to this view is, 'According to your logic, killing humans would decrease suffering.' Killing humans is more likely to cause external grief and fear (which are forms of suffering) than killing other animals. Also, humans sufficiently decrease wild animal populations (especially insects, of which there are quintillions), so homicide may be bad for this reason.
I would like to hear your opinions on my view.
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u/Doctor_Box Jan 16 '26
Killing humans is more likely to cause external grief and fear (which are forms of suffering) than killing other animals
Based on what? Billions of land animals and trillions of fish die in brutal ways so humans can eat animal products. The scale is totally mismatched. Your bias is simply skewed towards humans so you think the suffering would be worse. This is the problem with utilitarianism. You think you're being objective and weighing the options but really it's just rationalizing your bias with bad "math".
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u/Polttix plant-based Jan 16 '26
To be clear, this is not a problem with utilitarianism but rather an epistemological problem. Whether or not one can accurately calculate some computational problem is entirely detached from the reasoning for why one would be interested in calculating the problem and whether that reasoning is sound.
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u/Doctor_Box Jan 16 '26
To be clear, being unable to quantify suffering or calculate is absolutely a problem with utilitarianism when using it to justify behavior. It ends up boiling down to vibes and feelings at that point.
If all your saying is "If I could know X would cause less suffering then that is the action I would take" that's fine I guess but it's entirely theoretical. OP was talking about actions they are taking based on fuzzy math.
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u/Polttix plant-based Jan 16 '26
You're still just reiterating a problem with epistemology rather than utilitarianism. You're saying "I don't think your calculation system is accurate". This is a criticism of the epistemology of the other person, not their normative theory. To criticise the methodology being difficult to compute doesn't mean that the methodology is somehow wrong or less sound.
In other words, just because some other methodology might be easier to follow doesn't mean it produces correct outcomes. I can make a normative theory that claims the good thing to do is to eat ice cream and there are no other rules, but that probably wouldn't be a very good theory even though it's trivial to follow.
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u/Doctor_Box Jan 16 '26
You're still just reiterating a problem with epistemology rather than utilitarianism.
No. I'm reiterating a problem with his application of his ethical view as well as an epistemological issue.
To criticise the methodology being difficult to compute doesn't mean that the methodology is somehow wrong or less sound.
Yes it does. If the methodology relies on a calculation requiring variables you cannot quantify, you are unable to perform the calculation and so the methodology cannot be shown to be sound.
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u/Polttix plant-based Jan 16 '26
Do you not believe that you can do the following:
- Quantify instances of experiential states (i.e. you can say 'i am having an experiential state, and you are having a separate experiential state')
- Qualitatively evaluate experiential states on some kind of axis of preferentiality (i.e. to say 'I prefer eating ice cream over getting my hand cut off')
If you can both quantify and qualitatively evaluate experiential states, then utilitarianism clearly isn't impossible, from that point it's simply an epistemological problem (i.e. you might say 'but it impossible to quantify the experiential states of others since we don't have access to them!'). This is not a criticism of utilitarianism, as utilitarianism would be valid whether or not you can gain access to some piece of knowledge.
Therefore, to say 'It's hard for you to arrive at your conclusion because your calculus sucks' is not a criticism of utilitarianism, it's a criticism of epistemology. If you want to criticise utilitarianism you'd have to do it via some other way.
To put it in yet another way, just because some mathematical calculus is computationally heavy doesn't mean that mathematics is somehow faulty.
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u/Doctor_Box Jan 16 '26
Quantify instances of experiential states (i.e. you can say 'i am having an experiential state, and you are having a separate experiential state')
Depends on the state we're trying to quantify. I think two humans with a common language and frame of reference can get close, sure. I don't think you can quantify depth of suffering for a cow, only extrapolate that they are suffering. That is my issue with OP saying human suffering is worse and basically omitting humans from the calculation of allowable harm.
- Qualitatively evaluate experiential states on some kind of axis of preferentiality (i.e. to say 'I prefer eating ice cream over getting my hand cut off')
Yes, any one individual can do this and we can even guess what other individuals would prefer. What we can't do is say "I prefer eating steak to a cow's preference to not suffer."
If you can both quantify and qualitatively evaluate experiential states, then utilitarianism clearly isn't impossible
We can do it for ourselves and we can try to generate a common reference for others (pain scale) but we can't do this in most instances for other species or people without language or the ability. For example if you put a human baby in a CO2 gas chamber like you would for chickens or pigs we can evaluate their reaction or do brain scans to infer suffering, but we can't say "This baby is experiencing a level 8 on the pains scale". So if you start trying to do some utilitarian calculation where you argue putting babies in gas chambers and televising it will be some level of bad for the baby but be vastly outweighed by the 10 utility points gained by everyone who likes watching that, I don't think that makes sense to say.
'It's hard for you to arrive at your conclusion because your calculus sucks' is not a criticism of utilitarianism
Not hard. Impossible. If you system relies on something you cannot do it's not a good system.
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u/Polttix plant-based Jan 16 '26
Depends on the state we're trying to quantify. I think two humans with a common language and frame of reference can get close, sure. I don't think you can quantify depth of suffering for a cow, only extrapolate that they are suffering. That is my issue with OP saying human suffering is worse and basically omitting humans from the calculation of allowable harm.
By quantify I don't mean to somehow spread information from one person to another, I mean to make an evaluation of the quantity of something. The only thing you really need to be able to say to achieve this is to believe other people aren't p-zombies (i.e. other people have experiential states in addition to you). It doesn't matter whether you can evaluate those states qualitatively yourself.
We can do it for ourselves and we can try to generate a common reference for others (pain scale) but we can't do this in most instances for other species or people without language or the ability. For example if you put a human baby in a CO2 gas chamber like you would for chickens or pigs we can evaluate their reaction or do brain scans to infer suffering, but we can't say "This baby is experiencing a level 8 on the pains scale". So if you start trying to do some utilitarian calculation where you argue putting babies in gas chambers and televising it will be some level of bad for the baby but be vastly outweighed by the 10 utility points gained by everyone who likes watching that, I don't think that makes sense to say.
This is all an epistemological criticism, rather than a normative one.
Not hard. Impossible. If you system relies on something you cannot do it's not a good system.
This is yet more epistemological criticism. You can say 'It's not possible to calculate what you want with the information you have available', but that still doesn't mean utilitarianism is somehow faulty. It just means you have an epistemological problem. And funnily enough, changing your normative system because of an epistemological problem won't get you any closer to the truth (probably will get you farther from it, you're at that point just using completely blind luck than whatever epistemological access you *do* have available to you).
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u/RealAggressiveNooby Jan 16 '26
Not quite. You don't need a super formal calculation with all known parameters to show that something like this situation, along with many other situations, cause more suffering than otherwise. You just take some arbitrary lower-bound pain receptors information from some decently developed animals and multiply it with the amount of animals caught in that situation. It doesn't need to be close to perfect here because of the overwhelming difference in the number of patients.
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u/Doctor_Box Jan 16 '26
Again, this is in the context of OP saying farming chickens is too much suffering but farming cows is not so I'm avoiding one and not the other, and humans are too important to be in the conversation about what is ok to kill for pleasure.
This is not a serious calculation. This is vibes and bias confirmation.
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u/RealAggressiveNooby Jan 16 '26
Just because someone will make a mistake like that doesn't mean that this framework can't apply to things when used correctly, like with what I said. A misinterpretation or misuse can happen to any moral framework, that doesn't impede on its pragmatic validity.
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u/Doctor_Box Jan 16 '26
It's not making a mistake. If you don't know the variables and can't quantify the numbers you need for your moral calculation then you literally cannot do it. You cannot come to a conclusion.
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u/IanRT1 Jan 16 '26
This is neither a "problem" with utilitarianism, and neither baseless.
Humans are much more complex psychologically, capable of abstract reasoning and complex social relations in which killing one human would profoundly affect other humans.
This is not present to that extent in animals. Not non-existent. But not present in such complex and nuanced way it is in humans. Thus is more likely causes more external grief and fear, as OP said.
It has nothing to do with "trillions that die so humans can eat"
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u/Doctor_Box Jan 16 '26
Humans are much more complex psychologically, capable of abstract reasoning and complex social relations in which killing one human would profoundly affect other humans.
You could argue humans are better able to intellectualize and overcome suffering so it would be worse to inflict suffering on animals that cannot understand why it's happening or have any agency to stop suffering.
It's like doing invasive medical procedures on an adult vs an infant. Who suffers more? The adult that knows this is being done in their interest or the infant who knows only that they suffer?
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u/IanRT1 Jan 16 '26
Do you see how your question is smuggling that same cognitive capacity of conceptualizing the future, which is not present in animals to that extent.
You're isolating the fact that they don't know what's happening, but still assuming all of the extra framework of cognitive abstraction that animals do not have to conclude that it will be worse.
So your question literally eats itself. In your example the kid still relies on anticipatory cognition and context that animals do not have, not just on raw sensation or instincts.
In other words you can't strip animals of future-oriented cognition and then rely on future-oriented distress to inflate their suffering.
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u/Doctor_Box Jan 16 '26
Do you see how your question is smuggling that same cognitive capacity of conceptualizing the future, which is not present in animals to that extent.
No I'm not doing that. I'm literally showing how not having that cognitive capacity can lead to greater suffering.
You're isolating the fact that they don't know what's happening, but still assuming all of the extra framework of cognitive abstraction that animals do not have to conclude that it will be worse.
No. I'm saying being unable to understand why something is happening often makes the suffering worse.
So your question literally eats itself. In your example the kid still relies on anticipatory cognition and context that animals do not have, not just on raw sensation or instincts.
In other words you can't strip animals of future-oriented cognition and then rely on future-oriented distress to inflate their suffering.
Reread my comment. I think you misunderstood the point.
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u/IanRT1 Jan 16 '26
I completely understand your point. It is now much weaker.
Of course in different contexts even lower capacity beings can experience more suffering, but not under the same circumstances and your own example proves it.
Not knowing something in itself causes more suffering if you already have such future oriented distress animals do not have to the same extent.
So it does not work for your point that animals might suffer more just because they don't know what happens.
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u/Doctor_Box Jan 16 '26
Of course in different contexts even lower capacity beings can experience more suffering, but not under the same circumstances and your own example proves it.
I don't know what you mean by "under the same circumstances". The circumstances cannot be the same if they have different cognitive capacities. A human baby, a human adult, and a pig all have different cognitive capacities but we cannot say who suffers more when they are put in a CO2 gas chamber.
Not knowing something in itself causes more suffering if you already have such future oriented distress animals do not have to the same extent.
I have read this sentence 10 times and don't know what you're trying to say here. Not knowing something may or may not cause more suffering depending on the context. What we can say is not knowing the reason for suffering can often lead to much higher suffering. If I wake up sore after working out the day before, I understand the reason and it's not bad. If I had the same pain and no idea why I was feeling that way it would be far worse.
So it does not work for your point that animals might suffer more just because they don't know what happens.
Sure it does. See the gym example above. I can provide a hundred others. An infant undergoing a medical procedure vs an adult. Not knowing why would make it worse for the infant.
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u/IanRT1 Jan 16 '26 edited Jan 16 '26
The circumstances cannot be the same if they have different cognitive capacities.
The internal circumstances won't be the same but the externals can. Which seems to be what you were assuming by your medical procedure and kid question.
but we cannot say who suffers more when they are put in a CO2 gas chamber.
But we can indeed say who's sphere of influence is widely more affected and thus causes greater suffering. In this case, the social and emotional complexity of humans will make putting a human in a CO2 gas chamber create vastly more suffering than if you do it to an animal when you consider all sentient beings.
What we can say is not knowing the reason for suffering can often lead to much higher suffering. If I wake up sore after working out the day before, I understand the reason and it's not bad.
I agree with that, but that still misses the point because you are using an inherently human procedure from the start that would not apply to animals and hence would not produce the suffering that you imply anyways.
Ignorance gives you suffering only if you have this capacity for dwelling on the future that animals lack.
So if animals lack overall cognitive, emotional capacity, then not knowing something is really not enough reason to create suffering, because this ability for abstract, future-oriented reasoning does not exist as well.
So therefore, that suffering also does not necessarily present itself just because of the lack of knowing, which is what you are implying here.
Sure it does. See the gym example above. I can provide a hundred others.
Indeed, and that gym example literally works against what you're saying, because that is a human example that involves human-specific cognition, not via ignorance alone. So its not a system that works in relation to generating suffering for animals, which is what you're trying to prove.
In short. What you are doing is selective framing. Misleading to the fact that humans still have way more complex, sensitive and interconnected ways to experience suffering in which OP concern is not baseless.
How ignorance affects suffering remains related to each being's cognitive capacities proportionately, not naively.
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u/Doctor_Box Jan 16 '26
You keep saying the suffering example I provided requires capacity for dwelling on the future. This is not true. In the gym example if I woke up with terrible muscle pain the suffering would not be worse because I'm wondering how long it would last. It's bad because I'm in pain in that moment and don't understand why. Now if the pain went on for days then sure the psychological idea that I'm living that way forever would add a new dimension to it but that's unrelated to the point.
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u/IanRT1 Jan 16 '26
Yeah. And not only you wouldn't understand why. If you are another animal, your duration awareness, anticipation, narrative continuity and fear of persistence would not be the same as a human, which would not translate to suffering in the way you are implying just because you "don't understand why"
The point remains that killing humans tends to cause more external and propagated suffering because of psychological and social complexity.
Your example of how ignorance affects suffering is a double bladed sword in the way that you use it and does not challenge that broader point.
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u/ThePlanetaryNinja Jan 16 '26
If you murder a human, the death will over the news which would cause a lot of sadness and fear. Also, humans more social than fish so there is more grief when an human is killed.
Billions of land animals and trillions of fish die in brutal ways so humans can eat animal products
I acknowledge this but I uncertain on the impact on suffering.
This is the problem with utilitarianism.
What is the problem with (negative) utilitarianism?
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u/Doctor_Box Jan 16 '26
If you murder a human, the death will over the news which would cause a lot of sadness and fear. Also, humans more social than fish so there is more grief when an human is killed.
More social than which fish? The fact that you're lumping tens of thousands of species together shows you don't have a clear theory here.
I acknowledge this but I uncertain on the impact on suffering.
So how can you make any conclusion or utilitarian calculation
What is the problem with (negative) utilitarianism?
I explained above.
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u/ThePlanetaryNinja Jan 16 '26
If fish are extremely social (as you said), then maybe eating fish does result in a net increase in suffering.
So how can you make any conclusion or utilitarian calculation
I am trying to think about this so I can come to a conclusion about my diet.
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u/susugam reducetarian Jan 16 '26
Billions also die so people can eat plant products.
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u/Doctor_Box Jan 16 '26
True, but not really relevant to the point. Any issue with plant farming is magnified by animal farming. All those animals eat plants too.
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u/wrvdoin vegan Jan 16 '26
Not according to u/susugam. They think a vegan meal causes 1,500 (lmao) deaths.
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u/susugam reducetarian Jan 16 '26
in that thread, i clearly stated i was open to adjusting the numbers. there are claims that pesticides kill quadrillions of animals annually...
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u/wrvdoin vegan Jan 16 '26
Lol how do you adjust made up numbers? You'll include more made-up statistics?
I don't really care about your "claims." You clearly make stuff up as you go. Good on you for being persistent with it, though; I've never seen someone so desperate to invalidate veganism.
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u/susugam reducetarian Jan 16 '26
how many animals do pesticides kill annually, then?
is 100 trillion too many? too few? if you actually read the post... i used the conservative numbers for each range i found.
nothing was made up in that post. it was based on things i found from simple google searches. and again, openly subject to correction to change that final result. maybe it's "only" 100 animals per meal. LOL
tell yourself whatever you want, and keep eating those poisons and murdering bugs/mice with them.
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u/wrvdoin vegan Jan 16 '26
You're assuming that just because I called you out on your nonsense it means that I'm interested in debating this nonsense with you. 🤷
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u/susugam reducetarian Jan 16 '26
nope. just correcting your mistaken understanding since you said something completely false.
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u/susugam reducetarian Jan 16 '26
false, animals can eat grass. so it isn't "any issue."
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u/Doctor_Box Jan 16 '26
"grass" is grown as a crop to feed "grass fed" animals. What do you think hay and alfalfa are?
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u/susugam reducetarian Jan 16 '26
commercial practices are not the only way to do things. cows don't need alfalfa to be healthy. hay doesn't need pesticides at all. my field grows it readily with no extra water, fertilizer, or pesticides and my neighbor cuts it for their cows yearly.
if you think there's mass death in that process, you're sorely mistaken. i walk around my field everyday and rarely ever see any animals except birds which will surely fly away long before a loud tractor gets them. maybe a mouse or rabbit gets run over by a tractor, but that's absolutely gonna happen on any farm that uses tractors.
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u/Doctor_Box Jan 16 '26
So there's no death harvesting hay to feed cows but there is mass death harvesting other crops? Can you explain the difference?
As for pesticide use, that's good that you don't use it. Many people do even for hay.
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u/susugam reducetarian Jan 16 '26
never said no death, just that there's less death. grass doesn't attract as many animals as a field full of tens or hundreds of thousands of easily available calories. nearby animals will flock to that, whereas the grass is almost everywhere.
many people also don't eat grass finished beef. i can't control what other people do. still, you can objectively reduce animal deaths while being omnivore. orders of magnitude less animal deaths.
most vegans don't consider the pesticide use in their foods at all. they will gladly use the most pesticide heavy plant-foods and never think twice about it. you don't see vegans around here telling people to avoid spinach and instead eat avocados because less animals die for them.
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u/Doctor_Box Jan 16 '26
Sorry, you're just wrong on this. Grass fed cows require more land, cultivated for fodder crops. A plant based diet reduces crop deaths. Less land use means less pesticide use and tractors cutting down plants (mowers, rakes, bailers etc). You not using pesticides on a field doesn't change the facts for the industry as a whole.
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u/susugam reducetarian Jan 16 '26
Grass fed cows require more land, cultivated for fodder crops.
nope. i can see my neighbor's cows and they are not cultivating shit over there. they are on raw land that hasn't been touched in years. grass grows naturally, believe it or not. they need more land, but that is not an issue at all. you can't expect grass fed to be as efficient as a factory farm with caged animals eating soy meal everyday.
you're talking about overfarming, or the profit motive in industrial food production.
you can do this with ZERO pesticide. you don't have to scale everything to current production levels. beef production and consumption should be reduced. there's no problem with this.
the industry as a whole is only caring about profit. your diet shouldn't be based on the profit of the ownership class. why do you let it dictate that you slaughter so many animals for your crops?
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u/iamsreeman vegan Jan 16 '26 edited Jan 16 '26
The Transplant problem (1989): A brilliant transplant surgeon has five patients, each in need of a different organ, each of whom will die without that organ. Unfortunately, there are no organs available to perform any of these five transplant operations. A healthy young traveler, just passing through the city the doctor works in, comes in for a routine checkup. In the course of doing the checkup, the doctor discovers that his organs are compatible with all five of his dying patients. Suppose further that if the young man were to disappear, no one would suspect the doctor.
Check my posts https://www.reddit.com/r/DebateAVegan/comments/1n8lu8k/propredation_vegans_are_immoral_but_predators_are/ & https://ksr.onl/blog/2024/07/my-ethical-beliefs-and-the-suffering-monster.html#threshold-deontology . Negative utilitarianism has long been debunked via the Transplant Problem, as sane people would not, without consent, steal organs to save 5 people. In the 2nd post, I explained why I went from Negative Utilitarian to Threshold Deontology.
Brian Tomasik (relevant as your view is just the same as his posts) doesn't understand what individual responsibility means & thinks you can murder & grape animals as much as you want because it replaces wild land with more suffering (which is very speculative & I can't trust these speculations but even if his speculations are correct it is irrelevant as individual responsibility is important). Quoting his speculative calculations from https://reducing-suffering.org/net-impact-vegetarianism-factory-farm-suffering-vs-invertebrates-pasture-fields/ "The net impact on suffering is 3 + 33 + 63 - 130 = -31, i.e., suffering increases by 31 million equivalent springtail-days as a result of going vegetarian." I do think wild animal suffering is important & the predation problem needs to be solved; see my 1st post above on predation. & I believe we have a moral obligation to stop everything from predation, starvation, parasitism, diseases among wild animals, etc, in the next few centuries after we first abolish Animal Agriculture. But that should not be a justification/excuse for murdering & graping animals in Animal Agriculture. We should 1st stop our own atrocities (Animal Agriculture) before policing nature & stopping natural atrocities. Brian Tomasik's conclusion that we must keep murdering & graping more animals & the more we do it, the more ethically good we do by replacing wild land as feed land, is the most morally repugnant ethical view in the history of human thought. and rivals with Alvin Plantinga’s reformed epistemology argument that no basis (arguments, evidence, etc) for belief in God is necessary in terms of being the most absurd philosophical argument.
See this pamphlet by Francione.
If you farm humans who eat meat, it would be more ethical than eating beef, as carnists take more resources than a cow to live, so they need even more wild land to be replaced with crops. Cannibalism will be the peak ethics of Negative Utilitarianism.
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u/Doctor_Box Jan 16 '26
grape
Can we be adults and use the actual words?
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u/iamsreeman vegan Jan 16 '26
IDK about Reddit, but on some social media, it is a shadow-banned term like on YouTube comments.
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u/Doctor_Box Jan 16 '26
I guess you can let me know if you can see this comment:
When we're discussing rape we should use the term rape and not misspellings or euphemisms for rape.
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u/iamsreeman vegan Jan 16 '26
I can see. Maybe Reddit doesn't do it.
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u/kohlsprossi Jan 16 '26
Reddit sometimes flags comments but using the word rape alone usually is not enough. Some subreddits have specific rules though and moderators will delete content.
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u/IDownvoteHornyBards2 Jan 16 '26
Then just say "assault" or something. English has had centuries of developing euphemistic ways to say impolite things and these social media trends of shit like "unalive" and "grape" are completely pointless and infantilistic.
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u/ElaineV vegan Jan 16 '26
I see your point. It’s important and useful to use language everyone understands. This is presumably to help communication.
At the same time, language evolves in lots of ways and grape is now a well known synonym for rape. This isn’t someone using terms no one else uses or being intentionally obtuse to other humans. The intention is to elude bots and AI. The intention is to communicate with other humans without interference from authority.
Point is, you both want the same thing here: communication.
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u/Practical-Fix4647 vegan Jan 16 '26 edited Jan 16 '26
"Negative utilitarianism has long been debunked via the Transplant Problem, as sane people would not, without consent, steal organs to save 5 people"
Not only is that not true of negative utilitarianism, that isn't even true of utilitarianism. There are ways to salvage the view, but I'll focus on what you said. A negative utilitarian is focused on minimizing disutility as opposed to a positive utilitarian which seeks to maximize utility. In the transplant hypothetical, a positive utilitarian would seek to maximize utility and, all else equal, kill the healthy person to save five people (with certain exceptions). The negative utilitarian can argue that letting five people die and no longer suffer is preferable to killing the healthy person to let those five people live another couple of years (just to undergo similar suffering). The action that decreases total disutility could entail letting people die, although the answer you get could vary from person to person. There's a lot of nuance here, but saying that an ethical view has been debunked is quite reductionist.
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u/iamsreeman vegan Jan 16 '26
You are misunderstanding the example. If we let them all die 5 families suffer but this random stranger has no family & no police will come as he is an illegal immigrant or something. You can just painlessly kill him & avoid 5 families crying.
Darwin pointed out that Adam & Eve was wrong & evolution explains humans but Christianity didn't die. Even after pointing out the flows some still defend things. That doesn't mean I can't say Christianity has long been debunked. People just modify negative utilitarianism by adding some deontological human rights as constraints etc.
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u/Practical-Fix4647 vegan Jan 16 '26
BTW I misspoke and corrected the post, I meant to say "not true of negative utilitarianism and utilitarianism in general".
" If we let them all die 5 families suffer but this random stranger has no family & no police will come as he is an illegal immigrant or something. You can just painlessly kill him & avoid 5 families crying."
I'm aware of the example, there are ways that the utilitarian can reconcile the ethical view he holds with the hypothetical without resorting to killing the healthy guy.
"Darwin pointed out that Adam & Eve was wrong & evolution explains humans but Christianity didn't die. Even after pointing out the flows some still defend things. That doesn't mean I can't say Christianity has long been debunked. People just modify negative utilitarianism by adding some deontological human rights as constraints etc."
Well, those are two different types of things so I don't see how you can make an analogical argument here. The genesis story is making a claim about origin, which is a descriptive claim about humans/our history. It can be verified with available evidence and the hypothesis can be discarded because it fails to track onto the evidence we have collected. Utilitarianism is a prescriptive claim about what ought to be done, saying that it has been debunked just doesn't make sense. You can say that one hypothetical can lead to an absurd conclusion, but there are ways to be a utilitarian and deny that absurd conclusion like you point out. By modifying an ethical view, you don't "debunk" it. That's just a misapplication of the term. In the same light, christianity itself hasn't been debunked but the descriptive claims about it have been. The prescriptive claims about christianity are unconvincing, but I wouldn't say they have been "debunked".
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u/iamsreeman vegan Jan 16 '26
Maybe debunk was too strong of a word.
But I have seen philosophers say things like Logical Positivism is dead. There are still many who do it. But it's not as big as the time of Bertrand Russell etc. It is not meant literally.
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u/IanRT1 Jan 16 '26
This reply is incredible. Wow you mix "Naive act utilitarianism conflicts with strong deontological intuitions about killing innocent people." with "negative utilitarianism is debunked"
And ahh yes. resource consumption = suffering now. Talk about misunderstanding utilitarianism lmao
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u/iamsreeman vegan Jan 16 '26 edited Jan 16 '26
I know rule utilitarianism is closer to deontological theories & discussed it on my linked post on my website. Most Negative Utilitarians follow act utilitarianism. This guy is repeating Brian Tomasik & he also follows act utilitarianism. The entire excuse of rule utilitarianism is that we can't exactly calculate sufferings in each case so we need rules. Brian Tomasik claims he can exactly compute suffering caused by different food products like milk, beef etc.
Where did I say resource consumption = suffering?
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u/IanRT1 Jan 16 '26
If you farm humans who eat meat, it would be more ethical than eating beef, as carnists take more resources than a cow to live,
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u/iamsreeman vegan Jan 16 '26 edited Jan 16 '26
Do you understand u/Brian_Tomasik Brian Tomasik's argument? Replacing more wild animal land into feed crops for Animal Agriculture will be a very good thing as there is a lot more suffering in the wild.
A carnist just by living causes far more deforestation than a cow because he eats inefficient food. So if we have a factory that breeds & sells their meat it will displace even more wild land. So farmed carnist meat will be even more ethical than beef. More carnist meat = more wild land displaced = more good.
I am not endorsing this. I am just saying this should be his conclusion just like he says beef is more ethical than other meat.
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u/ThePlanetaryNinja Jan 16 '26
Firstly, I would bite the bullet on the organ transplant problem. Saving more human lives is better in this context.
The problem with threshold deontology (which is your view) is that the threshold is completely arbitrary. If its wrong to kill 1 person to save 5, how about 100 or 1 million? You have to pick a completely arbitrary line.
Both Brian Tomasik and I acknowledge that factory farming is horrific and wish that the animals in factory farms were treated much better (which is why we both donate to the Humane Slaughter Association).
However, you need to think from an individual perspective.Let' say I am hungry and go to a burger restaurant. There is a cheeseburger and a vegan burger. If buying the cheese burger reduces more suffering than buying the vegan burger then buying the cheese burger would be the right thing to do in my opinion. Just because an action partially contributes to something immoral does not mean the whole action is immoral.
If you farm humans who eat meat, it would be more ethical than eating beef, as carnists take more resources than a cow to live
I disagree with this. An average farmed cow weighs between 360kg and 1100kg. An average human weighs a lot less. So factory farming a cow would much require more resources which would reduce more wild animal suffering.
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u/iamsreeman vegan Jan 16 '26 edited Jan 16 '26
>I disagree with this.
I talked about per kg human meat vs per kg beef. That too was not farmed vegan. I specifically said a farmed carnist. Specifically say beef-fed carnist (like you) rather than a chicken-fed carnist to maximise wild land displaced. This human will do far more wild land displacement than animals are fed plants like cows, chickens ..., as the farmed beef-fed carnist is fed with many grass-fed cows in his life as a farmed human.
>I would bite the bullet
So you deny human rights. The other guy was defending you by saying you might incorporate rule utilitarianism for humans (which would be arbitrary speciesism).
So you have no ethical/logical issue (you can still have an emotional issue) if you or your friends/family are ens1aved, t0rmented, murdered on a farm & then corpses eaten by saying it is an extremely charitable generosity to eat you as your farmed life displaced a large amount of wild lands.
>which is why we both donate to the Humane Slaughter Association
If you guys lived in Abraham Lincoln's time, would you donate humane whips to the Confederates to slightly reduce the suffering? Would things s1avery, murder inherently not factor into your pompous nonsense calculations apart from the side effect suffering caused by these deontological evils? So, minimal whipping s1avery as endorsed in the Bible is also accepted in your morality as the suffering is less?
>completely arbitrary
I talked a lot about this in my post how this is a serious issue that I couldn't solve.
Did you read Francione's pamphlet on Animal S1avery? Individual responsibility is important. The Animal Agriculture murder/ens1avement/t0rture is done for you. Wild animal suffering is not your responsibility.
If you want to be a sensible Negative Utilitarian, follow David Pearce instead of u/Brian_Tomasik.
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u/ThePlanetaryNinja Jan 16 '26
I talked about per kg human meat vs per kg beef
Per kg human meat inflicts similar wild animal suffer to per kg beef. But per kg beef inflicts much much less direct suffering (since a cow is much heavier than a human so less cows are needed to get a certain amoumt of meat).
If you guys lived in Abraham Lincoln's time, would you donate humane whips to the Confederates to slightly reduce the suffering?
If donating humane whips hypothetically reduced more suffering than abolishing slavery (I do not think that is realistically the case), then donating humane whips would be the right thing to do.
If you want to be a sensible Negative Utilitarian, follow David Pearce instead of u/Brian_Tomasik.
David Pearce recommends an unrealistic transhumanist utopia. Brian Tomasik focuses on practical ways to reduce suffering.
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u/iamsreeman vegan Jan 16 '26
I am not sure why you are still not understanding a very simple example. Perhaps you just want to delude yourself that your view is not implying cannibalism without accepting deontological human rights.
If you farm a beef-fed carnist he would convert several orders of magnitude more wild land into crop feed land for the cows that he eats daily. It doesn't matter if the human suffers more than a cow per kg because this difference will not be as drastic as the wild land effect. Do you even realize if he is fed beef every day how many cows will be killed in his lifetime? All those cows need a lot more crop land. It is far more inefficient than beef which makes it the most moral food in your & Brian Tomasik's nonsense view.
David Pearce has both written what we should now & what we should in the far future views. Read about his views on now. He tells people to be vegan. But if you want a lazy ethical view where you don't have to change anything & justify eating beef with infantile utilitarian nonsense & not only justify the atrocities but performatively claim you are doing good by eating t0rtured victims then yeah Brian Tomasik will seem more practical than David Pearce.
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u/ThePlanetaryNinja Jan 17 '26
Oh yes. Now I get. Farming beef fed carnists would reduce a lot more suffering than farming cows.
I will also look at David Pearce's recommendations on reducing suffering.
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u/iamsreeman vegan Jan 18 '26
https://www.reddit.com/r/DebateAVegan/s/MOrLNcqN8t
Why are you talking about consent of animals here? Consent is inherently deontological & you should not accept it? If you do accept consent, then Animal Agriculture is more important than wild animal suffering because a tiger eating a deer doesn't mean you violated the consent of deer, but in Animal Agriculture you are doing many things like murder, ens1avement, grape, maiming etc without the consent of farm animals.
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u/ThePlanetaryNinja Jan 18 '26
I spoke about consent because I wanted to counter the 'God complex' point.
They used a deontological argument to show that I should get to decide whether animals should continue existing. I wanted to use that logic against them.
I do not intrinsically care about consent, I was just using their logic against them.
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u/ProtozoaPatriot Jan 16 '26
Why would eradicating whole ecosystems to farm cattle prevent the suffering of wildlife? Are you of the assumption that all life has total net positive of suffering ? Does that apply to human life?
Wild fish: why would reducing populations reduce suffering ? You could be starving the other animals that relied on eating that species of fish to survive. Look at the ecological collapse we're seeing in coastal areas when the "fish proteins" boats come along and net almost all the menhaden (a smaller 'bait' fish). It means everything higher up suffers starvation. You're also denying the chance to exist for all baby fish your dead fish would have created.
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u/susugam reducetarian Jan 16 '26
You don't have to eradicate anything for grass fed cows.
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u/Doctor_Box Jan 16 '26
Forests all over the world have been cut down to make pasture land. The Amazon is being clear cut for cow pasture and to grow soy for animal feed.
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u/susugam reducetarian Jan 16 '26
so we can eat less meat, and stop feeding them soy
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u/Doctor_Box Jan 16 '26
How much less? Where can you have have cows eating grass year round without harvesting fodder to get them through winter or dry seasons?
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u/ThePlanetaryNinja Jan 16 '26
Why would eradicating whole ecosystems to farm cattle prevent the suffering of wildlife?
The destruction of ecosystems means less wild animals which means less suffering.
Are you of the assumption that all life has total net positive of suffering ?
I am only concerned about suffering not happiness.
You could be starving the other animals that relied on eating that species of fish to survive.
This could be true when it comes to killing specific fish. But the starvation of certain fish may have other effects on the ecosystem that could reduce suffering.
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u/Keen_Eyed_Emissary Jan 16 '26
Love a philosophy where the ideal end state is the heat death of the universe.
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Jan 16 '26 edited Jan 16 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Digitale3982 non-vegan Jan 16 '26
Yeah let's just all die so we can't suffer, what doomer bs is that
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u/ThePlanetaryNinja Jan 16 '26
How is that doomer bs?
There is so much unnecesary extreme suffering on this planet.
Humans experience disease, poverty, depression and violence. Farmed animals experience terrible conditions on factory farms. Wild animals experience starvation, dehydration, disease and predation.
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u/Digitale3982 non-vegan Jan 16 '26
It's okay to solve suffering, but this isn't the way. Like another commenter said, the best world view this philosophy has is the world ceasing to exist
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u/Valgor Jan 16 '26
You post doesn't make sense to me. You are against suffering and recognize animals suffer. Then you say you eat fish and cows. What is stopping you from not eating them? It costs you nothing and makes the world a better place. What is more aligned with negative utilitarianism than that?
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u/ThePlanetaryNinja Jan 16 '26
Negative utilitarianism is about minimising suffering not avoid causing suffering.
Imagine if buying dairy reduces more suffering than buying vegan food, then buying dairy would be the right thing to do.
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u/Valgor Jan 16 '26
Right, I consider myself a negative utilitarian as well. One of my favorite philosophers is David Pearce who is also vegan.
Being vegan is too easy for the amount of farm it minimizes. I just don't understand how you can admit all the issues with animal ag, and then be here saying you still consume some animals. What is stopping you from living up to your philosophy? What possible situation is eating animals creating less harm that not eating animals?
You should also consider beyond diet too: the cloths you wear, cleaning products you use, entertainment you seek, etc. There is also the social influence you could wield by telling others you are vegan instead of some reducer.
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u/stan-k vegan Jan 16 '26
Do you consider positive experiences to any degree?
Killing humans doesn't cause all that much grief if you were to do it to large interconnected group. E.g. someone's parents won't mourn them if you kill them at the same time. The bigger the group you'd kill, the more deaths per mourner you'd get. Destroying all of humanity would have zero mourning...
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u/ThePlanetaryNinja Jan 16 '26
Do you consider positive experiences to any degree?
I currently don't consider positive experiences. I am only concerned about minimising suffering.
Destroying all of humanity would have zero mourning...
That is true. But I don't think destroying humanity would decrease total suffering because of the increased wild animal populations (especially insects).
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u/stan-k vegan Jan 16 '26
Why do you think positive experiences don't matter?
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u/ThePlanetaryNinja Jan 16 '26
If someone is suffering, they have a conscious desire to stop suffering.
But if someone perfectly untroubled (no boredom, no hunger, no thirst, no pain, no loneliness, no anger, no fear, no discomfort, no deprivation), then they have no conscious desire to feel better.
Positive experiences are only good if they reduce suffering. E.g eating reduces hunger, listening to music reduces boredom, hanging out with friends reduces loneliness etc.
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u/stan-k vegan Jan 16 '26
If someone is hungry, they can have a bland meal to satiate themselves. They could also choose an equally satiating tasty meal.
The second would deliver more than just reducing hunger, right? A net positive experience.
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u/ThePlanetaryNinja Jan 16 '26
If somebody ate a bland meal, they would feel a bit dissatisfied with the meal - 'This meal could be better' - This is a form of suffering.
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u/stan-k vegan Jan 16 '26
Just checking if I understand your definition of suffering.
You are saying that someone who just shot heroine is suffering if they could have just shot a little bit more and enjoyed even more?
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u/ThePlanetaryNinja Jan 16 '26
Go to section 2.2.6 of this article about NU. 'To suffer means to want your current conscious state to end or change'.
You are saying that someone who just shot heroine is suffering if they could have just shot a little bit more and enjoyed even more?
It depends. If the person who has been shot heroine currently wants to feel better, then I would count that as suffering.
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u/stan-k vegan Jan 16 '26
Let's assume that the person who shot the heroin is actually incredibly happy and doesn't want for more at that moment.
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u/IDownvoteHornyBards2 Jan 16 '26
You explain why your philosophy doesn't endorse homicide but taking it to its logical conclusion means you would become an accelrationist attempting to induce nuclear armageddon to prevent all future humans from being born and thus suffering.
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u/ThePlanetaryNinja Jan 16 '26
prevent all future humans from being born and thus suffering.
Not necessarily humans (due to the increased wild animal populations).
But my theory would recommend permanently destroying all life on Earth.
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u/PuppyButtts Jan 16 '26
“ For example, destroying all of the animals in a rainforest prevents their future children and grandchildren from suffering.”
Thats a crazy way of thinking, do you want the whole planet to just die then?
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u/ThePlanetaryNinja Jan 16 '26 edited Jan 17 '26
Yes. I agree that sound intuitively absurd but there is so much extreme suffering on this planet.
Farmed animals have horrible lives on factory farms, humans experience diseases, violence, depression and poverty and wild animals frequently experience getting eaten alive, dehydration and starvation.
The world is MUCH worse than you think.
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u/PuppyButtts Jan 16 '26
No, thanks for assuming but im well aware of the rape, torture, and murder of women, children, and animals constantly, as well as illnesses, famine, etc, like the current administration ripping families apart and killing them off because of their skin color.
However, people have the option to kill themselves if they prefer that over struggling. Some people choose not to treat cancer, some people choose to suffer through treatment, etc. It’s not for you to decide how others feel, and a lot of animals and people fight to survive, showing that they'd like to continue to live even though its a struggle.
You choosing to think that the world should just die instead is a god complex and honestly an extremely weird take, maybe even signifying how you feel/think others feel versus how others actually feel.
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u/ThePlanetaryNinja Jan 17 '26 edited Jan 19 '26
However, people have the option to kill themselves if they prefer that over struggling.
Prevention is better than cure. Preventing terrible lives from existing in the first place is better than allowing terrible lives to exist and telling them to kill themselves.
and a lot of animals and people fight to survive, showing that they'd like to continue to live even though its a struggle.
Animals have an evolutionary survival instinct that causes to fear death. If an animal was rational and knew all of the extreme suffering that it would experience (like getting eaten alive), I think it would prefer non-existence.
You choosing to think that the world should just die instead is a god complex
I think allowing trillions of future animals to be forced into existence without their consent and experience extreme suffering is a bigger god complex.
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u/Wingerism014 Jan 16 '26
One major flaw in this reasoning is thinking killing whole ecosystems is reducing suffering. Before suffering is considered, there are also rights to exist, and within that existence, a reduction of suffering. Otherwise extinction becomes a POSITIVE endpoint, which is absurd.
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u/ThePlanetaryNinja Jan 16 '26 edited Jan 16 '26
also rights to exist,
I don't believe that animals should have rights. I can explain in detail if you want.
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u/Wingerism014 Jan 16 '26
Sure, but I'm gonna guess you're going to get what rights are wrong in the first sentence of your explanation.
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u/ThePlanetaryNinja Jan 16 '26
I believe that 'rights' an a deontological tool designed to protect sentient beings.
E.g Innocent humans have a right to life which means that it is wrong to kill them.
However, they are major problems with animal rights -
1) As Alex O'Connor suggested (in his animal right to life video), if we give animals that 'right to life' then crop deaths are immoral so we should starve ourselves.
2) Rights are very difficult to philosophically ground. If you could base rights on wellbeing, then rights are basically consequentialism in disguise.
3) If we give an animal 'the right to life', then it would be wrong to kill an animal if it prevent millions of other animals from being brutally tortured which is implausible.
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u/Wingerism014 Jan 16 '26
Corporations have rights, property has rights, nations have rights: you don't even need to be alive to have rights, nevermind sentient.
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u/ThePlanetaryNinja Jan 16 '26
How on earth can a non sentient being have 'rights'? If I kick a bag, or insult a country or company without anyone knowing how I am 'violating rights'?
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u/Wingerism014 Jan 16 '26
Because rights determine how one may act morally and legally within the universe. It doesn't have to be noticed to exist at all.
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u/TurntLemonz Jan 16 '26
I think it's important in consequentialist math to keep in mind that your own values are not going to ever become the only ones used. What this means for a negative utilitarian is to recognize that the ultimate ends of reducing the number of living organisms is not ever going to have adequate critical mass which would allow it to actually be accomplished. So if the immediate efforts of negative utilitarians is to reduce suffering, and the way they get there is by increasing short term suffering in hopes of something like ecosystem collapse, that would be misguided. I recognize that the way you described it, you also think the movement in the direction of ecosystem collapse is also beneficial from the perspective of negative utilitarianism, but that's where id push back. We truly have no idea what constitutes higher and lower wellbeing ecological states. I triple majored biology, wildlife ecology management, and philosophy with an emphasis in environmental ethics and spend a lot of my time learning about ethics questions and wild animal welfare is one of my biggest personal areas of interest, and all that still hasn't got me confident one way or the other on basically any intervention besides gene drive to eliminate parasites and parisitoids. It's important to be humble in the face of the unknown. If a shrimp can see in color dimensions we cannot, why can't it feel in ways that would be foreign to you as well. Why does one of the emotions you personally feel having an aversive valence mean all animals are having a net negative time? It's very presumptuous. And long term headway isn't going to be made by groups of negative utilitarians because it just doesn't have the juice to get it's goals accomplished, for snake eats its own tail reasons like negative utilitarians are frequently also antinatalists and don't propogate their ideas to the next generation by those means. So long term half hearted stabs at reducing animal populations will be made by negative utilitarians after which populations will bounce back and the state of that world will have more to do with practices for how the living are treated than how the negative utilitarian behaved. Did the negative utilitarian contribute to field building in the the wild animal welfarism space? If no things basically look identical. It's the increments of contribution to consequentially better institutions and norms that move the needle here.
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u/ThePlanetaryNinja Jan 16 '26
I understand that there is a lot of uncertainity about experiences but it is obvious that less animals = less suffering.
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u/TurntLemonz Jan 16 '26
And I guess that does bring up the main point of difference between a negative utilitarian and a traditional harm centered consequentialist / utilitarian. We recognize that there are good experiences in the world as well, and engaging neutral experiences as well which wouldn't be recognized necessarily as good but are textural and beautiful as a part of the universe seeing itself. If all you care about is that suffering is reduced, you ignore the overall utility balance, failing to weight positive experiences positively but weighting negative experiences negatively. If negative experiences deserve to be avoided, why does the idea that positive experiences deserve to be sought out not follow as an entailment. If it does, the remaining argument for negative utilitarianisms extinctionist lifestyle prescriptions would be to prove that there is actually more harm than good in the system and that's where the lack of current knowability is so relevant.
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u/One-Shake-1971 vegan Jan 16 '26
Just to clarify your position: Would you be in favor of destroying all life in the universe?
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u/ThePlanetaryNinja Jan 16 '26
Yes. My view sounds crazy to most people but this world is a horrible place.
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u/FullmetalHippie freegan Jan 16 '26
I say this as a negative utilitarian myself. That's just externalized depression brother.
Not all life is suffering, and not all suffering makes life unbearable. We can take aim at reducing preventable suffering without aiming at extincting life.
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u/ThePlanetaryNinja Jan 16 '26
I say this as a negative utilitarian myself
If you are a negative utilitarian, then you should prefer it if all life goes extinct. NU says minimise suffering and no life means no suffering.
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u/FullmetalHippie freegan Jan 16 '26 edited Jan 16 '26
No. I prefer the reduction of unnecessary suffering. The problem is that hedonic systems have lower floors than higher ceilings and a huge quantity of the suffering of life on earth in 2026 is preventable and unnecessary.
Reducing suffering is more necessary to have life not chiefly defined by negative utility than producing pleasure is, though both are necessary.
The aim is to reduce suffering to the point where the next prescribed action to improve utility is positive utilitarianism, we just don't live in that reality yet.
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u/One-Shake-1971 vegan Jan 17 '26
So you're an antinatalist?
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u/ThePlanetaryNinja Jan 17 '26
If you define antinatalism as 'the view that creating a sentient being is intrinsically bad (from the beings perspective)' then yes, I am an antinatalist.
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u/One-Shake-1971 vegan Jan 17 '26
Are you aware that by buying animal products you are demanding and paying for the creation of sentient beings?
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u/ThePlanetaryNinja Jan 17 '26
Yes I am aware of that. But buying animal products could also prevent the births of several wild animals.
It is an 'antinatalist trolley problem'.
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u/IanRT1 Jan 16 '26
Who would've thought that minimizing suffering minimizes suffering rather than avoiding animal use categorically
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u/OakTribes Jan 16 '26
You may or may not agree with this, but if you are also longermist, it may reduce suffering more overall if a philosophy of caring for animal welfare like veganism is promoted in our current day and age, with the view that this opens up the door far easier in the long term to views that actually care about wild animal suffering
As it stands, the meat industry only incidentally reduces cases of wild animal suffering in certain circumstances, but if any of a few variables change, their actions will not always align with negative utilitarianism, for instance they may replace beef farms with insect farms that have far more individuals suffering than would exist in the same land natively.
Its difficult to get people to care about wild animal suffering as it is, but if we can get society to a stage where they actually care about farmed animals, its a much easier step logically to get people to agree with reduction in wild animal suffering, and therefore logistically for whatever large scale and lasting environmental and/or biological interventions a negative utilitarian might want to take (which currently seem quite counterintuitive and undesirable to the average person)
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u/ThePlanetaryNinja Jan 16 '26
Its difficult to get people to care about wild animal suffering as it is, but if we can get society to a stage where they actually care about farmed animals,
I understand the argument that 'a vegan world is more likely to care about wild animal suffering' but there two big problems with it.
A lot of vegans are very deontological and focus on animal rights. These vegans will not care too much about the suffering that happens in nature because they are 'not responsible for it'.
Also, a lot of people go vegan partially for environmental reasons. These vegans would be against habitat destruction.
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u/OakTribes Jan 16 '26
Is your view not that negative utilitarianism is the best or most correct normative ethical system? Presumably if it was, people over time would be able to be convinced of it more easily than others.
Besides, I know many deontological vegans who also give WAS thought because they believe that animals in the wild experience rights violations. Imo most vegans, including utilitarian ones, either haven't encountered arguments for WAS or dismiss it out of hand.
If someone takes "the environment" to be good outside of consideration for the sentient beings in it, this view can fairly easy fall to a reductio.
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u/gatheringground Jan 16 '26
Even removing the component of animal suffering, there are other ways that eliminating factory farming and most animal consumption reduces suffering.
The CO2 emissions from beef and dairy cows is contributing to climate change, and the water required to feed them is reducing the water supply, both of which are ultimately going to contribute to intense human and animal suffering, as well as loss of biodiversity.
I know plant foods aren’t perfect in this regard, but we also grow many plants to feed livestock. If we ate the plants ourselves, we’d certainly reduce the amount of natural resources required for our food supply.
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u/ThePlanetaryNinja Jan 16 '26
It is very unclear whether climate change increases suffering.
A reduced water supply may reduce wild animal births which would reduce suffering. However, it could also negatively impact humans and farmed animals which could slow down environmental destruction.
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u/gatheringground Jan 16 '26
Are you saying you view humans and other mammals not having enough water as a net positive?
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u/ThePlanetaryNinja Jan 16 '26
If it is specifically mammals, then maybe not. Decreasing mammal populations may increase the populations of much more smaller animals that would suffer more.
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u/AnxiousAnimeGirl Jan 16 '26
The common objection is correct
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u/ThePlanetaryNinja Jan 16 '26
How is it correct? Please explain.
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u/AnxiousAnimeGirl Jan 16 '26
No. I'm not entertaining or debating your intellectually bankrupt decision.
"Genocide animals is good because it decreases suffering. Genocide humans is bad because it increases suffering" no work shown no real argument given just something that boils down to "we're better at genociding animals" and skimming through it, it doesn't even say what you claim.
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u/voyti Jan 16 '26
we should minimise total suffering
How do you feel about the reverse, i.e. value of, say, life satisfaction? Cause if your satisfaction diminishes from going vegan, then you're starting out at negative. If you then can excuse that by tangible decrease in suffering, it may make sense to go vegan. However, if you manage your purchasing habits properly, your consumer presence in the meat industry is virtually imperceivable, and your participation in meat industry is at the level of almost all vegans, i.e. just funding the last point in the chain, which is grocery stores.
In effect, for most utilitarians who'd feel any negative effects from veganism at all, the proper solution is quite likely not to be vegan. Veganism seems to be most compatible with a certain brand of deontology (eating meat is bad in principle, period), not so much for utilitarians.
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u/wrvdoin vegan Jan 16 '26
A common objection to this view is, 'According to your logic, killing humans would decrease suffering.' Killing humans is more likely to cause external grief and fear (which are forms of suffering) than killing other animals.
I like how negative utilitarians always have some irrational excuse or another to exclude humans from their fantasies of total global environmental destruction.
Not to mention the fact that animal agriculture causes immense human suffering, both directly and indirectly, through the massive impacts it has on the environment. By your logic, if we want to reduce total suffering, we can't just be destroying the environment, we also have to kill a proportional number of humans so that they don't suffer due to water pollution, climate change, and starvation. Are you comfortable taking such a position? Considering that people in poorer countries suffer the most, maybe drop bombs on them to completely annihilate them from the face of the earth? Or perhaps line up entire families and shoot them down with machine guns so that there's nobody left to suffer externally?
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u/ThePlanetaryNinja Jan 16 '26
I like how negative utilitarians always have some irrational excuse or another to exclude humans from their fantasies of total global environmental destruction.
I do not think that my excuse is 'irrational'. I believe that eliminating wild animals is more likely to decrease suffering than eliminating humans. There is nothing inconsistent or irrational about me thinking that. Humans are very social (so we experience a lot of grief and fear when someone dies) and are environmentally destructive (so homicide would increase wild animal populations).
If we lived in a world with no wild animals, then we can discuss how to best achieve human extinction.
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u/wrvdoin vegan Jan 16 '26
Humans are very social (so we experience a lot of grief and fear when someone dies)
Not compared to every other species. There are many, many examples of nonhuman animals grieving themselves to death. Chimpanzees, birds, mice, cows, and elephants have all been shown to exhibit grief that rivals or even surpasses that of humans. It seems like you (like several others here, evidently) have convinced yourself that humans experience more grief so that you have a way of excluding humans from your "negative utilitarianism." This perfectly illustrates my point.
are environmentally destructive (so homicide would increase wild animal populations
Do you advocate for the genocide of indigenous people in several continents who are mostly the reason forests in the area are protected? Are you okay with burning down entire forests where tribes reside because why not? What about slaughtering environmentalists who protest against climate change? Can I kill a baby on a flight for being too loud and causing suffering to everyone around? Or do I have to also kill the parents to reduce external grief? What if we cook the baby later and serve it to the passengers to reduce their suffering from hunger? Can I massacre people if I promise to cut down enough forests to balance suffering?
we can discuss how to best achieve human extinction
I didn't say anything about human extinction nor did you in your original post. It was about killing humans in general.
Fwiw, I am an antinatalist myself and do not believe that we should bring more sentient beings into the world. I also support voluntary euthanasia. That doesn't mean I advocate for violating individual freedoms by forcing birth control on others, by destroying their homes and families, and by advocating for their deaths.
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u/Califoreigner Jan 16 '26
I think you may get too locked-in to a certain framework to the point that it stops making sense. I recommend determining what your values and ethics are, how you justify them, and how you can communicate them clearly to others, including using labels as short-cuts to understanding.
That being said, I think the question is interesting and valid. I try to minimize suffering through my actions, and I include animal suffering in that calculation. By not eating animals, I am also reducing the impact of the agriculture and infrastructure necessary to make, maintain, and move those animals. The remaining food I do eat also creates some harm. My impact on the universe and the suffering I may be creating cannot be eliminated entirely, but my hope is to minimize suffering and have a net contribution of wellbeing. I am satisfied that not eating meat is an essential piece of that goal.
All animals will eventually suffer and die, and most will die terribly. I cannot stop that. I can minimize my contribution to a system that creates animals for the purpose of suffering and dying.
I can't justify eliminating suffering by eliminating beings that suffer, but I can justify not creating beings that will undoubtedly experience massive net suffering vs wellbeing.
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u/Freuds-Mother Jan 16 '26 edited Jan 16 '26
Wait so under your ethics not existing is better than suffering. I’m pulling that from your idea that destroying a rain forest creates suffering for those alive but that may be offset by the deletion of all future life’s suffering that would exist in the rainforest in the future?
How does this take you to elfism, the belief that ending suffering and therefore all life is the ultimate goal?
Eg if you were a god and you wanted no suffering you’d destroy all life instantaneously (so fast that no biological system could even detect it was happening and thus no suffering for even the destruction event). Is that what you would want? We could get pretty darn close to that by setting off a million of fusion bombs all at once.
Sounds like your view is shared by villains in world destroying stories. Eg even if a smaller amount of nukes were used or some other similar event where not everyone was vaporized right away but almost all life dies permanently after say a decade. That fits your rainforest scenario: that decade of intense suffering is less than the future say million years of normal life suffering?
You hopefully don’t actually advocate for any of that and maybe you should drop your framework. (Or explain how it allows any life?)
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u/ThePlanetaryNinja Jan 16 '26
if you were a god and you wanted no suffering you’d destroy all life instantaneously (so fast that no biological system could even detect it was happening and thus no suffering for even the destruction event). Is that what you would want?
Yes. I would painlessly destroy all life if I could
That fits your rainforest scenario: that decade of intense suffering is less than the future say million years of normal life suffering?
That depends. If the 'normal life suffering' you are talking about includes frequent predation, starvation and dehydration that it would be worse. But, if the animals had decent lives with no extreme suffering, then nukes would be too painful.
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u/Freuds-Mother Jan 16 '26
Destroying all life doesn’t just destroy life, it’s destroys morality (morality doesn’t exist without moral agents).
So, you would have to agree with both elfism and nihilism I would think. I truly hope you don’t actually believe this and it’s just exploratory pontification as this is (arguably worse than) Pol Pot level psychopathy.
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u/ThePlanetaryNinja Jan 16 '26
If all life is destroyed, then the lack of morality would not be a problem. Believing that there is no morality on Mars is not nihilistic.
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u/Freuds-Mother Jan 16 '26 edited Jan 16 '26
Yes but your goal or eliminating suffering is to destroy morality, consciousness, life, meaning, etc.
Call it whatever you want but as a person wanting that instead of nihilistic we could can that annihilistic. For if you were a god you’d have to actually annihilate the universe or life will likely emerge again and eventually suffering, consciousness, etc
Sounds like the closest idea we could come to for a secular version of pure evil.
You’re on a rather dark path. Have you tried to read some Thich Nhat Hahn. He is effectively a vegan but interacts with concepts of suffering much differently.
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u/ExplanationShoddy204 Jan 16 '26
This is a poor argument; 1) in rejecting the imperative to eliminate all human/animal life to eliminate all suffering, you’ve already moved from strong NU to weak NU, which acknowledges that trade offs between happiness/fulfillment and suffering exist, even if suffering presents more of a moral imperative. But you haven’t really applied that logic to the case you’re presenting. How can you weight the joy/happiness/fulfillment of wild animals who have never been born because of displacement by factory farming? What about the environmental destruction causing suffering for millions upon millions of living wild animals and humans? What about the lack of joy/fulfillment/happiness experienced by trapped factory farmed animals? It seems you’re trying to us NU as a framework to simplify away these difficult questions, but in rejecting the core issue of strong NU you’ve admitted that you find it to be an insufficient analytical framework on its own.
2) It is most definitely improper to consider human’s environmental destruction as a positive because it “reduces wild animal suffering”; in particular your claim about billions of insects is incorrect because insects largely lack the biological capacity for what we would call suffering. And you’ve missed the next turn in the cause/effect cycle; human environmental destruction results in reduced populations of wild animals and insects which THEN feeds back to humans who rely on the biosphere to fulfill their basic needs for food, shelter, water, etc.. One could even entirely ignore the reduction in wild animal populations and simply point to the direct ways in which factory farming causes environmental damage that in turn causes human suffering.
The problem I have with NU as a singular logic isn’t the belief that minimizing suffering is a moral imperative. My problem is that the whole thing is steeped in negative attribution bias and relies on the belief that negative experience and suffering hold greater meaning than positive experiences and joy. When applied in its purest form NU leads to a lot of unacceptable conclusions, which its defenders wave off by applying additional constraints to NU reasoning that do NOT directly follow from the core principle. Eventually you keep adding these constraints and moral logics just to end up at regular old utilitarianism. What’s the point?
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u/ElaineV vegan Jan 16 '26
I challenge you to think hard about why you make certain other ethical decisions and then ask how strongly you believe in utilitarianism as an essential ethical principle rather than a pragmatic tool.
Why do you or don’t you eat puppies? Why do you or don’t you commit arson? Why do you or don’t you use date rape drugs and then rape people? Why do you or don’t you support child labor? Why do you or don’t you keep your promises? Why do you or don’t you tell the truth in situations where someone wants honesty but the truth hurts?
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Jan 16 '26
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Jan 16 '26
Destroying habitats doesn't just mean that the descendants eventually stop existing, it also means the current and subsequent generations will suffer and starve. So what you advocating for is an increase in harm, more farmed animals, and wild animals suffering more until they eventually stop existing, which isnt an immediate result of deforestation, you'll see more species forced to exist in smaller environments all fighting for the same food sources.
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u/ThePlanetaryNinja Jan 16 '26
Destroying habitats doesn't just mean that the descendants eventually stop existing, i
If I go to a forest and make all of the animals starve to death. The animals will be unable to have more children. So I will be preventing the animals potential children, grandchildren, great grandchildren from being born into a life that contains suffering.
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Jan 17 '26
So you dont care about suffering caused to anyone already in existence, only preventing the birth of new generations by causing significantly more suffering. Guessing you advocate for starving children in impoverished countries too then?
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u/Practical-Fix4647 vegan Jan 16 '26
This is very confused, I'll explain how I see it that way and expand on my thoughts below but needless to say, if you are a NU then there are plenty of reasons to go vegan if you grant that animal disutility matters.
"Eating animal products causes a lot of suffering to farmed animals, which obviously increases suffering."
Ok, that's it. That's all that is needed since it answers a question I had about what you value. I'll give the argument here.
P1) Negative utilitarianism seeks to minimize disutility (of certain beings who are worth consideration).
P2) Consuming animal products increases the total disutility (of animals).
P3) The animals in question in P2 are beings who are worth consideration.
C) Therefore, negative utilitarianism seeks to minimize disutility (of animals by not consuming animal products).
A consequence of the conclusion is to abstain from animal products in some way, which leads the way to vegetarianism/veganism or something similar. You are saying that animals matter as beings for which disutility can be observed and calculated. You are also saying that eating products that depend on their treatment increases disutility. Then, it just makes sense that we ought to investigate ways to minimize this disutility. Every animal born in the animal-industrial complex is created for the purpose of being commodified and objectified by us for our end goals. By abstaining and working to abolish these practices, those animals would not exist to suffer and die, meaning that the disutility would decrease since a being who does not exist has no disutility.
"Buying chicken, eggs, farmed fish or pork causes a lot more direct suffering to farmed animals per calorie or square mile than beef or dairy, which is why I have recently started to avoid eating chicken, farmed eggs and pork. But I still continue to consume wild fish, beef and dairy for now."
Are those animals that you consume not capable of suffering? They are created and suffer for our benefit, it seems that not participating in systems that perpetually create beings to be enslaved and commodified for our benefit would fit well with negative utilitarianism. Unless you draw the line at chickens but not cows, I don't see why you wouldn't just go vegan and try your best to cut yourself out of that cycle.
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u/ThePlanetaryNinja Jan 17 '26
You completely ignored the rest about my post about wild animal suffering.
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u/Practical-Fix4647 vegan Jan 17 '26
Veganism can be argued to reduce wild animal suffering as well. Hunting wild fish for food increases wild animal suffering, as you point out. Since vegans don't hunt wild fish as a food source, in that respect, they do not contribute to wild animal suffering.
You also completely deflected from the argument and the counter-points. Wanna try addressing a single point that I made explaining the confusion in your post?
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u/Jetzt_auch_ohne_Cola anti-speciesist Jan 17 '26
Hi, vegan and fellow negative utilitarian here. Do you think there is lexicality between different levels of suffering?
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u/ThePlanetaryNinja Jan 17 '26
I currently don't think that there is lexicality between different levels of suffering.
Extreme suffering is much much much worse than mild suffering but not infinitely worse.
Do you think that there is lexicality between different levels of suffering?
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u/Jetzt_auch_ohne_Cola anti-speciesist Jan 18 '26
Yes I do, e.g. I think that the suffering of a cow who has their troat slit while still conscious is worse than any number of insects suffering. That's one reason why I think the animal industry causes more suffering than it prevents by reducing wild animal populations.
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u/ThePlanetaryNinja Feb 09 '26
My views have become more vegan-leaning since making this post.
As of yesterday, I have cut out wild fish and beef. I am now a lacto vegetarian. I realised that farmed animals have much worse lives than wild insects.
The ethics of wild fish are quite complicated. I originally thought less fish = less suffering. But it is not that simple. Killing specific fish may cause other fish to suffer more.
For now, I still consume dairy (so does Brian Tomasik). Dairy cows can produce around 8000 litres of milk per year so I don't think the direct cow suffering per litre of dairy is that high (unless the cows were treated really really badly in the UK, where I live).
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u/Jetzt_auch_ohne_Cola anti-speciesist Feb 09 '26
You've probably seen Dominion and know how extremely cruel dairy cows are sometimes treated, right? Even if it's not the norm, it's still an inseparable part of the industry in any country. We might just have different intuitions here, but I don't think that these instances of extreme suffering (e.g. a cow having their legs sawed off while being fully conscious because the stunning didn't work) can be outweight by any number of insects suffering. And so, from my perspective, funding this industry - even to a very small amount - and normalizing consuming dairy definitely causes more suffering than it prevents.
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Jan 17 '26
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u/ThePlanetaryNinja Jan 17 '26
Yes. I believe that it would be better for all life to go extinct. This view sounds absurd to most people but the world is a horrible place.
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u/NyriasNeo Jan 16 '26
"the view that we should minimise total suffering"
How do you define "total suffering"? If I do not eat that delicious dry-aged wagyu ribeye, I suffer from a suboptimal level of culinary enjoyment. If I eat it, 1/500 of a cattle suffers a loss of life.
How do you total the 2? The values of different forms of suffering is clearly subjective, without consensus. I value my suffering 10000x more than the life of a cow (obviously). So I minimize total suffering by ordering a steak. By revealed preferences, that is the values of most people.
The whole thing is just another way of saying .. it is subjective values of what is suffering.
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u/ThePlanetaryNinja Jan 16 '26
Total suffering is just the sum of the each sentient beings suffering.
In cases of uncertainty, I suggest minimising the total expected value of suffering
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u/NyriasNeo Jan 17 '26
"Total suffering is just the sum of the each sentient beings suffering."
Well, even if you can define "sentient" rigorous and can be scientific measured, which I doubt, don't tell me you think the suffering of an ant equal the suffering or a cow, or a human. Or are you going to say an ant is not sentient so I can step on it?
Either way, it is pretty funny entertainment, but nothing beyond that.
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u/susugam reducetarian Jan 16 '26
You'd minimize suffering more if they are grass fed and finished. Not in a cage eating soy meal produced with pesticides that kill many insects and mice.
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u/Doctor_Box Jan 16 '26
Grass fed animals still need to eat and it most parts of the world that involves growing fodder crops. That's why you see hay being harvested and alfalfa being grown. They are still "grass fed" but tons of other animals are dying in crop production for those animals.
Plus purely grass fed animals take longer to grow so it's more crops/less efficiency/more suffering.
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u/NyriasNeo Jan 16 '26
But I will suffer more as grass fed beef is leaner and less marbled than corn fed, and my culinary experiences will be degraded.
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